Besides the configuration of the mid-1960s, there was one other period in twentieth-century history when these three planets—Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto—moved into an alignment constituted entirely by hard aspects. This took place from late 1929 to 1933, when the longer Uranus square Pluto that lasted through most of the 1930s was joined at its start by Saturn in what is called a T-square formation (formed by two planets in 180° opposition and a third planet in 90° square alignment with both). The three planets first moved into an exact midpoint configuration, with Uranus halfway between Saturn and Pluto within 1°, in late October 1929 in precise coincidence with the Wall Street stock market collapse on October 29, “the blackest day in stock market history,” which precipitated the first stage of the Great Depression and helped to set in motion the tumultuous political upheavals that unfolded throughout that decade.4 The longer Uranus-Pluto square then continued on through the Thirties, coinciding with that decade’s widespread social and political turmoil, catalyzing of mass movements, rise of radical political philosophies and parties, intensified labor unrest, student strikes and demonstrations, unleashed mob violence, and mass immigrations.
The convergence of all three planets in hard aspect in the 1929–33 period appeared to be correlated with historical events that reflected the characteristic themes of all three relevant planetary cycles: the Saturn-Pluto cycle, with its intensification of authoritarian and totalitarian impulses, mass hardship, economic failure, and the other phenomena discussed in the present section; the Uranus-Pluto cycle, with its sustained social and political unrest, mass movements, empowerment of radical political programs, and mass demographic shifts, which we observed in the preceding chapters; and a cycle we have not yet examined, Saturn-Uranus.
Historical periods in which Saturn and Uranus moved into dynamic aspect were marked by certain distinctive themes that were readily intelligible in terms of the archetypal principles associated with these two planets: the exacerbation of tensions between authority and rebellion, order and freedom, structure and change. Often the two archetypal principles combined and interpenetrated in contradictory ways: repressive revolution, erratically unpredictable authority, and so forth, as evident during the Terror in revolutionary France and the Cultural Revolution in communist China just mentioned. Especially frequent with this cycle were crises and the sudden collapse of structures, crashes and accidents, grim awakenings, and sudden breakdowns, whether political, economic, or psychological.
Such phenomena regularly coincided with hard-aspect alignments of the Saturn-Uranus cycle; with the additional presence of Pluto in the more rare three-planet configuration, an especially massive, overwhelming, sometimes catastrophic dimension was typically constellated. In the 1929–33 period, the widespread political and economic destabilizations (Saturn-Uranus) suddenly catalyzed a full range of characteristic Saturn-Pluto phenomena: widespread financial failure, poverty, and traumatic personal hardship on a vast scale throughout the world, plus the rapid ascendancy of authoritarian and totalitarian forces—in Germany, the empowerment of Hitler and his anti-Semitic policies after the collapse of German liberalism and the Weimar government; in the Soviet Union, intensified repression by Stalin and the immense disaster imposed on the Ukraine by his policies of compulsory collectivization, mass starvation, gulag imprisonment, exile, and the forced displacement of millions; the aggressive assertion of fascist militarism in Italy and Japan; and the rise of fascist and communist political movements that pressed for power in many other countries. Economists are still unable to adequately account for the sudden mass collapse in 1929–33 that shook the world’s structures to their foundations and had so many long-term consequences. It was also during this period that the first splitting of the atom occurred, in 1932 at the Cavendish Laboratory, which represents another form of structural breakdown with the sudden release of titanic energy, also with consequences that extended far into the future. This was the only T-square of Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto in the twentieth century.
I found that individuals born during this configuration in this critical period of 1929–33, as also during the similar three-planet alignment of the 1964–67 period, seemed to experience with special acuity the challenges and tensions of these dynamically interacting forces in the course of their lives. In an extremely varied range of ways, the circumstances of their lives seemed to require them to hold the tension and negotiate a highly complex clash of opposites, sometimes (as with Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, both born when the T-square was near exact in 1931) on a large scale and with enduring consequences.
One other important category of historical phenomena that should be mentioned here comprises the many instances in which events that occurred during a longer Uranus-Pluto alignment set in motion powerful forces that later, after that alignment was over, suddenly reached a crisis or breaking point, a critical collapse of structures, precisely when Saturn moved into hard aspect with Uranus. Often this sequence took the form of emancipatory or dissident forces emerging on a wide scale during the earlier Uranus-Pluto alignment, then subsequently producing a violent schism in the body politic. For example, the sustained wave of intensified abolitionist activity and related political and social developments during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56—the activities of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and John Brown, the Underground Railway, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the founding of the Free Soil and Republican parties that brought the rise of Lincoln—all led to the Civil War, which began in precise coincidence with Saturn’s movement into exact square with Uranus in 1861, immediately after the election of Lincoln. Not only are the characteristic Saturn-Uranus themes of sudden crisis, political breakdown, structural destabilization, and national schism visible here; so also is the peculiar combination of rebellious (Uranus) and repressive (Saturn) impulses that coalesced in the slaveholding Confederate states, which specifically sought and proclaimed freedom (Uranus) from the Union to maintain their systemically oppressive (Saturn) mode of life.
A similar sequential pattern is visible in the sequence of events that led to the Russian Revolution. The Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907 which we examined earlier coincided with a sustained surge of radical impulses and activities in Russian political life, including Lenin’s seminal manifesto of violent revolution to be led by an elite vanguard of the proletariat, What Is To Be Done? of 1902, the founding of the Bolshevik party by Lenin in 1903, and the first Russian Revolution of 1905–06. These developments led directly to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian civil war, which began just as Saturn moved into close opposition to Uranus in November 1917 (and in the immediate aftermath of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1914–16 and the first years of World War I with their disastrous effect on Czarist Russia).
Certain distinctive themes were visible in the Bolshevik Revolution and in the character of the resulting Soviet Union that uncannily fit what one might expect in a problematic synthesis of the two archetypal principles associated with Saturn and Uranus: the emancipatory impulse intricately interlocked with the impulse for authoritarian control, which engendered one of the most rigid political structures in history yet was heralded as a new bulwark of freedom and defended in the name of revolution. Many of the glaring contradictions in the Soviet style of government—the erection of implacable barriers to keep the citizens firmly liberated, the ubiquitous censorship to ensure the propagation of only truly revolutionary ideas, the totalitarian dictatorship to realize the ultimate freedom of the people—suggest the uneasy and unresolved integration of the two opposing principles.
Considering his critical role in these developments, it is remarkable that Karl Marx himself was born with Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto all in hard aspect. This three-way archetypal complex can be seen in the marked tension and often unconscious compromise formations in Marx’s personality and thought between the rebellious, innovative, emancipatory impulse of Uranus with the Saturnian principle of control, rigidity, structure,
repression, and authority—with the two principles merging in self-contradictory and problematic ways, and with both compelled and empowered with Plutonic titanic intensity. Marx therefore was born with the same category of configuration that coincided with the several periods we have examined above—the time of the French Revolutionary Terror and Committee on Public Safety in the mid-1790s, the tumultuous period of political and economic breakdown and crisis of the 1929–33 period, and the era of the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao beginning in the mid-1960s—all eras when the characteristic motifs and contradictory impulses present in Marx’s thought were acted out on an immense collective scale.
Conservative Empowerment
Returning now to the Saturn-Pluto cycle on its own terms, we can examine more closely the diachronic patterning of historically significant events coinciding with the successive conjunctions, then with the intervening squares and oppositions. The events of the 1981–84 conjunction period—the wave of conservative and reactionary empowerment throughout the world and the climactic intensification of the Cold War antagonism between the two superpowers—can be recognized as closely related to the events of the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 at the beginning of the Cold War. During the earlier alignment, the emergence of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe was met in the United States by the establishment of the many enduring anticommunist and Cold War political and military structures that characterized the American response to that state of sustained global crisis and tension. These included the founding of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, and the Department of Defense; the formulation of the containment policy in George Kennan’s influential paper in Foreign Affairs and the assertion of the Truman Doctrine; the intensification of the anticommunist hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that led to the McCarthy era, the establishment of the Hollywood blacklist, and widespread anticommunist witch hunts, among many other comparable phenomena reflective of this archetypal complex.
Remarkably, George Orwell wrote 1984, his dark vision of totalitarian oppression and control, during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48, and placed it in a year, 1984, that happened to coincide with the very next Saturn-Pluto conjunction one full cycle later. Orwell’s writing of the book was driven by his growing fear and conviction that not only had a Cold War (his coinage) begun against totalitarianism but that in this critical period of the later 1940s, during the conjunction, the Western democracies were losing it.
These two periods of 1946–48 and 1981–84 that coincided with the two successive Saturn-Pluto conjunctions bear a close historical and archetypal connection to the period of the intervening opposition of the same two planets in 1964–67. In the United States, for example, in 1964 Barry Goldwater—against the larger trend of the decade—effectively initiated the gradual grassroots rise of the Republican right that culminated in the election of Reagan at the following Saturn-Pluto conjunction. (Yet even Goldwater, in his own, highly conservative inflection of the 1960s’ zeitgeist, gave voice to the dominant impulse of that decade archetypally associated with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction—extreme intensity in the service of freedom—with his famous declaration, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”) During the same opposition, in 1966, Reagan began his political ascent by winning the California governorship in a landslide and immediately afterwards took action to suppress student protests and the free speech movement at the University of California at Berkeley. Similarly reflective of the turn to the right during these same years in the 1964–67 period was the rise of a widespread “white backlash” movement against black civil rights gains. So also was the Johnson administration’s move to the right, as expressed in the decision to escalate the Vietnam War from 1964–65 on. In the Soviet Union, the more liberalizing Khrushchev was replaced in 1964 by the more conservative Brezhnev, whose regime lasted precisely until the next Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1982.
This cyclical pattern of conservative empowerment in the United States extended to the most recent Saturn-Pluto alignment, the opposition of 2000–04. The period of this alignment began with the contested presidential election and Supreme Court decision that brought to power the younger Bush and the Republican right just as the opposition first moved within 15° in the fall of 2000. The subsequent further empowerment of the Bush administration and the Republican right in the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, and the systematic intensification of their efforts on behalf of a more extreme conservative agenda coincided precisely with the Saturn-Pluto opposition’s reaching exactitude. The period of greatest conservative empowerment, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, coincided with the following two years when Saturn and Pluto were positioned in closest alignment. George W. Bush was himself born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946 that coincided with the start of the Cold War.
During all the Saturn-Pluto periods we have been examining, such as 1981–84 or 2000–04 when the two planets were last in conjunction and opposition, we can observe how consistently these specific eras bring forth the emergence of a widespread strengthened resolve to reestablish “traditional values,” with broad social and political support. Various movements tend to arise that are devoted to “restoring a solid moral foundation,” to reempower “the moral majority,” to “bring back family values.” For example, in the United States, whereas the decade of the 1960s during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction exalted progressive, radical, and revolutionary thinkers, the 1981–84 period and again the more recent 2000–04 period coincident with the Saturn-Pluto alignments brought into prominence and power a wave of conservative and neoconservative thinkers. Whereas the 1960s brought a wave of rebellion against established structures and values, a rebellion that was embraced by an enormous segment of the population, the 1981–84 and 2000–04 periods brought a conservative movement demanding law and order that was equally widely embraced. The entire decade and dominant ethos of the 1960s became the frequent target of moral condemnation by prominent figures of the 1981–84 period, as with Margaret Thatcher’s characteristic dismissal of the Sixties when she was prime minister in 1982: “Fashionable theories and permissive claptrap set the scene for a society in which old values of discipline and restraint were denigrated.”
During Saturn-Pluto periods such as 1981–84 or 2000–04, conservative empowerment regularly expressed itself through social and legal constraints and judgments (Saturn) against sexuality (Pluto), such as legislative and administrative attempts to limit contraceptive technologies, abortion rights, premarital sex, and same-sex marriage. During both periods, government funding was cut off for scientific research and international public health programs that were viewed by conservatives as encouraging sexual irresponsibility. Sexual abstinence and monogamy were affirmed as social and religious ideals. Nature itself seemed to conspire in the archetypal shift from the 1960s to the early 1980s, when the emergence of the AIDS epidemic during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981– 84 brought what was widely called at that time an “end to the sexual revolution” and the era of sexual experiment and freedom that had emerged during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction and Dionysian awakening of the 1960s. Such characteristic Saturn-Pluto themes as mass suffering, disease, death, and fear arose at this time in relationship to sexuality, as did a resulting conservative transformation of social mores with the establishment of new structures of inhibition and control, both internal and external.
Another important characteristic set of Saturn-Pluto themes emerged at this time in the collective psyche in the widespread rise of fundamentalist interpretations and denunciatory moralistic judgments of the epidemic as God’s righteous punishment of sin and licentiousness. This phenomenon closely resembled the emergence of widespread views throughout medieval Europe concerning the Black Death or bubonic plague as the manifest embodiment of God’s punitive wrath during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1348–50.
Similar inte
rpretations of contemporary historical events reappeared during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the 2000–04 period, such as Christian fundamentalist claims about the true cause of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on September 11. Religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson stated that the attacks were God’s righteous punishment for the moral corruption and licentiousness of the targeted city, which symbolized the sins committed by secular America, liberals, gays, and feminists. These assessments were in certain respects nearly identical in terminology and in archetypal character to Islamic fundamentalist views of the same events, including those that inspired jihad terrorists. Comparable phenomena can be recognized in earlier historical epochs, such as the ancient interpretations, both pagan and Christian, of the barbarian sack of Rome as reflecting the punitive wrath of the gods or God against a faithless people.
The archetypal contrast between the Uranus-Pluto era of the 1960s and the two Saturn-Pluto periods of the early 1980s and the early 2000s was equally evident in the dominant popular attitudes in those periods towards patriotism. In the United States, for example, whereas the 1960s brought widespread and fervent resistance by American citizens against the U.S. government throughout the decade, by contrast the 1981–84 and 2000–04 periods brought a widespread and equally fervent resurgence of traditional American patriotism that was pervasively visible in the display of flags, performance of ceremonies, and expression of popular attitudes. Often the intensified patriotic impulse and an intensified conservative law-and-order impulse were tightly amalgamated into one phenomenon, or one was appropriated by the other, as in the Patriot Act in the 2001–04 period. Passed hurriedly by the U.S. Congress in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks and overseen by the Christian fundamentalist attorney general, John Ashcroft, the act established as “vital security measures” a degree of governmental jurisdiction that was regarded by many observers as having legitimized an incursion on civil liberties so problematic that references were widely and repeatedly made to Orwell’s 1984 and the shadow of Big Brother state control over the private lives and freedoms of citizens. The tendency towards hypervigilance and armored boundaries associated with the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex was evident in the collective experience of the 2001–04 period in many ways, as in the extreme intensification of air travel security, the constant warnings of heightened alerts to catastrophic threats, and the widespread popularity of aggressively oversize, quasi-military vehicles such as SUVs and Hummers. (The armored tank itself was first conceived and produced during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1914–15.)
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