Jim Jones

Jim Jones was an American preacher, political activist and mass murderer, and no reading of his chart can soften that fact. He founded the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1955, built it into an ostensibly integrated, socialist congregation, and moved it to California, where he cultivated real political influence in San Francisco. Behind the civil-rights language, reports of abuse and coercion mounted through the 1970s. In 1978, after ordering the murder of U.S. Representative Leo Ryan and four others, he directed the murder-suicide of 909 people at his Guyana commune, 304 of them children, most poisoned with cyanide.

His Sun sat in Taurus in the fourth house, the fixed, earthy sign of unshakeable opinion and the pull toward home turned into an inward-facing compound. His Moon in Aries, in the third house, is a Martian, self-asserting emotional nature wired to words and persuasion, and in its low, uncontrolled expression it runs to domination, aggression and control. His Capricorn Ascendant wore the mask of authority and the boss. A natal signature can describe temperament; it never explains away, excuses or shares the blame for a person's choices. The atrocity was his, wholly and only.