Steve Jobs

Water accounts for four of his ten planets, fire three and air two, with a single one in earth. Six of the ten sit in cardinal signs, the part of the zodiac that starts a thing rather than keeping it going, and only one is mutable. The record says Jobs co-founded Apple, was forced out, came back, and oversaw the products that turned the personal computer into a consumer object.

The Sun sits on the sixth degree of Pisces, the sign that holds no fixed edge of its own, while Mars sits at the very end of Aries at twenty nine. His Moon sits on the third degree of Aries at noon and may have been in Pisces, so the private half of the chart is open between dissolving into a thing and going straight at it. Mercury sits at fourteen degrees of Aquarius and was retrograde. For a record whose shape is a departure and a return, a Sun that keeps no line of its own and a Mars at the far end of the starting sign is a fitting pair.

Jupiter is in three of the five closest aspects in this chart. The Sun sits in hard contact with it at eight hundredths of a degree, Venus sits directly opposite it at three tenths, and Saturn sits in easy contact with it at under two thirds. Scale braced by identity, opposed by taste and supported by limit, all inside two thirds of a degree, is a remarkable arrangement to carry, and Jupiter itself was retrograde. He was born with five of the ten planets retrograde. A T-square holds Mars, Uranus and Neptune with no outlet. For a company founder the record has leaving and then coming back, scale at the centre of the chart and running backwards is the fact that fits.

He died at Palo Alto on 5 October 2011, at fifty six, of pancreatic cancer. Neptune rules his Pisces Sun, and Jupiter ruled it before Neptune was found. That day Neptune stood in workable contact with his natal Mars at four tenths of a degree and in easy contact with its own natal place at the same four tenths, while Saturn stood square his natal Jupiter at just over a degree and Pluto sat sixty degrees from his natal Sun at under half. The Moon was at its first quarter and sixty seven per cent lit, which is the phase that acts decisively and usually has to break something to do it. Jupiter at the centre of three of this chart's closest aspects, and reversed, is the fact to keep from a record that is a founding, a removal and a return.