John Labozza

The most powerful member of the Zodiac 12 was obsessed with tracking the sky and the Zodiac. His name was J.P. Morgan. In 1917, Morgan’s clock collection went to the Metropolitan Museum. One piece is a 17th-century astronomical clock with a mechanical astrolabe. It shows which planet rules each day of the week and how long each day is, and all its dials move together. On top sits an obelisk. You can lift it off, because the obelisk is also the key that winds the clock. The real prize is a silver celestial globe made in 1579 for Emperor Rudolf II. Rudolf was the occult emperor of Prague: Kepler was his imperial mathematician, and John Dee came to his court. On this globe the heavens don’t rest on Atlas. They ride on the back of Pegasus. Inside, clockwork turned the sky once every sidereal day and moved the Sun through the zodiac. One of its rings is numbered for the astrological houses. It went from an emperor to Queen Christina of Sweden, then to a counsellor of the King of France, then through Paris auctions, and finally to J.P. Morgan. The sky machine passed from crowns to capital. Morgan didn’t hide what he believed. Look up in his private library in Manhattan and you’ll see the zodiac painted on the ceiling, laid out around his own life. Above the door, set apart from the rest, are Aries for his birth and Gemini for his second marriage. He walked under his “lucky stars” every time he came in. Across from them are Libra and Aquarius. Aquarius is the sign his first wife died under. Libra was his seat in the Zodiac 12, the Zodiac Club, a private New York dining club that only ever had 12 members, one for each sign. The banker took the scales. A tapestry from 1545 hangs over the fireplace in that same room. It’s called “The Triumph of Avarice.” People argue over whether he really said “Millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do.” His astrologer, Evangeline Adams, settled the bigger question in her 1926 memoir. She said she knew about his belief in astrology “because I taught it to him.” So why did the man who financed America collect machines that model the motion of the sky? Why is the key to his astronomical clock an obelisk? Why did a banker sit at a table of twelve, each member wearing a sign of the zodiac? Maybe it was just Gilded Age taste. Or maybe the people who move the money have always watched the clock above us. My view: the old elite never stopped reading the sky. They just stopped telling us.