Martha Stewart Birth Chart

Martha Stewart's Sun sits at 10°57' Leo in the 9th house — and immediately the architecture of her public identity becomes legible. Leo Suns are wired to perform mastery; the sign rules the heart's sovereign expression, the urge to make a life that reads, on its surface, like a deliberate work of art. But Leo placed in the 9th house — the sector of publishing, broadcasting, higher learning, and far-reaching influence — pushes that performance beyond the household stage. The 9th house Sun wants to teach. It wants its self-expression to travel, to be codified into doctrine, to become curriculum. Stewart didn't simply cook; she published cookbooks. She didn't simply renovate a farmhouse; she founded a magazine. She didn't simply entertain guests; she built a television catechism around the act of entertaining. The 9th house turns personal aesthetic into doctrine, and Leo turns doctrine into spectacle. (For another high-output Leo Sun cut from very different cloth, compare <a href="/celebrities/charli-xcx">Charli XCX's Leo Sun</a>.)

That Leo Sun is also conjunct Pluto, at 4°07' Leo in the same 9th house — an orb of roughly 6°50', generationally common for her cohort but personally activated by their shared house and proximity to the Sun's identity center. Sun-Pluto natives experience self-expression as a high-stakes act. There is no casual mode. Every performance carries the weight of survival, control, and reinvention. When Sun-Pluto natives are knocked down — and they almost always are, often spectacularly — they regenerate rather than recover. The five months Stewart served in federal prison in 2004-2005 read, from this chart, less like a derailment than a Pluto-style descent: a forced confrontation with shadow material (control, image, ego) followed by the resurfacing that <a href="/blog/seth-rogen-birth-chart-aries-sun-pluto-knocked-up-2026">Sun-Pluto demands</a>. She emerged with a Comedy Central roast, a Snoop Dogg co-host gig, and eventually a Sports Illustrated cover. That is not redemption; it is regeneration, which is Pluto's signature move.

The Sun also forms a tight square to the Ascendant (orb 0°43'), which makes the identity-versus-image tension structural rather than incidental. The Leo Sun wants to shine outward; the Scorpio Ascendant wants to control what gets seen. The result is a person who built her entire career on radical aesthetic transparency — every fold of a napkin documented, every garden bed photographed — while keeping her interior life famously opaque. That contradiction is not a flaw in the chart; it is the chart's core tension and her defining commercial asset.

Martha Stewart's Ascendant sits at 10°14' Scorpio — a placement that explains a great deal about why people simultaneously trust her, fear her, and cannot stop looking at her. Scorpio Rising natives present a controlled, watchful, often unreadable surface. They are the sign of the chart that other people meet first, and Scorpio meets the world with strategic reserve. There is no oversharing, no nervous laugh, no compensatory warmth. The Scorpio mask holds. This is why Stewart's on-camera presence has always read as authoritative rather than approachable — a quality that early critics mistook for coldness and that the culture eventually came to recognize as competence. For a contrasting Scorpio-coded public persona that works in the opposite register — opacity as art rather than authority — see <a href="/blog/tilda-swinton-birth-chart-scorpio-neptune-astrology-2026">Tilda Swinton's Scorpio-Neptune chart</a>.

With Scorpio Rising, the 1st house is ruled by Mars (traditional) and Pluto (modern). Mars sits at 16°18' Aries in the 5th house, fiery and self-directed; Pluto sits in the 9th house, conjunct her Sun. Both chart rulers are in fire signs, both are placed in houses of public expression and creative output, and both reinforce the same message: this is a body that exists to be seen doing something. The Scorpio rising controls the framing; the Mars-in-Aries and Pluto-in-Leo dispositors supply the fuel. It is the difference between a public figure who performs and a public figure who commands.

Scorpio Rising also explains the prison narrative more cleanly than any tabloid analysis ever did. Scorpio's domain is power dynamics, hidden resources, other people's money, and the consequences of secrets — exactly the territory of the ImClone insider-trading case that put her in Alderson Federal Prison Camp. That she emerged from that 1st-house Scorpionic ordeal with her brand intact, and arguably enhanced, is itself a Scorpio-rising achievement: the sign rules death and rebirth, and Stewart staged hers in front of a national audience.

The Moon at 25°24' Sagittarius in the 2nd house gives Stewart an emotional life organized around growth, knowledge, and material self-sufficiency. Sagittarius Moons need room — philosophical, geographical, financial — and they grow restless when constrained. Placed in the 2nd house, the house of personal income, possessions, and self-worth, this Moon ties emotional security directly to wealth-building and to the freedom that earned resources confer. This is the inner climate of a woman who became the first self-made female billionaire on the Forbes list after her company's 1999 IPO. The Sagittarius Moon does not feel safe with a salary; it feels safe with an empire, because empires guarantee the horizon stays open.

The Moon also forms a tight square to Neptune at 25°47' Virgo (orb 0°23'), one of the most exact aspects in her chart. Moon-Neptune squares often manifest as a complicated relationship with idealization — both projecting it and being subject to it. The lifestyle that Martha Stewart Living curated was, in part, a Moon-Neptune fantasy: the perfectly set table, the heirloom tomato, the hand-stenciled bedroom. Critics called it unattainable, which was both correct and beside the point. Moon-Neptune squares don't sell attainability; they sell the dream itself, and they sell it with the kind of operational precision (note the Virgo) that makes the dream feel earned rather than escaped to.

Mercury sits at 25°25' Cancer in the 9th house, and forms a wide cross-sign conjunction to Pluto at 4°07' Leo (orb roughly 8°40' — at the outer edge of conjunction territory, but functional because both planets sit in the same house and Pluto is the chart's identity anchor next to the Sun). Mercury in Cancer thinks in images, memories, and domestic detail; the mind moves through kitchens and gardens before it moves through abstractions. This is why her instructional voice has always been concrete rather than theoretical. She does not teach you the principle of pie crust; she teaches you the temperature of the butter. Cancer Mercury is the cookbook author's natural placement, and the 9th house gave her the imperative to publish that domestic intelligence on a national scale.

The conjunction to Pluto makes that communication style intense, investigative, and frequently controlling. <a href="/blog/mercury-square-pluto-taurus-aquarius-may-2026-transit">Mercury-Pluto natives</a> research compulsively, edit ruthlessly, and rarely accept a first draft of anything. Mercury also forms a tight sextile to Saturn at 27°17' Taurus (orb 1°52') and to Neptune in Virgo (orb 0°22'), creating a stabilizing earth-sign support network around her mental output. The Saturn sextile gives her communication structural discipline and authority; the Neptune sextile gives it imaginative reach and aesthetic sensitivity. Together these three aspects describe a mind that can simultaneously plan a menu, audit a balance sheet, and visualize a magazine spread — which is, in functional terms, the job description she invented for herself.

Venus at 9°09' Virgo in the 10th house is, arguably, the most operationally important placement in the entire chart. The 10th house is the house of career, public reputation, and the legacy structure a person builds. Venus there means the career is fundamentally aesthetic — taste, beauty, and refinement are the product, not the decoration. And Venus in Virgo refines further: this is the placement of artisanal precision, of the perfectly hemmed napkin, the correctly proportioned table runner, the herb garden organized by harvest sequence. Virgo Venus does not love grandeur; it loves competence. The romance is in the right tool used correctly. (For another lifestyle-empire built on a Virgo Sun's craft instinct — though differently styled — see <a href="/blog/lisa-vanderpump-birth-chart-virgo-sun-empire-2026">Lisa Vanderpump's chart</a>.)

Stewart's entire commercial proposition has been Venus-in-Virgo doctrine made replicable for a mass audience. Where other lifestyle brands sell aspiration as fantasy, hers sold aspiration as a checklist — and a checklist is a Virgo love language. The 10th-house placement guaranteed that this aesthetic philosophy would not stay private. It had to become a public office, a recognizable institution, a brand that other people could buy into. Magazine, television show, retail line, sheet sets at Macy's, then Kmart, then Costco — each was Venus in Virgo's 10th-house insistence that good taste is a teachable, scalable, monetizable discipline.

Saturn at 27°17' Taurus and Uranus at 29°54' Taurus form a conjunction in her 7th house, with an orb of about 2°37'. The 7th house governs marriage, business partnerships, and one-to-one alliances; Taurus brings the language of value, money, land, and security; Saturn imposes structure and longevity; Uranus injects rupture and unexpected reinvention. The combination is rare and combustible. It tends to produce partnerships that begin in stable, traditional form and then either modernize radically or break apart, often spectacularly. Stewart's marriage to Andrew Stewart began in 1961 and ended in divorce in 1990 — a Saturn-length commitment ruptured by Uranian disruption. The 7th-house conjunction also describes her business partnerships, many of which followed the same pattern: long, structured, often profitable alliances that ended in sudden, public reinvention.

This conjunction also forms a wide trine to Neptune in Virgo (Saturn-Neptune orb 1°30') and a trine within the same earth grand-trine territory to her Mercury — meaning her partnerships, even the disrupted ones, were folded back into the larger creative and communicative architecture of the empire. The Saturn-Uranus pairing in Taurus is, finally, why her brand has been able to absorb seismic shocks (divorce, prison, corporate restructuring, Macy's lawsuits) without disintegrating. Saturn rebuilds. Uranus modernizes. Together in Taurus, they renovate the foundation without abandoning the house.

Mars at 16°18' Aries in the 5th house is the chart's pure-fuel placement. Mars is in domicile in Aries — the planet operating in its native sign — and the 5th house governs creativity, play, romance, and the pleasure of making things for their own sake. This is the engine room of the entire enterprise. Mars in Aries does not deliberate; it initiates. It launches the project, breaks the ground, signs the lease, hires the contractor, plants the orchard. Stewart's well-documented 4-AM work habits, the multiple simultaneous renovations, the willingness to start a new venture in her 80s — that is 5th-house Aries Mars expressing itself through creative initiative without the brakes most charts install.

Mars forms a trine to her Leo Sun (orb 5°20') and a sextile to Jupiter in Gemini (orb 1°30'), which feeds that Aries fire directly into both her identity and her expansive intellectual side. The Sun-Mars trine gives the will-to-act seamless access to the will-to-be-seen; the Mars-Jupiter sextile attaches that initiative to ideas, communication, and big-picture optimism. It is the aspectual reason her productivity has never read as compulsive or grim. The energy is genuinely enjoyable to her, which is the 5th house's quiet contribution: even the labor is, at root, play.

The 2004 conviction and 2004-2005 incarceration are, in retrospect, the most natally legible chapter of Stewart's life. Her chart contains the signatures of a person built for exactly that kind of public descent and resurfacing. Sun conjunct Pluto in the 9th house is the literal symbol of an identity that is publicly destroyed and publicly reborn — Leo's stage, Pluto's underworld, the 9th house's broadcast reach. Scorpio Rising governs death-and-rebirth as the body's native operating system. Mercury in the 9th house, sextile Saturn, gave her the discipline to write a prison memoir worth of material in her head while inside, and the structural authority to walk back onto television without apology. Jupiter in Gemini in the 8th house — the house of shared resources, taxes, and other people's scrutiny — gave the legal ordeal itself a kind of expansive, almost philosophical frame: she famously taught fellow inmates yoga and learned the prison microwave.

What the chart does not predict is the specific cultural form the comeback took: Snoop Dogg, the roast, the Sports Illustrated cover at 81. But the chart absolutely describes the underlying psychological capacity for that comeback. A <a href="/blog/pluto-retrograde-aquarius-may-2026-transit">Sun-Pluto native</a> does not exit a Pluto chapter the same person who entered it; they exit transformed, often with new alliances that the pre-Pluto version of themselves would have found unthinkable. The Sagittarius Moon's appetite for the unfamiliar made the Snoop friendship — and the broader cultural rebranding — emotionally available rather than threatening. The Saturn-Uranus conjunction made the structural reinvention of the business possible. Stewart did not survive her Pluto chapter despite her chart; she survived it because her chart was, in important respects, already organized around the architecture of survival.

It would be dishonest to read this chart purely as a success story. The same placements that built the empire have specific costs, and they show up consistently in the public record. Sun conjunct Pluto is, in its shadow expression, a control problem. The need to manage image, narrative, staff, and outcome can curdle into the controlling perfectionism that ex-employees and biographers have described in detail — the kind that lands a person in court, on tabloid covers, and eventually in front of a federal jury that famously found her demeanor as damaging as the underlying trade. The chart does not exonerate that pattern; it just names where it lives.

Scorpio Rising, the controlled public mask, has a domestic cost. The strategic reserve that reads as competence on camera reads as opacity at the dinner table. Stewart has spoken candidly about her difficulty maintaining close friendships during the empire-building years, and about the loneliness of leadership — both classic Scorpio-rising disclosures. Moon square Neptune adds another layer: the lifestyle she sold was, in part, the lifestyle she wished she had. The square doesn't lie about the disconnect; it monetizes it. And Saturn-Uranus in the 7th house has produced exactly what 7th-house Saturn-Uranus tends to produce — a marriage that ended after Saturn's structural commitment was ruptured by Uranian need-for-freedom, and a string of business partnerships that followed the same arc. The chart is honest about this. Pretending otherwise would be a worse reading.

None of this is failure. It is, instead, the price tag that comes attached to placements this concentrated. The Sun-Pluto native who builds an empire is also the Sun-Pluto native who has to be publicly humbled by it. The Scorpio rising who controls the frame also pays for the privacy that the frame insists on. Reading a chart well means refusing to flatten it into a press release.

• 1972 — Founded a catering business out of her Westport, Connecticut basement. Venus in Virgo in the 10th house, in operational form: domestic skill organized as career.
• 1982 — Published 'Entertaining,' her first cookbook. Mercury in Cancer in the 9th house going public: domestic intelligence becoming doctrine.
• 1990 — Launched Martha Stewart Living magazine. The 9th-house Sun-Pluto and 10th-house Venus fully fused into a single editorial product.
• 1999 — Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia IPO; she became the first self-made female billionaire on the Forbes list. Sagittarius Moon in the 2nd house realized at scale.
• 2004-2005 — ImClone conviction, five-month federal sentence at Alderson. Sun-Pluto conjunction and Scorpio Rising delivering their textbook descent.
• 2015 — Sequential Brands acquisition; she stepped back from direct ownership but retained creative authority. Saturn-Uranus in Taurus: structural reinvention without identity loss.
• 2023 — Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover at 81. Leo Sun, Mars in Aries, and Sagittarius Moon producing a culturally improbable third act that the chart, in hindsight, makes look almost inevitable.

The Martha Stewart birth chart is finally a study in how concentrated placements compound. A Leo Sun on its own is theatrical; a Leo Sun conjunct Pluto in the 9th house with Scorpio Rising is something stranger — a person whose identity is structurally organized around being publicly tested, publicly destroyed, and publicly rebuilt, again, more visibly than before. The reckoning isn't with her, exactly. It's with the cultural reflex to treat her trajectory as exceptional. The chart says it isn't exceptional; it is exactly what this configuration tends to produce when given enough decades and enough oxygen. If you have Sun-Pluto contacts of your own — and many millions of you do — the lesson is not that you will become a billionaire, or that you will go to prison. The lesson is that survival, for this configuration, requires accepting that the descent is part of the design, not a derailment from it. Stewart's chart asks readers to give up the fantasy of clean victories and inherit, instead, the harder discipline of regeneration. That is what Pluto, finally, teaches — and it is the throughline her life keeps illustrating, whether she set out to or not.

For entertainment and self-reflection purposes only. Astrology is interpretive, not predictive, and this analysis is not a substitute for professional advice — legal, medical, financial, or otherwise. All biographical references are drawn from documented public-record events.

Methodology & Sources: This analysis is AI-generated chart interpretation using Swiss Ephemeris calculations via the Kerykeion 5.x Python library (tropical zodiac, Placidus houses). Birth data — August 3, 1941 at 1:33 PM EWT in Jersey City, New Jersey — carries a Rodden Rating of AA (verified from birth certificate) sourced through AstroDatabank (https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Stewart,_Martha). Biographical facts are drawn from public reporting on Stewart's career (founding of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 1997, 1999 IPO making her the first self-made female billionaire on the Forbes list, 2004 ImClone-related conviction and 2004-2005 sentence at Alderson Federal Prison Camp, 2015 Sequential Brands acquisition, 2023 Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover). Every planetary position cited in this article comes directly from Kerykeion's calculated output for this chart and has not been altered, rounded selectively, or hallucinated.

Q: What is Martha Stewart's zodiac sign?

Martha Stewart is a Leo, with her Sun at 10°57' Leo in the 9th house of publishing and higher learning. Her Leo Sun sits in a wide conjunction with Pluto, which is the astrological signature of an identity built for public reinvention. The 9th-house placement explains her instinct to turn personal aesthetic into doctrine and broadcast it nationally.

Q: What is Martha Stewart's rising sign?

Martha Stewart has Scorpio Rising at 10°14' Scorpio, based on her Rodden AA verified birth time of 1:33 PM on August 3, 1941 in Jersey City. Scorpio Rising gives her the controlled, watchful, strategically reserved public presence that has defined her on-camera authority and her ability to survive — and reframe — public scandal.

Q: What is Martha Stewart's moon sign?

Her Moon is at 25°24' Sagittarius in the 2nd house of resources and self-worth. The Sagittarius Moon needs emotional room — philosophical, geographical, financial — and placed in the 2nd house it ties her inner sense of security directly to wealth-building, which helps explain her trajectory from caterer to self-made billionaire.

Q: Is Martha Stewart's birth time verified?

Yes. Her birth time of 1:33 PM EWT on August 3, 1941 in Jersey City, New Jersey holds a Rodden Rating of AA, the highest tier of birth-data reliability, sourced through AstroDatabank from a birth certificate. This means rising sign, house placements, and angular aspects can be analyzed with full confidence rather than treated as approximate.

Q: What is the most important aspect in Martha Stewart's chart?

The Sun conjunct Pluto in Leo in the 9th house is the chart's defining signature, with an orb of roughly 6°50'. This aspect maps the entire pattern of her career — an identity built around public mastery, subjected to public destruction in the 2004 conviction, and then publicly regenerated. Sun-Pluto natives are wired for high-stakes reinvention.

Q: How does her chart explain the prison comeback?

Three placements work together. Sun conjunct Pluto in the 9th house gives her an identity organized around public death-and-rebirth. Scorpio Rising governs survival as a native operating system. The Saturn-Uranus conjunction in Taurus in the 7th house provides structural reinvention of partnerships and business. Together they describe a psyche built to absorb and metabolize public ordeal.

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Madonna's chart parks a Leo Sun, Mercury, Uranus, and Pluto in the 12th house — the most private corner of the wheel — and the result is a forty-year career staged from inside the confession booth.