Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by Waldo, was the sage of American self-reliance, the essayist and lecturer who taught a young nation to trust the infinitude of the private soul. With the Sun in Gemini, the marriage of Helios and Mercury, he shone through the word: the eternal communicator who understood both sides of every argument, forever between the seen and the unseen, and who built most of his great essays first as spoken lectures before revising them for the page. That Sun sits in the sixth house of work and diligent service, and true to it he laboured at his craft with quiet devotion, shaping "Nature," "Self-Reliance" and "The Over-Soul" through the mid-1830s to mid-1840s, his most fertile years.

His Moon in Leo gave him a large, generous heart and a performer's charisma at the lectern; feeling flowed through expression, and it moved a generation. Sitting in the eighth house of death, rebirth and the buried depths, that Moon drew his gaze constantly to the soul's transformation and the unseen order beneath the visible world, the very ground of transcendentalism. His Sagittarius Ascendant was the mask of the wandering preacher-philosopher, the jovial sage forever giving the lecture. He mentored Thoreau and lit America's intellectual declaration of independence.