Tomás de Torquemada

Tomás de Torquemada, the Castilian Dominican friar who became the first Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, made his name synonymous with cruelty, fanaticism and religious terror. Appointed after the Inquisition's founding in 1478, he oversaw a machinery of persecution that used torture to extract confessions and burning at the stake to destroy those judged heretics; roughly two thousand people were burned during his tenure. He was among the chief architects of the 1492 Alhambra Decree, which expelled the Jews from Castile and Aragon, an act of mass dispossession and exile whose cruelty is compounded by reports that he himself descended from converso ancestors. He died in 1498.

His chart carries a Libra Sun, the archetype associated with justice, balance and the weighing of judgement, and an Aquarius Moon, tied to ideology, the collective and the conviction that one serves a higher cause. Read analytically, this pairing describes a temperament capable of dressing coercion in the language of righteousness and order. It describes temperament only. It offers no mitigation whatsoever for the torture, expulsions and killings he directed; those were his own deliberate choices.