In Greek mythology there is a family that is cursed by the gods for impiety. Known as the House of Atreus, each generation receives gifts from the gods but acts out their impiety and brings further reproach upon the family. Character is destiny. Spiritual nobility builds virtue. Spiritual willfulness stores vice as karma.
The House of Kennedy suffers from this type of curse. The family suffers from a form of karma that is tied into the gens or clan of the family. The House of Atreus is cursed multiple times over many generations and each generation works out their destiny according to their character.
The wedding horoscope of Joseph Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald is the best chart describing the Kennedy curse. In the chart, Joseph is represented by Pluto, the ruler of the Ascendant, and Rose is represented by his partner Ceres, the ruler of the Descendant.
Curse Astrological Pattern. The Kennedy-Fitzgerald curse has been highlighted. In many ways, this astrological pattern is not a curse of punishment. It is a pattern that is a test with public consequences. That is the meaning of the planetary duo located at the top of the triangle. To maintain his honor, Perseus had to slay the gorgon Medusa, a feat no man had ever survived. That myth lies at the heart of the curse. A triangle in astrology flows in a certain way. The red square pattern (asteroid Atreus to Midheaven) sets up the crises, the semi-sextile (Atreus to Pluto-Saturn) is the reaction choice to the crises, followed by the sextile pattern (Pluto-Saturn to Midheaven) which act as the conclusions.
The retrograde Cancer Pluto is conjunct Saturn (♇♄). This is the glyph of Perseus. There was an ancient connection between the House of Atreus and Perseus. Four sisters of Atreus marry four sons of Perseus. That is indeed what the wedding chart is telling us. The asteroid Atreus lies in the seventh house which, in a wedding horoscope, represents the house of the bride. Rose Fitzgerald’s natal asteroid Atreus is conjunct the Moon and Descendant. This is a strong astrological restatement that the Fitzgeralds are the origin of the curse but it is inactive in Rose’s natal chart until her marriage to Joseph Kennedy. Joseph Kennedy is marrying a daughter of a cursed house. That is an interesting pattern in the Kennedy family that the individual’s curse crisis often comes from their marriage.
Joseph Kennedy was born with a retrograde Gemini Pluto conjunct Pallas and retrograde Neptune (♇⚴♆). Neptune is at 2° Gemini conjunct the Marriage asteroid Atreus. Joseph Kennedy’s power fantasies will become the source of the Kennedy curse. It is his dreams that set up the crises. Kennedy has a dream about his clan or sept (Gemini). He is not focused on his natal family (Cancer).
The Neptune-Pluto conjunction (♇♆) of the late 1880s is present in both Joseph Kennedy’s chart and Rose Fitzgerald’s chart. Public figures often demonstrate the archetype of these transpersonal alignments. This particular conjunction occurs only once every 492 years and it heralds the death and transformation of dreams.
Pluto is the archetype of rebirth and inheritance. Reproduction that creates children that are heirs to the family. Pluto often represents your grandparents and your grandchildren. Due to the nature of female reproduction, the first person that nurtured the first part of you was your maternal grandmother. At the time of your mother’s gestation, she formed all of her eggs and one of those eggs is half of your DNA. That means the first half of you was present while your mother was still in her mother’s womb. That is the rebirth of Pluto. The connection to a past generation and a connection to a future generation. More than the natal family the familial lineage. Pluto represents the emotional residue of generations past.
The Kennedys had left Ireland in 1849 to escape the potato famine and they had fallen far. Joseph Kennedy’s grandfather, Patrick, was the third son of a small farmer with no prospects struggling to feed himself but he knew his family had once been rulers of Ireland from a nephew of Brian Boru. They had lost Ormond to the English sometime after 1546. It was only in 1740 that the family had left their homeland and moved to New Ross, Ireland. Now they had to leave Ireland altogether. The Fitzgeralds arrived during the potato famine as well.
The Irish potato famine has strong Plutonic overtones. The Irish planted potatoes during the blight for five years and blamed the English for their woes. They persisted in planting a crop that failed. Blame shifting is notoriously a habit seen in Scorpio. Pluto is a kidnapper and seeking to blame another for the crime is a way to keep everything secret. The end of the famine came only when the Irish planted beans and barley in the fifth year of the Great Hunger and then the famine ended fast. The answer was simple and the Scottish and English who suffered from the blight of the potato crop quickly seized on the answer, they stopped planting potatoes and immediately switched to beans and barley. There was no Scottish potato famine nor English potato famine. The Irish starved and abandoned their country rather than change the crops they planted.
The death of neighborhood and clan (retrograde Gemini Pluto) weighed heavily on these grandchildren of Irish immigrants. They also carried dreams of that community. For them, Ireland was both a dream and a nightmare. Pluto requires us to let go and yet these grandchildren would need to let go not only of what had died but their old dreams. The world was on the verge of a monstrous cataclysm that would require an entirely new dream.
Joseph Kennedy harbored a dream of becoming President of the United States and, in November 1940, as the U.S. Ambassador to St James’ Court during the Battle of Britain as the British were fighting for their nation’s life and against the policy of the President he gave a newspaper interview in which he said “Democracy is finished in England. It may be here [in the United States].” At this seminal moment, when his generation was facing the cataclysm promised at their birth, Joseph Kennedy and his parochial dreams clashed with reality and he found himself on the sidelines. A year later in November 1941, he took his firstborn daughter to a clinic and destroyed her life in the belief it would aid him in his political ambitions.
Agamemnon wanted to gain glory by sailing with the Spartans to Troy for the Trojan war. The goddess Artemis had stopped the wind from filling Agamemnon’s sails. He had angered her when he killed a sacred deer in her grove. She required the sacrifice of the most precious thing that had come into his life in the same year and so he called for his firstborn daughter, Iphigenia, to marry Achilles. When she arrived, he sacrificed her so he could sail for Troy and set off the chain of events that would destroy his family.
Joseph Kennedy grew afraid that Rosemary would destroy his power fantasy so he destroyed her. Rosemary’s lobotomy left her incontinent and unable to walk and speak. Her father hid her far away in an institution. Afterward, he provided her everything she physically needed but never went to visit her and kept the family away from her. Although he had not realized its fact, he sacrificed his firstborn daughter one year after he had already destroyed his own chances at the political career he wanted. Joseph Kennedy’s lack of character brought the Atreidae curse upon the House of Kennedy.
Joe Kennedy Fails the Test. He had a grand dream of presiding over America but he felt this would be blocked by his mentally disturbed daughter, his Neptune-Pallas-Pluto (♇⚴♆) conjunct marriage Atreus square marriage Midheaven conjunct Rosemary’s Virgo Mercury. This set up the crisis and triggered the curse (asteroid Atreus). He reacted by playing the role of the marriage Cancer Perseus (♇♄) and the piety test was upon him. Having a severe lack of positive virtues, he was greedy, an adulterer, a renown coward and gloryhound, he decided his ambitions were more valuable than his family and he sacrificed his daughter’s mind (her 2° Virgo Mercury). One of the consequences of his test was the public knowledge that he destroyed his child’s mind to prop up his already lost reputation, status and chance at his dream. This is the Marriage Midheaven conjunct Rosemary’s Venus-Mercury conjunction. He had a choice he could destroy Rosemary or he could champion her. His willful reaction resulted in him being blocked from attaining his dream and unleashed the curse onto his family with Rosemary Kennedy as its first victim (her natal Pisces Ascendant).
The Murder of Oenomaus & The Olympic Games
The doomed House of Atreus suffers misfortune through multiple generations of the family from Tantalus – Pelops – Atreus – Agamemnon – Orestes with mulitiple other related family members involved. Tantalus begins the curse by killing and roasting his son Pelops for a banquet for the gods to their disgust and ends with Orestes killing his mother to avenge his father knowing he is dooming himself. He understands piety but has no good choice so he chooses the action that dooms himself. The curse is then removed from the family at his trial by the gods.
Pelops wanted to marry Hippodamia. Prophesized to be killed by his son-in-law, her father Oenomaus challenges all her suitors to a chariot race and slays the losers. Pelops promises Oenomaus’ charioteer Myrtilus the wedding night with Hippodamia and half of the kingdom of Olympia. Myrtilus replaces the bronze linchpins of the chariot with beeswax and the stage is set for Oenomaus to perish. Once Oenomaus is dragged to death by his horses, Pelops breaks his promise and kills Myrtilus who curses him. Pelops marries Hippodamia and becomes King of Olympia.
The murder of Oenomaus causes Pelops to start the Olympic Games in an attempt to thank the gods and as funeral games for Oenomaus in an attempt to purify himself of his death. In 1941, Joseph Kennedy, worried about his political career, secretly arranged for his daughter Rosemary to have a lobotomy. Rosemary survived in this state, institutionalized with her location unknown to her siblings for decades. Her mother didn’t visit her for twenty years and her father never visited her. Only when he had a stroke and lost the ability to speak did her siblings learn where she was. Only when he died was she allowed to visit family. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, her younger sister, founded the Special Olympics.
The virtuous man or woman creates karma that propels themselves and others forward. Bad things happen to all people but virtue shapes its spiritual meaning. Eunice Kennedy is the fifth child of the Kennedy-Fitzgerald marriage and the first who appears to have lived her life without being unduly personally affected by the curse. Eunice’s love of her sister (2° Gemini Venus) blocks her approach of service. She reacts by championing her and others like Rosemary and as a result she becomes publicly known for her philanthropy and service to the disabled. Eunice is the foil of her father.
She first watched her eldest sister Rosemary being cruelly sacrificed for her father’s fantasies of glory for himself, followed by her eldest brother, Joe Jr. dying in World War II in attempt to best his younger brother’s war hero status, next, shunned by her mother, her older sister Kathleen died ignominously in a plane crash with her married lover just after the war, and Eunice responded by embarking on a career in social work and charity.
Eunice had a part to play in the Kennedy curse. She publically displayed her love for her sibling Rosemary and her community. She demonstrated by the way she lived her life that she had the character to respond to the curse with piety and service. Spiritual nobility could easily be described as Leo in the twelfth house. Spiritual nobility builds virtues. The effect of Leo in the twelfth is felt as Virgo in the first. The forceful expression of virtue. The virtuous warrior (Virgo Ascendant) has spiritual nobility (Leo in the twelfth). This is the positive version of this astrological pattern. That is the karmic ethos of Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s horoscope. The negative of this is shown when Joe Kennedy’s vainglory built negative virtues or vice.
The asteroid Orestes, the Atreidae who finally ends the curse by fulfilling it with his own doom, is conjunct Eunice’s Imum Coeli and tightly sextile her Moon. Both the Imum Coeli (I.C.) and the Moon are astrological markers of the past. She had acted to save her family before. The Special Olympics are her offering to the gods on behalf of her family to purify the family from the act of sacrificing Rosemary, Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his firstborn daughter Iphigenia, for family glory. Ending the curse of the Kennedys was not her work, only the legitimate heir apparent, Orestes, can end the curse.
The Heir Apparent
Joe Kennedy Jr. was the heir apparent. The entire family had great hopes in him. When his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, announced his birth he told the newspapers that the child was the future President. Joe Jr. was following a career that would groom him for the job. His chart contains a pattern that highlights his belief that he would be the man who would choose doom and end the curse of the family.
Joe Jr. arrived at his curse test believing he would be the one to end it. Natal asteroid Orestes conjunct Marriage asteroid Atreus. This belief was blocked by an event that had occurred almost a year before and that set up the crisis. Now he would need to advance and use his 2° Cancer Pluto conjunct the Midheaven to react.
Joe Jr. went into the military even though he admired Hitler and planned to run for Congress once the war ended. As a naval aviator he was able to complete enough missions to come home but six months prior to that his younger brother had been involved in his own curse incident that had gained him status as a decorated war hero. The result was his brother had sustained serious injuries while still saving his surviving crew. This had also seen young John Kennedy tow a badly burned crewmember through miles of shark and crocodile infested waters twice using the strap of a life preserver clenched in his teeth. His father had publicized the story.
Young John Kennedy had found his life and his serving crews’ lives in danger (natal Gemini Sun conjunct explosion Gemini Vesta) floating in the twelfth house. Blocked from being able to return to his community, he had persevered and used his own 3° Cancer Pluto in the first house to physically swim to various islands until he could get a message to United States forces. They had rescued him and his men six days after the destruction of PT-109.
The Death of Orestes. Joe Jr. decided he should seek a similiar story and so he volunteered for a dangerous mission. Flying a remote controlled drone aircraft packed with explosives planning to bail out, he never gets the chance. They arm the plane and two minutes later it explodes killing him and his co-pilot. The family member who can save the entire family is killed, his body vaporized. The Kennedy family nevers recovers from this disaster. The only potential opportunity in this generation to end the curse dies, accomplishing nothing.
This is when the curse really starts rolling like a wrecking ball through the family. The next group of follow on effects will be explored in Part II of the Astrology of the Kennedy Curse.