Posted by Dharmaruci: Every US President from 1840 to 1960 who has been elected in a year ending in a zero has died in office. This phenomenon has been attributed to what is known as Tecumseh’s Curse, which appeared to have broken, or at least weakened, by the time Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980: there was an assassination attempt a few months after Reagan began his term, but he survived.

There is a well-known astrological correspondence to Tecumseh’s Curse, which is that there has always been a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction within a year or so of the ‘zero’ Presidents being elected. Until the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, Jupiter and Saturn were the 2 outermost planets, and so very much the significators of world events and their cycles. When they conjoin (about every 20 years) a whole new cycle begins.

Saturn (authority) and Jupiter (King of the Gods) are both connected to leadership, so if this curse is/was real, it would not be surprising to find a correspondence to the Saturn-Jupiter cycle. That there is in fact a correspondence suggests to me that the curse is real.

So what was different about 1980? What happened was that the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction moved from being in an earth sign (which it had been all along) to an air sign. It has shifted element, and won’t be back in the earth element for a few centuries. The curse, it appears, has run its course.

It’s not quite as clean cut as that, however, because the conjunction returned to the earth element one final time in 2000, the year George Bush was elected. He has one year left in office, so we shall have to see if he makes it. His chart doesn’t seem to have particularly strong death indicators, and what happened to Reagan suggests that the curse is at best weakened.

Tecumseh was a Native American leader who spent much of his life trying to rally disparate tribes in mutual defence of their lands. The curse, for which there seems to be no documentation (nor would we expect there to be), arose out of his loss to General Harrison at the Battle of Tippecanoe on 7 November 1811.

Tecumseh is said to have declared:

“‘Harrison will win next year to be the Great Chief……. He will die in his office….. I who caused the Sun to darken and Red Men to give up firewater tell you Harrison will die. And after him, every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people.”

In fact Harrison became President 29 years later, in 1840, but he did die in office, after just 31 days, suggesting the Curse was pretty powerful. What I don’t think has been looked at is the chart for 7 Nov 1811, which could be seen as a chart for the Curse. It yields some very interesting results.

Planets that are stationing in a chart – i.e. motionless in the sky as they change direction – are unusually powerful, and in this chart for Tecumseh’s Curse we find Pluto (death, curse) and Jupiter (leader) stationing retrograde. Not only that, but Jupiter at 5.58 Cancer is within 11 minutes of the US natal Jupiter at 5.47 Cancer!

Traditionally, it is the Sun and Saturn we look to for Kings, while Jupiter is Princes. But you could say that the US President is more of a Prince than a King. A King has the job for life, he comes from a lineage, and he has the solid authority that goes with that. Democracy only produces princes, because they do not have this authority. They just have the job for a few years, and they have to play to the gallery to get and to keep their job. They are lightweight.

So US Presidents are Jupiter, not Sun or Saturn, and the chart for Tecumseh’s Curse supports this.

If we progress the Curse Chart, what we find is Jupiter going Retrograde for the following century, during which time it passed into late Gemini. In 1916 it began to go Direct, and in 1966 it returned to its original sign of Cancer, on the way to completing its journey (in 2002) back to where it began. Looking at it this way, the Curse was over in 2002, and it was considerably weakened in 1966, when Jupiter returned to Cancer, which is perhaps why Reagan survived his assassination attempt in 1981.

So what about this idea of Jupiter being the President? The hard transits from Pluto and Neptune over the last century are interesting.

Pluto conjoined the US Jupiter in 1920, when Warren Harding, who died in office 3 years later, was elected. Pluto squared this Jupiter in 1974, when Nixon was forced to resign.

Neptune opposed the US Jupiter in 1945, when Roosevelt died in office. And Neptune squared it in 1986/87, a period when many suspect the US had a President in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The next hard transit is an opposition from Pluto in 2011, so we will have to see what that brings. But if the President dies, it won’t be due to Tecumseh. Maybe by then we will have ‘Bin Laden’s Curse’ or ‘Ahmadinejad’s Curse’?