George Armstrong Custer

Fire accounts for four of his ten planets, with two apiece in earth, air and water, and only Pluto was retrograde. The Sun, Moon and Saturn fill under five degrees of Sagittarius and both lights are certain, which is uncommon in this set. The record calls Custer the youngest general in the Union army, and says he was killed with his entire immediate command at Little Bighorn in 1876 after attacking a far larger force.

The Sun sits conjunct Saturn at twelve hundredths of a degree. The standing reading is self definition through discipline: seriousness from young, achievement that is genuinely earned, and somebody who finds it very hard to believe they have done enough. In the record of the youngest general in an army, the first two thirds of that is the part a reader will want, and the last third is the part worth sitting with.

Uranus squares both halves of that pairing, Saturn at a quarter of a degree and the Sun at just over a third. Those are order against revolt, the fight between security and freedom, and the urge to break out arriving at the wrong moment. Mars sits square Pluto at three fifths of a degree, force against force, where winning becomes more important than the thing being won. A reader will reach for all of that as an account of 1876 and it is not one: these are the standing meanings of four angles, and the last decision of a life is not in a birth chart. The Moon sits in quiet contact with Jupiter at two hundredths of a degree, optimism as a resting state.

He died in Montana on 25 June 1876, at thirty six. Saturn stood square his natal Moon at under three tenths of a degree that day and in easy contact with his natal Jupiter at the same orb, while Uranus sat in easy contact with his natal Pluto at half a degree. The Moon was a crescent at twenty one per cent, the phase that pushes against the weight of how things have always been done.