Jimmy Carter

Water takes four of his ten planets, fire three, air two and a single one earth, with five of the ten fixed. This chart holds no closed figure of any kind, and Uranus was the only retrograde planet. The record says Carter was a peanut farmer and nuclear engineer whose one term was dominated by the hostage crisis, and whose forty years afterwards, on housing and disease eradication, won him the Nobel Peace Prize. He lived to a hundred.

Venus sits conjunct Neptune at a degree and three quarters, which is a wide orb and the contact worth printing anyway. The reading is idealised affection: artistic sensibility, tenderness, and a persistent tendency to see people as they might be rather than as they are. Set against a record whose largest fact is forty years of housing and disease eradication after leaving office, seeing people as they might be is about as close as this project comes to a chart describing a working life, and the orb is the reason to be careful rather than pleased.

Mercury sits in quiet contact with Neptune at under four tenths of a degree, intuitive understanding: picking things up without being told, and an ear for what somebody means rather than for what they said. Jupiter then stands at an awkward angle to Pluto at under a degree, and that is the unflattering reading here: ambition and force colliding, overreaching for control, and growth pursued past the point where it is good for anybody. For a president the record gives one term and a crisis, that is a reading with nowhere to land, because the record's own account of the ambition is a building programme and a Nobel Peace Prize.

Mars sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at over half a degree, effort that pays: well-timed action, and the useful ability to commit fully without agonising. The Moon's sign is certain at sixteen degrees of Scorpio, which will not be known on anybody else's schedule. He died at Plains on 29 December 2024, at a hundred, in the town the record says he was born in. The transiting Sun stood square its own natal place at a quarter of a degree that day, which puts the death almost exactly a quarter of a year from the birthday, with Saturn square his natal Jupiter at a tenth of a degree and Uranus square his natal Venus at under a fifth. The Moon was balsamic and two per cent lit, a phase that finishes things, lets them go, and is already looking past them.