Ancient Astrology Answers: Was Joseph Smith a Fraud?
A Horary Chart, a Hard Question, and the Space Between Conviction and Con
Was Joseph Smith a Fraud?
A Horary Reading, a Hard Question, and the Space Between Conviction and Deception
Some questions don’t arrive neatly. They accumulate — across decades of testimony meetings, shelf items, late-night rabbit holes, and the slow unraveling of a worldview you once wore like skin. “Was Joseph Smith a fraud?” is one of those questions. It doesn’t land softly, and it doesn’t resolve cleanly. Which is exactly why we brought it to the stars.
The question originated with John Dehlin, host of Mormon Stories, who posed it on his Substack alongside five points of consideration. For those unfamiliar, Dehlin has spent over fifteen years creating space for people navigating faith crises — a figure once so vilified within the Church that his name carried the same warning label as the CES Letter. Don’t go there. You’ll catch apostate leprosy. And yet, stepping outside and actually engaging with his work reveals something far more generous: a man honoring all sides of the faith experience, helping people feel less alone in their unraveling. That generosity is part of what drew us to the question. We didn’t just take it up academically. We took it up as people who lived inside the thing being questioned.
The Chart
Horary astrology works like this: you pose a specific question, and the chart is cast for the moment the astrologer understands and accepts it. In our case, that moment came during a group conversation when we collectively decided — yes, let’s do this — and Ryan screenshotted the clock. That timestamp, set in Berkeley, California, became the birth of the question.
The chart was cast using Regiomontanus houses, in keeping with the John Frawley tradition taught at the Nightlight School of Astrology, where the three of us — Ryan, Bianca, and Mindy — originally met.
The querent (John, and by extension, us) is represented by the Sun — ruler of the Leo ascendant — and the Moon. Both luminaries landed in the ninth house, each in their respective exaltations. The ninth house: religion, philosophy, higher truth. The house of God. Both significators dignified and strong, which tells us the people asking this question come to it with real investment. This isn’t idle curiosity. It’s personal.
But the Sun and Moon don’t agree on how they feel about what they find there. The Sun, exalted in Aries, holds Mars — our significator for Joseph Smith — in high regard. The Moon, exalted in Taurus, views Mars with something closer to disfavor, since Mars is in detriment in Taurus. A mixed testimony. Which felt honest to us. We weren’t coming to this question with a verdict already in hand.
Why Mars?
We chose Mars as the significator for Joseph Smith — lord of the ninth house (Aries on the cusp) — rather than the more default seventh-house assignment for a named individual. The reasoning: Joseph Smith isn’t just someone else we’re asking about. He’s the godlike figure seated at the center of an entire religious cosmology. “I know Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God” — a sentence drilled into children from birth. The ninth house is the joy of the Sun, the house of God. If any figure in this story belongs there, it’s him.
Mars is domiciled in Aries — essentially dignified, strong in its own sign. But it sits in the eighth house, a dark place that can’t easily see the ascendant. Strong internally, obscured positionally.
Something powerful operating in shadow.
The God of Thieves Pays a Visit
To address the fraud question directly, we looked to Mercury — classically the god of thieves, the trickster. And here’s where the chart gets interesting.
Mercury at 5°30’ Aries is applying directly to Mars at 7°03’. It’s close. It hasn’t perfected yet. In horary, an applying aspect means something is about to happen but hasn’t yet arrived. Mercury is also freshly separating from a sextile to Pluto and recently past Neptune — translating their light onto Mars and Saturn.
Read that sequence: Mercury collects something from Neptune (illusion, vision, the numinous, the first-vision-shaped thing) and from Pluto (deals made in the underworld, power dynamics, the obsession with death and the afterlife that runs so deep in Mormon theology) — and carries it all toward Mars.
Toward Joseph.
Not from Joseph outward. Toward him.
This is the image of a man who was the object of his own fraud before he ever became the perpetrator of anyone else’s. A person subject to delusion, not necessarily manufacturing it. Someone who ate the mushrooms in the Sacred Grove — maybe literally — and genuinely saw something, and had no framework for understanding it beyond the revivalist fervor of his time.
The Zeitgeist Defense
This matters historically, too. Joseph Smith didn’t operate in a vacuum. The early 1800s were thick with upstart prophets, spiritual revivals, polyamorous communes, and wildcat banks printing their own currency. The Cochranites practiced plural marriage decades before Joseph claimed revelation on the subject — and many Cochranite converts folded directly into the early Mormon church. Joseph’s bank wasn’t unusual; its collapse wasn’t unusual. His polygamy wasn’t unusual. His claim to speak with God wasn’t unusual.
What was unusual is that his movement survived.
And Then Came Brigham
The tenth house — the house that follows the ninth — represents what came after Joseph. His successor. His legacy made institutional. In this chart, that’s Venus, domiciled in Taurus, sitting right on the Midheaven. Pleasant. Dignified. Happy where she is.
And applying directly to the fixed star Algol.
Algol — “the most difficult of the fixed stars” — carries significations of deception, destruction, losing one’s head (literally or figuratively). And that’s where the real fraud enters the picture. Not with Joseph in the grove, but with the institutional machinery that came after: Brigham Young’s authoritarian empire-building, the whitewashing of history, the Correlation program that bleached every rough edge from the narrative and presented it as squeaky-clean revelation.
Joseph’s story was taken after his death and used to instigate something that looks a lot more like fraud than anything Joseph himself set in motion. Venus, happy and domiciled, walking straight into Algol on the most public point in the chart. That image is hard to ignore.
The Verdict (Such As It Is)
Was Joseph Smith a fraud? Our read of the chart: No — but it’s complicated.
He was deceptive, certainly. Deception was woven into early Mormon culture as a survival skill — the ability to say something technically true while meaning something entirely different. (Ryan’s ancestor, asked if the group was “bearing arms,” cheerfully confirmed they were — meaning the arms they were born with.) Joseph was a product of that culture and a master of it.
But fraud implies something more deliberate. Bernie Madoff was a fraud. Joseph Smith was a man consumed by his own conviction — a conviction born partly of illusion, partly of genuine spiritual experience, and shaped entirely by the wild, fertile, chaotic religious landscape of his era. Mercury brought the delusion to him. He believed it. And because he believed it, others did too.
The fraud — the institutional, systematic, whitewashed kind — came later. It came with Algol. It came with the tenth house. It came with what the church did with Joseph’s story after he was gone.
The question was asked. The chart answered. And like most things worth asking about, the answer lives in the space between yes and no — in the territory where faith meets fate.