John Jay

There is a certain kind of person born to travel far, gather wisdom and carry it home to build something lasting, and John Jay was one of them. His Sun in Sagittarius is the Jupiter-ruled philosopher-explorer, the walking, mobile university, and you can feel it in a life that reached across oceans: a lawyer who studied law, theology and the wide sweep of nations, drawn to the exotic and the foreign, sent as ambassador to Spain where he coaxed financial aid for a fledgling country. This is the sign of big-picture thinking and extreme directness, and Jay put both to work negotiating the Treaty of Paris that won Britain's recognition of American independence, and later co-authoring five of the Federalist Papers alongside Hamilton and Madison.

His Moon in Leo is one of the warmest of all, king and queen in one, a generous heart that seeks the centre of things. It carried him to the presidency of the Continental Congress, to the first Chief Justiceship of the United States, and to the governorship of New York, where he signed gradual emancipation into law, though he owned enslaved people himself, a genuine shadow in the record. A Sagittarian sage who could not stop building.