May 25, 2004
Presidents and Pluto . . . and the Rest
HAVING LAID OUT the problem in the first part of this article, I will begin this part by saying categorically that Pluto seems to play only a supportive role in who wins or loses a Presidential election, and most of my other ancient rules about transits to the natal and progressed fare about the same. On the other hand, certain transits do seem to be important during an election, though for the most part they are quite different than what I would have expected.
Years ago, my study of this question had been done in a somewhat informal way, so with the help of more modern tools than pencil and paper and with the benefit of a few more election cycles to consider, I decided to take a closer look at the issue. In my effort to look more closely at the question of transits to the “two Suns,” I collected the data on all major candidates plus the transits on election day from 1932 through 2000, calculating each man’s natal and progressed Sun, and then tabulating the actual transits to these two points on the election day in question. 1932 seemed a logical starting point because it was a watershed election in terms of the use of film and radio, and generally marked a new era in national politics.
However, I omitted 1940 and 1944 from my analysis, as Franklin Roosevelt is the only President ever elected to more than two terms, so including electoral contests past the first two for him would have given him more weight than any of the other candidates. I took a different tack with Richard Nixon, who was the only one other than Roosevelt to run in more than two contests (he lost the first and won the next two). However, as he was both a winner and a loser, and eight years separated his first run at the office from the next two, his case seemed quite different from Roosevelt’s, so all elections he ran in were included.
Finally, I did not include third-party candidates, as even though Ross Perot set records in this regard, there are just too many to consider, none has ever won, and historically their main role is to affect the strategies and tactics of the major party candidates. If a third-party candidate ever did win, the likelihood is that the astrological situation would not differ much, if at all, from that of a winning major party candidate.
The basic approach was to consider the number and type of “standard” aspects (semisextile, sextile, square, trine, quincunx, and opposition) on election day to the natal and progressed Suns of both winners and losers, allowing a three-degree orb. Below is a section of the raw data, as the complete table is too large to show here. At the top of the five-line entry for each election can be seen the planets for EST noon on election day, while on the left can be found the candidate’s birth date, as well his natal Sun and his progressed Sun for the election.
The entries to the right of the candidate’s solar positions show the distance of those two points from the nearest 30-degree aspect on the election day in question to each planet. In this table, close 30-degree aspects of any kind have a value tending toward zero degrees, while a lack of such aspect is shown by a value closer to 15 degrees. For example, Roosevelt’s natal sun at 288.04° is 2.77° degrees away from an exact 30-degree aspect with the transiting sun (195.27°). The longitudes in this table are sidereal, because I may at some point make comparisons with the Galactic Center or other fixed points on the celestial sphere.
More interesting than the raw data is the tabulation of the planets in close aspect to the “two Suns” on election day for both winners and losers.
A listing of all of the aspects for elections from 1932 to 2000 can be found below in Table 1. After tabulating all of these aspects, I could see why I had come up with my original rules, but it was also clear why those rules came up short. Pluto, which I had singled out as a “winner” planet all by itself, is instead part of a general pattern involving certain types of aspects to the birth Sun from planets Saturn through Pluto. Jupiter, a planet I had originally linked with losing candidates, actually contributes the fewest transits to the Sun for winners and losers alike. However, it does seem to be involved in an interesting pattern along with Venus and Mars which seems at least as crucial as the Saturn through Pluto aspects, even though traditional aspects may or may not be involved.
One more observation, noted in the rules that follow, is that I could find no clear pattern for transits to the progressed Sun, so I am not including that table here, though I will make it available. Even though the same number of events was involved, the overall number of aspects to the candidates’ progressed Suns was noticeably lower than the number of aspects to the natal Suns. This suggests that those to the progressed Sun are more or less random. It could also suggest that I’ve done my arithmetic wrong, but so far double checking hasn’t shown any problems of this sort. These aspect totals are
Winners’ birth Suns: 54
Losers’ birth Suns: 57
Winners’ progressed Suns: 43
Losers’ progressed Suns: 46
Important note: These rules are best applied to American Presidential elections only. A local race for a council seat is not likely to have the same dynamics as a national election for an office that is fairly unique among democracies, most of which use a parliamentary system. Other types of elections may respond to similar configurations, but there are no guarantees.
1. Certain transits to the natal Suns of the two major party candidates are useful indicators of the outcome of a Presidential election, though they are less effective in cases where one or more strong third-party candidates are involved. Transits to the progressed Sun seem to have little effectiveness, if any.
2. Transits of Pluto to natal Sun can be helpful at getting a candidate in the game, but the degree to which these help or hinder depends on the aspects involved, as in rule 3.
3. Electoral losers tend to have trines (either waxing or waning) to the outer planets, Saturn through Pluto. Winners tend to have quincunxes or squares to the same set of planets. Conjunctions to these planets tend to be neutral.
4. Winners show an overall lack of transiting opposition aspects to the Sun.
5. Conjunctions, oppositions, and the waxing square or waxing semisextile to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter to the natal Sun are useful indicators of electoral failure. The same aspects when waning may be useful indicators of electoral success.
6. Even when not aspected, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter rising before the Sun (i.e., in the 160 or so degrees to the West of the Sun) tend to be associated with electoral success, while if they rise after the Sun (i.e., in the 160 or so degrees to the East) they tend to be associated with electoral failure.
7. These rules deal only with transits the natal Sun, and should be considered along with other transits, the general suitability of the two candidates’ charts for a public contest like this, and other more general indicators of the emotional and political mood and tone around the time of election.
May 03, 2004
Presidents and Pluto - Some History
LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, I was given the assignment to write an article projecting the probable outcome of a U.S. Presidential election that was still in the early primary stage. On the Republican side there were two contenders, which included our only appointed President Gerald Ford, and California Governor Ronald Reagan (which tells you how long ago and far away it was). On the Democratic side there were a half dozen or so contenders, many of whom were relative unknowns. Between all of those in both parties with their eye on the prize there was exactly one (Ford) at that early date who had a reliable birth time. For Reagan, several claimants were in circulation, all of which seemed to be phony, and most of the Democratic candidates were too unknown to have drawn much interest from astrological data hunters.
Given both the number of candidates and the lack of data, I decided to focus on outer-planet aspects to the candidates’ natal and progressed suns. Years later, I can’t remember for sure to what degree I was following my own intuition and observation, but in recently reviewing some articles on the subject of electoral predictions, I’ve decided that in my emphasis on the two suns, I was likely following trails of predictive bread crumbs laid down by astrologers Donald Bradley and Everett Blackman, even though my conclusions were a bit different than theirs. For example, Bradley, writing in American Astrology 1964 under the name of Garth Allen, wrote a forecast centering on the Republican convention that year in San Francisco which laid out a remarkable pattern of connections between transiting Pluto and the progressed suns of that year’s candidates. Bradley’s observation:
Using local zone-time noon as the epochal moment of the horoscopes for the three men whose birth hours are not known to us, careful calculations show that on the dates of the Republican convention, the longitudes of their progressed Suns in the sidereal zodiac are:
Goldwater 13°09' Aquarius Rockefeller 16°22' Leo
Lodge 18°50' Leo Romney 16°38' Leo
Nixon 18°01' Aquarius Scranton 17°56' Leo
The position of a progressed Sun depends upon the native's age at any given time as well as upon his birth data as a whole. Fantastic though it seems, four of the candidates just happen to have been born spaced apart in such a way that the gears of their progressed horoscopes mesh, or link up with one another, age-wise. Compounding the oddity, Nixon's progressed Sun falls athwart this same axis, but on the other side of the sky, 180° removed.
Somewhat prophetic, in a halfhearted way, Goldwater's progressed Sun also tries to join the troops, being only 5° behind Nixon's, which is still close enough to provide a scientific exercise in the estimation of the odds against all this having happened merely by chance. If you stood on a street comer, say, and randomly tapped six people on the shoulder, what are the odds against finding that all six you singled out have their progressed Suns within 5°42' of either a conjunction or an opposition?
The exact figure is unimportant, it being staggeringly large. But the answer comes out in the neighborhood of 32,000,000 to 1 against mere coincidence being the explanation. Or work it out for the four conjoined Suns in Leo alone, assuming that Nixon's and Goldwater's cases were not co-operative in any way and thereby represent misses. The chances are still over 20,000 to 1 that you could randomly pick six people and out of them find four with progressed Suns all within a space of 2°29' on the ecliptic.
The uniqueness of the interlocking configuration having been settled, now what does this convergence of Suns mean in practical terms? It certainly cannot tell us which man is going to win the nomination because the same aspects to that critical zone of zodiacal degrees would be commonly shared by all of them.
The planet Pluto the night balloting begins just happens to be at 18°04' Leo Now we see the light, and won't have to settle for any delineation so bland as saying, for instance, that a bundling of Suns signifies a coming together of radiant personalities, or even a stronger choice of words, a clash of egos.
It is axiomatic in astrology that Pluto transiting in major formation with the Sun evokes such situations as (a) throwing the klieg light of attention on the native, (b) creating nerve-fraying tension that leads to a pompous walkout, if not mass rejection, © inspiring a zealous following whose zeal at times becomes fanatical, and (d) causing shake-ups and showdowns of historic magnitude.
Take a half-dozen politicians who are simultaneously under a king-size Sun-Pluto influence and you can't help but witness the most bristling “shake-up and showdown” of the decade, if not of the entire century.
The convention was indeed, as Bradley noted, a shake-up and showdown, with Goldwater’s backers booing Rockefeller and otherwise behaving in raucous fashion as he tried to speak. Goldwater himself, whose ardent conservative views had led him to be identified by both Democrats and “moderate” (i.e., liberal) Republicans as an extremist, defiantly highlighted his acceptance speech with the politically deadly admonition, “ . . . extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And . . . moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
In an election-prediction article published in the same magazine nine years later, Everett Blackman noted an interesting connection between transiting Saturn and the natal and progressed suns of candidates, and he also pointed to a connection of the same type involving vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency. Blackman summarized his conclusions thus:
(2) No vice-president has succeeded to the presidency without a favorable Jupiter-Sun aspect on the day he took office. In making this observation we should alert the reader to the fact that there are two Suns in every chart, a condition we will describe in some detail later. Since there are no exceptions to the above, the inference is obvious. No candidate can reach the presidency without a major Saturn-Sun aspect during the critical election-inauguration period. No president can die in office without Jupiter favorably aspected to the vice-president's Sun.
In my own survey of the 1976 presidential election, I explored the transits to the natal and progressed suns of all involved, comparing them with past presidential contests. Then I kept an eye on what actually happened that year, and between Allen and Blackman’s suggestions and my own observations, I came up with several rules of thumb:
- Transits of Uranus or Jupiter to a candidate’s sun (particularly square, opposition, conjunction) signal an unsuccessful candidacy. This is usually due either to not staying on message or to the candidate creating a media splash that does not result in many votes.
- Transits of Neptune also signal an unsuccessful candidacy, but with the interesting addition either of scandal or a general mistrust of the candidate, a kind of personality clash between the public and the candidate.
That third rule seemed less certain than the others in regard to success and failure as such, though transits involving Neptune do seem to indicate definite problems in getting traction, for the reasons mentioned.
Fans of gender neutrality will note that I have used masculine pronouns throughout, which in this case is as it should be, since no woman then or since has been a serious contender for the top office, or in fact even made it into the “also ran” position, as the lone contender against the eventual winner. Because of that, the entire range of comparisons at this point is of man against man, at least at the presidential level, so it’s not at all safe to say any of what’s right (and, as you’ll see, much of it needs to be changed). And, by the way, observations in the ensuing years have led me to believe that whatever truth there is to these ideas, they apply only weakly to lower-level contests, perhaps due to the overwhelming personal demands required in a presidential campaign. American presidential candidates have to start the grind years in advance, and then work through a grueling primary system before they’ll know whether or not they’re even going to get to vie for the big prize.
Between the Saturn and Pluto in the first rule of thumb above, it always seemed to me that while Saturn provided lots of staying power and focus, Pluto was the real indicator of success, perhaps because it helped a candidate frame issues in a way that struck a chord with the public. However, no matter what the situation with the transiting planets at the time of the election, the simple notion of transits to natal and progressed sun is a fallback that is useful when no birth times are available, but is a secondary consideration when one has reasonable data in hand.
During the recent 2004 contest for the Democratic nomination, I was reminded of my old transit rules when I began paying attention to the fracas around the time of the first real test of strength of the ten-candidate field, the Iowa caucuses, followed a week later by the New Hampshire primary. The result of those two back-to-back challenges was two clear victories for John Kerry, and dashed hopes for the front-runner anointed by the media and endorsed by many leading party figures, Howard Dean. A quick comparison of the two showed, interestingly enough, that Kerry was undergoing a transit of Pluto to his natal Sun, while Howard Dean was not.
However, at least as interesting as Kerry’s win was the second place showing in Iowa of total dark horse John Edwards of North Carolina. Having myself dismissed Edwards early on in the contest as too new to the rough-and-tumble of presidential politics to get much traction, I hadn’t even looked at his birth pattern. There were, after all, quite a few candidates in any case at that point, even if one omitted the obvious comic-relief candidates and wannabes. Not only Edwards’ decent showing, but also his obvious persistence made him worth a look. The result was quite striking, especially when Kerry and Edwards were compared , and it led me to do a more thorough study of transits to presidential candidates’ charts. The comparison chart here is set for EST noon on “Super Tuesday,” and shows only transiting Saturn and Pluto, along with some interesting points of contact between the natal patterns of the two men.
One would think just from looking at this particular setup that Pluto does in fact play a role in the campaigns of American presidential contenders. However, given Bradley’s observations on the 1964 Republican convention and the comparison here, it also seems likely that simply saying “Pluto equals winner” isn’t sufficient. So I decided to make a more thorough study of the issue. What I found was more than a bit surprising.