The Astrology Podcast

Transcript of Episode 543, titled:

The Libra Rising Birth Chart of the United States

With Chris Brennan

Episode originally released on July 29, 2026

Original episode URL:

https://theastrologypodcast.com/2026/08/07/the-libra-rising-birth-chart-of-the-united-states/

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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com

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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo

Transcription released August 12th, 2026

Copyright © 2026 TheAstrologyPodcast.com

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CHRIS BRENNAN: There’s been a mystery surrounding the birth chart of the United States for more than two centuries now. But recently, new historical evidence has come to light that may solve that mystery or help to solve that mystery. And today I would like to present that evidence and outline all of the historical evidence which will ultimately, I think, show that the US was actually born on July 4th, 1776, in the morning, and that the birth chart of the United States has Libra rising. 

All right, so let’s get into it. So the United States, as we all know, is kind of unique as a country because it was born relatively recently, having just this past week celebrated its 250th anniversary. And despite the, you know, historical recency of how recently the US came about as a country, the birth chart of the United States for astrologers has been something of a mystery for the past couple of centuries. And it’s actually been really hotly debated in the astrological community with different astrologers proposing different times and different rising signs, especially focusing on July 4th, which is the day the Declaration of Independence was approved, but also sometimes suggesting other dates that might be relevant as the birth chart of the United States as well. 

So in previous episodes, I’ve covered this, but we ended up just presenting a bunch of different charts, and I’ve always sort of just lamented that there didn’t seem to be enough historical evidence from primary sources to allow us to narrow down the time, and that basically it wasn’t recorded that day so that any chart proposed was ultimately just gonna be based on rectification and therefore would be highly speculative. 

However, a few days ago on July 4th, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I discovered that there may be some new evidence. So I was following this Twitter account called 1776Live at – it was the Twitter handle or the X handle is @250YearsAgoLive. And on that day, they tweeted out a picture where Thomas Jefferson, who was the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, had written down – he’d been writing down or was in the habit of writing down times and temperatures during the course of that entire year of 1776. Like, he was into meteorology and so he would write down the temperature a few times a day, and he would write down what time it was when he took the temperature. 

So I had never seen this before, and I’ve never seen any other astrologers mention this before, but it suddenly got me excited because it made me realize that we have something tangible that perhaps we could use in order to try to narrow down or triangulate what they were doing that day on July 4th, 1776, and perhaps through that to reverse engineer a birth time or a plausible birth time based on historical evidence. 

So once I had that, I really started focusing over the course of the past week on just pulling out what are all of the primary sources that we have that talk about what was going on during that time. And during the process of all of that, I realized that there’s actually much more primary evidence that allows us to narrow down the approximate time that day on July 4th than I had previously realized. And so as a result of that, what I’m gonna do today is I’m gonna outline all of the historical evidence that we have to work with in order to narrow down the birth date and birth time of the United States, especially focusing on July 4th, but also mentioning some adjacent dates such as July 2nd when they took the vote for independence as well as some of the other dates surrounding that, such as when the Declaration of Independence was first promoted – or first publicly proclaimed and read out loud in Philadelphia several days later on July 8th, which is actually the same as today. Today I’m recording this on Wednesday, July 8th, 2026, and I started a little bit after 2:05 PM here in Denver, Colorado, with Libra rising. 

All right, so I’m gonna outline the historical evidence we have to work with. I’m also gonna establish what timelines are plausible based on that evidence, just from a historical standpoint. I’m also gonna spend some time later in the episode dispelling some false myths surrounding the different birth charts that have been popular historically amongst astrologers, such as the Sagittarius rising Sibley chart or the earlier Gemini rising chart that some astrologers used or was more popular in the 1800s and early 1900s. And then in the case – what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna make the case for what I think the true and most plausible birth chart is, which it turns out has Libra rising. And in fact, several of the prospective charts that week, or at least three of them – not just for the Declaration, but also for the vote for independence as well as the first public reading the Declaration of Independence – I believe all three had Libra rising at the time that that happened. So this is gonna be really interesting and really important, I think, and I’m excited to share what I found. 

All right. So first things first – why July 4th? So Americans have come to celebrate the 4th of July as Independence Day and as the birthday of the United States. And July 4th, what it is, what it represents is it marks the day when the Declaration of Independence was finalized, adopted by Congress, and then sent to the printer as well as the date on the document that they put on it when they sent it to the printer to start distributing this document. 

So the Declaration of Independence did three important things. The first thing is that it announced that the 13 colonies were separating from Great Britain, so it announced the separation of the 13 colonies from its original like, parent state, let’s say. Second, it listed the colonies’ grievances with King George III. And finally third, it asserted the famous principles that all people have come to know in the United States, such as the idea that all people have the natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which then became some fundamental sort of aspirational ideas in American history, which of course at the time of the creation of the Declaration of Independence there was a sort of hypocrisy built into it because that obviously didn’t apply to all people, including women didn’t have the right to vote and a large percentage of the population was enslaved, even with the founders themselves owning slaves in some instances. But it contains some aspirational principles that later civil rights leaders, such as Abraham Lincoln and later Martin Luther King, Jr., would refer back to in order to sort of drag the country forward and push it on the path of progress towards something – towards creating a more perfect union or a more perfect state or a more equitable state, let’s say. 

So that was finalized – that document was finalized – on July 4th. Two days earlier, though, Congress took the actual legal vote for independence to separate from Great Britain on July 2nd, 1776. But then they spent the next few days editing, basically, Thomas Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence that he’d been working on for the prior two to three weeks ever since about June 11th. And then they quickly, once they voted to, basically, become independent on the 2nd, they then spent the next couple of days heavily editing and removing at least 25 percent of Jefferson’s written Declaration of Independence, including references to slavery and other things like that, before eventually finalizing the document on July 4th, at which point that became the formal announcement that the United States was now an independent country. 

So both of those two dates are important, both July 2nd as well as July 4th. But eventually July 4th is the one that came to be celebrated as the nation’s birthday. And there are still worthwhile debates, I think, to be had astrologically about whether to use July 2nd or July 4th as the main date. But for me personally, I do think that July 4th is the one that has the greater symbolic significance. And interestingly, whether you use July 2nd or July 4th, as we’ll see later – I’m gonna make the argument that both charts probably have Libra rising, and that the crucial moment happened both days during the time window between approximately 11:15 in the morning until about like, 1:30 in the afternoon, that that was the operative range where if it was finalized anywhere between that window, then the chart would have had Libra rising. So it’s interesting that we may end up with the same rising sign in both charts. 

And in terms of why, though, the Declaration is more important symbolically, one of the things I’ve been reading some different historians lately. Like, one historian named Pauline Maier who wrote a book titled – I think it’s called American Scripture. And one of the things that she talked about and that other historians talk about is that since the US was founded as a secular country as opposed to other earlier countries that were more religiously based in their actual institutions – like, with the Roman Catholic church, for example. With more of a secular base, in America, the Declaration of Independence ended up acting as a sort of foundational scripture for American civic life, and taking on eventually almost this quasi-religious sort of like, text of reverence and in which some of the later leaders of the country would refer back to, such as, like I said, Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr., as an aspirational seed document about what the country was supposed to be about and the direction that it was supposed to take according to what became sort of mythologized as the founding of the country and the legendary founders of the country like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so on and Benjamin Franklin and so on and so forth. So there’s something about the document of the Declaration of Independence that has special significance for the United States, and that’s part of the reason why I think it is the more important symbolic chart to focus on on July 4th. 

Additionally, I believe that the symbolic significance was confirmed years later when exactly 50 years after July 4th, 1776, after the Declaration of Independence was approved and that that draft was – it was edited, of Thomas Jefferson’s writings, which John Adams helped to edit. Exactly 50 years after that document was completed and then they basically published it that day, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the two principal writers, basically, especially Jefferson, of the Declaration of Independence, they both died on the same day on July 4th, 1826, exactly 50 years to the day after the completion and publication of the Declaration of Independence. 

So I think that’s hugely – it’s one of the things that’s always like, remarked on in history books and as like, a funny, an interesting trivia fact. But for us as astrologers, I think that carries extra symbolic weight indicating that something really important happened on July 4th, and that July 4th is probably the primary date to focus on that has the greatest significance for the actual birth of founding of the country, in the same way that for the birth of a human – a normal person’s birth chart, like, my birth chart or your birth chart – we have the notion that there can be conception charts, which is when you’re originally conceived and the body starts being formed. But there’s something special about that moment of divergence – when you as the individual are born and break away separately from the body of your mother. And I think that’s part of what was happening at this time on July 2nd and July 4th. 

So one of the things that’s important that I wanna talk about also to help ground this in some of the astrology that was happening this summer that speaks to that and speaks to that notion of separation is that summer, there was a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini that was happening in the sky most of that summer, especially when they were working on the Declaration of Independence and then eventually when they finalized it. 

So Mars traditionally – let’s talk about Mars first. So Mars is the planet that its primary meaning and significations in astrology, one of the overarching meanings is that Mars severs and separates. And it’s also traditionally the planet associated with war for over 2,000 years now. 

Uranus, on the other hand, is a planet that has to do with the impulse for freedom and liberation and change. And Uranus was actually discovered in 1781 during the course of the American and the French revolutions. And so these revolutions that were happening at the time of the discovery of Uranus actually inform a lot of our understanding of what Uranus means, or they at least gave us an early clue about what Uranus meant in astrology that these two major, unique revolutions were happening at the time that it was discovered and sort of came into human consciousness. 

So when you put those two together, when you put Mars and Uranus together, this represents the breaking away of America through an armed rebellion, or other words, through the revolution and through what we now call today the American Revolution or American Revolutionary War. 

So it turns out, I’ve been researching these Mars-Uranus conjunctions over the past year. And I did a whole episode on Mars-Uranus conjunctions in US history with my friend Nick Dagan Best in order to try to understand what we were looking at with the current conjunction, the current set of four conjunctions that’s gonna take place in Gemini over the next seven years. And one of the things I realized and discovered over the past several months is the United States is not the only example of a country that had a revolution where they broke away from a colonial empire under a conjunction of Mars and Uranus. But in fact, so the US was the first country in the world to do that in 1776 at the time of this Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini. But then a few decades later, Venezuela became the first country in South America to declare its independence from a colonial empire on July 5th, 1811. And this was under a Mars-Uranus conjunction in the sign of Scorpio. And when I say “conjunction,” I mean both the two planets aligning in the sky by degree, but also a conjunction can be just being copresent in the same sign as a sign-based conjunction as well. 

So Venezuela was the first country to break away in South America from a colonial empire, and they did it on a Mars-Uranus conjunction. And they were inspired by the United States at that time and sort of following a similar pattern. But then it turns out there’s other countries as well. So I found out later that Cuba, the current government of Cuba, celebrates its revolution as starting on July 6th, 1953, which was during a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Cancer, Mars-Uranus copresence in Cancer. And then in the 20th century there was another country – Lebanon – celebrates their independence from France on November 22nd, 1943, under a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini. So this is something that was in the air and that America becomes one of the first examples of having this revolution or this armed rebellion in order to break away from a parent country or from a colonial empire. 

So I’m actually gonna animate the chart and show the chart right now for the Mars-Uranus conjunction in 1776, because I want you to see where it was in early July when the country was being founded, but also what I’ve discovered – I want you to see the full sequence of what happened around the time of the exact conjunction, because it’s actually really insightful in terms of what we’re looking at here. And the fact that even though we’re trying to identify a chart of singular significance as the birth chart of the US that, like with most things in terms of electional or inceptional astrology, the birth of the US was not just a singular moment but it was part of a sequence of events that unfolded over an extended period of time. And the focus in 1776 was primarily and for our purpose, especially in early July, is declaring independence and making that publicly known. But then there were other things that came after that such as starting to actually set up the form of government and doing the Articles of Confederation and things like that. 

All right. So let’s jump into – let’s take a look at the chart. So for those watching the video version, I am going to animate the chart. So this is the – I guess first off, just this is the chart set for July 4th, 1776, so the day of the Declaration of Independence. And I have it set for 11:15 AM, which I’m gonna be arguing is the correct rising sign and perhaps even approximate birth chart of when they finalized the Declaration of Independence on July 4th and approved it. 

So in the chart, we can see – I’m not gonna go over the whole chart right now, but I wanna focus on the first part, which is the Mars-Uranus conjunction or sign-based conjunction and copresence, which is up there in Gemini with Mars at about 21 degrees of Gemini separating from a degree-based conjunction with Uranus at eight degrees of Gemini. So I use both sign-based and degree-based aspects, so any time two planets are in the same sign, they’re in a conjunction; it’s just that the conjunction tends to be more intense the closer they get to the exact degree. But nonetheless, this is a conjunction between Mars and Uranus. 

So what’s cool is when you take it back – I’m gonna go back to early June; I’m gonna animate the chart and move it back to early June to when Mars ingressed into Gemini around June 4th. And what happened is shortly after this ingress took place, on July 7th, something was introduced called the Lee Resolution. And this was basically proposing that the colonists and that the Continental Congress, which were the representatives of the 13 colonies, should declare that the American colonies are independent from Great Britain. So this is really important, because that means that shortly after Mars went into Gemini and starting building up to that degree-based conjunction with Uranus. Here on June 7th, Mars is at two degrees of Gemini, and Uranus is at seven degrees of Gemini. Then that was the first time that this proposal was introduced saying, you know, that’s it; let’s do it; let’s declare our independence from Great Britain and say that we’re no longer a part of that country, but instead we are separating and we’re gonna form our own independent country. 

So what’s interesting is after that, they ended up – the resolution was proposed on June 7th, but they ended up postponing the vote on it to either confirm it or deny it partially because they didn’t think they could pass it at that time, and they needed more time to talk about and debate it. So they postponed the debate, or they postponed the vote, which eventually is what took place on July 2nd, 1776. But in the meantime, what they did is just in case the vote was affirmed and if the vote went through, basically, to declare independence, then they wanted to have a document ready. They wanted to have the Declaration of Independence ready so that they could quickly approve that afterwards in order to start moving forward, which is eventually what they did on July 4th, just two days after the vote took place. But in order to have that document ready, that meant on June 11th, the Committee of Five was created, which included people like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. So let me move the chart forward to June 11th. 

Here we can see now Venus has moved into Gemini and joined Mars and Uranus, and now Mars is at five degrees of Gemini and it’s applying to a close conjunction with Uranus at seven degrees of Gemini. So what happened is the Committee of Five was created, but Thomas Jefferson became the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence. And apparently, he wrote it pretty quickly. John Adams says it may have only taken a day or two once he started writing in order to have his first draft and to have the bulk of the Declaration of Independence already ready to go. So if we move the chart forward, we see that Mars and Uranus and Venus move into this very close triple conjunction by June 13th and June 14th. And then eventually early on June 15th, Mars completes its conjunction with Uranus at seven degrees of Gemini, and then later that day, there’s a New Moon in Gemini as well. And in the meantime, Jupiter has just ingressed into Cancer by June 8th and June 9th, basically, shortly after the Lee Resolution is introduced. But the point I wanted to point out here is just that the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini went exact within a few days of the Committee of Five being formed and within a few days of Jefferson starting to write the Declaration of Independence. And because we have John Adams later saying that he largely completed it within a day or two, I think he may have actually completed the main bulk or the main draft of the Declaration of Independence right on this Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini or right on this triple conjunction of Mars, Uranus, and Venus in Gemini that went exact around June 13th, 14th, and 15th. 

So that’s really extraordinary to me, because as I’ve talked about in other episodes, Mars-Uranus conjunctions would later become really important in US history. And it turns out that the founding document was basically being written right on that exact Mars-Uranus conjunction. 

All right. So they eventually vote for – so let’s move things forward. They’re working on this draft, basically, and then Adams and Benjamin Franklin over the next couple of weeks are providing some feedback to Jefferson to make light suggestions. But then eventually, later in June – I’m gonna move the chart forward – on June 28th, the Committee of Five for the first time presents the Declaration of Independence to the rest of Congress. And they lay it out on a table, and they have everybody read it basically on June 28th. And one of the things that you’ll notice right away is that Mercury, which had been slowing down up to this point in Cancer, it stations retrograde on this exact day on June 28th, 1776, the day that they present primarily Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. So what’s interesting about that, since the Mercury retrograde then begins at that point, is if we move the chart forward to July 2nd, this is the day they finally take the vote. So on July 1st, they take the Lee Resolution up again, and they start debating intensely whether to declare independence. And then finally on July 2nd, they take the vote, and they vote to declare independence. 

But then over the next couple of days for the rest of July 2nd, July 3rd, and into early July 4th, the entire Congress spends that time editing basically Jefferson’s and in parts rewriting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. In some areas perhaps improving it, in other areas taking out 25 percent of what he wrote and taking out some really important passages, including the passages on slavery. So Jefferson himself was like, super not excited about this, and was really upset how much they edited of his writing and he ended up sending out copies of the original draft later to friends asking them what they thought. And that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to do comparisons of the draft versus what they eventually created today. But I think that’s part of the Mercury retrograde effect, and it’s one of the trickier things in the US birth chart – whatever chart you end up using for July 4th – is you end up having Mercury retrograde in Cancer, and it’s also somewhat closely opposing Pluto, which is down there at 27 degrees of Capricorn. And I think these are some of the revisions that were put into place as political compromises, they said, especially with some of the southern colonies over things like slavery in order to get the vote and get the Declaration passed, basically. But that becomes obviously some of the core wounds, then, that are set up and set things up so that we would eventually have things like the Civil War in the middle of the 1800s on the next Uranus return. 

So okay. So that’s one thing that’s happening; that’s one piece of this is we have the Mars-Uranus conjunction, and we have a revolution, and we have the Declaration of Independence that we are gonna like, fight for our independence at this time, and we are severing or separating from our parent country. But that’s not the only conjunction that was happening at that time, especially by July 2nd and July 4th. But there was also this very notable and very auspicious Venus-Jupiter conjunction that was happening in Cancer in early July of 1776 as well. And this is another important component, because this represents the coming together of the 13 colonies into one country. 

So we can see on let’s say, for example, by July 2nd, by the time they take the vote and they all vote to declare their independence and to become one new country, Venus has just ingressed into zero degrees of Cancer, and it’s now applying to a close degree-based conjunction with Jupiter at five degrees of Cancer. Then two days later when they adopt the Declaration of Independence, Venus has moved to two degrees of Cancer – late two degrees of Cancer – and now it’s applying even more closely to Jupiter at five degrees of Cancer. And Jupiter, of course, is in the sign of its exaltation, which is traditionally, since about 1,000 BCE in the ancient Mesopotamian tradition seemed to be one of the most positive zodiacal placements in the sign that follows the summer solstice. 

So we have the Venus-Jupiter conjunction that’s highly auspicious. And one thing that’s important about this is there was a prior precedent. And the prior precedent that I found is that earlier, about 22 years earlier on July 10th, 1754, Benjamin Franklin proposed what’s known as the Albany Plan of Union. And this was basically the first attempt to unite the colonies. And Franklin was inspired by some Indigenous American traditions and drew heavy inspiration from the democratic and federalist structure of the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Haudenosaunee. And what I find really notable and important about this, this first proposal, is that it was happening at the time that there was a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in the sky. So in this chart on July 10th, 1754, I don’t believe we have a time or an approximate time, although I didn’t attempt to research the time on this one too closely. But we can see that Venus is at about 14 or 15 degrees of Leo, and it’s applying to a conjunction with Jupiter at 19 degrees of Leo. So it’s a pretty close applying Venus-Jupiter conjunction, which is exactly what happened then and what the Declaration of Independence about 22 years later would eventually become a recurrence transit of. And what happened with Benjamin Franklin’s thing is that they approved this, they proposed the Albany Plan of Union and to unite the colonies. But then when it was sent out afterwards, every single one of the colonies ended up rejecting the plan and the British also rejected the plan as well for obvious reasons. But it set some sort of idea or some sort of foundational chart on a Venus-Jupiter conjunction which has the idea of a union or a marriage or a coming together of different parties into one, and that idea would eventually be realized on July 2nd and July 4th, 1776, where under this conjunction of Venus-Jupiter in Cancer, it becomes a recurrence transit of the Albany chart. But this time it worked, and the 13 colonies put aside their differences and decided to come together to form one union and one eventually government. 

So it’s an interesting example of a recurrence transit where sometimes you’ll have, like, an earlier thing under an alignment, and then when that same alignment recurs, you’ll get a repetition of that in some way. But of course, 1776 is a more powerful version of that alignment, of that conjunction, because in 1776 Jupiter was in the sign of its exaltation in Cancer. So it ends up representing this highly benefic signature ends up representing the successful optimistic union of the colonies at that time. 

All right, so that means that we’ve got on the one hand, both the armed revolution and separation of the Mars-Uranus conjunction, but we also have the unification indicated by the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, and both qualities are actually really important. And this ends up representing the birth of the country, I think, because this is the formal point of separation. And in an episode that I did previously with the astrologer Bruce Scofield about the nature of astrology, he called these bifurcation points, which is basically, like, that astrologers study when they cast a chart for something – especially when they’re looking for a chart that represents the singular birth of something, not just with an individual let’s say human, but also when we’re looking at event charts or we’re looking at the inception of something like a country or a business or a marriage or a trip or other electional or inceptional charts like that. We’re looking at bifurcation points and we’re looking at inflection points where there’s a divergence between two things, which in some instances also represents a point of severance and separation but also ultimately individuation at the same time. Like, when you are born – like, up until that point, the human body is attached to your mother’s body. And in the ancient world, they would make an analogy that, like, before you’re born you’re sort of like, a piece of fruit that’s growing off of a tree and is still an extension of that tree. But then at some point, the fruit ripens and the apple falls off of the tree, and then it is and becomes this sort of separate, independent thing at that point. 

So there’s these notions of severance and separation. There’s also this notion of an autonomous emergence at this time, which in the context of this country is gaining self-governance. There’s also other notions of like, singularization and actualization, the ability to actualize one’s potential. But it also acts as a new – as an inception or a new beginning, and a seed moment for what that thing that is born at that time will eventually become in the same way that each of our birth charts that’s cast for the moment of our birth and the moment of our separation and individualization into this world, the birth chart acts as a seed moment and a blueprint and a sort of like, promise of our life and what will develop in the future as we get older and grow and age and go through the course of our life. That’s basically what’s happening here on July 2nd and July 4th, and that’s the reason why I think these are the two most important dates to focus on. 

Of course, you know, with the country also at this time as I mentioned, the Declaration of Independence was also aspirational because it contained the seeds of what it would later become or what the country would later become, even though at the time it did not at all live up to the high ideals that it claimed. So you know, the most famous line from the Declaration of Independence is “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And that line – the pursuit of happiness – I think is really striking in terms of the Venus-Jupiter conjunction. But one historian refers to this, and the sort of seed that it set up, as “the quasi-religion of equality,” which is I think really interesting, because it makes me think of not just the Venus-Jupiter conjunction, but also potentially as we will see, if the birth chart of the US has Libra rising, that may be part of where that’s coming from as well. 

So the phrase “the quasi-religion of equality” was coined by a historian and a cultural critic named Garry Willis in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book titled Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. And I wrote a note that in his analysis, basically, Willis argues that Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address did not merely dedicate a cemetery, because it occurred after a battle – one of the largest battles in US history – but it fundamentally altered the American political tradition by elevating the Declaration of Independence and its core tenet that all men are created equal into a sort of sacred, civic creed. So this goes back to that thing I was saying earlier about how the US partially being founded as a quasi-secular country ends up using and taking documents like the Declaration of Independence as these almost like, sacred documents that later politicians and civil rights activists would use in order to push America in certain directions based on the theoretical seeds that it planted at that time. 

So that’s sort of the case for why this is important and why I’m focusing primarily on July 2nd and July 4th. But of course, there were also points of conception that paved the way. 

So one of the questions that I had was why early July, and were there – was this a singular like, founding point, or were there earlier events that had happened in July that fed into why July ended up being the final moment of importance in American history in 1776? And what I found is that there were some earlier conception charts that kept relating back to early July in pre-American history, or pre-1776 history. So one of them that I already mentioned was Franklin’s Albany Plan which took place on July 10th, 1754, when he first proposed this notion that all of the colonies should unite into a single union. And what I think’s important about that is it was almost exactly 22 years to the day that the finalized Declaration of Independence would be read to the public for the first time on July 8th, 1776. So in some ways, that July proposal in July of 1754 that Franklin did may have set an earlier conception chart or sort of like, precursor that then feeds into the July 1776 charts. 

Additionally, weirdly, the same exact week in 1754 on the morning on July 4th, 1754, a 22-year-old George Washington ended up surrendering at Fort Necessity and marching his troops away. And what happened basically is that this specific battle ignited the incredibly expensive what became known as the French and Indian War, or it’s called that in the history books. And what happened is that the British ended up spending a ton of money helping to fight this war in the Americas with the colonies, and then eventually later, especially after it was over, to recoup their massive war debts, Britain began taxing the colonies without representation in order to make back the money that they spent partially defending the colonies. 

So what’s funny about Washington surrendering on this date, July 4th, 1754, is that this is literally like, the historical domino that directly led to and caused the events of July 4th, 1776, because of course as soon as the British started taxing the colonies without representation, the colonists started to rebel and started to talk more openly about revolutions and about eventually breaking away. So there’s, again, it’s weird that that same week that Franklin presented that plan of like, a union, we have Washington having this hugely crucial moment in his life and in arguably in the history of the colonies that just happened to take place the morning of July 4th, 1754. And I suspect that these two events created some sort of earlier conception or like, base charts that then we return to about 22 years later in early July of 1776. 

Lastly, one other precursor chart that’s incredibly important took place on July 6th, 1775. So this is one year before the Declaration of Independence, and this is when Congress adopted the Declaration of Causes, which in astrological circles is sometimes referred to as “the war chart,” because the colonists or the Congress, the Continental Congress, basically de facto declared war against the British empire at this time. Although it was kind of ambiguous, because at the same time, I think the day before that, they sent something called the Olive Branch Petition where they were still trying to find a way to like, come to peace with the British basically. So what’s funny about this astrologically is historically, it’s usually recognized as like, they were kind of sending mixed messages, but functionally this still ends up de facto being a declaration of war on July 6th, 1775. And what I noticed was interesting about it from an astrological standpoint – there was a Mars-Saturn-Neptune conjunction happening in the sky at this time. And Mars is usually associated with war, but Neptune is usually associated with things that are like, nebulous or ambiguous. And when you put those two together, you have, you know, this sort of like, mixed message of them de facto declaring war, but also kind of like, trying to sue for peace at the same time, and there being this sort of ambiguity about it. You know, they weren’t declaring full independence at this time, and they didn’t do that until exactly one year later, basically, in 1776. So let me put that chart up really quickly just so you can see what I’m talking about. 

So this is July 6th, 1775. And we don’t have a time for this. My friend Alan White liked this chart; he thought this was really important, the Declaration of Causes, which he basically called the war chart. He did use a Libra rising chart for this, but I don’t know historically if that can be validated, because I was seeing indications that the Declaration may have been passed later in the day. And I don’t have any final conclusions about that necessarily; I just wanted to highlight this chart because this is one of the other charts that people sometimes use or sometimes like, dates of importance that people argue are important as potential charts for the United States. And for me, I was just fascinated by this triple conjunction where we can see Mercury at 27 degrees of Virgo, and it’s conjunct Neptune at 20 degrees of Virgo, and Saturn at two degrees of Libra. And so as a result of that, you get this de facto declaration of war at this time, but also some ambiguity. But this point, the American Revolutionary War is like, fully kicking off at this point. 

So those are some of the early precursor charts. There are also probably other charts as well that are relevant, both in terms of the history of the colonies. I’m also sure, like, for example, seeing Benjamin Franklin presenting that plan for the union and being inspired by Indigenous American traditions that there’s probably some important Indigenous American traditions and dates that lined up with previous alignments and charts that were also probably relevant that we don’t know about or can’t know about in terms of recorded history. 

But I think instead of going through all the other possible charts, I think that’s sufficient. And that basically this just confirms that the early July timeframe that ended up becoming so important in July of 1776 with the Declaration of Independence was already somehow established in some early base charts for the United States because it keeps coming up over and over again. And it would eventually culminate in early July of 1776 with this really special point when I believe the country was officially born. 

All right, so now that we’ve discussed the importance and we’ve established the importance of the July 2nd and July 4th dates, I want to now discuss what the historical evidence is for different times that were happening that day that can give us some sort of timeline of what possible rising signs are available to us for potential rising signs for the two significant moments that happened that day – first with the vote that happened on July 2nd, 1776, and second with the finalization of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. 

All right, so first things first. An important rule I wanna outline here for all astrologers in the future is don’t take anything for granted when it comes to this topic. Find primary sources for everything when you’re talking about this, not secondary sources, not just like, whatever random blog posts or social media things or things that somebody told you. Every statement, if you’re gonna try to rectify the birth chart of the United States, needs to be verifiable from a primary source from that time period. And that’s the only way to reliably do this, because there’s been 250 years of different myths and legends and other things built up that we have to like, weed through in order to attempt to get to the truth. And that’s part of what I set out to do with this as carefully as I could. 

So one of my rules is that every statement needs to be verifiable. There’s a lot of false assumptions that astrologers make when discussing this topic which are not really well-sourced when you look into them. And that’s why the primary sources are so important. And you know, in the past, I feel like we can kind of like, give some leeway to some of the astrologers in the past in like, the 1800s or the early 1900s perhaps where they didn’t have access to as many resources as we do. But at this point, we have access to so many resources, and we have the ability to research these things now. So I don’t think there’s really any excuse for not using the primary sources when talking about this topic. And if somebody’s talking about it without reference to primary sources, then I think that immediately makes their discussion of it somewhat suspect. 

All right. So first piece of evidence. One of the first questions is can we establish a timeframe when Congress was in session when they were doing these important things, which is one – taking a vote on July 2nd, and then two – adopting and agreeing to adopt – to finalize and adopt the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. So in order to do that, Congress had to be in session and they would together as a body all of the different representatives of each of the 13 colonies would vote, basically, for these things. So as a result of that, Congress needed to be in session. 

So one of the questions immediately is when was Congress in session? So I can actually answer that, because what I found is that according to John Adams, he actually wrote a letter to his wife Abigail in 1774 saying that Congress had a pretty rigid schedule. And what he said is basically that Congress would gavel in around nine AM in the morning, they would debate continuously without a sort of, like, lunch break as we would usually consider it, and they would adjourn at three o’clock PM for the main meal of the day, which was referred to as “dinner” in the 1770s. 

So here’s the actual quote from John Adams, who was one of the signers who worked with Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence. He eventually became one of the signers. And then he eventually became, you know, a president of the United States along with Jefferson. So this is what he wrote to his wife. He said, 

“I shall be killed with kindness in this place. We go to Congress at nine, and there we stay most earnestly in debate upon the most abstruse mysteries of the state until three in the afternoon. Then we adjourn and go to dinner with some of the nobles of Pennsylvania at four o’clock and feast upon 10,000 delicacies and sit drinking Madeira, claret, and burgundy ‘til six or seven.” 

So this is important because in the 1700s basically, it conforms to what historians know about schedules and when the main meal of the day was usually eaten, which is that in the 1770s the main meal of the day was referred to as “dinner,” and it was typically eaten later in the day, basically, between two and four PM. So he’s saying specifically here that they’re breaking at three PM each day. And we see partial confirmation of part of this for the start time happening usually at nine AM in the journals of Congress where I actually found that there’s published journals of Congress which includes basically the business that they wrote down the business that they did that day as well as the order in which they did that business. And I was reading through these journals of the Continental Congress, and we can see at the end of each day they would sometimes say that the meeting is adjourned until nine o’clock the next morning. And consistently either nine o’clock or sometimes 10 o’clock is mentioned as their starting point most days. So that’s really important, because that gives us our earliest sort of timeframe, knowing that Congress was usually getting into session and beginning business at about nine o’clock in the morning each day. So that gives us our starting point. 

And then knowing that they would often break by, like, three or four each day gives us an approximate endpoint so that now we only have a certain amount of rising signs that day to choose from when it comes to picking a chart for the United States of America when they either took that vote on July 2nd or when they finalized the Declaration on July 4th. So why don’t I actually animate the chart just to demonstrate for those watching the video version what I mean and what rising signs this narrows things down to? 

Okay. So this is the July 4th, 1776, chart for the Declaration. Let’s back it up to nine o’clock in the morning. So here’s the chart set for Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776, at nine o’clock in the morning. So we can see that the Ascendant is already at four degrees of Virgo at that time. So that means that Virgo is the earliest and the first possible rising sign that they could have right at the very beginning of the day, both on July 2nd and July 4th. 

So if I animate the chart and move it forward a couple of hours, we get to our first sign change, which is that on July 4th it switches to Libra at about 11:07, 11:08 AM in the morning, and then the Ascendant moves to Libra and then Libra is rising for the next couple of hours during the course of the morning. So right there in terms of morning times, if something happens in the morning before noon, we basically got a choice between two rising signs, which is basically Virgo rising until about 11 o’clock in the morning, and then it switches to Libra rising for the next couple of hours. 

So I’ll move the chart forward a couple of hours. And we see in the afternoon, just after 11:37 [1:37] PM on July 4th, the Ascendant switched into Scorpio. So that means, you know, every day, both of these days, the Ascendant switches to Scorpio in the afternoon just after 11:37 or so PM. Then we get Scorpio rising for a couple of hours, and this is our third possible rising sign during the course of the day. But interestingly, Scorpio rising takes us all the way to it looks like exactly 4:09 and 4:10 PM when on July 4th, 1776, in Philadelphia the Ascendant switches into Sagittarius. And then from four PM until after six PM, let’s say until 6:32 PM, Capricorn starts rising. 

So already let’s just, like, stick with that for a moment and realize that if we stick with the stricter timeframe that John Adams outlined in his letter to his wife that they start at nine AM, which we know is usually true from the journals of Congress that they start at nine AM, and that end at about three PM, that only gives us three rising signs to choose from and to work with and to attempt to rectify the chart at some point, if we’re gonna move to that step eventually, although we’re not there yet because I wanna analyze some other evidence first. But just hypothetically, if we take that timeframe, we’ve got Virgo rising, Libra rising, and Scorpio rising all the way through from nine AM until four PM. So that’s really important, because that establishes that we’ve only got three rising signs, and maybe four rising signs if we push it late in the day – if we have some reason to think that it got pushed super late in the day. But as far as Adams is concerned, we only have about three possible rising signs that day. 

Okay. So that’s point one that’s really important is our timeframe is narrowed significantly, which is helpful. The next thing is Jefferson’s weather log. And this is the thing that I discovered on July 4th just, what, like, four days ago now, where it turns out that Thomas Jefferson had a habit of writing down the temperature multiple times a day. And he did this throughout 1776 and we actually have the log book where he wrote this down. And once again, this was first brought to my attention on Twitter by the account 1776Live, which is @250YearsAgoLive on X or on Twitter. And I actually have the image for this, so let me pull that up and share it. 

So this is the actual – an actual, like, photograph of, which is what made me so excited and like, re-energized me to look into this. This is the actual log book of Jefferson writing down in his own handwriting the temperature at multiple different times of the day in July of 1776 in Philadelphia. And remember Jefferson’s, like, the one who is the primary writer of the Declaration of Independence, and he also becomes one of the people that sign it eventually and then eventually becomes president. So what’s interesting if we look at this document is a few things. One, we can see that he wrote down the times and temperatures during the course of July 2nd. So he wrote at six o’clock AM; he said the temperature was 78 degrees. Then – so right as soon as, like, early in the morning when he woke up he writes down the temperature. Then his next entry was at 9:40 AM on July 2nd; he wrote down the temperature was 78. Then he writes down another temperature at nine PM; there’s a big gap this day basically of almost 12 hours between 9:40 AM and nine PM. And remember, that was the day of the vote for to declare independence. But then the rest of that day, they basically started editing Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, which he was super unhappy about. And so that’s why there’s actually a big gap in time from 9:40 AM to nine PM that day, which is illustrative and I’ll come back to. Then we have July 3rd. We see he wrote down the temperature at 5:30 AM, at 1:30 PM, and at 8:10 PM. Then finally we come to July 4th. And we have entries that day where he wrote down the temperature at six AM – he said it was 68 degrees. Then he writes down the temperature at nine AM. Then he writes down the temperature at one PM. And then finally he writes down the temperature one more time at nine PM on July 4th, 1776. 

So this is really important, because it gives us some time frames to work with on those two days. Because we know basically that he’s inside working with the rest of the Congress, and they’re editing or debating things and doing business. But then we know that Jefferson took a break and stepped outside and used his thermometer to take the temperature at those specific times that he wrote down, which means that they wouldn’t have been doing business at that time, which provides us with some additional information in terms of triangulating the time when things are happening that we didn’t know about up until this point, and as far as I’m aware, at least, not other astrologers have taken into account until today, until right now. 

So some of the things we can gain from this – sometimes there’s, like, a blackout pattern where as I said on intense debate days like July 1st and 2nd, he had these, like, 11-hour blackouts where he was too busy to log anything. So on July 2nd, for example, he writes, six AM, 9:40 PM, and nine PM. So there’s this 11 or almost 12-hour jump between nine AM and nine PM. And one of the things I wanna point out that’s really important about the July 4th entry at one PM that’s really unique is that it proves that the intense pressure of whatever was happening in terms of debate or other things in finalizing the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, that the pressure broke by midday, which gave him a recess or gave him a break to test his new thermometer that he actually brought that day. And that’s an actually interesting symbolic sidenote is that Jefferson, we have written notes of things he bought, and he actually bought a new thermometer that day on July 4th, 1776. And I think there’s something actually probably symbolically significant about that as well I won’t go into and I’ll skip, but what this means is that this gives us – this log book gives us some theoretical possible times to work with when we know that Jefferson and probably by extension the rest of the Congress took some breaks during the course of the day, especially on July 4th that one at one PM, and on July 2nd, that one at 9:40 AM, both of which will become important here. 

Finally, the last piece of primary evidence I just wanna mention that I’m drawing on – I mentioned that we have the journals of Congress, and those are incredibly important because it shows us the sequence in which they were doing business and what business they did during different days, including July 2nd and July 4th. So we have an actual, like, list of all of the stuff that they did, the official business that they did that day, as well as roughly the order in which they did it. And then second, we also have letters, because each of these guys in the Congress was often, like, writing letters to people at that time when important stuff just happened. So, like, John Adams writes a letter to his wife saying right after the July 2nd vote saying this hugely important event just happened that I think is gonna be celebrated by future generations, because we just voted successfully for independence. And Adams thought that that was gonna be the important anniversary. And of course, people always remark ironically that the anniversary we would end up celebrating was two days later on July 7th with the completion of the Declaration of Independence. But we do have letters sometimes that people are writing around this time, and in some of these letters, they are referring to the time of day in which certain things are happening. And this will become incredibly important, especially because any letters that are written at that time are contemporary witnesses to what was happening. And this is gonna become a really important distinction, because in later years, some of these founders that were involved in this would later write either autobiographies or biographies would be written about them, drawing on recollections, but many of those were written, like, years and years later. Like, for example, Thomas Jefferson published an autobiography that was written, like, more than 40 years after the events of the Declaration, and by then he was in his late 70s and his memory was starting to fail, so that historians have noted really important instances where Jefferson gets things wrong. Like, most famously, for example, he says in his autobiography he misremembered – he thought that all of the founders signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. But what we actually know is that they approved the Declaration of Independence, but it was the actual signing where they printed up or they got made a fancy parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence, and then all of the founders signed that, that ceremony actually happened on August 2nd. And we’ll look at that date later. But that’s a really important piece of information, because it means sometimes the autobiographies that were written many years later, because they are written so long after the fact, those are not always as accurate as the contemporary letters that were being written at that time, or the contemporary notes, like, you know, Jefferson writing down the temperature at different times in the day. And we need to prioritize the notes and the letters, I would suggest, because they are contemporary eye-witness accounts as opposed to things that were recorded many, many years later. 

All right. In this next section, I wanna break down what exactly happened on July 2nd and focus on the July 2nd chart first and talk specifically about what historical sources survive that can give us some indication of when that vote took place that day, that crucial vote where the colonies agreed to separate from Britain and to form a new independent country. So the Continental Congress officially voted to declare independence from Great Britain by passing the Lee Resolution on July 2nd, 1776. And remember, the Lee Resolution had been first introduced on June 7th, which was right after Mars ingressed into Gemini and started conjoining Uranus. But the vote on that got postponed in order to basically due some politicking and shore up support so that eventually it could be passed by the proponents who wanted to have it passed. They also took that time, as I said, to write the Declaration of Independence or at least draft it. 

So when they took this vote on July 2nd, the passage of this vote marked the actual legal act of separation. And the official resolution states, “Resolved that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved.” 

So this was really important, this vote was really symbolically important, and this chart does need to be taken into account and considered as a significant potential chart for the birth chart of the United States. And as I said, John Adams wrote a letter to his wife, Abigail, the next day emphasizing the weight of this decision wherein he said, he basically predicted that July 2nd would be celebrated by succeeding generations as, “the most memorable epocha in the history of America” – the most memorable epoch basically in the history of America – and that it should be celebrated with all sorts of things that later we would come to celebrate on July 4th. Although remember that, you know, he’s one of the guys, basically, that then died exactly 50 years later to the day of July 4th, the Declaration of Independence, at the same day as Jefferson. So it’s like, that kind of pushes things more in the other direction of July 4th rather than July 2nd. But it’s still an interesting discussion to have and to consider. 

All right. So what time did it happen? So the journals of the Continental Congress state that they were supposed to gavel in at nine AM, although sessions typically began between nine AM and 10 AM in the morning. But I read the actual docket that day, and the previous day before on July 1st when they finished that heavy day of debating, basically, that last day of debating things that lasted all day. At the end of that journal entry, it says that they’re adjourned until nine o’clock the next morning. So nine AM is our possible start time for that day of business. However, it’s possible that the start time could have been delayed on July 2nd because there was a delegate from Delaware named Caesar Rodney, and he had to ride all night on horseback in order to arrive in time to cast the deciding vote for Delaware. And this is something that’s discussed not just by historians, but in the primary sources that day. And what’s interesting is that if you look at Thomas Jefferson’s temperature logs, these also for that day may suggest a delay, because that morning Thomas Jefferson – like, on other days, sometimes he would take the temperature at nine AM, which was probably right as Congress is gaveling in and they’re starting their business. But on this day, Thomas Jefferson took a reading at 9:40 AM – like, 40 minutes later than usual. And I think that this implied that – and he didn’t end up taking another reading until nine PM. So I think this implies that they met, that they started a little late that day at 9:40 AM, and then they ended up taking the vote sometime after 9:40 AM and then eventually ended up debating the rest of the day so that Jefferson doesn’t get – they ended up not just debating, but they ended up revising Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence the rest of the day, which is why he’s, like, too busy to take temperature readings because he’s too busy, like, pulling his hair out over all of the important stuff that they’re pulling from his draft of the Declaration of Independence. So they may not have started until 9:40 AM is one of the conclusions I think we might be able to take from his temperature log that day. 

Additionally, in Jefferson’s autobiography, he explicitly describes the members arriving and the vote taking place “that morning.” So Jefferson himself remembers the vote on July 2nd taking place sometime that morning, which if that’s true that they didn’t start until 9:40, that gives us a time window of sometime after 9:40 AM but sometime before let’s say noon or the middle of the day – midday. 

Later I’m gonna – we have to be cautious with Jefferson’s autobiography, because like I said it was written more than 40 years after the fact. And we can see that his memory failed at different points. And I’m gonna argue at one point that it failed in a really important way. But at least for this date, Jefferson is saying “that morning,” and we also know that there was this delegate from Delaware that had to get there in order to cast his deciding vote, which we’re not sure when he arrived that morning either, which also could have caused the delay. 

All right, so I read through the journals of Congress for July 2nd, and they lack exact timestamps. But they clearly outline the chronological sequence of events that happened on July 2nd. So they don’t tell us, like, what time different things happened for the most part, but they do tell us the order in which they did different points of business that day. And what’s interesting is that the morning session of Congress that morning began with a bunch of administrative housekeeping, specifically where they read different “sundry letters” from people like General George Washington to see how the war was going. They read letters from the Council of Massachusetts Bay, from Governor Trumbull, and also from the Paymaster General. So Congress basically processed this mail by eventually executing three specific orders of business, which was one – delivering the Paymaster’s account to the Board Treasury, two – ordering the publication of an intercepted letter, and three – referring the remaining letters to the Board of War and Ordinance. So why this is important and why I’m belaboring this is that it means if they started at, like, 9:40, they did several points of business – they had to do several things – before they eventually turned to the vote. And in the journals, it says, only after clearing the morning mail does the journal then state that, “the Congress resumed the consideration of the resolution,” which was then in the journal immediately followed by the official record of them having taken the vote and passing the resolution, basically. 

So they did all this business early at the beginning of the session, and then they immediately went into doing the final vote and voting for independence. So we’re still pretty early in the day when they’re doing this. There’s a little bit of a delay window of maybe let’s say an hour or two of doing other business, but then somewhere later in the morning or middle of the day they finally take the vote and they vote that America should be a new independent country. 

So what’s interesting, though, is that following the vote, Congress spent the remainder of the day basically revising Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence. Because once they decided, “okay, we’re gonna be an independent country,” then they needed to approve the actual Declaration and the announcement of that. And because the vote for independence is positioned immediately after the morning correspondence on this sort of procedural docket, historians usually assume that it was tackled early in the legislative session. And basically, my conclusion for that is that the historical sequence supports a late morning timeframe, which as we’ve looked at in the late morning from about 11:15 AM all the way until about 1:15 PM, we have Libra rising. So as a result of that, Libra rising is the likely rising sign for when they took the vote for American independence that day on July 2nd. 

So let me – I’ll actually pull up the chart so you can see what I’m talking about just to actually visualize astrologically the timeframe that we’re looking at here. Okay. So let’s back it up to, like, nine AM. So they’re theoretically, usually starting by nine AM each day; sometimes they start at 10. But we know that Jefferson took the temperature, which he often seemed to do at the beginning of Congress going into session; on this day, he took the temperature at 9:40 AM. So I think that gives us our starting point when Congress goes into session. And by 9:40 AM on July 2nd, the Ascendant’s already at 11 degrees of Virgo, and that’s the beginning of the day. But then they start doing all of these other orders of business. 

So they do all these other orders of business, and then eventually by later in the morning, if we’re talking late morning, by 11 AM the later part of Virgo rising is wrapping up. So we have to take that into account as a consideration that it could have been late Virgo rising. However, because of all of the business that they did and because of the delay with the representative from Delaware riding all night in order to get there in time to cast his final vote and not being quite sure when he arrived but that potentially delaying things, we have starting at 11:15 AM that morning, so in the hour – the 45 minutes, let’s say – prior to noon, we have Libra rising. 

So this is the chart, theoretically, if we had a Libra rising chart that day where a Full Moon has just taken place the previous day on July 1st, which is really funny, because that was the day that they were arguing intensely about hashing out whether to vote for independence. But then the following day, the Moon is later in Capricorn at 24 degrees of Capricorn, and it’s applying to an opposition with that retrograde Mercury at 25 degrees of Cancer. And why that’s funny is because they probably took the vote late that morning or sometime – because basically from 11:15 AM all the way until, as I said, like, 11:45 [1:45] or so, we have Libra rising. So if they took the vote anytime late in the morning or pretty much in the middle of the day, then it was definitely a Libra rising chart. And what’s fascinating about that from an electional standpoint is Libra rising is, arguably, and I’ll talk about this more later, but the most auspicious electional chart that day using the rules of traditional electional astrology that have been pretty consistent for the past 2,000 years where you establish the rising sign, you establish the ruler of the Ascendant, and what the ruler of the Ascendant is doing. And in this instance with Libra rising, the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus; it’s at zero degrees of Cancer, and it’s applying to that conjunction with Jupiter at five degrees of Cancer, which is a highly auspicious indication, basically, for the ruler of the Ascendant. So I shouldn’t dwell on that too much because I’ll come back to and do a better, more thorough analysis of this chart as an inceptional chart later. But that’s one of the reasons why I’m sort of like, gravitating towards Libra rising if we had to make a choice between that morning them taking the vote between Libra rising versus the Virgo rising chart where the ruler of the Ascendant is the retrograde Mercury in the 11th house – the 11th whole sign house, since I’m using whole sign houses for the purpose of this, as well as the traditional rulerships and the tropical zodiac. 

So the Libra rising chart dominates the later part of the morning and the middle part of the day, and therefore is, I think, the most likely chart of when they actually took the vote. So ultimately, we don’t know the exact time, but we’ve at least narrowed down the potential rising sign or rising signs that morning on July 2nd, 1776. And I think that’s really interesting and really important, because it means that the available charts to choose from for this vote are probably a lot more narrow than I think astrologers have fully realized until recently. 

And let me just reiterate what they’re doing here is they’re not just voting to break away from Britain, basically, at this time, which is the Mars-Uranus signature which in the Libra rising chart is in the 9th house of foreign countries. And Britain at this point would become a foreign country, relative to the United States. But they’re also voting at this time then, essentially to form a new country with all of the colonies coming together to make this decision. And that’s where this Venus-Jupiter component comes into play, which is very prominent, especially in the Libra rising chart with Venus applying to the conjunction with Jupiter in the 10th house. And what’s fascinating about that is as you can see from 11:15 in the morning, the actual degree – it’s not just that the Ascendant has moved into Libra, but the degree of the Midheaven passes over and conjoins Venus at about 11:17 that morning. And then Jupiter conjoins the Ascendant at about 11:38 or 11:39 that morning. And so symbolically, you can kind of imagine all of them taking this vote together to create and to form a new country at this time, and to unify these disparate 13 colonies right as the two benefic planets, Venus and Jupiter, are on the Midheaven at the top of the chart at their highest elevations. And there’s something incredibly symbolically significant and compelling about that in my opinion. And that’s why I’m leaning towards this time of Libra rising and potentially early Libra rising, because especially the early part of Libra rising is the part that was rising before noon that day and before it switched over from basically morning time to midday. 

All right, let’s now move onto talking about July 4th and what historical sources exist – what primary sources exist – that we can draw on in order to narrow down the time in which the Declaration of Independence was approved and finalized that day. 

All right, so first we have – and most importantly – we have the journals of Congress. And what happened in terms of the sequence is that, so as we just saw, on July 2nd, Congress voted for independence. And that vote was successful. But then immediately they went to work revising Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence for the rest of July 2nd, all of July 3rd, into early on July 4th. And we know from the journals of Congress that on July 4th at nine AM, Congress went back in session, and that they handled a quick request for military flints. So they did, like, one order of business, but then after that they resolved into what they call a Committee of the Whole, and then they agreed to the Declaration of Independence eventually. 

So what’s interesting about this is after adopting the Declaration of Independence sometime in the morning, they tackled a massive docket of 14 other items that are listed in the journals of Congress for that day. And there’s a historian who edited some of these letters and journals of Congress named Paul H. Smith, and he wrote a really important article titled “Time and Temperature: Philadelphia, July 4th, 1776.” He wrote this article in the 1970s around the time of the bicentennial celebrations. And what he pointed out is that there’s a third item after the Declaration of Independence which was forming a defense committee. And after they formed that committee, there’s a letter that was written on – it was written from the committee itself on July 4th where it said, “The Congress this morning directed us to confer,” and then it goes on talking about what was decided. And what this historian, Paul. H. Smith, argues is that if the committee was formed after the Declaration was appointed in the morning or was approved in the morning, then the Declaration of Independence must have been adopted sometime in the morning that day, because this third thing that they did on the docket happened immediately after but still sometime in the morning. 

So the argument then is kind of like, two-fold. And let me see if I can pull up the journals of the Continental Congress, because I really wanna emphasize this point and I want to show you what we’re actually working with. And I found a, like, an actual PDF of the journals of the Continental Congress online, and here is what they look like. 

All right. So journals of Congress, and first I wanna show you – so first see on July 1st, so this entry is for Tuesday, July 2nd. But just before that, you can see where it says at the end of the previous day on July 1st, it said, “adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow.” So that means we know on July 2nd that they were scheduled to start at nine o’clock in the morning, although as we were looking at earlier because Jefferson doesn’t take the time until 9:40 in the morning, there may have been a delay that morning. And I suspect it may have had to do with that representative from Delaware showing up at the last minute so he could vote. 

Anyway, so that’s July 2nd. This is what the sequence is where they do the vote on July 2nd and agree to become – it says, “Resolve that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent states” on July 2nd, so that’s the vote. Then it says at the end of July 2nd that they adjourn until nine o’clock tomorrow. So then they debate things on July – or they’re basically, like, revising Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence the rest of July 2nd and all of July 3rd. And then eventually at the end of July 3rd, it says, “Adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow.” So that means we know that their start point was scheduled to be on July 4th, 1776, was scheduled to be at nine AM. And Jefferson in fact, on July 4th, has an entry where he takes the temperature at nine AM. So that’s probably right before he goes in as Congress is getting started. So July 4th. And then here’s that first order of business that I was talking about where the first thing on the docket that day is this first thing on July 4th where it says, “Resolved, that an application to be made to the committee of safety of Pennsylvania for the supply of flints for the troops at New York: and that the colony of Maryland and Delaware be requested to embody their militia for the flying camp, with all expedition, and to march them without delay to the city of Philadelphia.” So that’s the first order of business. But then the second order of business on July 4th, then, sometime that morning is they say “Agreeable to the order of the day, the Congress resolved itself into a committee of the whole to take into their farther consideration, the declaration; and after some time, the president resumed the chair. Mr. Benjamin Harris reported that the committee of the whole Congress have agreed to a declaration which he delivered in. The declaration being read was agreed to as follows,” and then it reads, “The unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America.” Again, the Venus-Jupiter conjunction is, like, when they’re finalizing this is again probably on the Midheaven with Libra rising. 

And then it just starts going with the Declaration. “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s god entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” And then it gives the famous line I already read – “When hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And it keeps going, and it just gives the entire Declaration here that they passed and approved that day, which is kind of long, because again, it’s like, listing all their grievances with the King and other things like that. And then eventually, they pass a motion at the end of all that once they approve it saying, “Ordered, that the declaration be authenticated and printed.” So they immediately send it to the printer so that they can do a rush job so that they can get copies, which they do eventually get by the next morning, and they start sending out immediately the following day on July 5th. It says, “That the committee appointed to prepare the declaration, superintend and correct the press. That copies of the declaration be sent to several assemblies, conventions and committees,” and “that it be proclaimed in each of the United States, and at the head of the army.” 

And then they start going into other orders of business which is, “Ordered, that Mr. Robert Morris and Mr. Joseph Hewes determined the hire of Mr. Walker’s vessel, which is employed by Commodore Hopkins in the service of the continent.” And then it says, “A letter from General Washington, dated New York, July 3rd, was laid before the Congress and read.” So it just starts going on with all of these other things that they did. And they did something like 14 other orders of business during the course of the day if you read through the rest of this journal. And there’s the rest, and then eventually they adjourn at the end of July 4th that says, “Adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow.” And then they pick it up again on Friday, July 5th. 

So one of the things that’s important about that and one of the things I realized, because I found the journals first by trying to find what the primary documents were basically, and the first thing I realized and first conclusion I took was they have a little bit of business in the morning, but then they immediately get into finalizing the approving the Declaration of Independence early in the day. And then they do, like, 14 other pieces of business the rest of that day. So as a result of that, just logistically if you’re thinking about, you know, let’s say they open at nine, and let’s say they usually break by around three PM, and you’re trying to figure out what of those three or so rising signs they would have approved the Declaration under, the fact that they have so many orders and points of business after the Declaration means that that pushes the Declaration to earlier in the day rather than later on. And this is really important and this was really eye-opening for me, this realization, because one of the most popular charts which we’ll talk about later for July 4th that’s become more popular, especially since the 1970s, one of the main charts that people use for the US is the Sagittarius rising chart that happens much later in the day at like, four or five PM. And the Sagittarius rising chart is a variation of the Sibley chart, which I will show later; there’s issues with the Sibley chart. There’s a big, like, huge, huge issue with the Sibley chart which I’ll explain. But one of the reasons that the order of how much business they did after the Declaration is important is it means they didn’t do the Declaration at the end of the day; they did the Declaration early towards the beginning of the day. And that’s crucial because that pushes us away from the later rising signs, which are like, Sagittarius or Scorpio, which are happening in the afternoon. And it pushes us potentially before 12 o’clock, before midday. And so I had sort of like, come to that conclusion, and then I found this paper from the historian I said – Paul H. Smith – who wrote this really important article where what he noted is that after the third order of business was done that day, Congress wrote a letter about it. And in the letter, it says “the Congress this morning directed us to confer.” And Paul H. Smith’s argument was that if the third order of business was still taking place in the morning and that was the order of business after the Declaration was passed, that means that the Declaration was also passed sometime in the morning. And this has rewritten, then, basically what historians thought potentially up to that point, because as I’ll talk about in a few minutes, Jefferson 50 years later would claim that it happened in the evening. But what Paul H. Smith points out in this article is not only do the journals and the letter indicate that the morning is the more likely time, but it means that Jefferson basically misremembered things. So the conclusion that we can draw from this is that the Declaration was appointed in the morning, and it must have been adopted before noon. So let me pull up the chart to show you then what timeframes we’re talking about if the Declaration has to have been adopted before noon. 

Okay. So here’s let’s say noon on July 4th, 1776. We’re talking about a period prior to noon. And at noon, we’ve got 10 degrees of Libra rising. And for quite a while, for almost an hour, from about 11:07 AM, that’s when the Ascendant switches from Virgo to Libra rising. And everything prior to that point from, like, nine AM to 11 AM is gonna be Virgo rising. So that gives us our two timeframes to choose from, except we know that when they got in at nine, that they did some other order of business first, and then eventually they got to talking about the Declaration again, and then at some point late in the morning they finally passed the – approved the – Declaration of Independence. And then they didn’t all sign it, but the president, I think Hancock and one other person signed the order sometime probably towards the very end of that. And I believe that that puts us probably in this range in that last hour before noon when the Declaration of Independence was completed. 

So provisionally, the historian Paul H. Smith said because it has to have taken place in the morning, he thought it was, like, maybe prior to 11 o’clock AM. But there’s nothing in the documents themself that specifies 11 o’clock. So I think we are safe, basically, based on the primary sources we have here with a time anywhere before noon, which is then either late Virgo or probably early Libra rising. And if I had to choose between the two of those, as I’ll get into later, I believe it was the early Libra rising time, and I’m using currently then a approximate time of about 11:15 AM that day on July 4th, 1776, in Philadelphia, which while I haven’t dialed the degrees of the angles in super closely, I actually suspect that they’re not far off from this – of the degree of the Ascendant being around one degree of Libra and the degree of the Midheaven potentially being around one degree of Cancer or so. And you can see at that point the Midheaven started conjoining Venus at two Cancer and then eventually Jupiter at five Cancer. And I believe that is when they finalized this document which brought together all 13 of the colonies and created a new country basically as a result of that process of both separating from Britain but then also coming together as one. 

All right, so now I’ve got to address one other piece of evidence that we have to take into account, which is Jefferson’s autobiography, which is that 45 years later after the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson when he was in his late 70s – he was 78 years old – he wrote an autobiography in 1821 that eventually got published. And in this 1821 autobiography, he basically says that they passed the vote on independence on July 2nd, but then he says that the debates happened over the Declaration happened on the 2nd, the 3rd, and into the evening of the 4th. And this is his exact quote. So he says, “The debates, having taken up the greater parts of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th days of July, were on the evening of the last closed.” So this is important, because this is Jefferson who was there, but he’s writing, you know, 45 years later. And up until now, this is actually the strongest piece of evidence for something like the Sibley chart with Sagittarius rising, which would have taken place in the evening. 

So let me show that chart really quickly, just to orient people. So it’s like, this is the provisional chart, which is at 11:15 AM if it happened in the morning. Jefferson writing 45 years later is thinking it wasn’t wrapped up until the evening. So if we pushed the chart later, you know, it comes down to a definition of what “evening” means. At 3:15 PM when they’re usually adjourning, we still have mid-Scorpio rising. By 4:15 PM, we do have Sagittarius rising. And then eventually by let’s say 5:15 PM, we have mid-Sagittarius rising. And so the Sun is up there in the 8th house; it’s headed towards sunset, although the Sun didn’t set that day until it looks like a bit after 7:15 PM. 

So as a result of this, this is the one piece of evidence where I think somebody could take this and argue then for a chart later in the day on July 4th. However, historians have pointed out that Jefferson’s memory was flawed by this time later in his life. And this is actually that he would lament in a letter to somebody. So in the same sentence in which Jefferson said that about it being in the evening, he claimed that everybody signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. However, we know for sure that they didn’t all sign the Declaration of Independence until August 2nd. And that’s when all of them get together and sign their names on this sort of large, fancy parchment copy, which is still the copy of the Declaration of Independence that survives today and is, like, hidden in a vault in Washington, D.C., or is at least protected behind glass and a bunch of other stuff like that. They didn’t sign that until, like, almost a month later on August 2nd. So it means that in the same sentence that Jefferson’s saying that they were finished until the evening of July 4th, he’s making a major mistake in terms of his memory by misremembering and thinking that they all signed the document that day, which raises some questions. 

Additionally, one of the things that – and this is part of the argument that Paul H. Smith makes in his article “Time and Temperature” – the other thing is that Jefferson also claimed elsewhere that July 4th was a hot day, that it was a famously hot day, and he said that Congress was eager to leave due to gadflies. However, one of the points that’s really interesting is that Jefferson’s own weather log, as well as another weather log that was taken by a person named Robert Treat Paine in his diary, show that it was actually a cool day that day, of only 76 degrees. So there’s another point where we can see that Jefferson in his later years – because that quote would be repeated in a biography of Jefferson that was written after his life, but it was based on somebody that had collected sayings and stuff that Jefferson said later in life – again, Jefferson’s misremembering something about July 4th where he was telling people it was a famously hot day. But if you actually read the primary source from his own hand, it says that it was actually a cool day. So you know, here’s – again, this is the written log from Jefferson where at one PM on July 4th, he says it was 76 degrees. And that’s the hottest it got that day. At nine AM, it was, like, 72 degrees; at nine PM it was 73 degrees. And at six AM it was 68 degrees. 

So as a result of this as well as other mistakes in Jefferson’s memory that have been pointed out by historians, historians like Paul H. Smith and Pauline Maier believe that it is the – they believe, basically, that it likely happened in the morning. That the Declaration was completed sometime in the morning, and that Jefferson’s memory was flawed in this instance. And that when it comes down to a discrepancy between taking into account Jefferson’s memory from 45 years later when he’s 78 years old – he’s towards the end of his life – that’s been shown to be flawed, versus taking into account the journals of Congress which indicate that they dealt with the Declaration earlier in the day, that ultimately we should side with the primary documents that were contemporaneous at that time that indicate that the Declaration was completed sometime in the morning, and sometime in the late morning, specifically. 

Additionally, there was one other piece of evidence that I found. What’s funny is, like, I researched all of this intensely and found the journals and then eventually I found the Paul Smith article late in that process, and then at one point just yesterday I think I found – I remembered to, like, pull Nick Campion’s Book of World Horoscopes. And what was funny is, like, he’d already researched and found all of this, including the journals and Paul H. Smith’s article from the 1970s. So it was funny because I kind of like, recreated the wheel basically, reinvented the wheel from a bunch of the research Campion already did years ago. He has a brilliant article on this. But most of pretty much 98 percent of my outline was written prior to reading Campion’s work; I wanted to make that clear. But one point that Campion did note is he mentions a letter by someone named Elbridge Gerry who wrote a letter on July 5th. And I wanna mention this because Gerry wrote that independence was achieved after a day’s debate. And Campion reads this, and I think mistakenly thought that this was referring to July 4th. And he assumed that this meant that the debate being referred to was the completion of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. However, when I was reading the document itself as well as reading historians’, historians actually think – and I think as well – that Elbridge Gerry’s letter was specifically describing the grueling nine-hour debate over the Lee Resolution that took place on July 1st. And then the vote finally took place on July 2nd. And it seems clear to me that that letter was referring to the debate that took place prior to the vote that happened on July 2nd, not just the passing of the Declaration on July 4th. So I think that’s really important; I wanted to mention that as a sidenote for the sake of completeness here as another potential primary source that should be taken into account, but usually that historians think is referring to the debate on July 1st. 

So to sort of bring this long historical section to completion, Jefferson was the only real historical basis for the evening time that you can really point to, because he did say 45 years later that he thought it was completed in the evening. However, if his memory is called into question, and additionally if the Sibley chart is thrown out, which I’ll show in a little bit why it should be – because the Sibley chart is a complete misunderstanding. It was actually an ingress chart, and it was never meant to be a timed chart for Sagittarius rising in Philadelphia, and I’ll show that in a little bit. If you throw those two pieces of evidence out, then all that leaves us with is a late morning timeframe for the completion of the Declaration of Independence. And like I said, when Paul H. Smith wrote this article in the 1970s, I think up until that point, a lot of historians claimed – they just took what Jefferson said for granted that it happened in the evening. But then when Paul H. Smith wrote this article in the 1970s, I think most historians started following that and now in a lot of the secondary sources, not just like, Paul H. Smith but Pauline Maier, who wrote American Scripture on the Declaration of Independence, also say that it probably happened in the morning. And I think that’s become more of the historical consensus at this point to question Jefferson’s memory and to go with what the primary documents seem to indicate, especially in the journals of Congress. 

So like I said, Paul H. Smith did conclude that it probably happened before 11 AM. However, in my opinion, any time before noon would basically fit the available evidence. And while we do have then to consider both late Virgo and early Libra rising, I lean towards the Libra rising chart for astrological reasons that I’ll get into shortly. 

All right, so we have seen that there’s a potential Libra rising chart for the vote on July 2nd. There’s a potential Libra rising chart for the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. But it turns out there’s a third Libra rising chart, and this one we know for sure the exact timing of when this event took place. And what happened is that after the Declaration was passed and approved on July 4th, the Continental Congress scheduled the first public reading of the Declaration for July 8th, 1776, at exactly 12 o’clock PM in Philadelphia. So we know for sure that it was scheduled for exactly 12 o’clock PM. And what happened is that at this time, they read the Declaration aloud in the yard of the Pennsylvania state house by Colonel John Nixon to a massive crowd of citizens and soldiers. And following this noon reading, the entire city basically erupted into festivities and bells rang across Philadelphia all afternoon and into the night. The King’s coat of arms was torn down from the state house courtroom and burned in a bonfire, and military battalions paraded through the city. And we know that this started exactly at 12 PM noon on July 8th. And guess what the rising sign was, of course, at 12 o’clock noon on July 8th? It was Libra rising. 

So let’s take a look at that chart. All right, so here’s July 4th, and we’re gonna advance the chart four days to July 8th at 12 o’clock noon. And this is the first – this is the official public reading and announcement, and a hugely, then, symbolically important moment for the presentation of this document which represented both, again, the independence and the breaking away from Britain, but also the unification of the 13 colonies. And at 12 o’clock noon, we have 13 degrees of Libra rising. Saturn is conjunct the degree of the Ascendant at 14 degrees of Libra in the sign of its exaltation in a day chart. And the ruler of the Ascendant is Venus, which now is at seven degrees of Cancer in the 10th whole sign house just barely separating about a degree passed from a conjunction with Jupiter at six degrees of Cancer. And one interesting feature about this chart is that this is actually the day that eclipse season began, because on July 8th, the Moon moved into a square with the Sun, and it reached the third quarter phase, basically. And in the research methodology that I’ve developed over the past few years after doing a series of episodes on eclipses that coincided with important events in history, one of the things that I established is that eclipse season begins about seven or eight days before an eclipse once the Moon reaches the square with the Sun that it will complete at the time of the eclipse. And the eclipse, in this instance, was scheduled to take place on July 15th, 1776, and it would happen in Cancer basically a week after this. 

But because the Moon was in Aries here – it’s at 21 degrees of Aries – and the Sun is at 16 degrees of Cancer, eclipse season basically started on this day, and it started building up to an eclipse that would take place a week later in Cancer. And that’s actually really interesting and important, because as we’ll see later, it wasn’t until the very day of the eclipse that the final state joined in its vote, and the entire process became unanimous. Because New York had to abstain because they were waiting for orders, and those orders actually ended up coming in the day of the solar eclipse in Cancer, and on that day, the colonies became unanimous in their decision to form a new country. Effectively, it already had happened on July 2nd and July 4th because they had abstained, so it ended up being, like, 12 to zero. But yeah, there’s an interesting, like, connection there between those two dates, which I’ll explore more later. 

All right. So this is important, though, because it’s, like, you know, with the other two charts with July 2nd and July 4th, we’re having to approximate a time, and so we’re not fully sure of the exact time that the most crucial moment happened. But in this instance, we actually do know the exact time when the most crucial moment happened, and it is exactly this chart. And one of the reasons why I think that’s important then and the fact that this chart had Libra rising is that I think this chart then is replicating the Libra rising charts that probably also already took place on July 4th and July 2nd. So to me, this chart is also hugely important, but also I think this in a way helps to symbolically reinforce that we’re sort of on the right track with the Libra rising chart as the correct rising sign for the birth of the United States. 

All right. So with all of this historical information now outlined in terms of the primary sources that we know we can draw on in order to attempt to reverse engineer or triangulate an approximate timeframe for these important dates and events that happened on July 2nd and July 4th, I now wanna look at the Libra rising chart from my perspective as an astrologer and specifically somebody that specializes in ancient Hellenistic astrology and who specializes in electional astrology, which is something that I’ve been doing intensively over the past two decades and which I’ve become known for, and I do a whole separate podcast called The Electional Astrology Podcast, and I also specialize in rectification. So I wanna look at the chart now from that standpoint now that we’ve got the historical argument sort of outlined to give us our baseline. So let’s take a look at the Libra chart, both from that perspective as well as from a symbolic or interpretive or astrological standpoint at this point, if this was hypothetically the birth chart for the United States. 

All right, so here’s the Libra rising chart. Let me once again just reiterate for those listening to the audio version the details of this chart and the placements. So I have the chart set for July 4th, 1776, at about 11:15 AM in order to make it late in the morning, but early enough before noon that that third order of business could be completed and take place before the middle of the day, before noon. And so that would push the Ascendant theoretically, if it was Libra rising, potentially towards the earlier end of that sign, although remember that Jefferson didn’t write down a temperature until, like, one PM that day. So the fact that he didn’t take a break until later, there is some, you know, potential argument there. But for the most part, this is the range that makes the most sense and is also consistent with what some of the current historical or historians have concluded. 

All right, so the Ascendant’s at one degree of Libra. The Midheaven’s at one degree of Cancer. Venus is at two Cancer. Venus is the ruler of the Ascendant. And one of the points that’s actually really interesting is I always noticed and thought that from a purely, like, electional, astrological standpoint the Libra rising chart is obviously the most auspicious and sort of powerful astrological electional chart or inception chart that day, because it has the best placement of the ruler of the Ascendant. And what’s interesting about this now is that that had always been obvious to me, however, I didn’t realize unless recently that there was actually a bunch of good historical evidence that actually pointed towards a morning time, and therefore made the Libra rising chart one of the plausible charts that could have actually happened that day. But now that that’s been established, it makes me look at this chart through a different lens. 

And so when I say that it’s like, the best chart that day, one of the reasons is because it has the best setup for the ruler of the Ascendant, which in this instance is Venus which is in Cancer, and Venus is applying to a conjunction with Jupiter within three degrees, which in ancient Hellenistic astrology is a condition of what’s called bonification when a planet is made fully good because it’s applying within three degrees to a conjunction with the benefic of the sect in favor, which in this instance is Jupiter in a day chart. Venus is also in the 10th house. It’s not afflicted by the most difficult planet in the chart, which is Mars in a day chart in the 9th house; they’re completely in aversion, which is great. And other placements that this chart has that I wanted to mention – so again, with the rising signs, every other rising sign that day has a problematic ruler of the Ascendant in different ways. And remember, there’s only, like, three, maybe four rising signs for us to choose from. There’s the Virgo rising chart, which we have to take into account as a possibility. But from an electional standpoint, Virgo rising has Mercury ruling the Ascendant, which has just recently stationed retrograde in Cancer. So we have a major – a pretty significant impediment to the ruler of the Ascendant if that was, let’s say hypothetically, the ruler of the Ascendant. Neptune in the rising, and then Mercury is opposing Pluto in late Capricorn. And then additionally, the Virgo rising chart would put the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini in the 10th house or in the 10th whole sign house, which again would bring some problems. That doesn’t necessarily rule it out, but I can at least say, like, if I were picking charts this day for both what if I had to make a major action that day, the chart that I would have chosen – even though I don’t think that the founders deliberately chose that to happen or chose this date astrologically using electional astrology, and we’ll talk about that more later – even though I don’t think that, I think that for something to have been created that day that ended up being very long-lasting, that arguably the Libra rising chart is the strongest and most impressive and potentially most powerful one. So the reason for that, as I said, is with Virgo rising, Mercury which has stationed retrograde is the ruler of the Ascendant with – if you go after that into the afternoon, you get a Scorpio rising chart where the ruler of the Ascendant is Mars in the 8th house in a day chart. And we’ve already ruled that out because it’s later in the afternoon as a potential chart for contention. But I’m just noting the status of the different rulers of the Ascendant. If you push it really late in the day, you get the Sagittarius rising chart, which is the Sibley chart. And then you do have probably the second best ruler of the Ascendant that day, which is Jupiter which is in the sign of its exaltation in Cancer, but it is also in the 8th house, which is not a great or very prominent place from let’s say a purely electional standpoint. And you also Mars and Uranus in the 7th. 

So just in terms of that, there’s some interesting things then about the condition of the ruler of the Ascendant with the Libra rising chart being surprisingly good due to being in the 10th house and being in that applying conjunction with Jupiter. 

So additionally, we remember, of course, that this chart is a recurrence of when Benjamin Franklin on July 10th, 1754, first proposed the Albany Plan of union and the idea that the colonies should unite. And that was under a Venus-Jupiter conjunction in Leo. But here we see that the colonies did actually officially unite under this conjunction probably when Venus was ruling the Ascendant. And symbolically, that also makes sense, because we have Venus, which is traditionally the planet of marriage and partnership and unions, coming into a conjunction with Jupiter as the ruler of the Ascendant which is the planet of success and optimism and the confirmation of good things and stabilization and other things like that. 

So those are very relevant things in terms of just looking at this as an electional or as an event chart. The other thing that I had always thought was remarkable, and I believe I’ve mentioned before in other episodes, is I always thought it was remarkable that when the United States was born, that the two outermost visible planets, which are Jupiter and Saturn, were both in their signs of exaltation in that year. And I always thought that that was really impressive, because the exaltations and the notion of those signs of exaltation being important places of power for the traditional planets is something that goes back to Mesopotamian astrology, back to at least around 1,000 BCE if not a little bit earlier. And it’s not a common alignment that happens all the time. But what’s interesting is that in this chart, if the Libra rising chart was true, it actually makes those two planets in exaltation part of the focal point of the chart because then Saturn in its exaltation in Libra is in the first house, which is one of the most prominent and angular and active houses, and then secondarily, Jupiter is in its exaltation in the 10th house, which is the other most powerful and prominent let’s say house in the chart. So it’s like, not only were the two outermost planets in their exaltation, but they may actually have been angular and prominent at the very moment when the Declaration of Independence was being finalized and was being approved that day on July 4th, 1776, which is just remarkable. And in the Hellenistic astrological tradition, planets in their exaltation were thought to indicate things that are raised up to the highest level, or that represent some sort of, like, excellence or preeminence or like, eminence. So for example, like, prominent people are said to be indicated – like, socially prominent – by exaltation. And I think that’s interesting in terms of, you know, at least until somewhat recently the sort of like leadership role that the US came to play eventually as it got older, especially during the course of the 20th century during and after World War II. 

The other thing I find very striking about the Libra rising chart also is how it recontextualizes the Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, which in the Libra rising chart would place that very volatile conjunction in the 9th whole sign house. And so Mars, because this is a day chart, Mars would be the most difficult planet in this chart. And Mars-Uranus conjunctions are very volatile, and by placing that in the 9th house, the 9th house represents foreign nations, foreign countries, long-distance travel, and other things like that. So one of the things that becomes immediately evident and sort of fitting about that placement in this context is that as soon as the vote took place on the 2nd and as soon as the Declaration of Independence was approved and then started being sent out everywhere on July 4th, it indicated and was the start basically – well, not the full start, but – it basically indicated the armed rebellion and the severing or the break with Britain, which immediately from this point forward became a foreign country, which is where we would find it in the 9th house. And so from this point forward, it’s no longer, like, a part of an empire or a colony that’s rebelling, but instead from the American standpoint, they are now fighting against what is now being framed, essentially, as a foreign power or a foreign country that they are in an armed rebellion against, which is what that Mars-Uranus conjunction is all about. 

So I find that interesting, then, because that also would then explain why foreign conflicts have come up in two of the three Uranus returns so far, and how famously, for example, during the Uranus return in the 1940s when Uranus came back to Gemini, which it does every 84 years, the US entered into shortly after Uranus went into Gemini, the US entered into World War II. And then famously, one of the most important things that the United States has ever done in world history when a Mars-Uranus conjunction recurred in 1945, the US developed and then deployed the atomic bomb for the first time by using and dropping it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945. And up until the present time, that’s the only time that the atomic weapon has ever been used in war. And seeing the Mars-Uranus conjunction in the 9th whole sign house, the place of foreign countries in this chart, and realizing that by transit Mars and Uranus again met up in Gemini and were transiting the 9th house of the US at the time of using the atomic weapon is an incredibly stunning realization to me that feels very compelling as a sort of like, preliminary observation about the implications of what it would mean if the Libra rising chart was the correct chart for the United States. 

Furthermore, as I was reflecting on this last night, I realized that that also still makes sense of the Civil War as well, which happened in between the American Revolution and World War II when Uranus first returned to Gemini in the middle of the 1800s. And at that time, even though we conceptualize the Civil War as a, you know, not a foreign war in the same way that, let’s say, World War II was or the let’s say the Revolutionary War was, what’s interesting is that what happened in the Civil War is that a part of America, a part of the country, attempted to break away and become a foreign country. But the North basically and the central government of the United States fought a war in order to stop that from happening, and partially at least in order to keep the Union together was one of the motivating factors of Lincoln fighting the war. And obviously there were other major factors that were happening as well in terms of slavery and in terms of the motivation for the war being based on slavery and being partially a result of that unresolved tension that the founders of America had left completely unresolved and sort of forced later generations to deal with, which was really bad in many different ways. But nonetheless – and that’s also an element of the Mars-Uranus conjunction that I’ve talked about at different points in the Mars-Uranus episode that I did with Nick Dagan Best in December of 2025 is the Mars-Uranus conjunction is also connected with the history of slavery in different ways, both because Mars can deprive good things, and so part of its function as it shows up in the US birth chart is that Uranus sometimes represents freedom and liberation. But sometimes Mars represents the deprivation and the taking away of freedom and liberation from other people. But then sometimes the inverse can happen as well where it can be these revolutionary moments of like, breaking free and achieving freedom, especially through conflict or violence or through war. But one of the interesting things, of course, about the Civil War is it began with Fort Sumter on a Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini. So again, recurring. So it’s like, that Mars-Uranus conjunction recurred at the start of the Civil War, and it would have been in the 9th house when the South is attempting to break away from the Union and form another country, which is a 9th house thing. And then that Mars-Uranus conjunction recurred during World War II, and officially basically World War II for the US ended in August of 1945 because as soon as the US dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki during that Mars-Uranus conjunction in Gemini, after the second bomb, the Japanese immediately surrendered, which brought an immediate end to World War II because the Germans had already surrendered a few months earlier. 

So that’s already, just in terms of, like, initial statements we can make about this chart, there’s already ways and things that are incredibly symbolically striking and appealing to me about this. Now that we’ve narrowed down the historical likelihood of a possible Libra rising chart, we can begin to look at it and see if the chart makes sense. And obviously, that’s always the most tricky and potentially subjective and not as compelling in many cases, like, thing you can start doing, because every astrologer has different reasons for thinking that the chart that they chose makes symbolic sense or different arguments for that in different ways. But nonetheless, for me, starting to look at some of the things that this chart would mean and looking at things in that context has started to prove fruitful. And these are some of the things that I’m excited about in terms of that. 

All right. I next wanna do a section where I very quickly run through some other major events in US history just to sort of glance at how those events line up with the Libra rising chart that we’re looking at. And so originally, this was gonna be, like, a later section, and I was thinking about cutting it, but I think I’ll just go ahead since I’ve already started mentioning some of those events. I’ll just quickly run through a handful of additional one in order to show you some of the things that I found interesting when I started looking at major events in US history through this new lens. 

All right, so let me share – let’s do Declaration and biwheel. And let me first show and reiterate some of the two events that I just talked about. So the first one is the beginning of the Civil War with the attack on Fort Sumter, April 12th, 1861, which marks the official outbreak of the Civil War. And here we see Mars at six degrees of Gemini roughly, conjoining Uranus at nine degrees of Gemini very close to the natal Uranus of the United States at eight degrees of Gemini. And as I was just saying, this is technically, like, part of the country attempting to break away and create a foreign country. And then the two go to war and eventually the sort of established country, the United States, wins out against the Confederacy of the South. So that’s that Mars-Uranus conjunction, which would be in the 9th house of foreign places. 

Then we have the other ones, which is the end of World War II with the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th, 1945. And here we see Mars at nine degrees of Gemini roughly conjoining Uranus at 16 degrees of Gemini, again in the 9th house and the use of the atomic weapon at this time. There’s other things that we could go into about transits to each of these charts, but I just wanted to quickly actually show these visually since I mentioned them. And when Nagasaki happened three days later, the Mars-Uranus conjunction was even closer with Mars now at 11 Gemini conjoining Uranus at 16 degrees of Gemini. And of course, we’re now back to that if we go to the present time with us just having our first Mars-Uranus conjunction this past week in Gemini again, and as I’ve sort of predicted multiple times over the past – over many years, this being the start of what will be a period of major conflict if the historical cycles repeat again as I’m sure that they will. 

But I’ll skip the future predictions for now and just go back to the history, because I was looking at some of the challenging and negative events, but one of the most striking ones that I found was actually one of the most positive events in US history. And this event took place on July 2nd, 1969. And on July – sorry, July 20th, 1969 was the Apollo 11 Moon landing. And this basically represents the culmination of this massive national effort all throughout especially the 1960s, as well as a technological triumph and the internal prestige of being the first country to land a man on the Moon. And this was a highly unifying and sort of expanding moment, and what’s fascinating about this is astrologically, I’ve talked about this moment astrologically in the past because something really special happened that day, which is that – I think I’ve talked about this in the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction episode, because on that day, earlier in the day before the Moon landing that morning, there was this incredibly rare and striking triple conjunction where the planet Jupiter conjoined the planet Uranus and the Moon swooped in and conjoined both of them at zero degrees of Libra that day. And eventually later in the day, by the time the Moon landing happened in Houston time, I think the Moon was around seven-ish degrees of Libra. But you still had this very close Jupiter-Uranus conjunction at zero degrees of Libra that day. And this is the day that the first human walked on the Moon. And it happened to be a human that was sent up there by the United States of America. And what I find so fascinating about this is, one, that conjunction – that special conjunction that already I’d identified in previous episodes – took place in Libra in the first degree of Libra, but in this context what’s fascinating is that now we can see potentially that that was in the rising sign of the United States. And furthermore, what’s actually even more fascinating to me is, you know, in the narrowed down birth time that I’m using of roughly 11:15 in the morning in order to make it earlier enough in the morning that that third piece of business could have been done by Congress that day while still being before noon, that puts the Ascendant around one degree of Libra, which even though that’s speculative, I find it incredibly interesting that this triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and the Moon took place that day the day of the Moon landing in the first degree of Libra. So potentially it could have been conjunct and not just in the rising sign of the United States, but potentially conjunct the actual degree of the Ascendant in the Declaration birth chart, basically – in the US birth chart. 

So you know, that’s not fully conclusive but I find that incredibly interesting as, you know, in terms of thinking about what happened after the US was founded over the past 250 years, like, singular moments of importance in terms of the US doing things that will be remembered in human history, this is for sure one of the top moments. And for some reason, Libra is actually being emphasized at this time, which potentially is the rising sign of the United States and potentially even the Ascendant degree. So I thought that was incredibly cool. And weirdly, that wasn’t the only time when I was compiling my list of, like, okay, what are some of the top 10 biggest things that happened in US history – most important moments in US history – another one came up that I found that was focused on the first degree of Libra. 

And it was this event where it was on August 28th, 1963, and this was the March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during one of the largest political rallies for human rights in US history, which directly led to the Civil Rights Act. And what I find interesting is this is literally one of the most important and most if not the most prominent speech in US history, and in this chart, Mercury just happens to be at one degree of Libra, which is at the very least potentially in the rising sign of the United States. But interestingly, again, it might actually be conjunct the degree of the Ascendant, depending on what the degree of the Ascendant is and if it truly is at one degree of Libra, which it would be around 11:15 AM that morning. So this is another, like, interesting and weird thing that stood out to me as I started, like, comparing this chart to some of the greatest events in US history. 

Okay. But obviously those are two positive events, so here’s a major challenging one which I talked about in the “Eclipses Coinciding with Important Events in US History” episode, which is that basically in late October of 1929 was when the stock market crashed, especially on October 24th, 1929, which is known as Black Thursday. And then again on October 29th, 1929, which is known as Black Tuesday. And already on October 24th, 1929, we’re about to head into eclipse season because there’s about to be a series of eclipses in Scorpio and Taurus. And by the time of October 29th, which is Black Tuesday and the stock market’s just in absolute freefall at this time, and on October 29th, some 16 million shares were traded, we can see what’s happening on these two dates. But on October 24th, we have an exact South Node-Mars conjunction in Scorpio in what would be the 2nd house of the US birth chart. And the 2nd house, of course, in a natal chart or inceptional chart is the place of money and finances and possessions. And the South Node indicates in ancient astrology the decrease of things, whereas Mars indicates cutting and separating and severing and the taking away of good things. So you basically have, like, a doubling up of two sort of negative, taking away significators at this time in the 2nd house of finances in the US birth chart. And that’s on October 24th, that South Node conjunction, which now we know potentially was in the 2nd house. But then if you advance the chart forward, shortly after October 29th, you end up getting a solar eclipse that happens in Scorpio in the 2nd house of the US birth chart. And this solar eclipse takes place on November 1st, 1929, when the stock market by this point is just in absolute freefall, and this is the beginning of the Great Depression. And so what you end up with is on this date on November 1st, 1929, you get an eclipse in the 2nd house. But I believe this was the opening of eclipse season, and two weeks later you get a Full Moon eclipse in Taurus in the 8th house of the US birth chart, which is the place of shared resources and other people’s money and taxes and loans and debts and other things like that. So this case is fascinating to me, because in our eclipses episode, if you go back and listen to it, where we provided more detailed coverage of the sequence of everything and how this was one of the greatest stock market crashes in US history and how it led to the Great Depression. But what I find fascinating now is that when we look at this set of eclipses through the lens of the Libra rising chart, it actually provides more useful information because we see those eclipses are falling in the 2nd and 8th houses of this chart, and therefore they actually are falling in the financial sectors of the US birth chart, which to me is just stunning. 

Okay, so similarly, another eclipse example – like, a major event that coincided with an eclipse season – in US history that Nick and I talked about in the eclipses episode was the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, which occurred on April 14th, 1865. And what’s fascinating about this is this one Nick and I had talked about in the eclipses episode was preceded by a lunar eclipse in the sign of Libra, which took place around October [April] 11th, 1865, which would be in the first house or in the rising sign of the US birth chart, which is interesting because in a natal chart the first house would relate to the body and the physical vitality of the native. It can sometimes indicate very important health things. And that eclipse was conjunct Saturn. But then if you go forward, so it’s like, Lincoln gets assassinated, but then what happens is there’s another eclipse, which ends up being a solar eclipse in Taurus that takes place a little under two weeks later – like, a week and a half later – on April 25th, 1865. And what’s fascinating is that Nick and I in the eclipses episode, I already really focused on this eclipse because what I found so fascinating is that Lincoln’s funeral procession was basically taking place at this point where his casket was being taken through different states, especially on the eastern seaboard, and on the day of this solar eclipse, I had talked about and noted how Lincoln’s casket, there was a viewing of it in New York. And that was the biggest, the largest crowd that viewed Lincoln’s casket, I believe, and it was this really important moment. And one of the things that I picked up in that episode was that this eclipse was taking place exactly that day of that showing in New York. And what I find, again, fascinating here when I put this in the context of the Libra rising birth chart is that this would be taking place in Taurus, which is the 8th house of death, basically, in the US birth chart, and therefore we get this solar eclipse on one of the days of Lincoln’s funeral, basically his funeral procession. 

So again, it’s like it’s providing additional information of things that we’ve already identified that’s important, but then all of a sudden it’s giving up additional contextual information through the houses that actually lines up surprisingly well. I also glanced at the Kennedy assassination, and this one, the main thing that I found was interesting was that there’s two really close transits that day, which is Mars and Venus are conjoining around 20, 21 degrees of Sagittarius in the 3rd house of the Libra rising chart, which is the place of short-distance travel. And they’re exactly opposing Mars in the US birth chart at 21 degrees of Gemini. And then simultaneously, Mercury at nine degrees of Gemini, also in the 3rd house, is squaring in the sky Uranus, which is at nine degrees of Virgo in the 12th house of enemies. And let’s see, and then also Mars and Venus are also squaring Neptune natally in the birth chart of the US, which is at 22 degrees of Virgo in the 12th house of enemies. 

But what I found fascinating about this is that the primary planets, then, that are indicating the event and the closest transits that day, which are those three Sagittarius planets that are either making aspects to other planets in the sky or are making aspects – like, difficult ones – to natal placements in the US birth chart, they’re transiting Sagittarius, which is the 3rd house of the US birth chart. And the 3rd house is traditionally the place of short-distance travel, including driving and cars, basically. In the modern period, it became the place where you find cars and vehicles. And of course, unlike Lincoln, John F. Kennedy was famously assassinated while he was riding in a car through Dallas as part of his motorcade. And there’s something kind of interesting about that to me then as a result of that. And there’s other things that we could look at then and perhaps study about this chart to get additional information. But I just wanted to mention that in passing that sometimes even, like, lower level houses that you don’t think about as much start to actually really pop up in striking ways through the lens of the Libra rising birth chart. 

All right. And the last example that I’ll share here today is this is the chart for September 11th, 2001, set for the exact moment that the first plane hit the first tower of the World Trade Center. So this is the chart for 9/11 basically. And what I always noticed and found fascinating, and what anybody that’s ever looked at this chart – the chart for the beginning of 9/11, basically – has always noticed is that the moment that the first plane hit the first tower, there was this conjunction where Mercury was rising over the eastern horizon at that exact time at 14 degrees of Libra. And this is exactly conjunct Saturn in the US birth chart at 14 degrees of Libra, which is true regardless of what time you use. But when you take the Libra rising chart into account and realize that this is a first house Saturn, that really takes that Mercury and puts a different spin on it. Because earlier, we were talking about how, like, Mercury at one degree of Libra potentially conjunct the Ascendant was when Martin Luther King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech. But here we have Mercury at 14 degrees of Libra on the degree of the Ascendant, and now it’s conjoining Saturn in the first house of the body, physical vitality, and other things like that, and that’s a much more challenging and problematic combination. So that’s obviously not the only thing, but it’s just the first thing that I found interesting. 

The second thing that’s more important and has more historical relevance for discussions about 9/11 and how 9/11 had been conceptualized up to this point is when 9/11 happened, most of the astrologers in trying to explain it in terms of mundane astrology, they really focused on the Saturn-Pluto opposition that was taking place at the time between Pluto at 12 degrees of Sagittarius, and Saturn at 14 degrees of Gemini. Because in the Sagittarius rising chart, or in the Sibley chart, that had been used somewhat widely up to that point, that would have placed Pluto in the first house or in the rising sign or close to the Ascendant potentially, depending on what rectification you use. And it would place Saturn in the 7th house or on the Descendant in the Sibley chart. However, what I find incredibly fascinating here is in the context of the Libra rising chart, that opposition that was taking place would fall in the 3rd house-9th house axis, which is both on the one hand the place of travel with the 3rd house and the 9th house as well. But it’s also the place of foreign countries and foreign land and people from foreign places. And the 9th house is also the place of religion. And what was interesting is that this began that entire era of on the one hand, America – this was one of the first and only times where America was struck on its homeland by a foreign adversary that ended up destroying the World Trade Center, the two towers, but also hitting the Pentagon and then the fourth plane was either going for the White House or it was going for Congress. But I find it incredibly fascinating because then it began this entire era of, like, you know, Bush doing the war on terror, but all of these fears surrounding religiously based terrorist attacks and things like that, and fears surrounding that, as well as tensions between especially in America in the immediately aftermath, like, tensions with Americans sometimes becoming racist or going after Muslims or other things like that, as well as the potential for it to be more religiously based conflict. So I find that incredibly interesting just in terms of that opposition between the 3rd and the 9th house in that instance and how that recontextualizes the Saturn-Pluto opposition in a way that still makes sense contextually, and arguably, I would say, even more so than what the Saturn-Pluto opposition was doing in the Sibley chart or in the Sagittarius rising chart. 

So two other important things that I think are striking. One of them is remember how I said this was, like, aside from Pearl Harbor, this was like the first actual attack on mainland America that was carried out by an enemy. And one of the things that are really fascinating about this chart is that Mars is at one degree of Capricorn, which is in the 4th whole sign house, the place of the home and the living situation and one’s country or one’s land. But interestingly, again, thinking of the potential for if early Libra is actually surprisingly the correct degree of the Ascendant, then the degree of the IC would be placed at one degree of Capricorn in the US birth chart, and in this chart, Mars actually happens to be exactly conjoining the degree of the IC. And that’s actually kind of interesting, because it’s also conjoining the South Node, so we have another Mars-South Node conjunction, which is indicating decrease or destruction or separation of something, which we saw previously when it fell in the 2nd house, and that was when the stock market crashed and the Great Depression began. But here we see that Mars-South Node conjunction in the 4th house of the home, the living situation, the homeland, one’s home or living situation, as well as buildings have always traditionally been associated with the 4th house. And to see Mars there, which is the planet of fire and destruction and war and death, traditionally, right there in the 4th and potentially even on the IC, is an incredibly striking placement, basically, that’s symbolically very interesting. 

There’s also some other stuff with eclipses that preceded 9/11, because there was an eclipse in Capricorn that preceded it. And this ended up partially being, like, part of the way that some astrologers got close to predicting it or did predict it in connecting it with the eclipses that preceded it in Capricorn. But I’ll skip over that for now, because I don’t wanna do a whole episode on the chart for 9/11. 

The last point that was kind of relevant and interesting is just in the Libra rising chart, one of the interesting pieces is the ruler of the 10th house is the Moon, which is at 23 degrees of Aquarius. And at the time, transiting Uranus was only, like, a degree-and-a-half or so away from that. Uranus was at 21 degrees and 50 minutes of Aquarius. And so we have this planet, Uranus, that represents sudden unexpected surprising, shocking things that shake things up, and it’s actually conjoining the Moon and potentially the ruler of the 10th house. And this would have a very drastic and sudden change in terms of the US’s direction from that point forward almost immediately. So I find that interesting in terms of the Moon ruling the 10th house in the instance of the Libra rising chart. 

All right, so that’s just a little preliminary taste of some – looking through some – major events in US history and comparing them to the Libra chart and some promising suggestive potential things that are kind of compelling. But I will save the more detailed analysis of that, which I think needs to be done – like, a lot more research needs to be done in terms of that. But I just wanted to give you a little idea of where I’m sort of headed with that and some of the things that seemed suggestive to me for the purpose of firming this up a little bit from more of an astrological perspective today as opposed to just the more purely historical and then secondarily electional perspective that I presented earlier. 

All right, in the next section, I need to back up a little bit, and I need to address a question that I know is gonna come up in a lot of astrologers’ minds which I’ve sort of alluded to a few times, but I haven’t fully addressed, which is what about the Gemini rising and the Sagittarius rising charts, such as the Sibley chart, basically? And those two charts, over the past century, have been the two most popular charts that most astrologers use. So I wanna address each of those at this point and point out some of the historical issues with them that I don’t think most astrologers are aware of when they use either of those two charts. 

All right, so first let’s talk about the Gemini rising chart. This chart was popular with American astrologers prior to the 1970s. And Luke Broughton in the year 1861, I believe, proposed an early morning chart on July 4th, 1776, with Uranus rising. And let me show that chart really quickly. Okay, so this is Luke Broughton’s roughly speaking – he put Uranus on the Ascendant basically – original chart, and then different versions of this chart started being used by different astrologers as the chart for the United States with different versions of Gemini rising. So for example, Luke Broughton used a chart where Uranus was exactly on the Ascendant, and then later, Evangeline Adams, who was the most popular astrologer in America in the 1910s and 1920s and 1930s, she used a later time that put Mars exactly on the Ascendant in Gemini. So this is one version of the US chart that was very popular as a result of especially some of the leading astrologers and most influential astrologers such as Luke Broughton and Evangeline Adams helping to popularize it. 

Okay, but here’s the problem with the Gemini rising chart. As you could have seen in the chart I was just showing is that in order to have Gemini rising, you have to set it for two o’clock or three o’clock in the morning, which is historically incredibly, incredibly implausible because Congress was not in session, as we’ve seen through the journals of Congress and all of the things that they were doing each day between especially nine o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon, they were busy doing legislative and other stuff related to the war effort and all these other things, like debating the Declaration of Independence, debating the vote, et cetera, et cetera. And Congress did not hold legislative sessions at two or three o’clock in the morning. 

So one of the points I need to make is that there’s absolutely no legitimate historical evidence that shows that the Declaration of Independence was, like, completed at two or three o’clock in the morning with the Gemini rising chart on July 4th. And with Luke Broughton, I think one of the points that’s really important about this is because it gets to the heart of where the Gemini rising chart comes from and why he originally proposed it, because Luke Broughton was doing astrology and practicing – he was originally from the UK, but then he immigrated to the US, and he became a very prominent astrologer especially around the time of the Civil War. And what’s fascinating about Luke Broughton is that he was the first astrologer, as far as I’m aware, to notice the signature where every 84 years, whenever Uranus goes through Gemini, the US would get involved in a major war. And this happened, he pointed out that it happened during the Revolutionary War, that it happened again during the Civil War, which helped him to predict it basically. But also he had tracked it back ever further, earlier than the Revolutionary War to other Uranus in Gemini periods, identifying that Uranus whenever it goes through Gemini, something really important would happen in the US or in America. And for that reason, because he could see how important Uranus in Gemini was for the US, he developed the idea that Gemini must be the most important sign for the United States. And this is where the Gemini rising chart comes from, because the rising sign – like, prior to the 20th century when Sun sign astrology became popular, whenever somebody would write down their sign, it was always – what it meant was their rising sign. That’s the sign that a person is “born under” virtually any time prior to, like, especially the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s. 

So Broughton developed this idea that Uranus in Gemini was important for the country. So in his Gemini rising chart, he just puts Uranus right on the Ascendant and assumes then and uses that for symbolic purposes as the sort of, like, rising sign or chart for the United States. However, I think we can see now that basically Uranus in Gemini can be important for the United States without it necessarily needing to be because Uranus was in the rising sign at the time that the Declaration of Independence was completed, or even at the time that the vote for independence was taken on July 2nd. We know based on historical sources at this point that they took the vote probably late in the morning on July 2nd, and we know from the journals of Congress that they completed the Declaration of Independence probably late in the morning on July 4th. So as a result of that, even though I understand why Broughton was thinking that, because he had legitimately discovered a very important historical pattern – he ended up being the first astrologer to discover that historical pattern with Uranus in Gemini coinciding with major wars – and that became the basis for Luke Broughton issuing a prediction about the outbreak of the Civil War. It became the basis, as I’ve talked about in a previous episode last summer when Uranus went into Gemini, it became the basis for Evangeline Adams successfully predicting a decade ahead of time that World War II would happen when Uranus went into Gemini in the 1940s. And you know, very quickly, you know, Uranus in Gemini is something that me and my friend Nick Dagan Best have been talking about and predicting then by extension will concede with a major war now that Uranus is coming up in Gemini again over the next seven years as we’ve been predicting going way back to some of the first episodes of The Astrology Podcast in 2013. 

So I understand why Luke Broughton thought Gemini was important for the US, but now I think the conclusion that we can make is that, like, Gemini doesn’t have to be the rising sign of the US in order for Uranus in Gemini periods to be important. And especially in the context of what we’ve been looking at today with if hypothetically the rising chart is the true birth chart for the United States, Uranus falling in Gemini in the 9th house of foreign places conjunct Mars, the planet of war, I think makes perfect sense, especially due to the tendency for the US to get involved in foreign conflicts – and not just foreign wars, but like, the biggest foreign conflicts in its history every 84 years whenever Uranus goes back into that sign. That falling in the 9th house of foreign places and foreign travel makes complete sense to me, and so I don’t think there’s any reason to have to posit that Uranus must be in the rising sign in the US birth chart, even though I can see why this was, like, tempting for him or other astrologers at one time. 

Furthermore, because of the historical and practical implausibility of the Gemini rising chart which would have had to take place at two or three AM, the astrologers that tend to promote the Gemini rising chart are sometimes forced to invent, like, conspiracy theories about speculating about that since some of the founding fathers were involved with freemasonry that they must have then somehow had a lot of knowledge or proficiency in astrology, and that they must have therefore elected to do something important like sign of the Declaration of Independence at two or three in the morning with Gemini rising is, like, one of the speculations that’s sometimes thrown out there. 

However, Nick Campion in his Book of World Horoscopes makes two counterpoints to that that I think are incredibly compelling and I’d like to relay them here. One of them is that, you know, unfortunately, as astrologers, no matter how much we would like this to be the case, you know, just because it would be cool, there’s unfortunately there’s no evidence currently that any of the founders were into astrology. So Benjamin Franklin is the only one who potentially could have calculated a horoscope, and he published an almanac. However, if you actually read Benjamin Franklin’s writing and you read his almanac, he seems to have actually been against astrology and in fact he satirized other astrologers of his time period, sometimes really viciously, going after other almanac makers and things like that. And part of his thing was to promote more, like, scientific-type thinking, usually at the expense of things that he viewed as unscientific or superstitious or what have you, because he was kind of like, an Enlightenment-type thinker. So I don’t think there’s evidence that Benjamin Franklin was an astrologer, was a practicing astrologer who believed in astrology. 

And similarly, with Thomas Jefferson, one of the things I found during this is that he did have two – I found two books, although Campion says there may have been a third book on astrology in his library. However, when I looked through the catalogue, one of the books that he owned was actually just, like, inherited from somebody else’s library that died and gave their library to him. And the other book was, like, Manilius that I think he bought later, but Manilius is often read by people who study Latin for its poetic meaning and flourishes and things like that. And there’s no other indications in Jefferson’s writings that he took any interest in astrology. 

So unfortunately, there’s no evidence that any of the founders were into astrology. And then secondly, point two, which is actually a much more compelling point, no electional astrologer would have chosen a chart with Gemini rising and a retrograde Mercury ruling the Ascendant at two or three o’clock in the morning, because that would have been a really bad electional choice from any standard, traditional rules of electional astrology. And that I think is a much more compelling point, because even if you are gonna argue that they were astrologers, you don’t have, like, any strong reason based on that chart. It’s actually a really crappy chart to pick Gemini rising on July 4th, 1776. And in point of fact, the best electional chart that day, as I’ve already shown, would have been the Libra rising chart, which happens late in the morning and basically in the middle of the day. And actually ironically, in terms of real historical evidence as I’ve shown in this episode does actually seem to be the chart that happened to be the one that that was used that day. But I don’t think that the founders did that deliberately for electional purposes, and that’s something you really have to be careful about is sometimes astrologers will speculate that people are using electional astrology behind the scenes or that, like, powerful people are using electional astrology. And while sometimes that’s the case, sometimes it – especially from the outside perspective – it’s really hard to tell when somebody’s deliberately using electional astrology, because sometimes powerful or eminent or important people that do historic things sometimes just happen to do things at auspicious times. And it’s not because they’re deliberately paying attention to astrology; it’s just because they’re people that are doing historic things and are doing things that would become successful. And so of course from our perspective as astrologers, we know that when that happens that the sky is always mirroring events that happen on earth. And so sometimes there’s just auspicious alignments that happen when auspicious things are taking place on earth. And I believe that’s what happened here. 

So I think that’s a really important point in terms of the Gemini rising; it’s just we have no evidence for it. It’s not a good electoral chart. We don’t have good evidence, even though I would love for this to be otherwise, that any of the founders were astrologers, and therefore in the end result that means there’s absolutely no basis for the Gemini rising chart as far as I can tell. 

All right, so that’s the Gemini rising chart, which I get the sense was more popular in the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, the first half of the 20th century, especially because it was promoted by Luke Broughton and then Evangeline Adams, who were two of the most popular and influential astrologers of their age. But then there was another chart that became popularized, and the origins of this chart – this is the Sagittarius rising chart, or what’s otherwise known as the Sibley chart. And the Sibley chart was first published by an astrologer in Britain named Ebenezer Sibley in 1787. And this chart eventually in the 20th century became adopted by some prominent astrologers, especially or chiefly the astrologer Dane Rudhyar, who researched this chart and ended up adopting it in the 1970s. And through Rudhyar, I think especially because of how influential Rudhyar was on late 20th century astrology, I think it became popularized and it started to potentially even eclipse the Gemini rising chart over the course of the past 50 years so that’s typically the most common chart used by astrologers today. 

And the Sibley chart’s tricky. Let me figure out where to – let’s show the chart first. So here’s the Sibley chart; it’s usually set for July 4th, 1776, at 5:10 PM in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And it has 12 degrees of Sagittarius rising, and Mars is at 21 Gemini and Uranus is at eight degrees of Gemini in the 7th whole sign house. So the Sibley chart, though, as it was presented originally by Ebenezer Sibley in 1787 and in subsequent publications, looked like this. He published an illustration of it in one of his books. And here is an image of the book where this is taken from where for the audio people, it’s like, he’s got the text on one side on the left where he’s talking about ingress charts. On the bottom, we see an image of maybe George Washington or some soldier – I’m not really sure. But at the top, there’s, like, an angel holding a trumpet on a cloud. And on its other hand, they have a chart. And it’s a, like, diamond-shaped chart in the style of that time – sort of similar to some of William Lilly’s charts. But the thing that you’ll notice about the chart – there’s two really important things. 

So in the middle, it says “America Independence,” and it says, “4th of July,” but then it says, “At 10:10 PM, 1776.” And if you look over on the left, the Ascendant which is what’s denoted here is roughly – he’s calculating it to be around 19 degrees of Aquarius. So the Ascendant’s 19 degrees of Aquarius in the Sibley chart, and it’s set for 10:10 PM in London. So this is the first problem is that the actual Sibley chart as it appears here is set for London on July 4th at, like, 10 PM. And this is where things get really weird and tricky, because later astrologers would see that illustration – because that image would get publicized in other books. Like, there was a famous astrology book in the 20th century that publicized the image. And astrologers would look at that; they would realize it’s set for London time on July 4th for some bizarre, inexplicable reason. And they would read 10:10 PM. So what astrologers would do is they would just, like, convert the timezone to Philadelphia, thinking that this was an exact time that he was setting for London, but that you could just convert that based on the timezones by subtracting several hours and then you would end up with the Sagittarius rising chart when you set it for Philadelphia at 5:10 PM. So they just directly converted 10:10 PM to 5:10 PM. 

So the problem with that, and then what astrologers would assume and sometimes speculate about, is that Sibley himself was a freemason and was connected with freemasonry. So the astrologers would just assume that, like, since he’s living in 1787 in England, like, a little over a decade after the Declaration of Independence, that maybe he had some sort of connections through his freemason connections and somehow knew the time when the US birth chart – when the Declaration of Independence – was completed, and that for some bizarre reason he just set the chart for 10:10 PM London time instead of setting it for Philadelphia. That’s often, like, the speculation or the working assumption, I think, that astrologers had to make in order to use the Sibley chart as Dane Rudhyar did. But it was assuming that he had some sort of like, special access to the actual birth time. And since this is one of our earliest sources, it would sometimes – our earliest, like, astrological sources or astrologer who’s showing a chart for the US – it was often given a lot of weight or taken really seriously. 

But here’s the problem. So this is a point that Campion – it was the other piece of research that I did get out of Campion’s treatment of this in The Book of World Horoscopes even though, like I said, I ended up doing most of the other research and finding, like, 95 percent of things by the time I just finally found his article yesterday. One piece that I was not aware of that addresses the Sibley chart specifically is that Campion points out that in a 1994 in the NCGR Journal by an astrologer named Susan Manuel, she pointed out that the Sibley chart, what it’s actually doing is that it’s using traditional medieval mundane ingress techniques, and that what the Sibley chart is is that it takes the exact angles for when the Sun ingressed into Cancer in London in 1776, and it uses that Ascendant and then it just superimposes the transits for July 4th on top of that. So as a result, this is not – astrologers have misunderstood this. This is not, like, a timed chart that he got from America, but instead, this is a mundane chart – an ingress chart – that’s set for Great Britain and is primarily focused more on how this is gonna affect the British and things like that, and that’s why he’s setting it for London, than it is a timed chart that he got from some source in America. And as a result of that, astrologers who have used the Sibley chart and just like, converted this 10:10 PM and converted it to Philadelphia have completely misunderstood for generations what this chart even represents. And that’s even more of an issue and is easier to do, because the techniques of mundane astrology – of medieval astrology and ingress charts – were pretty much virtually lost with the advent of psychological character-based astrology in the late 20th century, the type of astrology that Rudhyar and others were promoting. So that the astrologers of the late 20th century didn’t even, like, use that as a concept, so they couldn’t have even understood what was happening here or how this chart was being used and what it actually represented. 

So this totally blew my mind yesterday when I read – so Campion relates this from the Susan Manuel article from the NCGR from the spring of 1994; I have not read her article yet, so I haven’t been able to get a hold of it. But I’m just taking what Campion outlined, and then I was able to recreate it to actually show that it was actually true and that that was plausible. So let me show the charts right now in order to demonstrate that, because I think it makes a little more sense when you actually see it in the charts. And I should say one thing that’s funny about this and me discovering this yesterday while I was putting together all the research at the last minute is that, like, how many years ago? Six years ago in 2020 when I did an episode on the different birth charts for the US with Nina Gryphon, she’s the one that primarily had been researching all the stuff in the episode, and she actually mentioned this in passing. But then we moved onto something else and we didn’t come back to it, so I never actually knew about this or like, understood the implications of that until just yesterday, but it really blew my mind because of the implication that… I don’t know! That astrologers have been basing the Sibley chart off of a completely mistaken understanding for many years now. So shoutout to Nina for that research, because Nina focuses on medieval ingress charts, so of course she would have been able to verify this and would have known as well. 

So let’s take a look at this. Okay, so this is the chart for if you cast a chart for July 4th, 1776, at 10:10 PM in London. And we see that the Ascendant is at 28 degrees of Aquarius, which doesn’t match up with the angles that we saw in the chart which has them around, like, 19 degrees of Aquarius. But the solution to this and the issue, if I understand correctly, is that James Holden points out in some of his writings, especially in his Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers, he points out that even though on the chart itself it seems to say 10:10 PM, in fact the chart is calculated for 20 minutes earlier. The chart is calculated for approximately 9:50 PM. So if I understand correctly, what happened is that the way the chart’s written is it’s supposed to say 10 o’clock minus 10 minutes, which would come out to, like, 9:50 PM if I understand the argument then that’s made by, like, Campion and that was probably made in the original article by Susan Manuel and that Holden makes, basically, that there’s a disconnect already from the very start between – let me share it again – between this image which if you just glance at it seems like it says 10:10 PM. But then the chart calculation placements with the Ascendant at 19 degrees of Aquarius actually fits, like, 20 minutes earlier, so it would be 10 minus 10 minutes. And then you end up with this chart, which has about in this calculation about 18 degrees of Aquarius rising. 

So that’s point one, that astrologers are already screwing up that are using the Sibley chart is pretty much all the versions of the Sibley chart just take 10:10 PM London and then they subtract five hours to set it to Philadelphia time at 5:10 PM. The chart as he actually has it calculated is actually set for 9:50 PM. So we see Aquarius is rising, and then the transits are kind of like, superimposed on this chart for July 4th. But here’s where things get interesting is like, why is he using an Ascendant around 18 or 19 degrees of Aquarius? And the solution is that what he’s doing is he’s using the Ascendant degree that was established by the previous ingress of the Sun into Cancer that occurred just a couple of weeks earlier in London. So let’s back up the chart to that ingress. So I’m gonna take it back; I’m moving the chart back days in time. We see the Sun is moving back to the beginning of Cancer. And I’m gonna take it to the last degree of Gemini. So here the Sun is at 29 degrees of Gemini and 57 minutes of July [June] 20th, 1776, at 9:50 PM. And we see the Ascendant is currently at 26 degrees of Capricorn. 

So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna slowly animate the chart, especially for those watching the video version, until the Sun moves exactly into the sign of Cancer, which is when it hits the summer solstice. And I’m gonna see – we see the Ascendant moving forward now into Aquarius. The Sun is now at 29°59’ Gemini. It’s now, like, 10:30 at night. And then eventually, we will see the Sun click over and ingress into Cancer at approximately 10:43 PM. And at this time, the Ascendant has now moved to about 17 degrees of Aquarius. 

So that’s pretty close, especially relative to 18th century astrological calculations, that’s pretty close to the Ascendant that Sibley basically ends up using and setting the chart for on July 4th, 1776, in London. And it means that he didn’t know, basically, what time the Declaration of Independence was finalized on July 4th, 1776. So instead what he did is he used a symbolic time because he was able to calculate the moment that the Sun ingressed into Cancer in the lead-up to that. And when he calculated what the Ascendant was, the moment that the Sun ingressed into Cancer in London as a mundane chart, the Ascendant was at about 17 or 18 or 19 degrees of Aquarius according to his calculations. So then he uses that as the Ascendant in the chart that he prints in his book as we can see right here for those watching the video version where he has it at about 19 degrees of Aquarius. 

So and what further like, confirms that is if you actually read his chapter in the rest of this book in the parts that are surrounding it, he’s basically, like, talking about ingress charts and the Sun’s ingress into Cancer and all of this other stuff in the lead-up to where he shows this chart. So I find that argument, then, incredibly compelling – that this was never meant to be a exact time that he got through some sort of like, secret sources of something like that and then just like, bizarrely decided to cast the chart for London. But instead, this was always meant to be a symbolic chart that represented the degree of the Ascendant at the previous Cancer ingress. And then he superimposed the transits for July 4th on top of that. 

So I mean, there’s different arguments that could be made about whether that’s true or if people wanna attempt to dispute that or what have you, but I find that incredibly compelling and interesting. But if it is true, which I believe that it is, then it means that this is like, a symbolic mundane ingress set for Britain, and this was never supposed to be a timed natal chart for Philadelphia. And therefore, anybody that’s using any version of the Sibley chart is using a chart that’s fundamentally been misunderstood and sort of mangled from the very beginning. 

So that is not good news for the Sibley chart, but that’s why I wanted to bring that to people’s attention. Now you know, to be fair, there is one – that one piece of evidence from Jefferson where Jefferson said in his autobiography 45 years later when he’s 78 years old that he thought that the debates on the Declaration went through the 2nd and the 3rd and the 4th into the evening. So that is the one piece of evidence that you could still, if you really wanted to, grasp onto a Sagittarius rising chart of some sort later in the day on July 4th, you could grasp onto. But remember the problem with that is he’s writing, like, more than 45 years later; he’s 78 years old, and he makes a mistake in the very same sentence that he says that, which is that he says that they all signed the document that day. However, we know that all of the founders didn’t sign the document until a month later on August 2nd when they put it on parchment, which is the document that still exists in Washington, DC, to this day. 

So we know that his memory was not good. He also said it was – years later, he said that it was a hot day, but then it turns out that in his written weather log, it was actually a rather cool day; it was only in, like, the low to mid-70s, which is pretty cool for July on the east coast in Philadelphia.

So we have good reason to think that Jefferson wasn’t remembering things very well by the time he wrote down his autobiography 45 years later, and instead, all of the primary evidence that we have indicates – especially from the journals – that they completed work on the Declaration of Independence and finalized it late that morning, probably around 11:15 AM, which would result in the Libra rising chart. And I don’t think we have any reason to believe that it wasn’t finished until later that day. 

So I wanted to outline that, just because it’s really important in outline and uncovering this and trying to figure it out for myself and what my own understanding is to, like, gather all the historical evidence I have and to try to weigh the different pieces of evidence and to try to understand the pros and cons of different pieces. You know, these are the conclusions that I came to for myself, and so I wanted to outline as much of this for other people today because even if people don’t necessarily agree with me or don’t follow or agree with all the same conclusions that I’ve come to, at least this – I hope – will have progressed the discussion somewhat in that now we’re talking more about what the actual surviving evidence says and we’ve gotten rid of some of the faulty evidence or the mythology or other things like that that weren’t necessarily true, but that were often taken for granted when this discussion would come up periodically and when the chart of the US would be debated. So I hope that helps to clarify that. 

All right, in the final major section of this before I wrap things up and do a conclusion after this, I want to go through very quickly give a broad overview of the entire timeline of the summer of 1776, and I’m gonna animate the chart through each of the major steps along the way in order to tie everything together, and in order to give you a greater sense of how the astrology was playing out at really key moments every step of the way during the course of the summer. Because even though my focus here, and it’s important to try to identify, like, a primary chart or charts in terms of the Declaration chart on July 4th, 1776, that we’ve been focused on, as I said, this was part of a broader unfolding and sequence of events. And I think it’s important to step back and view it in that context as well. So let’s do that really quick. Let’s jump into it. 

All right, so here’s our first date that I’m gonna start with, and I’ve mentioned this already briefly before, but this is June 7th, 1776. And this is the day that Richard Henry Lee formally proposes independence, which was later referred to as the Lee Resolution. But the vote ended up being delayed until July, but they did agree to start drafting the Declaration of Independence in case the vote passed in July. 

So what I already mentioned related to this that I found so fascinating is that this was shortly after Uranus has just ingressed into Gemini by June 3rd or June 4th. And then by the time we get to June 7th, Mars is at two degrees of Gemini – that’s the planet I was referring to – Mars at two degrees of Gemini is really moving in closely to that conjunction with Uranus at seven degrees of Gemini. And this is literally, like, the proposal that we need to break away from Britain and start our own union and that we’re gonna bring this up for a vote. But then they ended up – they didn’t think – the people that wanted to pass that didn’t think that it could be passed at the time. So they delayed the vote until they ended up having it on July 2nd. But in the meantime, they realized that they needed to start writing a Declaration of Independence so that if the vote did pass on July 2nd, they could immediately move forward with also adopting the Declaration of Independence and then starting to publicize it and get the word out. 

So what happens is a few days later on June 11th, Congress forms a committee to draft the Declaration of Independence. And this took place on June 11th, 1776; we see now Venus has gone into Gemini and we’ve got this interesting triple conjunction of Venus at four degrees of Gemini, Mars at five degrees of Gemini, and Uranus at seven degrees of Gemini. And it was a committee of five, but the three main people that were important on this committee were Thomas Jefferson, who ended up being the primary guy that wrote it, John Adams, and then also Benjamin Franklin. 

So what’s interesting is after that, we get to the exact conjunction of Uranus, of Mars and Uranus starts taking place just a few days later on June 14th and June 15th. And at this time, Jefferson is said to have written the Declaration pretty quickly, in a day or two, according to Adams. So one of the things that I think happened is I think that, depending on the timing involved of when he got started – whether he started on the 11th or whether he started on the 12th or even afterwards on the 13th – somewhere very close, basically, to the exact Mars-Uranus conjunction which went exact early, I believe, on June 15th. There was that Mars-Uranus conjunction and also a New Moon in Gemini later that day. Jefferson pretty much wrote most of the Declaration of Independence in, like, one big push around this time, around the exact Mars-Uranus conjunction, which I just find is incredibly – I didn’t really know that until a few days ago. And because I’ve already done the episode on Mars-Uranus conjunctions in US history and how that worked out later, like, subsequently later on in US history and how important they were, it’s incredibly compelling and interesting to find that the founding document of the United States was also largely drafted on one on this conjunction right here in June of 1776. 

So also that wasn’t the only thing that happened on June 15th, but also on June 15th, the Virginia Declaration of Rights is published. And this actually influenced Jefferson, who was from Virginia and he had seen early drafts of it, and he ended up incorporating some things that he was probably inspired by from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, including the idea that “all men are created equal.” So that’s an important thing. There’s other important things that were happening at the same time that were, like, feeding into the Declaration of Independence and it being composed at this time. But even though he may have written the bulk of it pretty quickly, he then had a few weeks basically that passed by where he did do some additional work with John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. And then eventually the group of five later that month on June 28th presented their draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. So I’m animating the chart to June 28th. And here we can see, like, Mercury was already – when he was writing the Declaration of Independence, it was already slowing down and getting ready to station retrograde. But then literally this day, the day that Mercury stations retrograde, was June 28th, 1776. And that was the day that they presented the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress for the first time and set it down and allowed everyone to read it and start discussing it. So that’s a really important day, the day that Mercury stations retrograde. 

Then what happened is if we move forward a few days to July 1st, we see this Full Moon took place on July 1st in Capricorn where the Moon hits about 10 degrees of Capricorn early in the day, and it opposes the Sun at 10 degrees of Cancer. So it’s a Full Moon in Capricorn. And this was the day that they had this, like, long, pretty intense debate and whether to vote to become independent, basically, and to form a new country rather than trying to work things out with Great Britain or what have you. So they have this intense debate the day of the Full Moon, and then the very next day is July 2nd. And we’ve talked about this already; this is the date where they take the vote, probably sometime with Libra rising. And this is the day they officially vote for independence. And what’s interesting, as I mentioned previously, is only 12 colonies voted for independence on this day, and New York actually ended up abstaining. They abstained from voting because New York had standing orders from their homebase, basically, saying not to agree to any major votes until they had been given permission. So New York abstains, and this allows it to basically be a 12-to-zero vote on July 2nd, which allows the motion to pass. And that’s the actual legal vote for independence. But it sets up a little tricky thing that I think everyone would have been on edge about, which is that one of the most important states, New York, wasn’t officially on board with this according to being able to officially vote for it on July 2nd or even on July 4th. They were still waiting to hear back from New York to see if they could move forward. So we’ll come back to that. 

Okay, so this is July 2nd; they do the vote for independence; it’s successful. Adams thinks this is, like, gonna be the anniversary of the country; he thinks this is the most important moment, at least he did on July 3rd when he writes to his wife, Abigail. But then for the rest of July 2nd after they take the vote, for the rest of the day they start intensely debating and especially editing Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. And they just, like, as far as Jefferson’s concerned, they just take a hatchet to this thing because they end up removing 25 percent of what he wrote, and they end up changing some really critical – what would become historically but also philosophically or morally critical – passages, including some of the things he said about slavery. So they are doing this for most of the rest of July 2nd, and then they’re continuing this process of revisioning for the entirety of July 3rd. This is all that, like, Mercury retrograde which remember stationed retrograde the day they presented it to Congress. But now Congress is doing this entire Mercury retrograde process of revision and removing things, but also smoothing some things out, because historians do say that there are some passages that arguably they did improve the language or did clarify the language, and there was a lot of people there so that it became, like, a committee of people that were being attentive to the language that was used and some of the different things that were said, including things like being careful not to alienate the entire British public, which Jefferson had stronger words for the British populace, but the Continental Congress ended up smoothing out and removing some of that language. 

So eventually after the full day of revisions again on July 3rd, eventually on July 4th as we’ve seen, they finalized things and then they finally approved the Declaration of Independence sometime in the morning of July 4th, as I’ve said, probably around 11:15 AM. By this point, you’ll notice that in terms of the animation of things that on July 1st – just backing up a bit for a minute because I forgot to mention something – Venus you can see was at 29 degrees of Gemini. But by July 2nd, by the time they take the vote, Venus has just switched over; it just ingressed into Cancer where now it’s applying directly to Jupiter at five degrees of Cancer. So I find that one of the most fascinating things, that these 13 different colonies that all are very independent and are all very nervous in some ways about coming together to form a single country, they kind of like, smoothed things out and put different things aside. I mean, they also did a lot of politicking, and they made a lot of concessions, including concessions to some of the southern states over slavery and things like that. But that being said, they did whatever it was that it took in that time, and suddenly Venus ingresses into Cancer, and it’s heading towards that conjunction with Jupiter, and somehow they pull it off. And on July 2nd, they vote to form a new country just after Venus has made that ingress. 

Then on July 4th, they approved the Declaration of Independence, and then they immediately send it off to the printer. And the printer does a rush job overnight, and eventually he comes back with copies early on July 5th. And immediately, they start sending out all of these copies of the Declaration of Independence on broadsides to different people in different places around the country. And you can start seeing some of the people that were there signing the Declaration of Independence or the people who approved it the previous day were also writing personal letters to people and including copies of it. And during this time, the Venus-Jupiter conjunction keeps getting closer and closer. 

So let’s see. June 6th, I believe the first newspaper got a scoop, I think it was like, a Philadelphia newspaper got a scoop and printed the Declaration of Independence on June 6th. By this point, we see Venus is at 15 degrees of Cancer and Jupiter’s at six degrees of Cancer. I did have a note where I believe that happened in the evening because it was an evening paper that usually came out in the evening. But that was kind of, like, a scoop, and the official announcement or promulgation hadn’t taken place yet, but instead would take place a couple of days later on July 8th. And this was that date where, again, remember we have not just the date, but we know the exact time that the officials were instructed to officially read aloud the Declaration of Independence. And it was actually exactly at 12 o’clock noon on July 8th, 1776, right when the Ascendant was in the middle of Libra. And the Venus-Jupiter conjunction had just taken place, and it was now separating by about a degree with Jupiter at six degrees of Cancer and Venus at seven degrees of Cancer. 

So that’s a really huge, important moment to like, think about. And like I said, the other interesting thing astrologically at this point is that eclipse season has just begun as of this day because the Moon has now passed that third quarter and it’s now heading towards a conjunction with the Sun, which will be very important as we’ll see shortly. That’s actually the next event. 

So now we’re gonna animate things to July 15th is the next really important date that I found that I wrote down. And what’s cool about this is that this is the day of a solar eclipse in the sign of Cancer. At this point, so this eclipse takes place at 23 degrees of Cancer on July 15th at exactly 10:24 AM. And what I find really fascinating about this is a couple of things. One, if you cast the chart for the moment of the solar eclipse at about 10:24, one of the things that’s interesting about it is the Ascendant switches into Libra at that exact moment. So the Ascendant switches into Libra, and the Moon exactly conjoins the Sun at 23 degrees of Cancer. And since they’re very close to the North Node, which is at six degrees of Leo, this is actually a solar eclipse in the sign of Cancer which then would be visible, which would be somewhat visible, because we can see it there up in the 10th house in this chart at 10:24 in the morning. So what’s interesting about this is that sometime that morning, they start reading the letters that have come in that morning, and sometime that morning, word arrives from New York that they’ve finally voted yes and they’ve given approval to become independent of Britain and to join the rest of the other 12 colonies in order to make it 13 colonies that are finally as of this exact day, July 15th, 1776, it’s finally unanimous. And now it’s not, like, 12 colonies that said yes and one colony that abstained, which is what happened on July 2nd. But now on the exact day of this eclipse, it’s suddenly unanimous, and all of the 13 colonies of the United States are now united as one new country. And I’m really struck by how – because remember, they always gavel in and Congress always meets starting at, like, nine or sometimes 10 AM. And then they immediately usually start reading the letters and the mail that’s come in overnight or since they last left at the end of the previous day, at like, three PM the previous day. So I actually really strongly suspect that I bet what happened is that it was sometime around this time, sometime around 10:24 AM, I bet you they read that letter out loud that came in from New York, and suddenly, this feeling of both on the one hand relief and elation, because remember, like, they didn’t know up until this point – like, New York had abstained up until this point. And New York was one of the most important states in the colonies. And up until this point, they didn’t know for sure for sure if New York was gonna be on board, because it would have been a much different situation if it was like, 12 colonies that are united, but then New York – one of the most important colonies – stays with Britain, for example. But all of a sudden, probably I strongly suspect that morning around the time of this eclipse and when the Ascendant switched into Libra once again, again recreating the Libra rising charts of July 2nd probably, July 4th probably, and definitely July 8th when the Declaration was first read publicly, I think that they had this feeling not just of relief, but also this feeling of the magnitude of what had just happened and what had just been accomplished would have hit all of them like so strongly. It must have been quite a moment. And to realize there was an eclipse that was taking place at that exact time is just a stunning piece of astrology. So that’s why, you know, despite the length of this podcast episode at this point, I wanted to belabor the point and go through the actual chronology this late in the episode just because I was so struck by this and the synchronicity involved with that eclipse that day, the day that the United States fully 100 percent became the United States of America. 

And what’s interesting is that after this point, by July 19th – so I’ll move it forward a couple of, a few days – by July 19th and after that Cancer eclipse, Congress orders the documents to be engrossed and officially changes title to the United States. So it’s like, once New York comes in, it’s official. Like, the colonies are now the United States eventually of America. 

And then the last – one of the last points I wanna get to is on July 22nd. We see Mercury here. By the 19th, Mercury is retrograde at 16 degrees of Cancer, but it’s slowing down again and it’s getting ready to station retrograde. And then eventually what happens is Mercury stations retrograde – sorry, Mercury stations direct on July 22nd, and at the same time, Mars has just recently ingressed into the sign of Cancer on July 17th. So that’s a couple of days after that eclipse happens and they have those really positive feelings of unity and now we’re 13 colonies and we’re a new country and we’re all in this together. But then like, two days later, guess what happens? Mars ingresses into Cancer and crashes the party. And suddenly the planet of war and conflict and strife and division moves into that lovely Cancer stellium that had been so unifying for most of July up until this point. And what happens is Mars goes into Cancer, and Mercury stations direct on July 22nd. And then on July 22nd, Congress begins fiercely debating the Articles of Confederation. And basically what happens is like, you know, tearing down the old government and separating from Britain and saying that we’re gonna now be independent and form our own government was kind of easy. However, building a new government ends up being a really brutal process, and it ends up being a process that takes them a long time because they don’t eventually get the Articles of Confederation together until, like, a year later. And it begins with these really intense debates where the different colonies suddenly are, you know, pitted against each other in terms of their own interests and desires and power and money and all of these other different factors now, and the sort of like, internal divisions and pressures between them come into the forefront as they start the process of now starting to create a new government. But that really coincides with especially Mercury stationing direct, which is so fascinating, you know, because that’s the other end of when Mercury stationed retrograde and they first read the Declaration of Independence and started editing it. But now Mercury’s direct and now they need to put together a government. But Mars has joined the party and that is more tricky, and there’s much more strife than what they had had up to that point. 

All right. And then finally, the last one I’ll mention, although I don’t have much on this, but we just – I didn’t work on the time much on this, but we know that the Declaration of Independence was signed by all of the founders when they put it on parchment and then they all signed it on August 2nd, 1776. And I don’t have a time on this; I didn’t do much work on this because I kind of just ran out of time, and I wanted to record today using the electional chart that I was using today with Libra rising and Venus still in Leo with Jupiter and the Moon separating from Venus and applying to Jupiter. So they all signed the document this day, and what was interesting astrologically – one of the points that was interesting – is just that this was shortly after the 2nd eclipse that took place in eclipse season, which was at eight degrees of Aquarius. So we’re still right in the midst of eclipse season. And now they’re finally finalizing everything, and they all signed the document even though it had already been approved and sent out everywhere on July 4th, and even though the vote that was, like, the legal vote already happened on July 2nd. So they’re bringing some things to completion by signing this more like, ceremonial document on August 2nd, and they’re also starting the long and difficult process of forming the new government and debating the things that need to be debated relative to that. 

So that is pretty much where my story leaves off in terms of that sequence, because what’s important to understand now is the focal point of especially the summer of 1775 and especially early July I feel like was the vote for independence that took place on July 2nd and then finally the Declaration being approved on July 4th. But the charts for creating the actual government would come later. First with the Articles of Confederation, and then eventually much later about 12 years later with the Constitution, which interestingly ended up being a Jupiter return in Cancer, and I think it might have been an eclipse or something like that, although I may be misremembering. But so Congress basically fiercely begins debating the Articles of Confederation on July 22nd; they transition from fighting a common external enemy with Britain to suddenly fighting each other over things like power and money and sovereignty. These structural debates end up dragging on for years, and eventually necessitating the drafting of the current US Constitution in 1787 in order to hold the country together. 

So we’ve seen this be relevant in recent years because while we can use the Declaration of Independence as the symbolic birth chart for the United States, there may be other charts set up, especially the chart for the Constitution, that represent the form of government that they eventually created about 12 years later. And those may be two separate but still very important symbolic things. And I think we’ve been seeing this recently; I’ve been talking about this a lot on the forecast episodes over the past several years, because while the Pluto return of the Declaration of Independence happened when Pluto returned to late Capricorn over the course of the past decade, now ever since Pluto went into Aquarius over the past few years, we’ve been having the Pluto return of the US Constitution and essentially the form of government that they actually set up with laws about different checks and balances and the three different branches of government and how those are theoretically supposed to function if things were working according to how the founders intended. But then as we’ve seen, that’s all become very dysfunctional and as part of that Pluto transit to the US Constitution or that Pluto return now, we’re seeing some of those different things that they put in place starting to break down potentially. 

So that’s a whole separate obviously, like, topic that maybe we can get into some other time, and perhaps explore. If people would like me to do an episode in the future about the US Constitution, maybe we can investigate and see if we can come up with some sort of birth time for that. I haven’t done any – much on that at all, except for maybe dealing with it in the eclipses episode. But let me know in the YouTube comments if that’s something you’d like to see me cover in the future. 

But otherwise, I think that’s good for this chronological breakdown, and I hope, you know, even though this is very long, I hope you see why… Like, originally, I wanted to do the chronological breakdown earlier in the episode, and I decided to shift this to later at the last minute because I thought that made more sense. But I hope you understand why I did that, because as I was just researching the important dates in 1776, I was just astounded by how the astrology and the transits in the sky at that time matched the sequence of events at every step along the way in these really interesting and symbolically compelling ways. And I wanted to make sure that that research was, you know, presented and preserved, because I think it’s a really good example of mundane astrology in practice and how some of these things worked out, especially in the context of the birth of the United States. 

All right, my friends. We have made it to the end of this episode and the end of this discussion. So I just wanna make some final concluding remarks, and then we can wrap this thing up. 

All right, so yeah, thanks for watching this entire episode. I had a choice, and I went through different revisions of this over the course of the past week and whether to do a longer version of this that included all the research, or like, a medium version or a shorter version. I went back and forth all the way up until the last minute, but ultimately I decided to just present everything because I feel like this is such an important topic; it’s a topic that astrologers have debated for, you know, like, two centuries now. And I really wanted to contribute something substantive to that discussion, and I felt like I had found some things and was able to come to some conclusions this week that I thought were really compelling and that could make a major contribution to discussions about this topic. So I hope I’ve been able to accomplish that. 

One of the things that was funny is that I started working on this topic again quite unexpectedly as I said on July 4th, 2026, when I saw that tweet about the temperature readings by Jefferson. And I’d never seen that before, and it just like, suddenly was this really exciting thing to realize that that existed but had never been incorporated into these discussions before. And then it just led me on this wild not goose chase, but like, investigation case to try to like, truly understand what could be known about the birth chart of the U.S., and I found much more than I was expecting when I first started. But what’s funny about the unexpected nature of that on July 4th, of course, is that the Mars-Uranus conjunction, the first one in Gemini of this new cycle, just went exact that day. And what was fascinating is that it was actually happening very close to the degree of my IC in my birth chart, which is in early Gemini. So why don’t I actually just show that really quickly here. 

Yeah, so here’s my birth chart. November 1st, 1984, 1:28 PM in Aurora, Colorado, exact recorded birth time from birth certificate. My Ascendant’s at 17 degrees of Aquarius, and the degree of my IC is in Gemini at five degrees of Gemini. And right there is pretty close to where the Mars-Uranus conjunction went exact either late on July 3rd or early on July 4th at three degrees of Gemini. So I thought that was really interesting, because the IC, of course, just like the 4th house, represents one’s home and family but also one’s origins and ancestry and one’s country or where one comes from. And I had the Mars-Uranus conjunction happening on my IC, and I had this sudden unexpected discovery about something related to my country and related to the past. And it’s like, my other – it’s like, Austin, for example, my friend Austin Coppock, he had the Mars-Uranus conjunction in his 12th house, and he said he got unexpectedly sick this weekend, which I felt bad for him. But my Mars-Uranus conjunction was on my IC, and all of a sudden I got on this wild investigation case of finding this new evidence about the birth chart of the US and then deciding to put together this whole episode on it. And that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to animate the chart from June of 1776 to show you the sequence of things, because remember once again, I realized and I think that Thomas Jefferson ended up writing the majority and the first draft, basically, of the majority of the Declaration of Independence under a Mars-Uranus conjunction right when it was going exact around June 14th and 15th of 1776. And that, of course, became my primary focus here was investigating and seeing if I could figure out what time did they eventually approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4th of 1776. And exactly 250 years later, I ended up, you know, the astrologer Chris Brennan ended up getting on the case and doing my Scorpio stellium investigative thing that I love to do. And the other thing that I found fascinating, though, is apparently there’s, like, a 250 year Mercury cycle that I wasn’t aware of also, because as I was researching this this week and especially as I progressed further and further into it, especially over July 5th and 6th, I noticed that Mercury was retrograde at 24 degrees of Cancer. And that’s, of course, like, exactly where Mercury is of course retrograde in Cancer in the exact chart that I was researching, which is the chart for July 4th, 1776, the Declaration of Independence, where we see Mercury at 24 degrees of Cancer and 18 minutes retrograde. So basically, as I was uncovering all of this and putting together and coming to this realization gradually over the past few days that we may actually be able to know the rising sign for the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, better than I ever realized. As I was coming to that realization and realizing I may have perhaps figured it out, Mercury was retrograde in the sky passing over the exact same degree that it was retrograde in the sky 250 years earlier when the Declaration of Independence was approved on July 4th, and then eventually was officially announced as I said at noon on July 8th, 1776. And that was exactly 250 years ago to this day when on July 8th, 1776, at exactly 12 o’clock noon they made the first public official proclamation and reading of the Declaration of Independence. And then there were all those celebrations in Philadelphia and parades and everything else. And somehow magically exactly 250 years later, I’m recording this episode today and have just completed this research project, and now at some point here in the next week or so will put it out into the world. 

So you know, I don’t know; I don’t wanna get too, like, full of myself here and what have you. But sometimes it’s cool to see when you’re wrapped up in historical moments or when astrologers notice these weird synchronicities between the past and the future, and sometimes we see those in our personal lives, and other times we see those in mundane events. Sometimes we see them in the lives of historic figures when those figures aren’t aware that the planets are mirroring what’s happening in their life as they’re doing these monumental events at the time. But as astrologers, we can see those things when we pay attention and when we look for them. And that’s the special gift we have as astrologers, and occasionally if you pay attention, sometimes we ourselves get wrapped up in some of those events, and we can notice ourselves doing important things or being connected to important things in the past, for better or worse. So hopefully this is a positive contribution. I’m hoping that, you know, I did my best to be as forthright and open and clear about my deductions and inferences and the different evidence and different things like that. Obviously, I made different arguments, and I have my own opinion about the charts and about the chart involved. And in some ways, even just looking at those transits to me is helping me a little bit to confirm that for myself. However, I’m not under the false impression that now that I’ve presented this that this is gonna end all debate about what the correct birth chart for the United States is. I don’t expect that, and I don’t necessarily even want that, because I want people to keep researching and thinking for themselves, and a large part of my goal here was to outline the historical evidence, and my assessment of it in order to, like I’ve said a few times, attempt to advance the discussion forward. And if nothing else, I hope that that’s what I’ve accomplished here today. There was also a lot of built up mythology surrounding the different charts that needed to be examined critically, and in some instances I think rejected as either false or implausible or unlikely. And that’s something I tried to bring to this as well, although, you know, it’s funny that later in the process I realized that I wasn’t, like, even the first one. That other astrologers like Nick Campion had already done a lot of that work, and I just simply wasn’t aware of it until yesterday, or even that Nina Gryphon who I did the episode with previously also had researched a lot of this, and she had read Nick’s book and talked about some of it in the episode we did in 2020. But for me, I needed to do this research myself, and I needed to become immersed in it and read all the primary sources, and then come to some sort of conclusion. And I was quite surprised this week to realize that the sources were more plentiful than I realized, and that I do feel like you can get on more solid ground in terms of making certain arguments than I’d previously thought possible. And that’s ultimately why I decided to take the decision to put this episode together and commit it to a recording and to put it out there today. 

So one of the things – last things – obviously, there’s multiple charts that were important at different points along the way. I’ve continued to, if you’ve noticed, sort of stay open to those two main charts which are July 4th and July 2nd. I do think that both of them probably had Libra rising, so there’s gonna be a lot of overlap between the two. I do lean towards the July 4th chart as being the most symbolically significant one for some of the reasons I outlined, including like, you know, Adams and Jefferson both dying on the same day exactly 50 years later is pretty crazy. But I remain open to, you know, researching and comparing the two charts of July 2nd and July 4th and seeing, you know, if there’s value to the July 2nd chart or if it somehow like, pulls extra gravity or weight that we’re not taking into account so far. A lot of, as you saw, the section I did that I sort of tacked on just in the past day about looking at some major events in US history and comparing that to the Libra rising chart on July 4th, a lot of that’s just like, preliminary stuff I did over the past few days, or that immediately came to mind based on other research I did and that I found interesting when I then superimposed things like preexisting eclipses I knew about onto the Libra rising chart and found them to symbolically speak to that moment. But I almost cut that section of this episode entirely, because I knew this was gonna be way too long, and I knew that that research was somewhat preliminary. So I wouldn’t, like, hang a ton of emphasis on that yet; it was just meant to be a starting point for some of the things that I would look for and start looking at when it comes to trying to validate the Libra rising chart or if you were to attempt to validate any other charts. And I do think while I do feel strongly about the Libra being the correct rising sign for the US birth chart, I do think maybe – and I do also err on the side of at this point putting it around, like, an earlier Ascendant around 11:15 AM with around let’s say Libra rising – I do think the window could be open until later, and I remain open to different arguments and exploring that in order to dial that in more if that is possible through rectification, especially since we know – although we think and we know that it happened likely in the morning that the Declaration was completed. I think the absolute endpoint of any possible window in terms of that would be one PM because we know that Jefferson took a break and went outside and took the temperature at one PM. And so I think they finished the morning business at that time. And while I think that based on some of the evidence that I’ve talked about that I lean towards, and it’s more likely that they completed the Declaration with early Libra rising in the morning prior to noon, it is still possible that we have a wider window to work with than we can fully know based on the historical sources. So I remain open to revising that in the future with future investigations or other astrologers presenting me with things that I don’t know. But for now, yeah, I’m going with an approximate time of about 11:15 AM, and we’ll see how that works out. 

Yeah. And when we, you know, combine the congressional journals, all the primary evidence – and this is what you need to do is combine the congressional journals, Jefferson’s thermometer readings, the rigorous parliamentary schedule, and the idea of a morning adoption, I think the Libra rising chart is a very plausible chart. But ultimately, I will leave it up to history to decide. But as I said, I hope I’ve made a valuable contribution to the history of this discussion, and thanks for joining me and going on this journey with me through history and through time and through astrology in order to discover what we can about this subject and come to some sort of conclusion. 

All right, I think that’s it for this episode. So thanks a lot for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast. And I’ll see you again next time! 

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