Ancient Astrology Answers: Was Joseph Smith a Fraud? (Part 2)
Triplicity Lords, Three Stages of Life, and the Slow Erosion of Innocence
After our first pass at this horary — over an hour of pulling apart planetary dignities, translating light through Neptune, and landing on a verdict that satisfied none of us completely — we kept thinking. Kept texting. Kept circling back. Ryan went deep into Bonatti and al-Biruni and Lilly. And the question just kept sitting there, the way questions like this do when they’ve been lodged in your body since childhood:
Was Joseph Smith a fraud?
Our first reading leaned on some creative use of the outer planets — Neptune and Pluto — which we’ll own. Traditional horary purists would raise an eyebrow, and fairly. But something interesting happened when we stripped those back and returned to classical technique: we landed in essentially the same place. Just with more precision, and a few more cracks in the foundation.
Returning to the Signifiers
Before diving into the new technique, we needed to revisit something foundational: who, in this chart, is Joseph Smith?
Last time, we chose Mars — lord of the ninth house, the house of God, religion, and higher philosophy. The reasoning still holds. Joseph Smith isn’t just “some other person” to plug into the seventh house. He anointed himself prophet, priest, and king. He ran for president. He’s a figure of universal significance within a religious cosmology, the way a king or a head of state would be. You wouldn’t use the seventh house for the king unless you were the queen asking about your husband. Joseph gets the ninth.
Mindy raised something worth sitting with: do we even need to chase the applying aspects? The question isn’t about a specific action — a particular lie, a single scam. It’s about the character of a person. And when you look at Mars in Aries — domiciled, powerful, in its own authority — sitting right next to Saturn in its fall, you already have a portrait. Two malefics. One strong. One collapsed. Pressed together in the eighth house of darkness.
Could we just read that? Maybe. But we wanted to go further.
Bonatti’s Technique: Dividing a Life
Ryan brought something to the table from his research into Bonatti — a method for breaking a person’s life into stages using the triplicity lords of the significator’s sign. Instead of one universal signifier for Joseph Smith across his entire thirty-nine years, we could assign different planetary rulers to different periods of his life and ask the fraud question of each one separately.
For this diurnal chart, the triplicity lords of Aries are the Sun (diurnal ruler, first stage), Jupiter (nocturnal ruler, second stage), and Saturn (participating ruler, third stage). Thirteen years apiece, roughly. Three chapters of one life. Three chances to ask: was he a fraud here?
There’s a legitimate debate about whether to divide into two stages or three — the deeper Hellenistic roots tend toward two, with the participating ruler serving as a flavoring influence on both halves rather than owning its own period. We explored both readings. They don’t contradict each other. They just offer different angles on the same slow unraveling.
First Stage: The Sun — Youth, Vision, the Grove
The Sun, exalted in Aries, in the ninth house, in its joy. Unencumbered by malefics. Dignified in every way that matters.
This is the portrait of a boy who believed. A fourteen-year-old in the thick of the Second Great Awakening, surrounded by tent revivals and competing prophets and an entire culture electrified by the possibility of direct contact with God. He walked into a grove and prayed. Maybe he ate some mushrooms first, but whatever happened, he came out believing he’d been spoken to by the heavens. And the chart backs that up. The Sun here is self-contained, sincere, maybe naive. There’s a whiff of self-exaltation — the Sun exalts itself in its own exaltation — but for a teenager convinced he’s heard the voice of God, that tracks. That’s not fraud. That’s being fourteen.
We noted that the Sun sits just nine arc minutes from the anaretic degree — the very end of Aries, a signal of imminent change, a shift in dignity about to occur. Something is coming. But it hasn’t arrived yet. In this first period, the innocence holds.
Was he a fraud in the first stage? Unanimous: No.
If you strip the name of the person away and just read the chart, you’d describe someone with a strong moral compass, a sincere spiritual seeker, maybe a solid philosopher or teacher. You would not describe a con man.
Second Stage: Jupiter — Expansion, Congregation, the Cult of Personality
Jupiter, exalted in Cancer, in the eleventh house, also its joy. Three degrees from its exact exaltation degree. This is a planet operating at full capacity: growth, community, gathering, abundance.
This is the Joseph Smith who built Nauvoo. Who attracted thousands. Who organized a people and moved them across states. Mindy’s first instinct when she saw this placement was visceral: cult leader. And honestly? Exalted Jupiter in Cancer in the eleventh house — faith, mothering, belonging, the warm pull of community — it does read that way. It reads like someone who can fill a tent and make you feel like you’ve come home.
But here’s where it fractures.
Jupiter’s bound and decan lord is Mercury. And Mercury, in this chart, is peregrine — a wanderer with no essential dignity, no allegiance to the sign it’s in. The classical description of a peregrine Mercury is morally rudderless. Not malicious, necessarily. Just... untethered. Mercury isn’t telling Jupiter to commit fraud. Mercury is whispering that the rules are flexible. That the edges are soft. That when you’re this exalted, this beloved, this clearly chosen — maybe the normal constraints don’t apply to you.
And then there’s Saturn — the participating ruler, fallen in Aries — flavoring the whole period. Not running it. Just seasoning it with restriction, with compromise, with the slow corrosion of integrity that comes when power accumulates faster than character can keep up.
Was he a fraud in the second stage? We split the room.
Bianca said yes. She doesn’t trust an exalted Jupiter governed by a morally rudderless Mercury, and she’s not wrong to be suspicious. Ryan said no — that the classical signifiers aren’t strong enough to declare fraud, that what we’re seeing is excess and overreach and the planting of seeds for what comes next, but not deliberate deception. Not yet. Mindy couldn’t break the tie. Both readings are defensible. Both are incomplete.
This is the honest answer: the second stage of Joseph Smith’s life is where certainty goes to die. There’s too much ambiguity baked into the chart and into the history itself. Was he a polyamory-denying hypocrite, or was he a closeted non-monogamous person in a culture that would destroy him for being open? Was the Kirtland bank a calculated swindle, or was it the same reckless optimism that sank hundreds of other frontier banks in the same decade? Was the expansion of the church a power grab, or was it a genuinely charismatic person doing what charismatic people do — drawing others into a vision they fully believe in?
The chart says: both. The chart says: the ground is shifting under his feet and he may not even know it yet.
Third Stage: Saturn — Fall, the Eighth House, and the End
Saturn, in its fall, in the eighth house — the house of death. Mars applying directly to it. There is no ambiguity here.
This is the final period of Joseph Smith’s life, and the chart reads like a closing argument. Saturn fallen in Aries has no dignity, no authority of its own. It’s operating from a collapsed position, propped up by borrowed power and momentum. Mars — the planet of violence, of confrontation — is bearing down on it. The perfection of that conjunction is the image of a man whose life ends not in quiet decline but in gunfire and mob violence and the shattering of everything he built.
By this stage, the historical record and the chart converge. Joseph Smith had an on-staff assassin. He was running for president. He ordered the destruction of a printing press. He was in Carthage Jail not by accident but because the consequences of his choices — the polygamy denials, the consolidation of theocratic power, the sheer accumulation of enemies both earned and inevitable — had finally caught up.
Whatever innocence the Sun in the ninth house once held, Saturn in its fall in the eighth has consumed it.
Was he a fraud in the third stage? Unanimous: Yes.
No astrologer — regardless of their feelings about Mormonism, Joseph Smith, or the definition of fraud — would look at a fallen Saturn in the eighth house with Mars applying and call it the signature of a saint.
The Five Points, Briefly
John Dehlin’s original article laid out five categories of evidence: the treasure-digging with seer stones, the golden plates and lost 116 pages, his claims as a translator of ancient languages, the Kirtland bank scandal, and the polygamy denials.
We didn’t walk through all five in detail, but we noted something important: every one of them has arguments on both sides. The treasure-digging was a common practice of the era — we’re astrologers casting a horary chart about divination, so we’re hardly in a position to call divination itself fraudulent. The golden plates may have been described using York Rite Masonic code language that later generations took literally. The bank collapse was one of hundreds. The polygamy existed within a broader cultural moment of sexual experimentation and communal living.
None of these points are slam dunks. All of them are worth examining. And that ambiguity is precisely why horary is useful here — not to replace historical analysis, but to offer a different lens on a question that history alone can’t resolve.
What the Chart Tells Us
The arc of the triplicity lords tells a story that mirrors what the historical record suggests, and what we arrived at in our first reading through different means:
Joseph Smith began as a sincere seeker. The Sun exalted in the ninth house is not the chart of a grifter. It’s the chart of a boy who believed — in God, in himself, in the possibility that the divine would speak directly to someone like him.
He grew into something more complicated. Jupiter exalted in the eleventh house is the chart of a leader who built something real and powerful, but whose moral compass was increasingly governed by forces without integrity of their own. The seeds of fraud were present in the second stage, even if they hadn’t fully germinated.
He ended in collapse. Saturn fallen in the eighth house, with Mars bearing down — that’s the chart of someone who, by the end, was operating from a position so compromised that the violence of his death feels almost inevitable in the symbolism.
Was Joseph Smith a fraud? Not at the beginning. Not entirely in the middle. But by the end, the chart — and the history — make it very difficult to argue otherwise.