MAN TO MAN:
MUNDANE
LOOK-ALIKE CHARTS
The author's astrological practice began in 1967, to be precise on September 9th in Montreal's Swiss Hut -- the beery and smoky meeting ground of American war resisters, McGill University students, psychedelic gurus, Quebec Liberation Front conspirators, and their groupies -- where for five dollars he endeavored to help his first paying client take stock of his new life as a draft-dodger in a foreign country. Axel later helped supervise computations for some of John Addey's harmonic analysis work at the University of Montreal, co-founded Considerations with Ken Gillman, and became president of the Association canadienne des astrologues francophones. At other times he has been a journalist, translator, and teacher in a community college for Canadian natives.
THE TWO MOMENTS recalled here are separated by two and a half centuries and appear to be unrelated except for externals: both are cases of fatal single combat between gentlemen. On closer examination, however, there is an amazing connection between them in their historical background and their personal consequences.
The first event is a joust between King Henry II of France and the Count of Montgomery, an officer of the French king's Scots guards, which took place on 30th June 1559 (Old Style) "towards evening" in a tournament field on the Rue St. Antoine in Paris near the Palais des Tournelles, just south of what is now the Place des Vosges. I have taken 48N51 by 2E22 for the place and 19:30 UT for the hour.
The second is the pistol duel between Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States, and Alexander Hamilton, former Secretary of the Treasury, fought at Weehawken, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, around 7 o'clock in the morning of 11th July 1804. I have assumed 12:00 UT and 40N46 by 74w01. To go straight to the maps:
Figure 1: Fatal joust between King Henry II and Montgomery,
"towards evening," (19:30 UT is assumed here),
30th June 1559 (old style),
48N51, 2E22.
Figure 2: The Burr-Hamilton duel,
11th July 1804; around 7 a.m.; 12:00 UT here.
40N46, 74W01
The first contest was a sporting affair and no one was supposed to get hurt. Henry II was celebrating the treaty of Cateau-Cambresis and the double marriage of his daughter and sister with the King of Spain and the Duke of Savoy. A three-day tournament climaxed the occasion. On the third day the King--an enthusiastic athlete--challenged the young Montgomery. The riders missed each other on the first try. The King insisted on another tilt against Montgomery's protest. Another miss. On the third try both men splintered their lances; but the unfortunate Montgomery could not throw down his haft quickly enough and the jagged point of his broken lance punched through the King's helmet and lodged in his eye.
It was the last day of June. The King suffered until 10th July, having commanded that Montgomery be forgiven. Useless though noble gesture: his widow, the formidable Catherine de'Medici, could not forgive anything. Montgomery wisely left Paris and began a strange career--one he would certainly have missed if his King had not been so anxious for a playoff.
The second combat also led its survivor to a strange, unsatisfying destiny. For years a state of hypocrisy had existed between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, decorous political debate on the outside and malicious slander underneath. The events leading to the fateful day are too complicated to relate here: it is sufficient to say that the petty, incestuous politics of New York were too small for two great men. One of them had to go. Mr. Hamilton committed an indiscretion and would not apologize; seconds were chosen, a date appointed, and rules drawn up. Principals and seconds met on a secluded ledge in Weehawken--a favorite place for duels--and Hamilton, who as the challenged party was entitled to choose the weapons, brought a set of English pistols, caliber .54 with hairspring mechanisms.
Some writers have speculated that these pistols were unsuitable for duelling, that Hamilton had intended really to aim at Burr (and not to miss him deliberately, as his own eleventh-hour apologia stated) but that the hairspring action surprised him and made his shot go wild. Whatever is the truth, Burr's bullet crossed Hamilton's midriff and came to rest near his spine. Hamilton died thirty-one hours later.
Immediately Burr--who had been thought of as a future President at the beginning of the year-- became the Devil incarnate in the popular press; and Hamilton became a saint. "Catch the stream that flows from his mighty heart, and pour it in thy veins," sang one newspaper. "...Ye hosts of heaven, assemble thy chosen choir..." Another expressed amazement that anyone would "take a cool and deadly aim against...the father of a numerous family--the husband of a most affectionate wife--an ornament of his country and to human nature."
In fact the people who then enjoyed the rank of gentlemen--especially the Southerners among them--thought of the duel as a perfectly normal business. How else could one wipe the slate clean when all the talk and the writing and the rational stuff had failed? What neither they nor Burr realized was that the American Revolution had brought new values to the fore (Hamilton the great conservative had known, but no one listened). Now aristocratic honor was supplanted by Biblical-democratic morality; now any conflict had to feature one devil and one angel; and now "the father of a numerous family" was a value in itself regardless of how the father in question dealt with people who crossed his path.
Burr being the scapegoat (it might as well have been the other man) there was little to do but sit out the remainder of the vice-presidential term and then leave. Burr went West; was arrested and tried on account of the famous "Burr conspiracy", the alleged plot to found a Western empire, of which he was exonerated; exiled himself to Europe for four years; returned to practice law in New York; died at 80, still a pariah. Unfortunately we don't have Burr's birth hour. He was born on 6th February 1756 in Newark, New Jersey, certainly not early in the day since his mother had had time to jot a note in her diary that morning. It is interesting that at the moment of the duel the degree of Burr's natal Sun was setting; also that Saturn was square to his natal Mars in the last degree of Gemini.
The scapegoat of the earlier incident, Montgomery, also went West--back to his seignory in Normandy. There he became a Protestant and joined Condé in 1562, taking part in the Protestant occupation and defense of Bourges and Rouen; he was instrumental in the reconquest of the Béarn from French troops in 1569. But after the St. Bartholomew's massacre (1572) he fled to England, returning with a fleet to save the Protestant port of La Rochelle. He was captured in a later battle, arrested in spite of a promise of personal safety, and taken to Paris where he was tried by a special commission and executed (1574). Montgomery's trial had taken 15 years to catch up with him, but it was more brutally efficient than Burr's.
The American politician also had had a period of military glory. Early in the Revolution, an American force invaded Canada. Now this adventure was not merely a strategic attack on Britain. It also had a religious meaning. For the Thirteen Colonies the Enemy had been the French, the Catholic missionaries and the Indians. Then--hardly more than a dozen years before the Revolution--New France had fallen. The colonists' jubilation was gradually replaced by shock as it appeared that the British intended to leave everything in place as it had been: the Catholic clergy, the petty Norman aristocrats and their seignories, the Parisian legal code, and--final insult--the preposterously huge boundaries of New France, which stretched from Labrador to New Orleans. This was as much a cause of the American Revolution as taxes and commercial laws. So when the American expedition left for Canada in 1775 it was in a sense continuing the religious war of the previous two hundred and fifty years--a war that had even been brought across the Atlantic by earnest settlers from St-Malo and St-Nazaire and Flushing and Plymouth, who brought with them the curses of such people as Montgomery and Catherine de'Medici.
The expedition failed, but it provided the revolutionaries with one of their most dramatic legends: the rout, in a blinding snowstorm on 31st December 1775, of a small American band before Quebec, the strongest citadel in the New World; a young, small-framed subaltern trying to remove the body of his slain general in the face of enemy fire, finally having to retreat. The young officer was Aaron Burr, and the general's name was Montgomery.
Both maps have Suns conjunct Castor and Pollux (alpha and beta Geminorum) in right ascension. Here is what Robert DeLuce had to say about horoscopes with the Sun in contact with these stars. Castor: "Prominence in government.... It may give serious troubles, blows, stabs, wounds, and injuries to eyes and face. If the horoscope is evil, ...assassination, imprisonment, banishment or beheading." Pollux: "May cause blindness, injuries; riches and honor but final ruin and violent death."
Henry II was born on 31st March 1519 (Old Style) around 7:00 in St-Germain-en-Laye, 48N54 2E05 (source: Cahiers Astrologiques). Alexander Hamilton was born 11th January 1755 (New Style) at Nevis, West Indies, 17N00 62W30, time unknown.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Robert DeLuce, Complete Method of Prediction, 1935. Reprint, New York: A.S.I, 1978.
Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr, 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Srauss, Giroux, 1979.
Samuel H. Wandell and Meade Minnigerode, Aaron Burr, 2 vols. New York: G.P.Putnam's Sons, 1925
My sources on the Count of Montgomery are sparse and spotty. It is worth noting that the 1559 event, and the betrayal of Montgomery 15 years later, are referred to in some of the Nostradamus quatrains written probably before 1556: Centuries I-35, 111-30, and 111-55. Elsewhere in the issue of Considerations in which this article appeared (Volume 1, #2) Maurice Poulin explains that Nostradamus relied a great deal on planetary conjunctions with fixed stars (in right ascension). His predictions may have been based partly on the fact that there was to be a Sun-Mercury conjunction on Castor and Pollux on 30th June 1559.
This article was published in Volume I number 2, 1984.
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