John Jacob Astor

John Jacob Astor built an empire out of the deepest Cancerian instinct there is: the need to make a shelter, a home, a lasting shell around what one loves. His Sun sits in Cancer, the father shining through the sign of the mother, and while textbooks call this the softest, most maternal Sun, it is also the sign of home, homeland and real estate, and that is precisely where his fortune came to rest. Born Johann Jakob in Germany, he crossed to England as a teenager building musical instruments, then sailed to a young America and read the tide of a population moving west. He gathered the fur trade into a monopoly stretching to the Great Lakes and the Pacific coast, and when European tastes turned, the crab withdrew into its shell and re-emerged holding New York City land itself, becoming the first American multi-millionaire.

His Moon in Libra is the Venusian, Aphrodite moon, at peace through beauty and harmony, and in his final act he turned his wealth toward patronage of the arts. A Cancer who found happiness in walls and roots, and a Libra who softened the empire with beauty.