How can a guy with Venus rising go around beating up all those terrorists? Maybe it’s because it’s square an impulsive Aries Moon and his Sun is in the 12th house, just trouble incorporated. That’s what you might say about Kiefer Sutherland’s chart at first glance. Capricorn rising with Venus right on the Ascendant, is tough but charming, and in many other ways it’s a strange chart, indeed. Look at those houses, one of the results of being born on the winter solstice at high northern latitude. Some are huge, some are tiny, though not nearly so crazy as they could be even higher north. Houses 1-3 and 7-9 cover 2/3 of the zodiac, while 4-6 and 10-12 only 1/3. If he had been born 12 hours earlier or later, the opposite would have been the case. What does that say about a person? Certainly it means that transits and progressions spend a lot more time in his life emphasizing one set of issues than another.

The shape of the chart itself is a little strange, too. Although some might call it a splash type, it’s actually a double-handle bucket (where the two handle planets are within a sign or so of each other), just like the USA chart. With him the handle is Saturn-Moon, with the USA, it’s Pluto-Moon, both indicating emotional swings involving dire situations that determine the behavior of the rest of the chart. How perfect to dramatize America in its time of greatest projected fears. He’ll be your fast friend, then waterboard you if things get dicey. Of course, that’s only under pressure, you understand.

Current events: So, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that he gets a little off the wall when the pressure’s on or simply when things get a little crazy, for which at the moment he is now doing jail time. That’s partly a problem of the major Pluto transit coming upon his Sun right now, along with Jupiter at the same time. He’s bigger than ever, and in the process of changing himself inside (Pluto) irrevocably, as have so many folks with Sun in late degrees of Sagittarius lately under that current implacable transit. The good news is that Jupiter hits all of his Capricorn stuff first, this coming year, the Ascendant and Venus. The bad news is that Pluto follows it up over the next several years, and Saturn is also on its way to his MC in a couple of years as well. This is the portrait of a man in flux, who so strangely represents some of the most desperate feelings of a country in just such a condition. Who knows just what’s really going on in the heart of Jack Bauer, or Kiefer Sutherland?