By Philip Brown

(originally published in The Mountain Astrologer, Dec. 1999/Jan. 2000)

 

Of his bones are coral made,

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange

---from The Tempest,

by William Shakespeare

 

            A nation had just lost its charismatic ruler. It was fervently hoped that his only son would pick up the father’s fallen mantle and follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, when he came of age the son consciously turned his back on his father’s heroic legacy and sought instead to experience life and love apart from his inherited title. However, he carried a wound that could never heal, no matter how hard he tried to escape its pain. It was also the country’s wound, for when the boy’s father was slain, there occurred a psychic rent in the fabric of the nation’s consciousness. Not only had a father and leader been slain, but the nation seemed to lose its confidence. A vast reservoir of optimism began to evaporate and the formerly robust land seemed to lose its vigor. Nevertheless, the nation continued to look to the son, the unwilling successor, for regeneration. At least, such is the myth—not of the Kennedys, but of the wounded Grail King, legendary guardian of the Holy Grail.

 

            President Kennedy’s assassination was an extremely painful experience for many. I can easily recall everything about that day from the moment I heard the news in my 10^th-grade biology class. I will never forget the sight of a leather-jacketed “greaser” sobbing uncontrollably as the high school public address system brought news of the president’s death.  When John. F. Kennedy, Jr.—his father’s namesake—perished suddenly and “out of the blue,” it touched a deep collective wound. In The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, William Strauss and Neil Howe apply their provocative generational theories to the cycles of history. They mark President Kennedy’s assassination as one of the major turning points of the 20^th Century: It “became a personal milestone for nearly everyone alive at the time…an irreversible inner change had begun. A new wedge was penetrating the national psyche.”¹

 

                The untimely death of the president’s son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., elicited several surprising results, not the least of which were the outpouring of public mourning and an almost compulsive need to attach some greater tragic or redemptive meaning to what was, in essence, a plane accident involving a celebrity pilot and his two female passengers. Indeed, some observers wondered why such a widely televised wake was conducted over the death of a young man who, if anything, tried hard not to be the famed heir to “Camelot.”

 

            An answer to this question lies in the possibility that JFK, Jr. carried a collective psychic wound, symbolized astrologically by his Moon-Chiron conjunction in Aquarius. JFK, Jr. was at the same time the guardian of an inheritance (the Kennedy “mantle”: Mars, ruler of JFK, Jr.’s 8^th house of legacies is in the political 11^th house) from which he consciously sought freedom (Sun in Sagittarius, Moon opposing Uranus, Mars opposing Saturn). The planetary configurations in JFK, Jr.’s natal chart are played out with disquieting similarities in the romance myth of Anfortas, the maimed Fisher King and guardian of the Holy Grail, and in the more ancient myth of Chiron. These myths help to yield an explanation for the overwhelming and public obsession with JFK, Jr.’s death, and, in so doing, reveal much about ourselves.

 

            The Grail King is part of a much larger story, one involving a “foolish” seeker after the Grail named Parsifal. The Holy Grail itself was said to be, variously, a talismanic stone, a chalice used to catch the blood of Christ, or the cup used at the Last Supper (the props and many of the characters are interchangeable in a myth, and there are indeed numerous variations of the Grail Quest). The Grail is, according to Joseph Campbell, in essence “the symbol of supreme spiritual value.”² Kept secretly in the Grail Castle, the Holy Grail was to be discovered only by spiritual seekers who met a particular condition: asking the right question. Joseph Campbell relates that the Grail King “…had been appointed to his sacred office. The earlier king, his father, had been slain; and the eldest son, a mere boy, had been chosen to succeed. Thus he was king not by virtue of his character and personal realization, but by inheritance, perforce: the role was to him…unearned, unrelated to his nature.”³

 

                Anfortas consciously turned his back on his position as guardian of the Grail, however, and left to look for “love.” In so doing, he encountered another who wounded Anfortas with a poisoned spear (in the hip or testicles). Though weakened by his wound, Anfortas was “nevertheless retained by his sorrowing people in his spiritual role, ever in hope of healing, but without event.”⁴ Coincident with the disabling wound to the Grail King, the land itself ceased to produce. Crops withered and died. Finally, Anfortas was healed and the Grail was discovered when the knight Parsifal asked of Anfortas a simple question that had heretofore gone unasked: “What ails thee?” With that question—a pre-condition to healing the Grail King’s wound—and by placement of the same spear in the King’s old wound, both Anfortas and the land were healed. At the very moment of healing, Anfortas was also physically transformed into a person of splendid beauty. Immediately thereafter, he died, and his title as well as the Grail itself were passed on to Parsifal.

 

            Much of this parallels the life and death of John Kennedy, Jr.: His own father was killed when he was a boy; the death of President Kennedy is considered by many to be our national loss of innocence, a turning point in the affairs of the nation, after which the land metaphorically ceased to produce its formerly optimistic bounty; the public looked to the son as the heir to “Camelot,” but that role was “unrelated to his nature” and he consciously turned his back on his political inheritance; JFK, Jr. was wounded emotionally by his father’s assassination and more recently by his mother’s death; JFK, Jr., the son and heir, was then himself killed suddenly, thus reawakening painful collective memories of his father’s death; and JFK, Jr. underwent in death a sudden transformation into an astonishing fin de siecle icon.

 

            The mythic Chiron also suffered a wound that would not heal…Symbolically, JFK, Jr. carried the conjunction of Chiron (wound) and the Moon (feminine). This conjunction certainly implies that JFK, Jr.’s loss of a father was made manifest to him through his mother. It also implies, though, through its placement in Aquarius and in opposition to its dispositor Uranus situated in the 12^th house, that somehow this lunar pain has become projected onto the collective unconscious. Aquarius is the water-bearer, and the liquescent pain (Moon-Chiron) has been poured from Kennedy’s 6^th house into the chalice of the watery, unconscious, and collective 12^th.

 

            Liz Greene notes that, “The sick or wounded father [i.e., the Grail King] in myth is an image of spiritual decay and the loss of hope and faith.”⁵ The goal of the quest is not just to reach the Grail, but also to redeem the father. The Sun is one symbol of the personal inheritance from the father. JFK, Jr.’s personal inheritance from his Sun-in-Gemini father was a 3^rd house Sun that squared the opposition of Moon-Chiron and Uranus. The focal point Sagittarius Sun (which opposes the father’s Sun in synastry) empties into the vacant 9^th house of seeking or questing—not to mention publishing and flying. JFK Jr.’s 9^th house is ruled by Venus, which, by secondary progression, exactly conjuncted his natal Chiron at the time of the fatal plane crash. At the same time, transiting Chiron squared its natal position in his chart. As these planets clicked into place, like tumblers in a spinning combination lock, the door to the vault housing the collective wound swung open.

 

            Zane Stein writes that those possessing a Moon-Chiron conjunction “can be great sawyers of people’s emotions because they can tune into some feeling common to everyone—some emotion everyone can identify themselves with.”⁶ We turn more and more to celebrities for meaning and nurture. They have become for many our contemporary gods and goddesses. Indeed, in this age of Pluto in Sagittarius, many sports and entertainment stars seem to make enough money to purchase Jupiter, let alone live comfortably here on planet Earth. George W.S. Trow, in a fascinating book called Within the Context of No Context, observes with a touch of irony that “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million. For them, there is no distance between the two grids in American life. Of all Americans, only they are complete.”⁷ In other words, celebrities are Chironic fusions of the isolated self (Saturn) and the collective (Uranus). Kennedy’s “intimate life” (his Moon-Chiron conjunction) was projected onto “life in the grid of two hundred million” (Uranus in the 12^th house opposing Moon-Chiron). In this way, the one (Saturn) is merged with the many (Uranus), a link that is symbolized by Chiron, as well as the Grail King, for there has come to be “a desolating sense of not only no divinity within,” writes Joseph Campbell, “…but also of no participation in divinity without…and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul.”⁸ This is why, perhaps, we accord celebrities—especially ones whose wounds have pained us deeply—rites reserved in ages past for divine beings.

 

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Chart Data and Sources

 

John F. Kennedy, Jr., November 25, 1960; 12:22 a.m. EST; Washington, DC; news report quotes his mother.

 

Plane crash, July 16, 1999; 9:38 p.m. EDT; Martha’s Vineyard, MA; news report, based on last radar contact.

 

References

 

1. William Strauss and Neil Howe, The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, New York, NY: Broadway Books, 1997, p. 171.
2. Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology: The Masks of God, New York, NY: Penguin Arkana, 1991, p. 564.
3. Campbell, 392.
4. Campbell, 393.
5. Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and the Moon in the Horoscope, York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1992, p. 98.
6. Zane Stein, Essence and Application: A View from Chiron, Toledo, OH: Zane B. Stein, 1995, p. 38.
7. George W.S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context, New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1980, p. 48.
8. Campbell, 394.