I’ve written about Carolyn Bessette before. Personally, I think she was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe come back to take her revenge on the House of Kennedy. Marrying John F. Kennedy, Jr. the heir to the family and ending his father’s male line in a bid for karmic revenge. After examining many of the Kennedy natal charts, the women who marry the Kennedys are the fascinating ones. Jacqueline Bouvier. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. The French connection is elusive to me, still its there. The Irish Fitzgeralds are Norman transplants to Ireland. Jacqueline the descendant of a French soldier who was on the wrong side of Waterloo and who needed to get out of France and Carolyn, a distant French Canadian ancestor gave rise to her patronym.
As a woman coming of age, Carolyn portrayed the zeitgeist of the moment. A twelfth house Sun has glamour. Allure. Chameleon. Words associated with Neptune. Her cool blondeness was her Aquarian Ascendant and her feminine beauty is her retrograde Aquarius Venus conjunct Mars. This element with Mars leading was challenge mixed with attractiveness. A heady combination. Her Aquarian coolness was ruled by the Virgo Uranus conjunct retrograde Pluto. This is the famous conjunction of the 60s and she was a child of the 60s. She, along with her generation, made the 80s style appear blowsy and overdone. Sleek, cold, basic, simple. That is Aquarius and Virgo together. Pluto added something mysterious as well. Really though that isn’t a good quality. Sometimes, mysterious and horror mean what they promise; death.
The 1960s archetype. Carolyn looked like a flower in the shape of the archetype of the 1960s. Scorpio Neptunes, Virgo Uranus-Plutos opposing Chiron. Scorpio Neptune. Fantasy of the abyss. Virgo Uranus-Pluto. Breaking free from the prison of death and rebirth. Besides her marriage to John, she is also known for her style. His Leonine hair and trendy clothes has not held up nearly as well as her cool Virgo 60s basic style.
For people born in the 1960s, they wanted nirvana and I don’t mean the famous band that changed everything when they came of age, although I have written about the music before. Nirvana is the transcendant state of no suffering, no desire or no self in which one is released (Virgo) from the cycle of death and rebirth (Pluto). The Virgo Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s is an astrological gylph that sought to break free from the cycle of death and rebirth. The recent Neptune transit of Pisces was a trine to those 1960s Scorpio Neptunes, reenergizing them. This transit lies behind the ideas that there should be no children. A dying planet. A dying civilization. A dying country. Nirvana is a hollow void of nothingness. She is a cruel mistress that seduces but promises nothing, gives nothing and consumes everything. This brings us to Neptune, the sea, the maelstrom.
The House of Kennedy are Atreidae. The House of Atreus, cursed by the gods. The Kennedy curse is really a test of virtue with public consequences for good or ill. Many of the Atreidae are not pious and fail the virtue test. They test the gods and they often find their comeuppance through their marriage. Rose Fitzgerald had a dormant curse in her natal chart that her husband awoke. Jacqueline was a native of Scorpio and carried within her natal chart a mark that she would inherit money from her spouses. It is knowing this that we should examine Carolyn Bessette’s natal chart as well.
The retrograde Virgo asteroid Atreus sits in Carolyn’s seventh house. It is loosely interacting with her north-south nodes and her retrograde Vesta. Her asteroid is also loosely opposing her Juno. Virgo is also manifestation. Retrograde a mark of a karmic past. In her seventh house associated with marriage. Manifesting a past marriage to the Atreidae. The Kennedys might think it is their women who are bringing misfortune upon them but instead it is their owned failed virtue that creates the disasters. Like Marilyn Monroe, Carolyn Bessette has a Grand Water Trine. The emotionally needy Cancer Moon becomes the Scorpio Neptune idealized obsession becomes the Pisces Chironic unhealed wound that becomes the emotional needy Cancer Moon… This is a whirlpool that can easily suck you down to the depths. Trinal energy flows and moves easily. As a Grand Trine it circles back to itself. Spinning, swirling in the sea.
If Maureen Callahan is to be believed the last flight that resulted in just this very sort of wreck was just the final chapter in a life where John F. Kennedy Jr., only son of President Kennedy, was continually flirting with just this sort of maelstrom. Neptunian themes appear often in stories about JFK Jr. He even had a long relationship with Darryl Hannah who gained her fame playing a mermaid. His father was buried on his 5th birthday and the open maw of the grave seems to have followed him until it swallowed him.
Carolyn Bessette was the sea. As a twelfth house sun, she was a siren calling sailors to the vortex. Charybdis. The twelfth house is Neptune’s natural house. Looking at her horoscope, I don’t buy the idea that the tumultous relationship they had was over sexual affairs and cheating. Her Aquarian planets of Mars and retrograde Venus just don’t show in that sort of way. That is not to say that affairs might not have happened. The other people in JFK Jr.’s life could be the issue. The sea is a possessive mistress but it wants body and soul. She had a Scorpio Neptune. At the famous screaming fight in the park, Carolyn literally ran after him and jumped on his back and wrapped herself around him. All-consuming. Neptune’s possession. Her Scorpio Neptune.
The park fight film reveals emotion and fighting. Mars and Moon. And a John’s Mars – Carolyn’s Moon conjunction is a hook between their natal horoscopes. This chart aspect is very primitive and, in the context of the rest of the charts, dark. Mars wants to impregnate the Moon. The Moon is the mother. An infant. Simply, Neptune is the maelstrom. Nirvana. The empty Dark Maw. The empty womb. Neptune is also the all-mother. Neptune is not the mother to just an infant but the mother of all things. If Neptune is empty, than the maelstrom is hungry. The sucking whirlpool. After Pisces comes Aries. The empty womb is filled and then the birth of something new and different.
JFK Jr.’s retrograde Mars is loosely conjunct the 21° Cancer asteroid Charybdis in his eleventh house. That asteroid is conjunct Carolyn’s 21° Cancer Moon in the sixth house. She wanted nothingness and, if she could not stop death, she could stop birth. John’s Mars is retrograde. Karmically, he had wanted to impregnate her before. He wanted to impregnate her now. I believe this was behind the fight in the park. Give me back my ring, if you don’t want to have my baby.
I have always associated Uranus with potency. It was Uranus whose genitals were sliced off by his son Saturn who impregnates Gaia and in his falling semen created more offspring including Aphrodite when his semen hits the oceanic foam. The eleventh house is Uranus’ natural house. John F. Kennedy, Jr. wanted to plant his ancestral seeds. Whether idea or semen. Cancer Mars in the eleventh. Carolyn’s Cancer Moon took on the shape of Carybdis the maelstrom for him. The gaping maw to him becomes the empty womb. Her womb represented the primitive creative lust Uranus had to impregnate Gaia.
Glamour. Allure. A word associated with Neptune. This couple had this quality. They walked around shimmering. Beneath the shimmer, lay the most base instincts to create life to fill the empty space. The grave of his father and ancestor. Her great inner whirlpool.
The synastry chart shows that John’s Mars could easily defeat her desire for nothingness. The sextile aspect means that the door was his to open. But in kind, the abyss waited on the other side, her Pluto. Pluto is the grave, the underworld and the abyss. Pluto and Scorpio is more about the pit than Neptune and Pisces’ nirvana. Still the water planets have this theme; Cancer’s womb, Pluto’s grave and Neptune’s maelstrom. He attacked the nothingness directly and easily could take or leave her Virgo Uranus-Pluto conjunction. The closest aspect in their charts is his Mars sextile to her Pluto. Fighting death. Planting his seed so he could fight death. In the end, like many in the myths before him he strayed too close and was swallowed by the maelstrom.