Mahatma Gandhi's Birth Chart

Rates here are shares of simulated 1860s charts. Mercury's isolation ranks first at about one chart in 18 and its place within three degrees of the Ascendant second at about one chart in 15, the only one of the two the clock decides. Ranks three to six are one arrangement counted four times, and a T-square of any kind appears in about one chart in 6 born in the 1860s, more often than anything else listed. The Sun's fall in Libra is seventh at about one chart in 12, and six planets in fixed signs eighth at about one chart in 25.

The oldest printed chart consulted here, Maurice Wemyss's in volume III of The Wheel of Life, puts two degrees of Scorpio rising with Mercury beside it, gives no clock time, and appears to cite Modern Astrology for May 1924. Raman's Notable Horoscopes, chart No. 41, prints 7:45 AM without a source; his lagna, turned back into the tropical zodiac, lands in early Scorpio. A secondhand citation, which could not be compared with the book itself, credits Marc Edmund Jones's Sabian Symbols with 7:33 AM, which puts 1°26′ Scorpio rising. This page uses Raman's minute, which Indian sites also restate as 8:36 AM Indian Standard Time, while noting that no record favors it over the earlier cluster, which has similar standing.

The earlier cluster matches one interval counted from sunrise: Astrotheme's 7:08 AM, marked rectified; 7:09 AM from a collection cited as Notable Nativities; and 7:12 AM from the Indian site Grahaguru, labeled Indian Standard Time, an anachronism for 1869. Each equals three ghatikas and twelve palas, the way Indian horoscopes record the hour, after a differently defined sunrise; from the Sun's upper edge at 5:51 AM it comes to 1 hour 16 minutes. AstroSage's 8:36 AM, credited to Kundli Sangraha by Bhat, is Raman's minute on Indian Standard Time, which runs 51.6 minutes ahead of Porbandar's clock. Rentia Baras, the Gujarati observance of his birthday, falls on the twelfth lunar day, which by this page's reckoning began shortly before nine that morning, later than every time above; whether a family record lies behind the custom is unknown.

Side by side, the clusters disagree about the angles and little else. At 7:08 AM the Ascendant is 25°44′ Libra and the Midheaven 25°51′ Cancer. Under a Libra Ascendant, Venus takes over as ruler of the chart and Mercury moves down into the 1st house. Every planet keeps its sign, the chart stays diurnal, and from 7:08 AM to 7:33 AM Mercury is the only planet to change Placidus house. At 7:45 AM the margins are thin: Scorpio rose at 7:26 AM, Mercury's degree crossed the horizon under 2 minutes earlier, and a birth just 9 minutes later would carry the Sun over into the 11th house. The Moon, in Leo from September 30, 1869, until 11:42 PM on the birth date, moves only 0°21′ across all the candidates.

Mercury at 3°47′ Scorpio is linked to no planet by conjunction, opposition, trine, square or sextile. Venus, the nearest by longitude, is 12°40′ further on, outside this site's conjunction orb, and the Sun 24°50′ back in Libra. Its only aspect-table rows are with the angles, conjunct the Ascendant and square the Midheaven, and both hang on the disputed minute. Modern practice holds that an unaspected planet works outside the chart's give and take; the sample rate is about one chart in 18.

Declination adds a qualification. Mercury lies 15°54′ south of the equator and the Moon 15°56′ north, a contraparallel within 0°02′ that declination specialists treat as kin to an opposition, though none of the ten planets strays out of bounds. The closest major aspect linking two planets is the square from the Moon to Jupiter, at 0°07′; the closest contact of any kind is minor, Mars quincunx Neptune, 0.9 arc-seconds from exact.

The Moon squares Venus and Mars in Scorpio on one side and Jupiter and Pluto in Taurus on the other, while the Scorpio pair opposes the Taurus pair, most closely Mars and Pluto at 0°45′. Venus or Mars with Jupiter or Pluto closes a T-square on the Moon, hence four entries, each at about one chart in 6. The Moon's legs run from 0°07′ to Jupiter out to 3°50′ to Venus, and at 7:08 AM that widest leg narrows to 3°30′.

Modern authors describe a T-square's apex as the planet that absorbs the opposition's strain, and the empty point across from it as the outlet. Here that point is 20°18′ Aquarius, in a sign with no planet and, at the adopted time, in the 4th house. A figure built wholly of fixed signs is one astrologers call slow to start and hard to divert.

Scorpio holds three planets and the Ascendant. Mercury sits 0°22′ short of the rising degree in zodiac order, so its degree had already crossed the horizon, making it a 12th-house planet under Placidus though a first-house one under whole signs. Venus and Mars lie inside the 1st house, Mars in a sign it rules and Venus in its detriment, the reverse of their standing in Libra, where the Sun sits in the 12th house.

The Moon is in the 10th house with the North Node, also in Leo, under a Leo Midheaven. Taurus and the 7th house hold Jupiter and Pluto, both retrograde, as is Neptune in Aries; Saturn is in Sagittarius and Uranus in Cancer. Traditional astrology weights a planet on the Ascendant, and Mercury's place ranks second at about one chart in 15, yet under the earlier cluster it falls 8°02′ below a Libra horizon.

Fixed signs hold six of the ten planets, a count reached in about one chart in 25 born in the 1860s, and since no planet changes sign across the candidates the clock cannot alter it. At 7:45 AM the Ascendant and Midheaven are fixed too, eight of the twelve points tallied, falling to six under the earlier cluster's cardinal angles. Saturn is the lone mutable planet; among the elements water is strongest, with five points, while air claims only the Sun.

The planets make a seesaw in Marc Edmund Jones's scheme. The wider gap stretches from Saturn's place in Sagittarius round to Neptune's in Aries and leaves Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces empty, and a second gap of 61°31′ parts Jupiter from Uranus; the chart pattern analyzer draws both groups.

The Sun rose at 5:51 AM and stood 25°11′ high at 7:45 AM: a diurnal chart at every candidate time, which by sect doctrine the Sun leads, seconded by Jupiter and Saturn. Libra is the sign of the Sun's fall, a placement carried by about one chart in 12 born in the 1860s; the Sun is also cadent in the 12th house, scoring 35 out of 100, third from the bottom.

Mars scores highest at 92: own sign, angular, direct, swift, and the scoring's Lord of the Geniture; Saturn follows at 81. Hellenistic doctrine calls Mars the malefic contrary to sect by day, so readers of that school would watch the strongest planet most closely. Mercury, slow at 0°37′ daily, stands 24°50′ from the Sun and clear of its beams, like every planet here.

The table lists ten dated events from Gandhi's life, each with the source it was taken from. He sailed from Bombay for London on September 4, 1888, to study law, and was called to the bar on June 10, 1891, after his terms at the Inner Temple. The Natal Indian Congress, which he founded to defend the rights of Indians in Natal, was formally established on August 22, 1894. On September 11, 1906, at a mass meeting in Johannesburg, Indians pledged to resist the Transvaal registration law, the start of the campaign he came to call satyagraha.

He landed back at Bombay on January 9, 1915, the arrival India now marks each year as Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested on a sedition charge and sentenced to six years in prison. The Salt March left Sabarmati Ashram on March 12, 1930, with 78 followers, and on April 6 he broke the British salt law by making salt from the shore at Dandi.

The Quit India movement opened with his 'Do or Die' speech in Bombay on August 8, 1942. The last entry is January 30, 1948, when he was shot dead at Birla House in New Delhi on his way to the evening prayer meeting.

Two signs drop out of the nearest-chart score: the rising sign, which the candidate times dispute, and the Moon's, which the scoring withholds from any chart of disputed time whose Moon changed sign on the birth date. It rests instead on the Libra Sun and on Sun-to-Saturn distances, the Moon excepted. Vladimir Putin ranks first, his Jupiter within a degree of Gandhi's. Lata Mangeshkar shares only the Sun sign but sits closer on average than the next two: A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, whose Mars lies within a degree, and Kamala Harris. Nobody else in the roster shares the date October 2, 1869.

On the Lahiri ayanamsa of 22°02′, the rising-sign dispute disappears: the Ascendant is 12°07′ Libra at 7:45 AM and 3°42′ Libra at 7:08 AM, Libra at every candidate time, the lagna Raman prints. The Sun falls in Virgo and the Moon in Cancer, and Mercury, Venus and Mars join the lagna in Libra, so the Indian whole-sign count puts them in the first house and the Moon in the tenth. Venus, in detriment in tropical Scorpio, holds its own sign there.

Saturn's first return to its natal place fell on November 16, 1898 (age 29) and the second on December 21, 1927 (age 58), each in a single direct pass, and Gandhi died before a third. Jupiter needed three passes for its first return, between July 12, 1881, and March 1, 1882, then crossed once each time after that, last on April 14, 1941.

The chart is computed with precise astronomical calculations at 03:06 UTC on October 2, 1869. Kathiawar kept no standard time in 1869, so the offset is Porbandar's longitude turned into time, UTC+4:38:24, taken at the Kirti Mandir coordinates, 21°38′ N, 69°36′ E. Each competing time is cast for the same place and clock. Rates come from simulated charts spread over the 1860s at random hours and at cities weighted toward larger populations, run through this page's own detection code; they describe that sample, not Gandhi.