John McAfee

John McAfee was a man who shone through his intellect and his hands, and that is the mark of a Virgo Sun: the vitality expressed not through limelight but through work, service and a restless, analytical mind, a jack of all arts and, unlike Gemini, a master of them. In 1987 he wrote the first commercial anti-virus software and built McAfee Associates around it, a genuinely useful thing done well. That Sun sits at the very top of his chart, in the tenth house of career, the Sun at noon: natural fame was simply given to him, and his name became a household word, though later he turned on the company that carried it, calling its software bloatware.

His Moon in Aquarius, in the third house of communication, made him the crazy-genius nonconformist, wired to the collective, the rebel forever broadcasting, running twice for the Libertarian presidential nomination. Yet the Scorpio Ascendant, mask of the all-or-nothing survivor, drew him into the darker eighth-house terrain of his life: drugs, exile in Belize, a flight while wanted for questioning over a killing, tax-evasion charges, and his death in a Spanish cell in 2021. A chart maps temperament, never a defence for choices; his gifts were real, and so was the wreckage.