Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was a founder of nations and a founder of ideas, the pen behind the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. His Sun in Aries is an ace position, the pioneer-warrior, a double leader with the throned Sun set in the first and leading sign of the zodiac. Aries is the self-starter who begins things and gets others moving, and Jefferson embodied it: statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect and philosopher, forever the one to cast the first light and leave a lasting mark. That Martian solar fire drove him to draft the founding charter of American liberty, to serve as the nation's first secretary of state, and, with James Madison, to build a whole political party in opposition. His Moon in Sagittarius shows a psyche that found its peace only through freedom, learning and the open horizon, the born philosopher whose mental health depended on expansion. Small wonder he championed freedom of thought, speech and religion, served as minister to France, doubled the country's size with the Louisiana Purchase, and dispatched Lewis and Clark toward the unknown West. His record on slavery remains deeply and rightly contested. Yet the Aries drive and the Sagittarian reach shaped a mind that could not stop enlarging the map, of land and of human rights alike.