Stephen Harper's natal chart

For the 2004 Canadian election, I spent quite a lot of time putting together an astrological analysis of the candidates and the influences on the result.  That was fun, and I know a number of people were hoping I'd do the same for the current (January 2006) election; but unfortunately, I've been going through a very busy time with schoolwork and other things, and I just didn't have time.  As I write this, it's now the night before the election, and I couldn't possibly do a prediction before the result will be announced and the result isn't even in much doubt anyway, so there's not much point.  However, it was pointed out to me with the 2004 analysis that I had Stephen Harper's birthdate wrong, and since he looks likely to be a key figure in the near future, it seems worth doing a natal chart on him with the correct birthdate.

The date I originally got (out of Wikipedia, confirmed against some other online sources which I guess may have also gotten it from Wikipedia) was April 20, 1959, which put Harper's Sun near the Aries/Taurus cusp.  The correct date was April 30, "tax day", according to an article by Jan Wong in the 5 June 2004 issue of the Globe and Mail; the reference to the tax filing deadline makes it unlikely that it's a typo.

With the new date, and my standard procedure of putting the Sun on the Midheaven for unknown birth time, I get this chart:

The Sun is in Taurus, suggesting that his basic personality - how people who know him might describe him - is practical, realistic, stubborn, likely to pay close attention to matters of money and worldly possessions.  Probably much the personality traits you might expect from a Conservative leader.  One sort of random trait associated with Taurus is a fondness for jewelry - think "bull with a ring in its nose".  I wouldn't be surprised if Stephen Harper wears a watch that is more stylish than his clothing in general.  I don't watch television and so don't know a lot about what he looks like; I did just pull up a head shot of him on Wikipedia and he looks reasonably Taurean, although for personal appearance I'd look more to the Ascendant anyway, which we don't know in this case.

But looking a little deeper, to the position of the Moon, things get a little more complex.  I think of the Moon as indicating how the native sees themselves - and Harper's Moon is in Aquarius.  Whereas Taurus is about physical reality, Aquarius is anything but.  I call it the sign of "scientists and hippies" - people who ask abstract questions.  People born with the Moon in Aquarius tend towards starry-eyed idealism, and may annoy the rest of us a great deal by dismissing important practical concerns out of hand when those conflict with the great Aquarian Dream of how things ought to be.  Someone with a Taurus Sun and someone with an Aquarius Moon would be likely to fight bitterly.  So what happens when one person has both those features?

Well, what happens is that the person with those two apparently conflicting features will somehow find a way to make them work together, even if the result confuses everyone else.  Human beings are very good at resolving conflicts inside our own personalities.  In Stephen Harper's case, I'd suggest that maybe he's managed to find an abstract dream that is compatible with his affinity for practical and material matters - and then his Taurus stubbornness can kick in to make him follow that dream all the way down.  The ideals of the Conservative Party, as he envisions them, presumably are in line with that dream.  But it's something only he can see; he's got a very clear and non-contradictory image in his mind of how the world, or at least Canada, must be, but whether anyone else can absorb that may be another question.

Let's look at Mercury, the planet of communication.  In Harper's natal chart, it's in the middle of Aries.  It's also direct (as opposed to retrograde), which is fortunate for the general fluecy of his communication skills.  Aries is a fire sign, and Mercury in Aries suggests firey, heated communication - here's someone who won't hesitate to go on the offensive in debates or speeches.  This is a good moment to mention his Mars as well, which is in Cancer and square to Mercury.  That suggests a tendancy to take conflict personally, and worry about it emotionally more than is warranted.  Although he can't avoid charging into what on the Net are called "flame wars", Harper may end up suffering a lot of emotional pain as a result, even as he lashes out at others.

I don't think it's directly relevant to the fortunes of the Conservative Party, but I note that Stephen Harper's Venus, in Gemini, has only favourable aspects to it.  On a personal level, at home and especially in romance, it suggests good fortune and, especially, good communication.  I haven't got birth data for his wife Laureen Harper, but it might be interesting to compare them.  The Wikipedia article says he "mellowed" considerably after marrying her.  He's probably very good at talking to her, even if he gets everyone else angry when he tries to talk to them.  George W. Bush - in many ways politically similar to Stephen Harper - also has a favourably placed Venus, and a chart that lines up well with his wife Laura Bush's.

The next major planet is Jupiter, at the very end of Scorpio, retrograde, and somewhat lacking in strong personal aspects.  In broad terms, Jupiter is described as a planet of "good luck", and with some positioning, Stephen Harper may sometimes have trouble in that department.  When he does experience good fortune, it may come about by means of tricky backroom deals (which are the domain of Scorpio).  His Jupiter is also conjunct his Ceres, an asteroid or minor planet associated with nurturing and motherhood.  I think this would primarily have been an influence earlier in his life rather than now, but it may be that at some point in his history, Stephen Harper's mother took an active role behind the scenes in putting him in some position of power.

Saturn, Neptune, and Pluto formed what I call an "arrowhead" formation during late April of 1959.  These are slow-moving outer planets, so their influence is not very personal; the same formation occurred for everyone born in the world for several weeks.  I think I noticed and commented on it in my earlier analysis with the incorrect birthdate, because the difference wasn't big enough to affect these three planets much.  The Sun moved past the opposite point from Neptune around the 25th, making a kite formation, and by the 30th that formation (which was just starting to form on the 20th) was just breaking up.  For everyone affected by this formation, there's a lot of power of law and discipline going into the imaginary realm described by Neptune.  These are people who are very concerned about making rules for hypothetical situations.

This aspect configuration suggests some of the very things that annoy me personally about the Conservative Party - a focus on legislating issues like same-sex marriage that are really only of interest for abstract technical reasons of "what could happen" and "where will that lead".  For Stephen Harper, with his Aquarius Moon, abstract legal fictions and hypothetical scenarios are real, tangible things.  For me, the suggestion that permitting a marriage between two men is somehow a step in the direction of legalizing a marriage between, say, a man and a goat, is laughable; but Harper can actually see the goat.  It's not just a hypothetical for him; similarly, the abstract principles have to be absolute because otherwise they dissolve into nothing.  The internal truce between Taurus and Aquarius doesn't allow for any compromises in the real world.

The planet Uranus represents the tendancy to break free of authority and forge one's own path, and in Steven Harper's chart, it is in Leo, with favourable aspects to the nodal axis.  At this point I should talk about the nodal axis; Harper's North Node is in Libra, and the South Node (which is always exactly opposite) is in Aries conjunct his Mercury.  The asteroids Pallas and Juno are also sitting on top of the North Node.  Those influences are hard to separate; they form a tidy package.  Taken together, my interpretation is that Stephen Harper's cosmic mission in this lifetime is to grow from the fierce individualism denoted by Aries into an understanding of equality and accomodation denoted by Libra.  His Uranus gives him the power needed to find that path, and the two asteroids show that he has the willpower and commitment needed to do it.  That's a heck of a mission, and I certainly hope that whatever happens in the election will give him some chances to progress on it without doing to much damage to the rest of us.

Two objects on this chart that I haven't mentioned yet are Vesta (an asteroid of intense concentration) and Chiron (called "the wounded healer"), both of which are weakly placed in the Leo/Aquarius corridor.  I'd interpret those as contributing a general background of confusing desires and hurt feelings to the outer-planet arrowhead I mentioned before.  Similarly, Lilith (the direction of the Moon's apogee) is in Taurus, square to the Moon itself.  I take Lilith as representing unconscious urges, on a level below one's conscious self-image; in this case, being near the Sun and conflicting with the Moon, it heightens the apparent conflict between Harper's internal compass and others' perception of him; he may eventually be forced to admit to himself that his friends' understanding of him is accurate after all.

Of course, there's a lot more astrology that could be done both for Stephen Harper and for the election.  Time constraints make it difficult for me to pursue this much further, but I hope this note, at least, is of some interest.  You may also want to read some of the other articles in the astrology section of my Web site.