James Madison

James Madison was the quiet architect of a nation, remembered as the "Father of the Constitution" for his pivotal hand in drafting that document and the Bill of Rights, and later the fourth president of the United States. His Sun in Pisces gave the vision of an old soul, the sign that contains all the others, wise and unknowable, shining through the mystical and the ideal rather than the spotlight. Set in his first house, that Sun still made him a figure the young republic could not help but circle, a slight and unassuming man whose intellect somehow filled every room he entered. His Moon in Scorpio supplied the depth beneath the mildness: a born psychologist and reader of people, calm and composed on the surface yet carrying an intense, all-or-nothing inner life, the phoenix forever renewing itself. In the ninth house of philosophy, law and higher learning, that Moon fed on the great questions of governance, and he poured them into "The Federalist Papers" alongside Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. His Aquarius Ascendant marked him the revolutionary individualist, the man drawn to reinvent systems, who broke with Hamilton, co-founded a party with Jefferson, and led the country through the War of 1812. His record as a slaveholder is a lasting stain historians rightly weigh against his gifts.