The psychodynamics underlying this interplay was insightfully depicted by Freud in his understanding of the superego’s complex relationship to the id. The superego, as the internal principle of conscience, moral judgment, and instinctual constraint, carries in itself the fear of punitive retribution from the introjected parental authority. Freud recognized that the superego was not only repressive and punitive against the instinctual drives of the id, but was also energetically informed and impelled by the id—unconsciously from below, as it were, even when it perceived the nefarious threat to be from the outside. The psychological consequence could sometimes take the form of obsessive-compulsive and cruel, sadistic tendencies, directed either internally against the self or externally against others, often both. This conception of the superego (archetypally associated with Saturn) and the id (with Pluto) was formulated by Freud precisely during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1921–23 in his book The Ego and the Id, published in 1923.
Highly characteristic of Saturn-Pluto historical periods in psychoanalytic terms was an intensified dialectic on the collective level between the repression of the id and the “return of the repressed,” often in a covert form. The periods of such alignments seemed to coincide with an emphatically increased tendency towards psychological “splitting”—for example, tending to view oneself as entirely identified with the good and the other entirely with evil. Closely associated with this mechanism of defense was an equally powerful tendency towards “othering”: the intense objectification of other subjects. This objectification, when combined with the projection or experience of evil and shadow qualities, tended to impel such emotions as violent suspicion, terror, hatred, revenge, fanaticism, and murderous cruelty.
Such behavior and impulses seemed to be made psychologically possible by establishing or experiencing an absolute boundary (Saturn) between the self and the other. The other—whether defined by nationality, religion, race, class, caste, gender, sexual orientation, belief system, or any other category—was then perceived as radically separate and alien, sometimes as subhuman and unworthy of life. During these Saturn-Pluto alignment periods, frequent references were made to vile beasts, predatory animals, swine, filth, demons, devils, cancers, viruses, vermin, rodents, moles, reptiles, vipers, swamps, lairs, hunting down animals or smoking them out, exterminating a pestilence, and the like—all reflecting Plutonic themes.
The Freudian insight into the superego’s hidden dual relation to the id can be deepened by the Jungian perspective in which the shadow, possessing the ego but projected onto the other, enacts its cruelty against the object of its wrath with all the insidious destructiveness it perceives in the other and denies in itself. In theological terms, evil subtly appropriates the motivations of the soul that identifies itself exclusively with God and the good, and that then performs its dark actions in self-deceiving but absolute confidence that it is morally obliged to act thus against such a manifest evil. Thus the God-fearing parent cruelly punishes the wayward child “for its own sake.” The Inquisitor tortures and burns at the stake a person whose beliefs are perceived to differ dangerously from his own. The committee of public safety, the department of covert activity, gathers its information, trains its death squads, undermines elections, foments and assassinates to make certain that good prevails in the world.
The psychological orientation associated with the Saturn-Pluto complex often constellates a compulsion for an Ahab-like obsessive pursuit of an evil that must be rooted out at any cost. Remarkably, Herman Melville, who explored this complex with such memorable profundity, was born during the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the nineteenth century (1819), and wrote Moby Dick precisely one cycle later during the immediately following Saturn-Pluto conjunction (1850–51).
Ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning, to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in the statue devil;—Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and, then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.
Thus acts the suicide bomber, the witch burner, the whip-wielding slavemaster and the cross-burning klansman, the monomaniacal dictator and the righteous leader whose divinely authorized task is to rid the world of evil he knows is so uniquely and malignantly embodied in another person or race. With this absolute conviction of ineluctable destiny and righteousness, just before the final battle with the abhorred object of his obsession, Ahab declared: “This whole act’s immutably decreed…. I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”
Moby Dick and Nature’s Depths
One of the most remarkable sequences of synchronicities I have ever observed was a dramatic convergence of events involving Melville, Moby Dick, and the two planetary cycles we have been examining in this book. As we have seen, Melville was born in 1819 when Saturn and Pluto were in conjunction, and also when the Uranus-Pluto square was occurring, which corresponds to that powerful combination of conflicting complexes and impulses that we observed in Marx, who was born during the same alignments, and in several especially critical historical periods such as the mid-1960s and mid-1790s. In Melville and Moby Dick, we can recognize the potent interaction between these two archetypal complexes: on the one hand, the Uranus-Pluto themes of the awakening and eruption of nature’s forces in the whale, the unleashing of the instinctual id in Ahab his act of titanic defiance and the titanic power and creative intensity of the book Moby Dick itself; and on the other hand, the Saturn-Pluto themes of punitive retribution against nature and relentless obsession with projected evil, the cauldron of the instincts within Ahab driving his compulsion for vengeance with inexorable force.
Eleven days after Melville was born, in August 1919, the whaleship Essex departed from Nantucket for the southern Pacific Ocean, where it was attacked by an eighty-foot whale and sunk. According to the account later published by the Essex’s first mate, Owen Chase, the whale rammed the ship deliberately and repeatedly with “fury and vengeance” until it had destroyed and sunk the ship. The twenty surviving whalers were forced to spend the next ninety-three days unprotected and starving in rowboats in the open ocean, where most of them eventually died. This fateful voyage, from its departure through the ramming and sinking of the ship by the whale fifteen months later, took place during the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction and Uranus-Pluto square of Melville’s birth. The titanic forces of nature embodied in the whale, a vivid expression of the Plutonic principle of nature’s elemental power, mass, and instinct, can here be seen as suddenly awakened and erupting in a most unexpected manner, as is characteristic of the Uranus-Pluto complex. Yet the whale that turned upon and destroyed the Essex has also become, like both Moby Dick and Ahab, the Saturnian agent of judgment, punishment, retribution, and death—precisely reflective of the Saturn-Pluto complex.
Growing up unaware of this dramatic event that occurred so near his birth, Melville in his early twenties signed on to a three-year whaling voyage, which took him to the same area of the South Pacific as the scene of the Essex’s sinking. While on that voyage, he happened
to meet the son of Owen Chase, the Essex’s first mate, who loaned him a copy of the father’s original narrative. Melville was deeply affected by reading “the wondrous story upon the landless sea,” as he later wrote, “and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck.”
Exactly one full Saturn-Pluto cycle after Melville’s birth and the sinking of the Essex, during the very next conjunction of those two planets in 1850–51, Melville wrote and published Moby Dick. Amazingly, just as Melville was completing his book, in August 1851, with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction within 4° of exact alignment, the whaleship Ann Alexander was rammed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale it had been pursuing in the same waters in which the same fate had befallen the Essex over thirty years earlier—to this day the only two well-documented cases of such an event. Melville was stunned when he learned of the great coincidence.
Moreover, as we may recall, the publication of Moby Dick and the sinking of the Ann Alexander coincided with not only the Saturn-Pluto conjunction but also the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56 we earlier examined—the three planets in a triple conjunction, the only such triple conjunction in the past two hundred years. The extraordinary elemental power of Moby Dick, its sudden liberation of the dark and volcanic, the unleashing of the forces of nature in both the whale and the human creative imagination, fully possessed Melville as he worked on the novel. Writing hour after hour through the day without stopping for food, alternately on fire with energy and weary from the immense expenditure, he cried out:
Give me Vesuvius’s crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe…. Such, and so magnifying, is the virture of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme.
All these figures and events—Melville’s life and creative imagination, the narrative and themes of Moby Dick, the titanic figure of Ahab, the killing of whales, and whales that kill the killers of whales—profoundly reflect the character of the two archetypal complexes we have been examining here, Saturn-Pluto and Uranus-Pluto. I was considerably struck by the extraordinary synchronistic patterning in which two of the events, Melville’s birth and Moby Dick’s publication, coincided with the successive Saturn-Pluto and Uranus-Pluto alignments so precisely: These were the only two conjunctions of Saturn and Pluto in the first seventy years of the nineteenth century, and the only two hard-aspect alignments of Uranus and Pluto in that same period. But when I later discovered that both of those events also coincided with such rare and symbolically evocative sinkings of whaleships by whales, events that were so uncannily relevant to both Melville’s entire life and his masterwork, yet were also so precisely appropriate to the archetypal complexes associated with the rare coinciding planetary alignments—in all these events and coincidences, one succeeding another with relentless coherence, I felt that an intensity of synchronistic power had erupted through the acts of nature itself that was genuinely numinous in its elemental potency. “Some certain significance lurks in all things,” wrote Melville in Moby Dick.
As we know, Jung paid special attention to the sudden or unusual movements of nature for their potential synchronistic significance, whether of wind and water or of birds, insects, fish, and other animals. But these events and coincidences just recounted, the whaleship-sinkings, the births of Melville and Moby Dick, and the cosmic movements and archetypal patternings with which they all so precisely coincided, suggest a form of synchronistic orchestration in nature that, by comparison with the golden-scarab insect that entered Jung’s window while his patient recounted her dream, are awe-inspiring in their epic magnitude. Such powerful patterning, working at so many levels of the human and natural worlds, strongly intimates the possibility that an anima mundi, an archetypally informed depth of interiority, lies within “all things”—in the depths of the human psyche and in the depths of nature. Melville’s mighty work was something more than a human artifact: It represented the upsurging force of nature itself, imbued with dark and numinous significance. Elemental forces of meaning and purpose upwelled from the oceanic depths, twice in the whales, and twice in human forms, in the births of Melville and his book. These extraordinary double synchronicities in the human and cetacean realms are, on their own terms, sufficiently astonishing to compel deep reflection. Yet somehow precisely linked to and uniting all these events and coincidences is the great macrocosm itself, the planetary movements in the vast starry sky high above the ocean of whales and men, all reflecting a profundity of significant pattern and mysterious purpose in the depths of all things.
Historical Determinism, Realpolitik, and Apocalypse
To maintain a modicum of simplicity and clarity in what for many readers may be their first entrance into the archetypal astrological perspective and mode of analysis, I have generally focused on just one theme at a time for any given phenomenon, and emphasized some themes at the expense of others, in a way that conveys only a portion of the true complexity of the larger body of data. Since we are concentrating entirely on the dynamic, or hard, quadrature aspects of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, the evidence presented has been heavily weighted to the more challenging, problematic, and dark dimensions of this complex. Moreover, we have been centering our attention mainly on the great drama of history and culture, where the ordeals and crises of collective humanity are writ large and where paradigmatic individuals embody and express the forces and struggles of the whole. In doing so, we have been able to glimpse more directly the full magnitude and power of the archetypal dimension expressing itself in human affairs.
If, however, we were to examine each individual born with Saturn-Pluto aspects or who is undergoing Saturn-Pluto transits (either world transits or personal transits), we would see many examples of equally characteristic but far less intense embodiments of the same archetypal principles. And were we to examine the confluent, or soft, aspects of this cycle as well, the trines and sextiles, we would see the many ways in which these two principles regularly come together in more easily harmonious, mutually supportive, and intrinsically strengthening ways: for example, a well-developed capacity for sustained effort and discipline, a spontaneous facility for containing and focusing intense energies, the balanced and effective organization of power, a certain spirit of well-earned personal authority and gravitas, extraordinary solidity of character, perceptive moral judgment, deeply established enduring structures of all kinds, and the like. Using one example to stand for many: George Kennan, born with the Saturn-Pluto trine in 1904, represented a paradigmatic expression of these qualities, embodied in his well-known personal gravitas and authoritative influence, as well as his depth of historical-psychological insight and moral conviction. The characteristic qualities of the Saturn-Pluto complex were precisely articulated in Kennan’s summary statement from the famous Foreign Affairs article of 1947 that would guide American Cold War strategy against Stalin: “In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment.” Equally reflective was Kennan’s role as intellectual architect of the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild postwar Europe.6
Moreover, contrary to much of the astrological tradition, I found that even hard aspects between two planets often coincided with a full embodiment of the positive potentialities of the relevant archetypes—though typically only after considerable effort, whether individual or collective, had been expended in the integration of the different impulses involved in the challenging dialectic. The present discussion, therefore, must be recognized as only an introduction to and a fragment of a considerably larger and more complex reality. It offers an entrance to the larger body of ev
idence that, while accurately reflective of the archetypal dynamics correlated with this planetary cycle, illuminates only a part of the full spectrum of manifestations that regularly accompany such alignments. Yet the analysis pursued in these pages possesses the advantage of highlighting some of the most significant and distinctive characteristics and themes of this powerful archetypal complex. Given the particular character of these two principles—both of them potentially challenging and serious, sometimes in the extreme—our focus on the hard aspects in the context of history and influential cultural figures permits a sharper rendering of the essential qualities associated with this planetary combination.
Just as Melville’s work vividly reflected many archetypal themes and psychological mechanisms characteristic of the Saturn-Pluto complex, so also with the work of Franz Kafka, who was born in 1882 during the very next Saturn-Pluto conjunction after Melville’s Moby Dick, and who wrote his paradigmatic works The Trial and In the Penal Colony in 1914 exactly one cycle later during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction immediately after that. It is striking that these four consecutive Saturn-Pluto conjunctions so precisely coincided with the succession of births and major works of these two literary and psychological masters, both deep explorers of the very archetypal complex with which this planetary cycle is so consistently associated. With surreal precision, Kafka depicted the characteristic Saturn-Pluto motifs of judgment and guilt, cruel punishment, claustrophobic bureaucracy and totalitarian confinement. In work after work, in stories, novels, and his own diary, he portrayed the relentless imprisonment of consciousness wrought in the heart of both tyrant and victim, both pursuer and pursued, who are sometimes the same individual.
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