Thus it was this unexpected combination of so many factors—the strikingly close fit between the historical phenomena and the relevant archetypal principles, the precise timing, the inexplicable simultaneity of such phenomena in widely dispersed locations, and the coherent patterning of major archetypally related events and figures in coincidence with cyclical alignments over long periods of time—that in their totality seemed to me to require a fresh assessment of the ancient astrological vision of the universe, far beyond what conventional modern explanations could provide. I found compelling the subtlety and comprehensiveness of the archetypal astrological method, in which superficially unrelated phenomena of different categories could be integrated on a deeper conceptual level and thereby illuminated. Employing this perspective and this mode of analysis seemed to bring forth a continuing fountain of surprising insights into a wide range of cultural phenomena and cyclical patterns in history that I would not otherwise have come upon.
Let us now turn our attention to historical correlations of a different cycle of the outer planets, shorter in duration and more frequent than the Uranus-Pluto cycle but no less striking in its archetypal patternings. I found that as I expanded my research to encompass a larger spectrum of phenomena of different themes and qualities, and as a more comprehensive picture emerged of the ongoing multiple planetary cycles—sequential, interweaving, and overlapping with respect to each other—the complex archetypal patterns of human history were more fully illuminated and made more richly intelligible.
V
Cycles of Crisis and Contraction
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth….
—W. H. Auden
“September 1, 1939”
World Wars, Cold War, and September 11
We will now examine the planetary cycle of Pluto with Saturn, which in important respects bears a resemblance to the Uranus-Pluto cycle. The nature of this resemblance seems to reflect the activated presence of the archetypal principle associated with the planet Pluto in both cycles. But how the Pluto archetype is activated during Saturn-Pluto alignment periods (Saturn?Pluto) and, conversely, what second archetypal principle is empowered and intensified by the Pluto archetype (Pluto?Saturn), presents an altogether different picture.
While the Uranus-Pluto periods consistently coincided with widespread revolutionary upheaval, intensified emancipatory impulses, and radical cultural innovation, the successive quadrature alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle coincided with especially challenging historical periods marked by a pervasive quality of intense contraction: eras of international crisis and conflict, empowerment of reactionary forces and totalitarian impulses, organized violence and oppression, all sometimes marked by lasting traumatic effects. An atmosphere of gravity and tension tended to accompany these three-to-four-year periods, as did a widespread sense of epochal closure: “the end of an era,” “the end of innocence,” the destruction of an earlier mode of life that in retrospect may seem to have been marked by widespread indulgence, decadence, naïveté, denial, and inflation. Profound transformation was a dominant theme, as with the Uranus-Pluto cycle, but here the transformation was through contraction, conservative reaction, crisis and termination.
Both the First World War and the Second World War began in precise coincidence with virtually exact hard-aspect alignments of Saturn and Pluto, in August 1914 and September 1939, respectively. The most recent Saturn-Pluto alignment occurred in precise coincidence with the events of September 11, 2001, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York and the attack on the Pentagon in Washington, and the many events set in motion in its wake. In the first half of September 2001, Saturn and Pluto were within 2° of exact opposition. (In that same period, a Full Moon configuration of the Sun in exact opposition to the Moon formed a rare and extraordinarily precise “grand cross” with Saturn and Pluto, with the two oppositions—Sun to Moon, Saturn to Pluto—both 90° square to each other.) Many astrologers had speculated, both in print and in private, about what might take place during this alignment, including the strong possibility of terrorism.1 Within moments of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, virtually every astrologer in the country knew that the forces symbolized by the Saturn-Pluto alignment, an alignment that had coincided in the past with so many grim periods of historical crisis and contraction, had erupted.
The vivid complex of qualities, emotions, and meanings connected with those grave events—the beginning of the two world wars, September 11 and its aftermath, and many other such events during the periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments—fits with remarkable precision the synthesis of archetypal principles associated with those two planets in combination, expressed in their most extreme form, both negatively and positively: profoundly weighty events of enduring consequence; violence and death on a massive scale; the irrevocable termination of an established order of existence; collective intensification of division, antagonism, and hostility; the deployment of massive, highly disciplined, carefully organized destructive power; and a widespread sense of victimization and suffering under the impact of cataclysmic and oppressive forces of history.
More generally, this archetypal complex tended to constellate a widespread sense that one’s life was determined and constrained by large impersonal forces of many kinds—historical, political, military, social, economic, judicial, biological, elemental, instinctual—too powerful and dominant to be affected by the individual self. This sense of vulnerability was in turn regularly matched by a drive for power, control, and domination. Sometimes the two sides of this larger gestalt were constellated simultaneously in two opposing persons or groups, one predatory, the other victimized. Yet just as often the two sides were constellated simultaneously within the same person, group, or nation, each part of the complex unconsciously eliciting the other. Experiences of deep humiliation caused by violence, violation, and defeat were thus often accompanied by a compensatory need to prove one’s steely strength, invulnerability, and capacity to retaliate with lethal potency.
Saturn-Pluto alignment periods are also characterized by displays of personal and collective determination, unbending will, courage and sacrifice; by intensely focused, silent, strenuous effort in the face of danger and death; by a deepening capacity for moral discernment born from experience and suffering; and by the transformation and forging of enduring structures, whether material, political, or psychological.
The events of September 11 constituted an extraordinary human tragedy and represented a dark and consequential moment in human history. This was especially true for the people of New York and the United States, but because the searing images of the event were instantly transmitted throughout the world, the impact of the attack was to a great extent felt by people everywhere. The events drew forth a powerful sustained response in the following weeks and months—emotional and existential, political and military, morally reflective. Horrific violence was visited upon many other peoples during this alignment period—Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, Spain, Chechnya, Sudan, Kenya, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Bali—some directly connected with the September 11 events, some as part of a synchronic wave of terror and death that marked the years of this alignment. In all these respects, the events of September 11 and their aftermath resembled other periods of great historical gravity, and with remarkable consistency those periods coincided with the quadrature alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle.
As an archetypal principle, Saturn has long been associated with a complex of meanings that, while multivalent and diverse, nevertheless possess a certain easily discernible coherence and consistency: the hard structures and limitations of material reality and mortal existence, contraction and constraint, deprivation and negation, division and conflict, gravity and gravitas, necessity and finality, the endings of things. Saturn presses things to their conclusion and defines them in their finitude. It expresses itself in such existential re
alities as aging and maturity, dying and death, labor and duty, suffering and hardship, the weight of time and the past, the wisdom of experience. It governs authority, solidity, security, reliability, established tradition, the status quo, order and system, that which endures and sustains.
The Saturn archetype encompasses all that involves boundaries and limits. It defines and grounds, constricts and solidifies. It expresses itself in discipline and control, rigor and rigidity, repression and oppression. It rules judgment, guilt, the consequences of past actions, error and fault, defeat and failure, deflation and decline, depression and sorrow. Saturn is, in Nietzsche’s phrase, the “spirit of gravity,” both heavy and dark. In Freud’s terms, it is the “reality principle,” the delays and resistances to gratification, the obstacles and diminishments presented by life’s exigencies. Saturn is the conveyer of the hard truth: naked, un-adorned, instructive, sobering, often painful. It is the bottom line, the workings of necessity, the inevitable and inescapable.
In major aspects between two planets of which one is Saturn, the corresponding phenomena suggest that the Saturn archetype tends to combine itself with the second principle in such a way as to express its characteristic qualities and themes of contraction, realism, division, deprivation, materiality, hardship, judgment, strict authority, and so forth, but in this case through and by means of the archetypal principle associated with Pluto. With hard aspects in particular, the Saturn principle tends to bring out the problematic potential of whatever it touches while in other respects opposing or negating that second planetary principle. Its archetypal influence seems also to be one of moving events towards critical and defining junctures.
Just as during Uranus-Pluto alignments the archetypal principle associated with Pluto appeared to empower and intensify the Promethean impulse of rebellion, innovation, radical change, and the urge for freedom, with epochally transformative and sometimes destructive consequences, so too during Saturn-Pluto alignments the Plutonic principle seemed to empower and intensify each of the above-mentioned Saturnian tendencies and qualities to an often overwhelming degree and on a massive scale. Besides this intensifying and empowering influence, the Pluto archetype also appeared to add into the larger complex its own distinctive qualities involving instinctual and elemental forces, titanic power and violent intensity, violation and destruction, chthonic and underworld depths, and evolutionary transformation.
With these archetypal principles in mind, we can begin to observe the extraordinary consistency with which periods of profound historical gravity, crisis, and contraction coincided with successive major alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. As with the Uranus-Pluto cycle examined in the preceding chapters, the evidence again suggested striking correlations involving the sequence of consecutive conjunction and opposition alignments. For the sake of simplicity and clarity, when reviewing the distinctive pattern of correlations for the Uranus-Pluto cycle, I restricted our attention through much of that initial analysis to the two axial alignments, the conjunction and opposition, bringing in the square alignment only in the later sections. Here we will include from the beginning the full sequence of the four quadrature alignments of Saturn and Pluto in their ongoing cycle. Again, these alignments are the conjunction (0°), the opposition (180°), and the two intervening squares (90°), which are collectively known as the “major hard aspects.” These are equivalent in the lunar cycle to the New Moon, the Full Moon, and the two intervening positions, the waxing First Quarter and waning Last Quarter. The orb for the years given in all these chapters for conjunctions and oppositions of outer-planet world transits is approximately 15°, with a penumbral range up to 20°, while the orb for the intervening squares is somewhat smaller, approximately 10°, with a proportionately smaller penumbra.
The first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the twentieth century coincided with the immediate buildup to and eruption of World War I in 1913–16, first moving to exact alignment during the three months of August, September, and October of 1914, when most of the nations of Europe in rapid succession declared war on each other and mobilized their immense armies to begin the horrific slaughter of the following months and years throughout the conjunction period and beyond.
In turn, the immediately following first square, in 1921–23, coincided with the decisive emergence of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe marked by Mussolini’s coming to power in Italy, Stalin’s seizure of the Communist party machinery in the Soviet Union, and the beginning of Hitler’s rise in Germany leading to the beer hall putsch in Munich.
The next such alignment, the opposition that extended from 1930 to 1933, coincided with worldwide economic crisis and the rapid ascendancy of Nazism in Germany and the beginning of Hitler’s dictatorship, the rise of Japanese militarism and the invasion of Manchuria and China, and the intensified dominance of Stalin’s totalitarian control in the Soviet Union, his policies of forced collectivization, and the beginning of his mass starvation of over seven million Ukrainians.
Finally, the closing square coincided precisely with the beginning of World War II in 1939–41, first moving to 1° of exact alignment in August and September of 1939 as Germany invaded Poland. This alignment continued through the darkest period of Nazi dominance in Europe, the blitzkrieg, the fall of France and most of the other nations of western and northern Europe, the harrowing Battle of Britain, the massive German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler’s formulation of the Final Solution, and the beginning of the Holocaust.
It was also in this period—August 1939, when the alignment was first exact—that Einstein, fearful of German nuclear research, signed the fateful letter to Roosevelt urging the U.S. government to develop an atomic bomb (which he later considered “the greatest mistake” of his life). The Manhattan Project began in the ensuing months during this alignment.
This cyclical pattern of diachronically related historical events possessing the same archetypal character began again with the immediately following conjunction of these two planets, which occurred in 1946–48 in precise coincidence with the beginning of the Cold War, the establishment of the Iron Curtain, and the domination of Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union. Both terms—“Iron Curtain” and “Cold War”—first emerged at this time, each highly characteristic of the archetypal complex associated with the Saturn-Pluto cycle: the rigid impenetrable boundary separating implacable enemies, the armored state of permanent hostility, the relentlessly frigid geopolitical climate, the atmosphere of historical darkness and gravity, the sustained global condition in which catastrophic destructive power was simultaneously poised and held in check by the fear of mutual annihilation.2
The period of this conjunction brought a wave of events strongly suggestive of this archetypal complex: the beginning of the global nuclear arms race, the beginning of U.S. atomic bomb testing in the South Pacific, the escalation of systematic Cold War espionage and the smuggling of atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, the succession of communist takeovers and establishment of totalitarian governments in Albania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, the Berlin blockade crisis with the Soviet Union and Western allies in sustained intense confrontation, the rapid ascendancy of communism under Mao in China, the communist takeover of North Korea, the founding of NATO, the establishment of the CIA, and the rise of the anticommunist Cold War establishment and mentality in the United States. It was also during this conjunction, in 1948, that apartheid was instituted in South Africa with the rise to power of the right-wing Afrikaner National Party.
The successive cyclical conjunctions of these two planets occur approximately every thirty-one to thirty-seven years, depending on Pluto’s orbital position and speed. In the sequence of Saturn-Pluto alignments during the twentieth century, we can observe how the three successive conjunctions coincided with defining events and decisions that established an enduring historical foundation upon which causally related developments would then unfold for several decades afterward. In broad terms, the first conjunction of the twentie
th century that coincided with the onset of the First World War in 1914 essentially marked the commencement of the twentieth century’s “Thirty Years’ War” that engulfed Europe and then the world, critically unfolding from that point through the Second World War in close association with the successive quadrature aspects of those two planets during those three decades (1914–45).
In turn, the second Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the century coincided precisely with the beginning of the Cold War in 1946–48, which unfolded in a similar manner and was closely correlated with that cycle’s successive quadrature alignments. The following square of 1955–57 coincided with the Soviet Union’s reoccupation of Hungary, its crushing of dissent in Poland, and intensified threats against the West by Khrushchev (“History is on our side. We will bury you!”). The midpoint of this cycle, the opposition of 1964–67, coincided precisely with the start of the U.S. war in Vietnam and its rapid escalation. The following square of 1973–75 brought the U.S. defeat in Vietnam and the takeover by communist regimes in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.
The concluding alignment of this cycle, the last conjunction of Saturn and Pluto in the twentieth century, began in late 1980 and extended from 1981 through most of 1984. At this time the global nuclear arms race, the escalation of Cold War antagonism, and widespread fear of nuclear apocalypse reached its climax during the first Reagan administration and the final years of the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. During the period of this conjunction, the global situation was marked by massively increased defensive armoring, rigidly established boundaries, hostile separation, mutual demonization (e.g., Reagan’s calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world”), intensive military buildups, and repressive military action and state-sponsored terrorism in many parts of the world, including Central and South America, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. Characteristic events of these years included the activities of death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, the intensification of apartheid in South Africa, the militant ascendancy of Islamic extremists in Central Asia, and the West-supported rise of military aggression by Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
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