As Bill Clinton prepares to leave office, public affection remains strong for the Leo leader. Only time can tell if history will be as kind to him as it has been to his favorite Aries founding father, Thomas Jefferson.

President William Jefferson Clinton was defending his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent cover-up when our country’s most potent symbol of American values, Thomas Jefferson, blazed from the pages of history to bear witness to the fact that the primal urge has a most distinguished presidential pedigree. When DNA proved true the long-rumored intimate relationship between Jefferson and his mulatto slave, it served to make Clinton’s sins more palatable and sparked comparisons between Clinton and the revered man who drafted the Declaration of Independence.

Consummate Politician and Charming Ladies’ Man

William Clinton was born August 19, 1946, with a Leo Sun in the Eleventh House and a stellium (group of planets fused together) in Libra. Though his Sun foretold a potential for leadership (Leo) in the political arena (Eleventh House), it was his liberal (Libra) tendencies that moved him into the White House, brought him close to impeachment and make his place in history uncertain.

Mark of a Ladies’ Man

Clinton’s entire political career has been fraught with tales of womanizing, and a quick look at all the Libra planets in his birth chart tells why. Clinton was born when Venus (feminine beauty, love and personal values), Neptune (illusion and confusion), Mars (sex, lust, drive and action) and Jupiter (opportunity) were in Libra, the sign associated with harmony and balance in relationships. This reveals that Clinton’s drive for cooperative human interactions (Mars in Libra) and his ability to attract and charm women (Venus in Libra) combined to create strong sex appeal with a detached desire nature (Venus conjunct Mars in Libra) and a need to satisfy those desires in relationships (Mars in Libra).

Add Neptune’s confusion and Jupiter’s opportunities to Libra’s cool detached charm, then mix it all with a Leo Sun’s need for romantic attention, and you have the makings for a charming ladies’ man who has a sad weakness for women and sex.

Living the Great American Paradox

Thomas Jefferson was born April 13, 1743, with an Aries Sun in the Third House. This is appropriate for a man who came to the White House not by political ambition, as Clinton, but rather by virtue of his pioneering leadership (Aries Sun) and the written expression of his intellectual thinking (Third House) on personal freedom.

Unlike Clinton, who has maintained an enduring political partnership with his wife while involving himself in numerous shallow sexual escapades, Thomas Jefferson’s relationships with the opposite sex were much more complex and fraught with pain, passion and paradox. His wife died after only ten years of marriage, he was involved in a messy affair with a married woman during his stay in France and he carried on a forbidden relationship with his mulatto slave Sally Hemings that endured for 38 years.

Venus and Mars with Pluto: The Agony and Ecstasy of Life and Love

Jefferson was born with Venus (personal values, beauty and love) in Taurus square (challenging) Mars (lust, drive and action) in Leo. Taurus is a sensual, serene and artistic sign of material abundance that wants to possess and control what it loves and finds beautiful (certainly expressing the values of an eighteenth century plantation owner), while Leo is a passionate, spontaneous, playful and generous sign that seeks the unabashed physical expression of life and love.

Though Jefferson believed passions constituted the true life of man, he thought they must be kept under tight rein in order to attain the serenity, tranquility, happiness and right conduct sought by every man. He could not deny his ardent passions and desires (Mars in Leo) nor his enjoyment of sensual pleasures (Venus in Taurus), and found himself drawn to the Epicurean ethic, which, while admitting the reality and necessity of passion, sought control through the exercise of reason. However, his ardent nature (Mars in Leo), fueled on by the Aries Sun’s need to do and have exactly what he wanted, often overruled reason and resulted in actions that severely challenged his comfortable aristocratic values.

Complicating Jefferson’s character further, both Mars and Venus in his chart are in a critical “relationship” with Pluto, a powerful and transformative planet that unearths extreme truths that have been denied.

A Venus-Pluto opposition often reveals an individual who sees either black or white with little concept of gray. Jefferson aptly expressed this polarized aspect of his nature in his belief that the two sexes (and the two races) had separate functions to which they were genetically adapted, and that they should not mix. Yet, with Mars square (challenging) both Venus and Pluto, Jefferson was unconsciously driven to actualize the ultimate truths he refused to see.

Perhaps in the passionate and enduring relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, and the children that relationship produced, Jefferson created a visible merging of this polarity that enabled him to realize the narrowness of his original thinking on freedom and equality. Though some of his writing seems to indicate a softening of boundaries, at least in regard to slavery, neither history nor DNA can tell us if Jefferson ever accepted or understood the ultimate truths contained within his prophetic words on personal liberty and the equal creation of all men.

How Much is Too Much?

You have to wonder why a nation would so vilify one president for his indiscretions while forgiving and romanticizing the other. Perhaps our perception was influenced by the actual facts and details we were given in each instance. As the Clinton saga unfolded, the world got every raw and sexually explicit detail in the daily news, nothing was left to the imagination. No actual facts or details were ever documented on Jefferson’s indiscretions, and with the help of transiting Neptune, it was easy to romanticize Jefferson and his relationship with Sally, as we imagined what it could have been. However, take away this romantic notion and you find that Jefferson, like Clinton, was a man of his time who possessed extraordinary talents and abilities alongside some very ordinary human frailties.

Notes

Transits are contacts from the planets in the sky to planets and sensitive points in the birth chart. Though Thomas Jefferson died July 4, 1826, his birth chart remains active and continues to receive transits.

In 1998, as transiting Neptune touched Jefferson’s Ascendant, DNA findings were published that confirmed Jefferson had indeed fathered children by Sally Hemings. Neptune is a slow-moving outer planet that will veil reality as it dissolves what it contacts. In this case it was our long-held image of the great man. Though the truth of Jefferson’s affair could no longer be argued, Neptune’s arrival at the Ascendant denied us a clear view of the man by veiling his image in an elusiveness that brought more questions than answers. It was this quality that enabled us to see him in a softer light.

The Ascendant is marked by the degree of the zodiac rising on the horizon at the time and location of birth. Along with the Midheaven, the Descendant, and the Inum Coeli, it forms the structure of the birth chart. It is also the boundary between the Twelfth House (what is hidden) and the First House (what is readily seen). Symbolically, it represents the mask, facade or image that we project to others. Major transiting planets crossing the Ascendant into the First House will greatly affect how a person is perceived by others.