Empress Farah Pahlavi

Empress Farah Pahlavi shines through Venus's sign of the Scale, a Libra Sun set high in the ninth house of culture, learning and global horizons: a soul born to shine as a mediator and a patron of beauty, someone with the eye to see symmetry and grace and the instinct to lift a whole nation's aesthetic and educational life. Born Farah Diba in 1938 into a once-prosperous family, she was studying architecture in Paris when she met Mohammad Reza at the Iranian embassy; they married in 1959, and she became Queen, then Shahbanu, of Iran. That ninth-house Libra light found its true expression in her work: charities, the founding of Iran's first American-style university that opened doors for women students, and the buying-back of Iranian antiquities from museums abroad.

Her Moon in Gemini in the sixth house made her mind quick, sociable and endlessly curious, finding its footing in service, information and daily engagement. Capricorn rising gave her the composed, patient, old-soul mask of one born to carry weight with dignity. When revolution swept Iran in 1979 she went into exile; widowed the next year, she has continued her charitable work ever since, dividing her life between Washington and Paris, still the diplomat, still balancing the scale.