There is a famous legend called Tecumseh's Curse that says that when William Henry Harrison defeated the Shawnee at the Battle of Tippecanoe, Chief Tecumseh's shaman brother Tenskwatawa levied a curse on the "Great White Fathers" that started with Harrison's death just after taking the oath of presidential office in 1841. For the next 120 years, every president elected in a twenty year interval — Lincoln in 1860, Garfield in 1880, McKinley in 1900, Harding in 1920, FDR in 1940, JFK in 1960 — died while in office. Indeed, every president except Zachary Taylor who has died while in office was elected under this twenty-year cycle.
Starting in 1980, the curse took a new twist: Ronald Reagan didn't die while in office but his life was almost ended by an assassination attempt. Following in 2000 was George W. Bush, who also had a close call with death when a would-be assassin lobbed a grenade at him, but it failed to detonate. It seemed that Tecumseh's Curse had lightened up to become Tecumseh's Bluff.
There is a striking astrological correlation here. Every doomed president was elected for a term that coincided with a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which runs on a roughly 20-year cycle. This conjunction was seen in ancient times as a portent for major shifts in power, whether from war, natural disaster, popular uprising, or death of a king. Even in the cases of Reagan and Bush, while they did not die in office they represented a very new way of governing (the Reagan Revolution, the Bush Doctrine), and this theme carries on today with Joe Biden, elected just before the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 2020, whose administration has explicitly worked to reverse the Reagan and Bush policies that have distorted the nation's values.
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