Here’s our second installment of the Venus Rx in Gemini Files: Brigham Young. [You can read the first installment here.] He has a very prominent Venus retrograde in his chart, and an extremely interesting personal life to match. As president of the Mormon Church he led its followers to what became Utah (becoming its first governor), and was famous for having 17 wives — or possibly 55. But let’s back up a little.
Brigham Young was born June 1, 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont to a farming family and first worked as a blacksmith and carpenter. His denomination of origin is not mentioned in his Wiki page, but he converted to Methodism in 1823, married in 1824, and later converted to Mormonism in 1832. After his first wife died later that year, he joined Mormon missionaries forming a community in Ohio, where he was ordained and took on a high-level leadership role a few years later.
Young assumed the presidency of the Mormon Church, after a ‘succession crisis’ following the murder of church president Joseph Smith by an angry mob, in 1847. The years of Young’s church presidency – which spanned an impressive 29 years – occurred during the time of westward pioneer expansion in the U.S. He moved the Mormon Church to unsettled territory, where they established the city of Salt Lake.
It was a time of inter-territory skirmishes, and in fact one of the controversies surrounding Young is that allegedly he was unable to get word to other Mormon settlements in time to let immigrants from Arkansas pass through the area “unmolested.” As a result, 120 men, women and children died in the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 – despite Young’s promise, as governor of the territory to the federal government, to let settlers pass through.
Amidst all this, as governor, Young established Mormon settlements in other states, directed the building of roads and bridges, and organized a militia – in addition to the Mormon Tabernacle and the precursor to the University of Utah.
Now, what about those wives?