Joseph Smith

Founder of Mormonism ~ Part Three

In parts one and two of this series, I explored Joseph Smith’s birth chart through the lens of psychological astrology. I examined the powerful Capricorn stellium in his 6th house and added nuance through selected asteroids, symbols that can illuminate themes not always visible through the traditional planets alone.

In this third installment, I turn to a broader range of chart factors. They are more eclectic, perhaps, but they also resonate strongly, and at times eerily, with what we know of Joseph Smith’s life.

In Part One, I discussed the bowl pattern in Joseph’s chart, led by Uranus in Libra. In astrology, Uranus is associated with the rebel, the innovator, and the person who follows an inner rhythm rather than accepted convention. Uranian energy disrupts the status quo. It often belongs to someone who does not simply accept the world as it is, but feels driven to challenge, remake, or reinterpret it.

There is another major feature in Joseph Smith’s chart that seems to underline this tendency: his Mars in Capricorn was out of bounds.

Mars Beyond Limits

Mars represents action, will, assertion, courage, ambition, conflict, and the way a person goes after what they want. In Capricorn, Mars tends to be disciplined, determined, practical, and achievement oriented. This is not generally a reckless Mars. It is Mars that wants to build, lead, establish authority, and create something lasting.

Joseph’s Capricorn Mars was part of the larger 6th-house Capricorn concentration discussed earlier. Yet it had an additional unusual condition. It was out of bounds.

An out-of-bounds planet is one that has moved beyond the Sun’s normal northern or southern path in declination. Without becoming overly technical, it means that the planet is functioning beyond the ordinary solar limits. Astrologers often associate this condition with behavior, talent, perception, or initiative that does not follow conventional expectations.

Joseph was born close to the December solstice, when the Sun reaches its most southerly annual point, approximately 23°27′ south. Mars, however, was at approximately 23°50′ south, beyond the Sun’s maximum range. Thus, his Mars exceeded the normal solar boundary.

Astrologically, out-of-bounds planets often have a Uranian quality. They can behave independently, unpredictably, or in ways that stretch the accepted limits of what seems possible, permissible, or normal. In an individual chart, such a planet may describe a maverick tendency: the refusal to be easily contained by established authority, custom, or social expectation.

With Mars in Capricorn, this boundary-breaking quality is channeled through leadership, discipline, organization, ambition, and the urge to construct durable systems. Joseph’s Mars suggests someone driven not merely to have unusual ideas, but to act upon them, to create institutions, organize people, and establish a structure around a personal vision.

Some astrologers also connect an out-of-bounds planet with the ability to perceive beyond ordinary consciousness. In that symbolic sense, this placement is relevant to someone who reported dreams, visions, visitations, revelations, and encounters with unseen realms.

Mars, Work, Children, and Calling

Joseph’s Mars was in his 6th house, the area of the chart connected with work, service, duty, health, daily responsibilities, and the practical labor required to keep an undertaking alive.

Mars also ruled two important houses in his chart:

• His 5th house, with Scorpio on its cusp
• His 10th house, with Aries on its cusp

The 10th house concerns vocation, reputation, public role, and the contribution a person makes to the world. Aries on this house cusp suggests a life path involving initiative, assertion, independence, pioneering action, and conflict. Because Mars rules Aries, Mars becomes especially important in describing Joseph’s public mission.

With Mars exalted in Capricorn, the potential for long-range ambition, perseverance, command, and strategic effort is heightened. Mars in Capricorn does not simply begin things; it wants to make them real. It wants an idea to become a system, a movement, an authority, or an institution.

The out-of-bounds condition adds another layer: Joseph’s actions and ambitions were not likely to remain within ordinary religious or social boundaries. His life was marked by a willingness to introduce radical teachings, challenge established churches, gather followers, build communities, and repeatedly redefine the limits of accepted belief and practice.

Mars also rules Joseph’s 5th house, traditionally associated with children, creative self-expression, romance, pleasure, and the things one brings into the world. Because Scorpio is on that cusp, the 5th-house matters carry a more intense coloration: passion, secrecy, sexuality, death, regeneration, hidden knowledge, psychic phenomena, and transformation.

Scorpio, Death, and the Unseen

In traditional astrology, Mars rules Scorpio. In modern astrology, Scorpio is also associated with Pluto. Joseph’s Pluto was in Pisces in his 9th house, the part of the chart connected with religion, philosophy, sacred knowledge, spiritual belief, and the search for meaning.

The themes conventionally associated with Scorpio are especially relevant here: death and dying, psychic experiences, sexuality, secrecy, magic, spiritual transformation, occult interests, and what lies beneath the surface of ordinary life. Rex E. Bills’s The Rulership Book includes correspondences such as death, sorcery, secrets, underground matters, passion, regeneration, and the unseen realms within Scorpio’s symbolism.

This does not mean that one placement “causes” a life event. Astrology is more useful as a symbolic language, a way of identifying recurring patterns and themes. In Joseph’s chart, Mars ruling a Scorpio 5th house suggests that creative self-expression and personal desire may have been infused with intensity, secrecy, emotional transformation, and an unusual interest in matters of life, death, and the invisible world.

His reported religious experiences, his concern with the afterlife, and his eventual development of teachings and ordinances for the dead all echo this symbolism.

Grief and Salvation for the Dead

Joseph Smith appears to have had a sustained and increasingly central concern with death, dying, the afterlife, and the fate of those who had passed on. It became an important part of both his theology and his pastoral work.

In a discourse recorded in History of the Church, he said:

“All men know that they must die. And it is important that we should understand the reasons and causes of our exposure to the vicissitudes of life and of death, and the designs and purposes of God in our coming into the world, our sufferings here, and our departure hence. . .  It is but reasonable to suppose that God would reveal something in reference to the matter, and it is a subject we ought to study more than any other. We ought to study it day and night, for the world is ignorant in reference to their true condition and relation. If we have any claim on our Heavenly Father for anything it is for knowledge on this important subject.”

This was not merely an abstract philosophical concern. Death had visited Joseph’s own family repeatedly. His eldest brother, Alvin, died in 1823. Joseph later lost his father in 1840. Before the 1836 vision discussed below, he and Emma had lost four children: their first biological son in 1828, twins in 1831, and an adopted infant son in 1832. The Smith family experienced continued bereavement in the years that followed as well.

In August 1840, Joseph introduced what became known as baptism for the dead during a funeral sermon for Seymour Brunson in Nauvoo. The first proxy baptism was performed the following month. In this practice, a living person is baptized on behalf of someone who has died.

Upper Room Kirtland Temple

Location of vision where Joseph Smith had his vision of Alvin

For believers, this teaching represented a profoundly merciful vision of God’s justice and love. For historians and critics, it can also be understood in the context of a man who had personally lived with grief, loss, and questions about the eternal fate of loved ones who had died outside the new faith movement.

Either way, it was a highly unconventional development. It transformed mourning into a structured religious act: an ordinance carried out by the living on behalf of the dead. This is very much in keeping with the symbolism of a determined, system-building Mars in Capricorn, especially one operating beyond conventional boundaries.

The Vision of Alvin

Joseph’s fifth house, marked by Scorpio, is also relevant in another way. According to Rex E. Bills, the 5th house can signify children and, in some contexts, a brother, especially an eldest brother. That symbolism is striking given the importance of Alvin Smith in Joseph’s inner life.

On January 21, 1836, Joseph reported a vision in the upper room of the Kirtland Temple. He described seeing the celestial kingdom, the highest heavenly realm in Latter-day Saint theology. There, he said, he saw his parents and his deceased brother Alvin.

Joseph was reportedly astonished because Alvin had died twelve years earlier, before the formal organization of the church and before he could receive baptism. The revelation, later canonized as Doctrine and Covenants 137, answered that those who died without the opportunity to receive the gospel, but who would have accepted it had they been given the chance, could inherit the celestial kingdom. It also declared that children who die before reaching accountability are saved there.

Here is where believers and critics are likely to interpret the event differently.

For Latter-day Saints, this was a genuine revelation: a divinely given answer concerning Alvin, the dead, and the justice of God. For critics, it may be seen as an expression of Joseph’s profound and recurring grief, filtered through his visionary imagination and religious leadership.

From an astrological perspective, I would say that the chart symbolism is compatible with a person whose experiences of death, family loss, visions, and contact with the unseen became central to his creative and public self-expression. Whether one understands such experiences as revelation, psychological processing, psychic experience, or some combination of these is ultimately a matter of worldview.

The Mars Dispositor Chain

To understand Joseph’s Mars more fully, we need to follow its dispositor chain, the sequence of planets connected by sign rulership.

Mars is in Capricorn, which is ruled by Saturn. Joseph’s Saturn is in Libra and conjunct Uranus in the 4th house, the house of family, home, ancestry, and emotional foundation. Saturn then connects to Venus in Aquarius in the 8th house, because Saturn and Venus are in mutual reception: Saturn is in Venus’s sign of Libra, and Venus is in Saturn’s traditional sign of Aquarius.

This creates a tightly interwoven pattern:

Saturn in Libra can speak of seriousness, duty, separation, or loss in relationships. Uranus beside it can bring disruption, sudden breaks, nontraditional arrangements, or a powerful need to redefine relational rules. Located in the 4th house, these themes are tied to family and emotional roots.

Venus in Aquarius in the 8th house adds another important note: relationships, intimacy, death, shared resources, and transformation become linked with unconventional ideals and new forms of social or spiritual understanding.

This pattern does not simplify Joseph Smith into one thing. Rather, it suggests a complex personality in which family loss, public authority, spiritual vision, intimate relationships, social reform, and institutional building were deeply intertwined.

Vega and a Forceful Voice

There is one more important factor in Joseph’s Capricorn Mars. Mars was at approximately 12°31′ Capricorn, closely conjunct the fixed star Vega at approximately 12°35′ Capricorn.

Vega, the bright star Alpha Lyrae, is associated in astrological tradition with charisma, idealism, intellectual brilliance, artistic or poetic gifts, prominence, enchantment, magic, and spiritual illumination. Vega is part of Lyra, the Lyre which is the instrument associated in myth with Orpheus, whose music could move animals, stones, and even the dead.

That mythic connection is striking in a chart already saturated with themes of death, visionary experience, religious teaching, and the unseen. With Vega conjunct Mars, Joseph’s actions and ambitions may have carried unusual power to capture attention, move people emotionally, and turn a message into a mission.

This placement may also help explain the intensity of his personal communication. His letters, especially those written to Emma during imprisonment, show a man capable of strong emotional expression, love, longing, anguish, hope, grievance, loyalty, and spiritual conviction. He was not only a system-builder and public leader. He could also be intensely personal and emotionally direct.

With Aries on the 10th-house cusp, the public role carries the signature of a pioneer, founder, challenger, reformer, commander, or agitator. Mars in Capricorn strengthens the capacity to endure resistance and pursue an objective over time. Vega adds the possibility of charisma and a voice capable of moving others.

The Aquarius New Moon

Joseph Smith was born under a New Moon in Aquarius. In astrology, the New Moon represents beginnings, seeds, renewal, and the emergence of something not yet fully visible. Because the Moon is dark at this phase, astrologers often connect it with the unconscious, intuition, inwardness, and the sense of being carried by an emerging idea before its full meaning is understood.

The New Moon archetype is frequently associated with pioneers, visionaries, reformers, and those who feel compelled to begin something new. Aquarius adds the themes of collective ideals, religious or social reform, unconventional thought, community-building, and rebellion against inherited structures.

An Aquarius New Moon can describe someone who sees beyond the individual and toward the group, the society, or even humanity as a whole. It can also bring a conviction that new forms of community, belief, family, and cooperation are necessary.

Joseph’s Aquarius Moon was in the 7th house, the area of the chart concerned with marriage, close partnerships, agreements, and one-to-one relationships. This adds a strong relational dimension to his Aquarian impulse. He may have felt drawn to redefine family, partnership, and communal bonds in ways that were idealistic but also controversial.

Aquarius is traditionally ruled by Saturn and is modernly associated with Uranus. Both planets are together in Joseph’s 4th house of home and family. The symbolism reinforces a recurring chart theme: unconventional, disruptive, and nontraditional dynamics surrounding family, marriage, home, and intimate relationships.

This is particularly relevant considering Joseph Smith’s plural marriages. Historical estimates vary, but researchers commonly place the number at roughly 30 to 40 plural wives. The practice was secretive during his lifetime, deeply controversial, and emotionally consequential for the people involved.

One documented example comes from William Clayton’s May 16, 1843, diary entry. Clayton recorded that he and Joseph went to Benjamin F. Johnson’s house in Nauvoo “to sleep.” Benjamin Johnson later stated that Smith stayed in the same room as his sister, Almera Woodard Johnson, whom he regarded as one of Smith’s plural wives, “as man and wife.” Johnson also said Smith had previously occupied that room with another plural wife, Eliza Partridge.

The historical record is incomplete, and no single account can tell us the full texture of these relationships. Yet the broader pattern is clear: Joseph Smith’s marital and relational life moved far beyond the conventions of his day.

A Complex Human Pattern

Joseph Smith’s chart reflects a profoundly complex figure. It suggests a person with unusual vision, intense ambition, formidable resilience, emotional depth, and a powerful capacity to organize people around a compelling spiritual narrative.

It also suggests someone whose personal relationships could become entangled with authority, secrecy, innovation, conflict, and the crossing of boundaries that many people, then and now, would find troubling.

On one hand, Joseph appears to have been driven to teach, inspire, comfort, guide, and create structures that gave ordinary people meaning, community, and hope. On the other, he repeatedly challenged conventional boundaries around religious authority, family, marriage, sexuality, and personal power.

Finally, Joseph’s Aquarius Moon rules his Cancer ascendant, or rising sign. This indicates that the Aquarian Moon shaped the persona people may have most readily encountered: caring, idealistic, socially minded, forward-looking, and protective of a larger human family.

In Joseph Smith’s case, the chart repeatedly returns to the same central paradox: a man who sought to build a new spiritual world and whose effort to do so transformed not only public religion, but also the most intimate areas of human life.

In part four of this series, I will explore Joseph Smith’s nodal axis, a critical key to understanding the unfolding of his life.