How many traditional astrologers were practising during Carter's era? Maybe there were a few doing astrology á la Morin, because his popularity never quite died out on the continent, but I'm willing to bet **** few of even those folks were doing mundane.
There did seem to be one French astrologer who successfully predicted World War II, though I don't know what methods he was using - and his article was turned down by an astrological magazine because they deemed it too depressing. I think you can find the story at skyscript, it's been a long time since I read it, so I don't recall the precise details.
I know you think we 'trads' think that all ancient and medieval astrological techniques are tried, tested, and true, but that is emphatically not the case.
Bear in mind that in ancient and medieval times there was a lot of good predictive mundane (astrology's association with radical politics, especially during the English Civil War, was a big, big part of its death knell). But the reason for the good is that those guys were working for the royals, it was their full-time job to do this, it wasn't something they moonlighted at.
Some of the methods we've translated work well. More of them may work, but we've hardly done in-depth testing of all of them. The truth of the matter is that mundane astrology is at the very top of the astrological hierarchy, devillishly difficult to practise because it requires many charts, and while we know some things that work well, we simply do not know yet all of what works most efficaciously. That's going to take time.
I've managed to make a total of one mundane prediction, and it wasn't that big and only required five charts (an attempted train bombing in my city). Mundane is hard work and requires more energy than I usually have. I don't do a lot of it. Even most healthy astrologers don't do a lot of it. If you want to give good predictions (and I'm going to assume that most responsible astrologers, whether they be traditional, modern, or somewhere in between, don't want to go off half-cocked if they're predicting events with wide-spread consequences), it takes a lot of study. A lot. And since astrology seldom pays the bills, we don't see as much mundane as we'd like to. I do believe it will come, but I don't think we're there yet.
Sue Ward did an excellent series on economics based on the Great Conjunction, which has been proving out pretty accurately, but I don't believe it's posted in any non-copyrighted material.
Even Charles Carter, a modern I have quite a bit of respect for because he did real research, found himself a bit flummoxed over things like deaths in mass disasters.
Myself, I tend to agree with ibn Ezra's hierarchy of charts, which makes logical sense, at the very least. I've also seen some smaller studies in the modern day (I would hate to say it's iron-clad, because I'd like to see a few hundred more cases) that an angular Jupiter, in 10 especially, seems to be a mark of survivors of mass disaster. Obviously that wouldn't account for everyone, but again - it's one thing that would make sense.
As for the original topic, can astrology predict death? Yes, it can, ancient and medieval astrology was purpose-built as a form of divination, in other words, understanding the will of God or the Gods, by seeing into the future.
That in no way implies that astrology is easy, or that prediction is easy. It's not. But it's part of the job description. Irresponsible predictions of death are NOT part of the job description, not for astrologers, or doctors, or anybody else.
Modern astrology, on the other hand, was purpose-built to do character analysis, and therefore is not in a great position to predict anything.
So it's all going to depend on what kind of astrology you choose to practise.
