JFK, Psychohistory, and the Solomon Wave in the Stock Market

Popular interest in astrology, dungeons and dragons, angels, or draconian Halloween rituals attests at least to a deep and abiding belief that symbolic entities and forces influence human action. But few such beliefs ever generate testable scientific predictions or achieve scientific respectability. Does that mean, therefore, that symbolic elements have no substance to them, do not have a place in science, or are of no value in anticipating the future? Perhaps we are looking in the wrong places. Perhaps symbols do have a mysterious, unknown yet quantum, etiological significance in forecasting human behavior, but we haven’t found the appropriate venue yet.

Myths (magical legends), “collective dreams,” and what psychohistorians call “shared group-fantasies” (like the O.J. Simpson story) may not only help us understand our world once we decipher them but in some cases, may actually foreshadow or prefigure, even predict, certain mass psychological events. At prior psychohistory conferences, I attempted to show that the symbolic structure and motif of the Lindbergh myth anticipated World War II, and that the assassination of John F. Kennedy similarly revealed a symbolic structure and set of motifs that anticipates or prefigures the death of the American dream.

Consider the oscillating German-Jewish sub-text of the Lindbergh myth. In 1927 one of Lindbergh’s associates scribbled a swastika “for good luck” on the propeller of the Spirit of St. Louis. Lindbergh’s major patron after his historical flight was a Jew. The man who was charged with investigating the kidnapping of Lindbergh’s son the “crime of the century” was of German descent. The murderer who concocted this dastardly deed was a German, but he pleaded that he was innocent and tried to

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blame the crime on his scapegoat, a Jew. The man who successfully prosecuted the baby-killer and saw to his execution was a Jew. Then at the threshold of World War II, Lindbergh visited Nazi Germany. At a dinner party, Goring surprisingly pinned a German Eagle on his chest and thus “initiated” Lone Eagle Lindy into a completely new identity, one that would fully tarnish his image and terminate his tenure as America’s penultimate hero. The German-Jewish subtext to the Lindbergh story points to one conclusion: it is a myth, one that prefigured and foreshadowed World War II like a dream, an omen, a collective premonition.

When we apply the same mythic focus to the Kennedy saga different information filters through. Virtually 85% of the leading characters in the Kennedy myth had a mental instability or disability, including the Sybarite President himself. John F. Kennedy slept with over 27 women in the White House during his term in office. J. Edgar Hoover suffered from paranoid dementia and transvestitism. Lee Harvey Oswald had a borderline personality disorder. Jack Ruby was a psychotic delusional depressive. And the historical stage was littered by sociopaths as well: Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante, John Roselli, Jimmy Hoffa, Carlos Marcello and Joseph Kennedy. Today there are five times as many categories of mental illness in DSM as there were in 1952. Population has doubled, but mental illness quintupled. It is as if the Kennedy myth symbolically foreshadowed a number of megatrends in American society.

Indeed, when one puts on the spectacles of the psychohistorian, the mythic journey is not over; it merely began on November 22, 1963. As long as Jackie Kennedy kept making the cover of People magazine, or John Kennedy, Jr.’s romantic interests pepper our supermarket tabloids, the psychic energy invested in the Kennedy odyssey means the myth is still unfolding. The American national character has had two “big” dreams this century, and such dreams are never about incidental matters or extraneous minutiae. They are mammoth psychic events which point to even greater collective tragedies and catastrophes, and the meaning of the JFK myth is not merely foreboding but cataclysmic.

One Mafia historian, when asked “Who killed JFK?”, answered that Kennedy was killed by the “dark side of the American dream.” Certainly the myth is about the dark side of Kennedy who with his father bartered with the Mafia for power and women, but it is more importantly about the shadow, the Jungian shadow, the dark side of the collective American dream which went on an instinctual rampage for the next 33 years after Kennedy’s assassination: deficit spending, sexual profligacy, drug abuse, and crime. As JFK’s conscious “manifest” content pleaded with the American people to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” very much the opposite, shadow side burst into reality, far in excess of population growth. The latent content of the Kennedy dream spells out in bold letters the prophetic death of the American dream.

The death obviously has not yet happened, and the theory has been condemned to exile in that uncomfortable psychocyberspace called “pure speculation.” While waiting, and ensconced in this kind of dark thinking, I wondered if and how symbolic factors might also be related to, govern, or predict human economic activity a symbolic model of stock market fluctuations, in other words. On the face of it, a symbolic approach to the stock market, represented by the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), would probably be thought of as utterly far-fetched. But against the backdrop of some of the other wild and woolly Wall Street prognostications, it might not be that ridiculous. Is it not interesting, for example, that after both Presidential assassinations in this century, McKinley in 1901 and Kennedy in 1963, the stock market took off in exponential, almost parabolic, fashion over the next few decades? See Figure 1. Is there some symbolic meaning inherent in a Presidential assassination which is somehow linked to economic activity?

Figure 1

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There is obviously much economic psychohistorical commentary which can be brought to link the 1901-1934 and 1963-1996 post-assassination periods. Parallels of greed and lust clearly exist between the mania of the Roaring Twenties and of the 1980s and today: debt, arbitrageurs, relaxed credit, margin buying, takeovers, unbridled explosions of speculation and greed, the liberation of women, the decrease of inhibition, and blood imagery. Collective mania and euphoria precede a crash. The proof that we are recapitulating this manic euphoria of the Roaring Twenties is given by an obvious money trail. In the last few months the number of individual investors contributing to mutual funds, cash inflows to mutual funds, and even the number of mutual funds in existence have reached record highs. The mania is alive and thriving. It would be well to observe that the hit film in 1929 before the crash was called Chasing Rainbows and the lead song was “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

If we permit ourselves some speculation, enter the Solomon Wave, a DJIA stock market model based entirely on symbolic meanderings, most particularly the number 3 and its derivatives: 33, 666, 6.66, and 66.6. Recall that 666 is the number of the beast in Revelation 13:18, the sign of the devil, an obviously appropriate symbol for the Jungian “shadow,” and in the Kennedy myth the shadow plays an extremely important role. Curiously, Kennedy was nominated with 666 delegates at the Democratic convention on the first ballot (although his final delegate count was higher). The number 3 also plays a significant role in the fable: JFK had 3 children (one of whom died at birth), was President for 3 years, and was fired upon in Dealey Plaza, the myth insists, by only 3 bullets. Oswald was rejected by Marina 3 times before he went off to kill the President. There were 33 members of his fictional Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and he was fascinated by Pushkin’s Queen of Spades where the number 3 plays a repeating and significant role. Demented Jack Ruby had an obsession with dogs, called one of them his “wife,” and named her “Sheba.” Biblical Sheba was known for the gift of 666 talents of gold she gave Solomon (1 Kings 10:14). From that gift and through his sacred hexagram Solomon is associated with the number 666. Hence, the Solomon Wave.

Figure 2

Basing a stock market model on such purely symbolic wanderings, the theory of the Solomon Wave in the DJIA is shown in Figure 2. It includes only four basic concepts: (1) the cycles begin in Presidential assassination years, (2) they are 33 years long, (3) their peaks are 6.66 times their starting points, and (4) after a crash, the market sometime in the 33rd year will be at a low point only slightly higher than where the cycle began. This low level multiplied by .666 gives us the very beginning point of the cycle, which is 33% lower than the ending point. The Wave does not predict when the peak is reached, but it does predict its magnitude.

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This may sound absurdly technical, totally arbitrary yet capricious and random, and fully off-the-wall, but these four concepts generate an astonishingly close fit indeed, an exact fit for the DJIA from 1901 to 1934. See Figure 3. (1) McKinley was assassinated in 1901. (2) The cycle ran for 33 years 1901-1934.(3) The 1901 DJIA high was 57.Multiplying 57 by 6.66 gives 380. The market reached a top in 1929 of 382, just 2 points (or .5%) greater than the model’s 6.66 multiplier predicted! (4) In 1934 the low was 84. Multiplying 84 by .666 brings us one point shy of where the cycle began at 57! The beginning high of the first 33-year Solomon Wave in the DJIA is 33% lower than its ending low.

Figure 3

Figure 4

Let’s apply the theory to a presumed 1963-1996 33-year cycle. See Figure 4. (1) Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. (2) The cycle will run for 33 years 1963-1996. (3) The 1963 DJIA high was 767. Multiplying 767 by 6.66 gives 5108. We are very close to it at press time. (November 22’s assassination anniversary DJIA close was 5042 exactly 66 points lower than our projected peak of 5108.) (4) Dividing 767, the level where the cycle began, by .666 (to find a number that 767 is 33% less than) yields 1152, which should be the DJIA’s Solomon Wave cyclic low sometime in 1996. This would not merely be a steep decline or a crash, but would usher in another Great Depression.

One added concept might be applied to this analysis. What if the crash point of these two 33-year cycles was 66.6 years apart? This might be consistent with our symbolic numerology, but would it be consistent with reality? Here is where our extrapolations and speculations become redoubtable. The crash of 1996 should occur in late May/early June precisely 66.6 years after the crash of October 29, 1929, and 33 years after the assassination of JFK. Just as the 1929 high occurred in early September prior to the crash in late October, the 1963-1996 cycle peak of 5108 could be reached and the decline to 1152 could be well underway any time prior to the projected crash time period.

The Solomon Wave is quite an apocalyptic and cataclysmic “symbolic” model for the death of the American dream, the end of the “American Century,” and the millennium. It is based on an assumption that symbolic entities and forces do influence collective human action, and it is derived from an analysis of the Kennedy myth. Psychohistorians search through the tea leaves of history and the unconscious residue of myth, delusion, and dream. Occasionally we find curious numbers and coincidences colliding into one another, as in this instance, and though we feel a need to communicate our observations and speculations to our colleagues, we can only keep our fingers crossed and hope our meanderings at least this time are fully repudiated.

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