CHAPTER FIVE:
Two Hundred Years of Growth Through Crisis - 7

The U.S. birth chart features a square of Jupiter to Saturn from two angular Houses — the seventh and tenth. This square aspect is one of wide orb, but the presence of the Sun near Jupiter and in close square aspect to Saturn ties the whole pattern together; it also involves Venus and Mercury. Because the seventh and tenth Houses are fields of activity implying relationships with other entities (in this case, other nations), it should be clear that international issues and America's relation to the world community are essentially tense and crisis-producing, or — to put it differently — they involve problems of consciousness and spiritual tests of behavior. This can obviously be made to refer to the lasting issue arising from our early isolationism, as well as from our hesitancy and insecurity in accepting the mantle of world leadership and atomic power when it was Placed upon our national shoulders.
      The tense aspect of the relationship between Jupiter and Saturn in the U.S. birth chart may have something to do with the fact that every President who assumed office under a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn has died in office. At least this has been the case since the conjunctions occurred in Earth signs of the zodiac — since 1842. The following list shows the times and zodiacal degrees of these conjunctions from the middle of the eighteenth century through the twentieth century.

This is not the place for a lengthy discussion of the characteristic features of the sequence of the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in zodiacal signs. These conjunctions fall successively in Fire, Earth, Air and Water signs.(5) Suffice it to say that after moving from the Fire series to the Earth series in 1802, one anomalous conjunction still occurred in a Fire sign, Aries 1821); and while the series of conjunctions in Earth signs does not end before the year 2000, nevertheless a triple conjunction occurs in the Air sign, Libra, in 1981. Whether or not the President taking office in 1981 will die in office — as did those elected in 1842, 1861, 1881, 1901, 1921 and 1941 — remains to be seen. The conjunction of May 2000 should be extremely important, as it occurs concurrently with a massing of seven planets in Taurus, very much as it did in 1881.

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5. Fire signs are Aries, Leo, Sagittarius; Earth signs are Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn; Air signs are Gemini, Libra, Aquarius; and Water signs are Cancer, Scorpio, Pisces.  Return