Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith founded a religious movement that grew from a handful of believers into a faith followed by millions, all in a life of only thirty-eight years. Born in Vermont in 1805 and raised amid the fervent revivalism of upstate New York, he reported visions from his youth, and in 1830, at just twenty-four, published the Book of Mormon and organised the church that became the Latter Day Saint movement. His Sun in Capricorn is the old-soul climber, the disciplined organiser who builds institutions to last and takes on the mantle of authority: he was not only a prophet to his followers but the practical architect of communities, temples and settlements from Kirtland to Nauvoo.

That Sun sits in the fourth house of home, lineage and the family hearth, and indeed his movement centred on gathering a people, building Zion, and rooting a whole community around family and covenant. His Moon in Aquarius is the collective psyche, the revolutionary wired to a grand shared dream, the visionary who reorders the tribe. In the fifth house it fused his imagination with everything he created. The Virgo Ascendant lent the exacting, textual mask of the translator and scribe.

His path drew fierce opposition, and in 1844 he was killed by a mob in Illinois. The movements he began endure still.