Other biographical patterns with a comparable archetypal character were equally evident during these years of the Saturn return, age twenty-eight to thirty, as for example the tendency to take on a new level of personal responsibility and achieve a new degree of personal independence (Margaret Fuller becomes editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial; Abigail Adams, with her husband John away in public service for most of a decade, raises their family and runs household, farm, and business largely by herself from age twenty-nine, establishes her own independent sensibility and finds her own voice in writing her letters). Or one leaves the wanderings of youth to enter one’s mature calling (“The irresponsible days of my youth are over,” Tennessee Williams wrote of the moment, age twenty-nine, when he received a telegram in Mexico from the Theatre Guild that requested him to return to New York for his first Broadway production). One’s first film is directed (Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Godard’s Breathless, Fellini’s Luci del Varietà, Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou); one’s first mature work is produced (Kafka writes The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes The Great Gatsby, Camus writes The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, Saul Bellow writes The Dangling Man, Allen Ginsberg writes Howl); one establishes one’s public persona (Aurore Dupin employs the nom de plume George Sand and publishes her first novel Indiana, Samuel Clemens publishes his first literary work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, under the nom de plume Mark Twain). Or one meets the mentor or model for one’s subsequent development (Augustine meets Bishop Ambrose, Melville befriends Hawthorne, Freud studies with Charcot, Jung begins correspondence with Freud, Pablo Neruda encounters Federico García Lorca). Or one moves to the location and cultural milieu in which one’s life work will begin to unfold (Leonardo moves to Milan to work in the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, Rousseau moves to Paris and meets Diderot and the encyclopedists, Gertrude Stein moves to Paris and establishes her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus).
The Saturn return transit generally coincided with what might be called a period of biographical crystallization, visible not only in external events such as those just cited but also in a certain solidifying of the individual’s psychic constitution and establishing of the basic structure of the personality. William James believed that after age thirty a person’s character was “set in plaster.” Yet depending on the individual’s specific response to the pressures and circumstances of these critical years, this maturation and solidification could actually entail a new level of personal autonomy and self-reliance that had been unattainable in the years just before, a new confidence grounded in self-knowledge and the sense of having found one’s direction or purpose. Many factors seemed relevant for understanding the variability among the experiences of different individuals during this period, including differences in how the person led his or her life before the transit and differences between the birth charts of the individuals involved.
On occasion, the achievement of maturational independence and individuation seemed to inhibit or close down the sources of creativity that were previously accessible in youth, as if the spontaneous influx from a kind of creative wellspring could not survive the transition into maturity. With certain highly creative young artists, the crystallization of personality and maturational pressures of the Saturn return period resulted in an individuation that both climaxed and effectively ended the more freely experimental creativity of their twenties (a creativity that typically began during the Uranus square Uranus transit of the late teens and early twenties). A notable example of this pattern is the case of the four Beatles: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. After the period of brilliant group creativity sustained through their twenties, from 1962 to 1969, the four musicians decisively moved away from each other in the course of their Saturn return transits, preferring individual songwriting, bringing forth their first solo albums, and establishing marital relationships that precluded the close creative bond of the preceding years. The work the four men produced during their respective Saturn return periods between age twenty-eight and thirty, which began in 1968 and extended into the early 1970s, marked the climax of their creative lives, as embodied both in their extraordinary final albums as Beatles (the double White Album, Let It Be, Abbey Road) and in the first solo albums that each produced. After the age of thirty, their individual efforts seldom attained the creative brilliance of their youth, as if that particular form of creativity had flourished best as a kind of spontaneous collective influx through the group mind of the young Beatles, and ceased to thrive after the assimilation of the Saturn principle of maturity, separation, self-reliance, and serious engagement with the realities of the individual life associated with the period of the Saturn return.
I found that individual variations in the experiences during this period also closely corresponded with the other outer-planet transits that happened to coincide with the Saturn return, transits that varied from person to person according to their uniquely configured natal chart. (Only a transit of a planet to its own natal position happens to everyone at approximately the same time of life, as with the cycles of transiting Uranus to natal Uranus and of transiting Saturn to natal Saturn that we have been discussing.) The specific quality of the events and responses that occurred during an individual’s Saturn return seemed to be affected by the distinctive character of the archetypal principles associated with these other coinciding planetary transits.
Such a case is vividly exemplified in the life of William James, whose Saturn return transit happened to coincide with the once-in-a-lifetime transit of Uranus opposite natal Sun, a transit that I observed consistently coincided with periods of sudden personal emancipation and creative breakthrough with a sense of self-awakening or self-liberation. When James was in his twenty-ninth year, he experienced a crisis of depression and anxiety that reached nearly suicidal intensity. This emotional crisis was closely linked with his sustained philosophical struggle with the nature of free will and determinism, both scientific and theological. He experienced this struggle at a personal level in the form of a general sense of oppressive existential constraint and moral impotence. One day while reading the work of the French philosopher Charles Renouvier on free will, James suddenly saw his way clear to a resolution of the crisis, deciding that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” From this pivotal moment can be traced the subsequent unfolding of James’s life and thought, with his distinctive lifelong philosophical commitment to human freedom, individual autonomy, creative unpredictability, and pragmatic flexibility in response to an indeterminate open universe.
Human freedom is…a special case of universal indeterminism. My future, though continuous with my past, is not determined by it. Just so the future of the world; although it grows out of the total past, it is not a mere result of that past. If I am creative—that is, if human freedom is effectual—then the world is creative, if for no other reason than that I am part of the world. What is constant in my behavior is the result of habits which never entirely lose their flexibility. In the same way the constancies charted by the laws of science are only more inveterate habits.
James’s case exemplifies a distinctive synthesis of the two different archetypal impulses at work in correlation with the two transits. On the one hand, we see the characteristic biographical tendencies of the Saturn return period: the occurrence of a personal crisis involving an encounter with mortality, a general sense of existential contraction and enforced maturational development, a life decision establishing an enduring personal commitment and philosophical perspective, the crystallization of lifelong character traits, and the occurrence of a pivotal development establishing the direction of one’s career (his appointment as lecturer at Harvard). On the other hand, the outcome of this period also bore the distinctive archetypal character of the Promethean themes and qualities typical of a major Uranus transit to the natal Sun: the sudden personal emancipation from a constraining reality, a new and unexpected sense of freedom of th
e self, a newly awakened capacity for the active assertion of the individual will, the discovery of a path of self-expression liberating one’s creativity, and a new experience of creative indeterminacy in the world itself.
I found that a similarly decisive threshold of transformation, with similar individual variability, consistently coincided with the second Saturn return transit one full Saturn cycle later. Taking place during a three-year period approximately between the ages of fifty-seven and sixty, the period of the second Saturn return was typically marked by some form of culmination, completion, or cyclical closure of the processes and structures that had been established during the first Saturn return three decades earlier, including one’s work and career, significant relationships, and basic existential attitudes. Again, a deep encounter with the limits and mortal realities of human existence was typical (as expressed, for example, in Tolstoy’s great novella The Death of Ivan Illich, written during his second Saturn return). An acute awareness that the end of life was now closer than its beginning characteristically intensified existential concerns about what one’s life had accomplished, what values had been served, whether one’s current commitments reflected the reality of the finite time remaining. The entire spectrum of motifs and tendencies associated with the Saturn archetype again seems to be constellated during this moment in life coincident with the completion of the planet Saturn’s orbit: age, mortality, gravity of concern, self-judgment, duty, worldly status, work and value, endings of things, the passing of an era, a decisive maturational threshold.
The approach of the age of sixty generally seemed to mark a fundamental moment of biographical transformation with a quality suggestive of cyclical completion, life review, and structural reconfiguration in certain respects not unlike the first Saturn return. In this later period, however, the completion and reconfiguration was taking place after, at the other end of, the thirty-year cycle of adult activity and responsibility in the world. It mediated the transition into what in traditional societies would be called the status of elderhood, whether this transition connotes simply age and the consequences of time and life’s labors or a notably new level of societal responsibility, well-earned respect, personal gravitas, or wisdom grounded in long experience. Often the character of this period suggested the theme of reaping what had been sown, for better or worse. A new stage of life was beginning, at once older and yet also, sometimes, lighter—as if a task has been completed, a burden lifted, an obligation discharged—a cycle of Saturn completed. Both Saturn return periods seemed to function as a kind of constricting birth canal that bodied forth the next stage of life.
Before and after these cyclical conjunction periods of the Saturn cycle near the ages of thirty and sixty is a further noteworthy pattern of correlations involving the ongoing sequence of quadrature alignments in the personal Saturn transit cycle after birth and after each conjunction—the square, the opposition, and the next square followed by the subsequent conjunction. These quadrature aspects occur in intervals approximately every seven to seven and a half years, and last for about a year each time. The first Saturn-square-Saturn transit takes place near the age of seven; the opposition transit takes place around age fourteen to fifteen; the next square sometime between twenty-one and twenty-three. After the first Saturn return at the age of twenty-eight to thirty, the cycle begins again, continuing in approximately seven-year intervals throughout life.
I found that these transits marked with an almost clocklike regularity periods of critical transformation, maturational crises, pivotal decisions, and biographical contractions and stresses of various kinds. Transformative encounters with authority, with limitations, with mortality, and with the consequences of past actions were highly characteristic. Different forms of separation from parental, familial, or social matrices often occurred, requiring a new level of existential self-reliance, inner authority, maturity and competence, individuation, concentration of energies, and consolidation of resources, and bringing a fundamental realignment of one’s life and character. Distinct patterns were often visible connecting one Saturn quadrature alignment period with another—seven years later, or fourteen to fifteen years later, or twenty-eight to thirty years later.
I have seldom researched a biography for which I had sufficiently detailed records of the major inner and outer events in a person’s life where I did not find the above patterning readily visible. What made these correlations impressive to me was the precision with which their character matched the archetypal principle with which the planet Saturn has always been associated in the astrological tradition. Equally striking was the way in which the additional qualities specific to each unique case consistently matched the other planets specifically involved by transit in that individual’s life during those particular periods. In each instance, the basic Saturnian archetypal qualities and events that were characteristic of the Saturn alignment periods seemed to be given more specific inflections and further qualitative nuances in close correspondence with the other planetary archetypal principles being constellated at that time.
Archetypal Coherence and Concrete Diversity
The same archetypal principles and patternings that were evident in the study of personal transits were equally evident in the study of natal charts. I found the interconnected coherence of these different forms of correspondence an especially important factor in assessing the evidence. With respect to the two planets we examined in the last chapter, for example, I noticed that individuals who were born with Uranus prominently positioned (as in a major aspect to the Sun) tended to display in their lives and personalities a certain family of archetypally related characteristics: rebelliousness, impatience with conventional constraints or traditional structures, originality and inventiveness, erratic and unpredictable behavior, susceptibility to frequent sudden changes in life, restless seeking of one’s own path in life, incessant striving for freedom and the new, habitual desire for unusual or exciting experiences, and the like. By contrast, individuals born with Saturn similarly positioned showed equally distinct tendencies towards caution, conservatism, awareness of limits and constraints, a heightened sense of the weight and significance of the past, grounded realism, sternness and discipline, the maturity of long experience, a potential for pessimism and rigidity, and so forth.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, was born with a conjunction of Uranus with the Sun. Throughout his life, Shelley personally embodied and expressed an overriding impulse towards freedom, radical change, and unconstrained personal autonomy. He identified himself with the forces of social revolution and called for the birth of a new era to bring the liberation of humanity from all sources of oppression. His life and work were marked by creative originality and a certain spontaneous striving for heroic individualism. His relationships and the trajectory of his life were characterized by many sudden changes and unexpected breaks, and an almost compulsive flouting of social conventions and inconstancy of commitment that left several casualties in their wake. Shelley’s emphatic alignment of his own personal identity and self-image with the Promethean impulse can especially be seen in his having written the poetic drama Prometheus Unbound, the preeminent work in modern literature devoted to the figure of Prometheus.
By way of simple contrast, we might compare Shelley with his close contemporary Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born with a conjunction of Saturn with the Sun. Schopenhauer’s philosophical perspective was dominated by a profound sense of life’s constraints, suffering, and mortality. In his vision, humanity was imprisoned in a world of ceaseless struggle, pain, and ultimate defeat. Whereas Shelley’s life and work can be seen as devoted toward the liberation of the self, Schopenhauer called for a sterner confrontation with life’s problematic realities and an ascetic denial of the self to permit its transcendence from the painful struggle of existence. Whereas Shelley’s personality and biography were marked by a constant quest for the new and unexplored, a striving for new horizons of experience, whether in modes of self-expression, in rela
tionships, or in the quest for a future age of human freedom, Schopenhauer’s personality and biography were marked rather by a brooding solitude, constant fear of the unexpected, and a kind of radiant pessimism.
The two men’s personal transits are equally suggestive. Schopenhauer’s principal work, The World as Will and Idea, was written and published during his first Saturn return. “A man reaches the maturity of his reasoning powers and mental faculties hardly before the age of twenty-eight,” Schopenhauer wrote many years later. Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound in 1818–19 earlier in his twenties in exact coincidence with his Uranus-trine-Uranus transit. He never experienced the Uranus-opposite-Uranus transit, as he drowned at the age of twenty-nine, during his Saturn return.
Schopenhauer’s life also embodied another theme regularly seen in the case of those born with Sun-Saturn aspects, a tendency to experience personal recognition in the world and a sense of individual self-realization (corresponding to the Sun) only in later years, after the passage of time, the reaching of a more mature age, and the experience of rejection and long solitude (corresponding to Saturn). When Schopenhauer published his masterwork, The World as Will and Idea, at age thirty, the book was almost entirely ignored and his lectures at the University of Berlin, which he purposely scheduled at a time that conflicted with those of his far more famous philosophical opponent Hegel, went largely unattended. Schopenhauer withdrew in resentment to a life of solitude. In his early sixties, after years of further writing and publishing, he brought forth his more accessible collection of essays and aphorisms, Parerga und Paralipomena, from which time his name became widely known throughout Europe and his ideas began to exert a major influence on the culture. For the last decade of his life, until his death at age seventy-two, he enjoyed considerable fame and recognition. In a sense Schopenhauer seemed to see all of life through the lens of the Sun-Saturn archetypal complex and generalized his experience into a universal principle: “The nobler and more perfect a thing is, the later and more slowly does it come to maturity.”
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