Astrology in the Old West: Wyatt Earp
In my first two articles in this series I wrote about the horoscopes of Calamity Jane and Wild Bill Hickok. Wyatt Earp’s horoscope (click here to see a chart done for noon on his birthday) has similarities to the both.
Like Calamity Jane, Earp had Saturn square his Mars. This typically indicates the kind of toughness that comes from living through great adversity. Earp held just about every job a man could hold in the old west, from miner to saloon keeper to lawman. He was constantly on the move from one “boom town” to the next, and in these travels he collected a remarkable number of true friends and dangerous enemies.
Gemini figures strongly in Earp’s horoscope, just as it did in the chart of Wild Bill Hickok. Earp had Mars in Gemini in a strong square to Mercury. Like Hickok, Earp was noted for his manual dexterity with a gun and for his weakness for games of chance.
Earp was a Pisces by Sun sign. Pisces people are highly emotional and prone to extreme actions once their passions have been stirred.
After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, men affiliated with the outlaw group called the “Cowboys” killed Wyatt’s brother, Morgan, and seriously wounded his brother, Virgil. Wyatt Earp’s reaction to these attacks had little to do with the law. He formed a posse and proceeded to hunt down members of the Cowboy group. This vendetta resulted in four of these men being shot down.
After these killings, Earp was accused of using the power of his office as deputy Marshall in Tombstone to further his business interests in the town and to do away with personal enemies. These allegations continued to haunt Earp throughout his lifetime. It is not unusual for a Pisces person to blur boundaries. In Earp’s case it was the boundary between upright lawman and vengeful killer.
Another attribute we expect from Pisces is intuition. Despite the number of bullets that were fired in his direction over the years, Wyatt Earp was never hit. Even when the bullets came close enough to riddle his coat, they missed his body. Earp told his biographer that he often felt the presence of a guardian spirit that warned him away from some situations and encouraged him to act in others. It seems that Earp used this special facility to foresee when it was prudent to stand and fight and when it was not.
Earp had Neptune (the planet we associate with popular culture) strongly placed in Pisces and conjunct his Venus. Despite the vagaries that continued to surround his reputation as a lawman, Wyatt Earp was eventually accepted as one the great heroes of the Old West. In fact, no gunfighter from that period has been celebrated more often in movies, television and other organs of popular culture. Pisces and Neptune not only helped Earp live to a ripe old age, it made him a star.
