The intervening quadrature alignments of the full cycle suggest further signs of the same pattern. For example, in the American political context, the most recent Saturn-Pluto square alignment took place in 1992–94 (halfway between the conjunction of the early 1980s with the first Reagan administration and the opposition of the 2000–04 period with the first administration of the younger Bush). This period coincided precisely with the intermediate ascendancy of conservativism that was embodied in the Republican-dominated Congress elected in 1994, with Newt Gingrich as speaker of the house and with the “Contract with America” as its manifesto. The same Saturn-Pluto square coincided with an unmistakable wave of other events in the United States and throughout the world that reflected the characteristic patterns of this archetypal complex, such as the apocalyptic siege of the fundamentalist Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the Rodney King beating trial and the subsequent riots in Los Angeles; the ambush of American soldiers in Mogadishu by Somalian warlords, the most violent and disastrous U.S. combat firefight since Vietnam; the Bosnian crisis and ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and the first concentration camps in Europe since World War II; and the beginning of the Rwanda crisis and massacres. All these events took place during the same Saturn-Pluto alignment of 1992–94 that coincided with the several events cited earlier for this period with regard to international terrorism—the coming to power of the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan, bin Laden’s call for a jihad against the United States, and the first World Trade Center bombing. As was typical with these Saturn-Pluto hard-aspect alignments, the general ambiance of a pervasive contraction in human affairs was palpable and widespread.
Many other themes related to this archetypal complex were characteristically heightened during all these alignments: increased calls for moral rigor and social constraints, censorship and repression, puritanical standards of conduct, severe punitive judgments (such as the increased use of the harsh Shariah laws in the Islamic world or the imposition of the death penalty in the United States), and wars against enemies perceived and described as evil. The remarkable correlation of many of these quadrature alignment periods with worldwide economic depressions, recessions, and hardship (1921–23, 1929–33, 1946–48, 1973–75, 1981–84, 2000–2004) should also be noted. More generally, this cyclical pattern seemed to coincide with a widespread sense, both individual and collective, of being severely constricted or threatened by larger forces in life, by hostile powers, by poverty or lack of resources, by the legacy and errors of the past, and by the punitive judgments and oppressive power of established authority.
Equally visible during Saturn-Pluto alignments was the unfolding of events that possessed a distinct ambiance of grave wrongdoing, moral and political scandal, public guilt and humiliation, trial and judgment, crime and punishment. The Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the 1946–48 period was an especially grave and historically consequential but altogether characteristic example of this tendency. Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse” open letter to the president of France denouncing the anti-Semitic injustices perpetrated by the war department during the Dreyfus scandal, which forced a new trial and the revelation of the extent of military and governmental corruption, was written during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1898–99.
The most recent Saturn-Pluto alignment, of 2000–04, coincided with the wave of scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, whose hierarchy was accused of systematically covering up crimes by sexually abusive priests. This crisis brought widespread critical reflection on the shadow side of the Church’s hierarchically imposed strictures concerning human sexuality, the compulsory celibacy of priests, the male domination of the hierarchy, and the subordinate religious status of women. The numerous church closings and declarations of bankruptcy in the wake of the scandals, trials, and settlements were similarly reflective of the same archetypal field. In the same period occurred a wave of major corporate and financial scandals, involving systematic criminal practices by the executives and administrators of Enron, Halliburton, WorldCom, Vivendi, Harken Energy, and the New York Stock Exchange, among many others in the United States, with similar events in Russia, Italy, France, Mexico, the United Nations, and elsewhere. These phenomena reflected the characteristic Saturn-Pluto theme of crime and punishment, of Saturnian judgment against Plutonic transgressions, whether of greed, power, sexuality, or political corruption.5
The most dramatic scandal in U.S. political history, the Watergate scandal and the resulting Senate hearings and forced resignation of Nixon, coincided precisely with the Saturn-Pluto square of 1973–75. This was the quadrature alignment immediately following the opposition that coincided with the start of the Vietnam War. Significantly, this same alignment in 1973–75 also coincided with the U.S. defeat in Vietnam (widely perceived by Americans as humiliating and traumatic, both characteristic qualities of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex) as well as the OPEC oil embargo and worldwide energy crisis, which resulted in global economic recession and had major geopolitical ramifications that unfolded in the following years.
Moreover, other events highly characteristic of the Saturn-Pluto cycle and archetypal complex during this same period included the right-wing military coup in Chile, supported by the CIA, that brought General Pinochet to dictatorial power, the Greek military junta’s invasion of Cyprus, the devastating famine in Ethiopia, India’s first nuclear weapon test, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the sustained U.S. air-bombing of civilians in Cambodia, and the beginning of the genocidally destructive Khmer Rouge regime under the dictator Pol Pot. Again, a widespread sense of profound historical contraction and crisis during the period of this alignment was acutely palpable.
As with George W. Bush beginning in the 2000–04 period, it is typical of such eras that individuals born during Saturn-Pluto alignments—such as Henry Kissinger, born during the square in 1923—are politically empowered and play significant roles in historical events at that time, as Kissinger did in an extraordinary number of the just-cited historical events: Vietnam, Cambodia, the Middle East, Chile. Similarly, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, the two men who played the most powerful role in U.S. foreign policy under Bush beginning during the 2000–04 Saturn-Pluto opposition, were born during the two Saturn-Pluto quadrature alignments that occurred between those of Kissinger’s birth and Bush’s—Rumsfeld during the opposition in 1932, Cheney during the following square in 1941, both with their Sun aligned with the Saturn-Pluto configuration.
Just as any single period of a Saturn-Pluto alignment consistently brought a multiplicity of concurrent events reflecting the characteristic themes of this archetypal complex, so also I found that single, especially paradigmatic events during such alignment periods tended to embody a multiplicity of the relevant archetypal themes, all coming together in complex compromise formation to constitute the peculiar character of that event. For example, in the following remarkable diachronic sequence, we see at once the public accusation of grave wrongdoing, solemn trial and judgment, fundamentalist denunciation and prohibition, and intensive assertion of conservative or reactionary authority with highly inhibiting and repressive consequences. Thus the Roman Inquisition’s heresy trial and execution of Giordano Bruno exactly coincided with the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1600. During the immediately following Saturn-Pluto conjunction, in 1616, the Vatican declared the Copernican theory “false and erroneous” and placed the De Revolutionibus on its list of books prohibited for all Roman Catholics, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. The very next Saturn-Pluto axial alignment, the opposition in 1632–33, exactly coincided with the Roman Inquisition’s summons, trial, and condemnation of Galileo and the Vatican’s placement of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems on the Index of forbidden books. All three epochal events involving the Inquisition and Church heresy trials, censorship, and condemnation took place precisely in coincidence with the consecutive sequence of Saturn-Pluto axial alignments—1600, 1616, and 1632–33—all t
hree of these alignments being exact in those specific years.
It was under an earlier such Saturn-Pluto alignment, in 1543 (the year De Revolutionibus was published and Copernicus died), that the Spanish Inquisition burned Protestants at the stake for the first time and Pope Paul III in Rome instituted the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. This distinctive theme of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex was visible on both sides of the Protestant-Catholic divide: During the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1534–36, Henry VIII in England imprisoned Thomas More, his scholarly friend and lord chancellor, for refusing to recognize him as head of the English Church (1534) and a year later had him beheaded (1535).
It was during this same alignment that John Calvin—who was himself born during the first Saturn-Pluto square of the century—published his Institutes of the Christian Religion, with its doctrines of humanity’s innate moral depravity after the Fall, God’s predestination of the majority of humankind to eternal damnation, and the consequent need for severe strictures on human thought and action to ensure moral rectitude and dogmatic correctness. During this same period under Calvin’s influence Protestant reformers took over the government of Geneva: Catholic priests were imprisoned, the altars were stripped and sacred images destroyed, citizens were fined for not attending sermons, and a regime of strict moral censorship commenced. During the immediately following Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1553, the Spanish physician astrologer and theologian Michael Servetus—who had criticized Calvin’s Institutes and opposed the doctrines of original sin and innate human depravity, instead affirming the presence of God in all creation—was arrested in Geneva at Calvin’s behest for heresy and burned at the stake. Widespread revulsion at Servetus’s execution helped catalyze the birth of religious tolerance in Europe.
Remarkably, Saturn and Pluto were also in opposition from 28 to 31 CE, the years to which many biblical historians assign the period of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion. Characteristic themes of the Saturn-Pluto cycle are also clearly evident in the spirit of profound moral urgency, gravity, judgment, calls for repentance, and apocalyptic end-time expectations that pervade the New Testament accounts of the teachings of both Jesus of Nazareth and his exact contemporary, John the Baptist, whose ministry began in 28–29, “in the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar.”
Looking back even further, we find that Saturn and Pluto were also in hard aspect in 399 BCE, the year of Socrates’s trial and death in Athens, when he was condemned for “impiety and corruption of youth” through his philosophical teachings. Here again, as with Giordano Bruno’s trial and burning at the stake in 1600, the Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism in 1616, and Galileo’s trial under the Inquisition in 1633, the coincidence of the Saturn-Pluto cycle with historically weighty events reflecting the motif of trial, judgment, condemnation, and the punitive assertion of conservative or reactionary authority formed an especially consistent pattern.
Splitting, Evil, and Terror
One of the most important, mysterious, and potentially useful characteristics I regularly observed in all categories of correlations was a persistent commonality—yet also a deep ambiguity—between interior experiences and external events during the same alignment. The archetypal complex involved seemed to be equally relevant for understanding both subjective and objective manifestations, and often the boundary between these categories was difficult to as certain.
For example, alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, including the most recent one coincident with the events of September 11 and their aftermath, seemed to correlate not only with events whose overwhelming gravity, danger, oppressiveness, and moral darkness were vivid actualities, but also with an equally pronounced tendency on the part of the collective psyche to spontaneously constellate and project those shadow qualities with unusual potency. This characteristically took such forms as interpreting the world exclusively as a war between good and evil, perceiving and uncompromisingly enforcing simplistic dichotomies, seeing others as morally or mortally dangerous threats, and identifying particular individuals or states as evil enemies. An eruption of ancient resentments and enmities often occurred, as did a pronounced tendency towards both scapegoating and feeling victimized by specific identified groups.
Such phenomena were typically accompanied by the establishment of rigid defensive boundaries and repressive political structures that were justified by the need for “vital security,” often combined with “preemptive” offensive aggression against real or perceived enemies. Deliberate and highly organized acts of mass destruction consistently coincided with Saturn-Pluto quadrature aspects and often were justified as representing a necessary response to matters of life-and-death urgency, national survival, a need for more territory, the perceived enemy’s hostile intentions or past actions, or the special destiny of the invading nation to make war now to create a world of peace later. One regularly sees at such times a peculiar close association and mutual empowerment between bellicose right-wing forces within established governments and fundamentalist terrorist forces outside them, both of which support mass killing as a strategic necessity in their mortally opposed yet mutually implicated world views. The overwhelming nature of a trauma suffered by a nation or a people can convince it that its positions and actions are morally unassailable, as with the Bush administration and much of the American public after September 11, 2001, or as in the psychology that has often governed the state of Israel, born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 in the shadow of the Holocaust. Alternatively, the gravity of what is at stake, such as eternal salvation or the historical necessity of humanity’s movement towards utopian equality, as we will see later with Augustine and Marx, is regarded as justifying the use of authoritarian power and repression in the service of defeating the evil one, the bourgeois enemy, the pagan, the heretic, the dissident, the ever-insidious threat of ideological and moral corruption.
Often during these alignments there emerged a strong identification, either by a leader or by the group or nation, with a God of righteous vengeance and ruthless justice whose will and judgment cannot be questioned. A posture of moral absolutism was asserted with a conviction that one’s own motivations were self-evidently aligned with the forces of good in the world. During Saturn-Pluto alignments, as the collective psyche began to be gripped by such archetypal perceptions and shadow impulses, leaders who expressed and exacerbated this complex tended to arise, sometimes catalyzing entire nations into acting out the aroused impulses in often devastating ways. Religious symbols closely intertwined with authoritarian impulses potently manipulated public opinion. Characteristic of such periods was a call for crusades, jihads, and holy wars against the evil enemy.
For example, the First Crusade, of Christians in Europe against Muslims in the Middle East, coincided precisely with the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1097–99, climaxing in the infamous massacre of Jerusalem in July 1099 as the planets reached exact alignment. Similar perceptions, claims, and actions were evident during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2000–04, from both sides of the war on terror, with leaders’ references to crusades and jihads (Bush, bin Laden), and repeated claims to represent God’s authority in the battle against the ruthless evil enemy—a “war of opposing fundamentalisms.” A similar constellation of mutual demonization and righteous retribution was evident in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of the same years with its incessant cycle of suicide bombings and lethal counterattacks and repression.
Especially virulent forms of this complex were visible in the emergence of white supremacist and Aryan racist movements during alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. Saturn and Pluto were in opposition in 1865–67 at the time of the foundings of both the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia—supremacist groups cloaked with a religious conviction that asserted white racial superiority and the insidious threat of black political and sexual empowerment—which brought terror and lynchings to blacks throughout the American South for many decades after the Civil War. The Final So
lution to exterminate the Jews was conceived and began to be executed by Hitler and the Nazis during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1939–41.
This archetypal gestalt seemed therefore to reflect an epistemologically ambiguous interplay between the two multivalent principles associated with Saturn and Pluto. On the one hand, there was the perception, projection, or eruption of threatening subversive elements—infidels, heretics, terrorists, savages, inferior races, barbarians, criminals, subversives, perverts, evildoers. All these can be regarded as representing the archetypal Plutonic “underworld” in several senses: instinctual, psychological, sociological, theological. On the other hand, this perception of dire threat was matched by a compensatory empowerment of conservative, repressive, or reactionary forces in complex combination and compromise formations. Such an empowerment often brought about the authoritative implementation of methods and activities (war, torture, enslavement, legalized murder, extermination, weapons of mass destruction, manipulative deception and propaganda) that in other contexts or as used by others would be regarded by the same parties as something to be morally condemned and prohibited.
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