I woke this morning (16 Aug 2015) to the news that the civil rights leader Julian Bond had died yesterday and it occurred to me to look at his natal chart to see if this event had been foreshadowed in the stars of his birth. Fortunately, we have a reliable record of his birth with data from his birth certificate: 14 Jan 1940, 12:30 pm CST, Nashville, TN, Rodden rating AA. Here is the birth chart.
Julian Bond natal chart
The houses related to the death of the native are the 8th of death and the 4th of final endings and the grave. The 8th is ruled by Jupiter and the 4th by the Sun, with Pluto closely conjunct the 4th cusp. Since he died at age 75, I wondered whether Pluto on the 4th cusp would have reached the ASC by primary direction at age 75.
Using the Janus 4.3 program, I calculated his primary directions for 2015 (Placidus semi-arc without latitude, both the Ptolemy and Naibod keys):
Direct primary directions for 2015, Placidus semi-arc, without latitude, Ptolemy and Naibod rates.
One can see from the above table that during 2015, by direct primary direction the 4th cusp (endings) comes to the ASC and natal Pluto also comes to the ASC. These directions are within orb at the time of his demise.
We can also look at this Solar Return for the year for further indications. Here is his natal chart with the 2015 SR superimposed:
Most notable is that the ASC of the solar return lies on the natal 4th cusp of endings and very closely conjoins natal Pluto. In addition, SR Jupiter (ruler of his natal 8th of death) lies in the 4th of endings and squares the natal ASC and natal Uranus.
If we swap charts and place his natal planets around his 2015 SR chart, we get:
Here we see natal Pluto on the SR ASC. In addition, natal ASC-ruler Venus closely conjoins the 8th cusp (Placidus) of the SR chart.
If we superimpose his natal chart around the lunar return in effect on August 15, 2015, we see the following:
In the above chart, his natal Pluto/MC opposition lies exactly on the cusp of the 8th house of death of the lunar return chart.
Anthony Louis - Astrology & Tarot Blog 
Nashville not place of death nor residence.
Since I did not know where he spent his solar return, I decided to use the natal chart and its location for this blog. He died in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, which is due south of Nashville, so the charts will be very similar. Going due South from Nashville to the Florida coastline will keep the MC almost identical an reduce the ASC by just a couple of degrees.
Reblogged this on Grandtrines.
Nice work.
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Hi Tony,
I have an enquiry about “Horary Astrology Plain and Simple”. Like many of your correspondents, I found your book a pleasure to read, and it made topics that looked incomprehensible in other texts finally seem possible to understand.
The only problem I had with the book, however, was the extremely sparse index, which, if I remember correctly, is only about two-and-a-half pages long (I don’t have it to hand right now). This means that the index is less than 1% of the length of the book (it’s about 288 pages long, if the info at Amazon is correct). A really comprehensive index is usually 5–10% of the length of the book.
I work as a subeditor of a magazine, and one of my new side interests is creating back-of-book indexes. I haven’t done a lot of them, but I have created one for another astrological author who published his book without any index at all. There was no exchange of money involved, as I am relatively inexperienced – although I think I’m quite capable – and I’ve just finished it and the author has agreed to put the index up on his website. (Too late for it to be included in the book itself, however.)
So to make “Horary Astrology Plain and Simple” a bit more accessible for myself, I’ve started to create an index for it. I’m only up to page 57, but I thought I would contact you and ask you if you would possibly be interested in disseminating the final index to your book readers, blog readers and anyone else who might be interested.
I realise, of course, that you are unlikely to give whole-hearted approval at this point, when you haven’t even seen any of my work. But it would be great if you were to express even a tentative interest in distributing the index to your readers. If you wish, I can send you both the index that I created for the other astrological author and the partial index that I’ve created so far for your book, so that you can get an idea of what I can do.
I’m going to continue with the creation of the index until I reach the end, but it would be great if other people could also use it. I want to emphasise that I’m not asking for any payment from you for the index, as I am not an indexer with years and years of experience. It would just be a good exercise in indexing for me before I start creating indexes for paying clients – and it could help to unlock many of the topics in your book that currently remain inaccessible for your readers.
I look forward to your response.
Kind regards,
Tim Graham
Tim,
Thanks for the offer. It sounds like a useful project and I’d be happy to post it here once you complete it, giving you full credit for the work.
Tony
OK, I’ll now have to get cracking on completing the index. It will probably be several months, but I’ll give it high priority. (It will be in the form of a PDF.) Do you have an email address to which I can send the index when it’s done? I take it that you can see my email address if you want to send your contact details to me, is that right?
Sorry, in that last sentence I should have written “difficult to access” rather than “inaccessible”, which sounds a bit rude and impertinent – which was not my intention!
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