Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe shines in that rare way where genius and diligence are the same thing, and his chart names it exactly. His Sun sits in Virgo, the sign that glows not through the limelight but through mastery, service and relentless craft, the jack of all arts who becomes master of all. Placed in the tenth house, the Sun at noon on the throne of the chart, that same brilliance was destined to be public: poet, playwright, novelist, and also scientist and statesman. He wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, an early flame of the Sturm und Drang, then settled in Weimar in 1775, where he served the Duke, ran the theatre, reopened silver mines and reformed the University of Jena, the perfect Virgo blend of art and useful duty. His Pisces Moon at the bottom of the chart supplied the empath's oceanic imagination, the psychic well from which Faust, his lifelong drama, was drawn. A Scorpio Ascendant lent him the intense, all-seeing mask of one who reads the human soul. Regarded as the greatest writer in the German language, he became one of Emerson's "representative men," a lion whose light still circles nearly two centuries on.