Especially relevant here is one of the last stories Kafka wrote, The Burrow, in which a determined mole, using his head as a sledgehammer, spends every waking minute obsessively digging and fortifying an elaborate maze of tunnels and defenses to protect him from the predatory beast he is certain awaits him outside his underground fortress. All the powers of a hyperacute reason are placed in the service of that task as he ceaselessly constructs in his mind the countless ways his invisible enemy will at any moment be able to surprise and kill him. A brilliantly sustained parable of the ego’s incessant fear of an all-encompassing dangerous world, one whose constant peril lies as much in the depths of one’s own psyche and the fear of death as in the outer environment, The Burrow was written in 1923 just before Kafka’s own death, during the same Saturn-Pluto square in which Freud wrote The Ego and the Id.
On the collective level, the characteristic tendencies of the Saturn-Pluto complex towards perceiving and constellating danger, subversive threat, and malefic shadow elements in a rigidly polarized world view were typically accompanied by an increased perception of the inevitability of conflict and war, whether expressed on the level of mass psychology or of elaborate rational analysis. The underlying conviction of the inevitability of conflict and war has found philosophical expression in such paradigmatic works of political thought as Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, with its vision of humanity’s natural condition as a state of “war of all against all,” or more recently Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, with its view of the world’s geopolitical future as ineluctably shaped by historically determined enmity between religiously and culturally defined blocs of humanity, such as Islam and the West. Both of these works were written in precise coincidence with Saturn-Pluto alignments (the conjunction of 1648–50 and the most recent square of 1992–94, respectively). In turn, such works tended to be revived, widely referred to, and affirmed as authoritative in subsequent periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments, as in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. A related form of the same archetypal gestalt was the perception of civilization or history as moving towards inevitable decline, as in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, largely written during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of World War I.7
An unflinching realism and gravity of perspective tied to a vision of inevitable conflict or decline—whether authentic and empirically justified or subjectively distorted and self-fulfilling—was a dominant theme of this archetypal complex. The word realpolitik, for example, first entered the English language from the German during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1914. Many of the themes cited above can be recognized in the political philosophy, foreign policy decisions, and covert activities of Henry Kissinger, who was born in 1923 during the immediately following Saturn-Pluto square that also coincided with Kafka’s The Burrow. Characteristic of certain forms of the Saturn-Pluto realpolitik perspective and ethos is Kissinger’s response to Congress to criticism he received for having the CIA actively foment resistance among the Kurds against Saddam Hussein in 1975 (during another Saturn-Pluto square) and then suddenly abandoning them when his diplomatic strategy changed, which resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Kurdish people: “Covert activities should not be mistaken for missionary work.” Comparable actions and statements reflecting a realpolitik perspective could be cited for Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, often involving the same figures and geographical areas, and again in coincidence with the Saturn-Pluto cycle.8
Civilization and Its Discontents
An extraordinary number of the archetypal tendencies discussed here were evident, in a distinct inflection that proved immensely consequential, in the work and vision of Karl Marx, whom we will consider now in greater detail from the perspective of his natal Saturn-Pluto aspect. In our earlier discussion of the three-planet combination of Uranus and Saturn with Pluto, we saw how the tension and compromise formations between the Saturn principle of control and authority and the Uranus principle of rebellion and freedom were prominent in Marx’s philosophy and character, with Pluto intensifying both impulses. (His statement that “Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the calendar of philosophy” well represents the heightened sense of Prometheus Bound that is frequently found associated with the Saturn-Uranus archetypal complex.) Marx was born in 1818 during the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the nineteenth century—the same one as Melville—and presents many of the symptoms characteristic of the Saturn-Pluto complex. Like Melville, Marx was born with both the Uranus-Pluto square alignment, as we saw in our study of that cycle, and the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and in each of these titanic figures both of the archetypal complexes we have been examining in these chapters were conspicuously in evidence. In a sense, Das Kapital was Marx’s Moby Dick, with capitalism in the targeted role of the white whale, to be destroyed with all the obsessive power and will that could be mobilized in a task of such metaphysical and historical urgency.
All of Marx’s work was in the service of an overarching framework of mass revolution on behalf of an emancipatory cause, corresponding with his close natal Uranus-Pluto square. Yet within that framework, such characteristic themes of the Saturn-Pluto complex as absolute determinism and inevitability, rigidly polarized conflict, oppression and dictatorship were all dominant in Marx’s philosophical vision. We see the positive side of the complex in his penetrating analysis of and sensitivity to the shadow side of nineteenth-century capitalism, the extreme social injustice and human alienation inherent in the economic systems and societies of his time. This sensitivity was intensified as he articulated his analysis of the master-slave relationship, his recognition of the continual reappearance throughout history of structures of oppression, his vision of the crushingly inhuman prison in which so many human lives were enclosed, the enslavement and impoverishment of workers under capitalism, and the ubiquitous power of the oppressor over the oppressed.
The larger range of Saturn-Pluto themes was embodied and elaborated in such Marxist doctrines as the ultimate determinism of all structures of society and belief by economic and material factors, the ineradicable contradictions of bourgeois social relations, the necessity of class conflict and struggle, the inevitable unfolding of the dialectic of history, and the need for an intervening dictatorship of the proletariat to destroy all remnants of bourgeois society. More generally, the complex was evident in a certain authoritarian rigidity and dogmatism in the Marxist philosophy and sensibility, driven by a kind of titanic force of will.
Yet we begin to see the extraordinary range of archetypal multivalence in the Saturn-Pluto correlations when we compare Marx’s expression of an emphatically atheistic historical vision with an equally paradigmatic theological vision of history. For many of precisely these same archetypal themes—determinism and the overpowering nature of the forces governing and constraining human life, rigidly polarized conflict, intensely negative moral judgment of humanity’s current condition, the need for unbending will to counter and repress the forces of darkness—were acutely expressed, though with entirely different inflections and intentions, in the religious ideas and enduring legacies of Saint Augustine and John Calvin.
The most influential theologians of Catholicism and Protestantism, respectively, Augustine and Calvin were both born with Saturn and Pluto in square alignment. In both cases, their personal conceptions of human destiny took the form of grave moral judgment shaped by a vivid sense of humanity’s deep corruption, the power of evil in the world, and the inborn guilt of the human soul. Other themes that precisely reflected this archetypal complex include both theologians’ lifelong emphasis on the encompassing threat of eternal damnation, the need for rigorous suppression of sexuality and unregenerate instinct, God’s overwhelming and implacable omnipotence, and the theological certainty of predestination.
The dominant archetypal motifs of an individual’s life and work consistently seemed to find paradigmatic expression at the time of planetary alignments that were archetypally consonant with those specific themes, and when co
rresponding external events shaped both the individual’s personal outlook and the larger cultural zeitgeist. Many of the themes just cited were articulated, with lasting influence on the Western religious imagination, in Augustine’s monumental work The City of God. There he set forth his vision of history as a dramatic battle between the two invisible societies of the elect and of the damned, the city of God and the city of the world, climaxing in the Last Judgment. The powerful vision of The City of God seems to have been especially inspired and pervaded by the archetypal complex associated with the Saturn-Pluto cycle: the perception of human existence as bound and driven by overwhelming forces, the moral and mortal gravity of the human condition, Manicheaen cosmic dualism, the enduring power of evil and satanic subversion, the anticipation of eschatological finality and judgment, hell and damnation. Augustine conceived and began writing The City of God during the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the fifth century, in 410–12. This was the same conjunction that coincided with the massive barbarian incursions and the sack of Rome by Alaric and the Visigoths, awareness of which deeply shaped Augustine’s historical understanding and the vision set forth in The City of God.
Thus we can recognize here both the diachronic and synchronic patterning that I found so pervasive in studying planetary correlations with cultural and historical phenomena. Diachronically, as we saw with Kafka and Melville above, Augustine was born during one Saturn-Pluto alignment and wrote the work that especially reflects that complex during a subsequent one. Synchronically, the period that brought forth that work was marked by the simultaneous occurrence of significant historical events bearing the same archetypal character as the work itself.
As it happens, the correlation was more complexly precise than this, for Augustine was himself born with not only Saturn and Pluto in hard aspect but also Uranus and Pluto—like both Marx and Melville—with the characteristic titanic conflict and violent intensity, inner and outer, that so consistently coincided with this three-planet configuration. Moreover, these same three planets were again in hard aspect in the 410–12 period (the shorter Saturn-Pluto conjunction of those years occurring near the end of the longer Uranus-Pluto square of 406–13) in the period of immense upheavals in the late Roman Empire produced by the barbarian incursions and the sack of Rome, when Augustine began The City of God. Both the drama of Augustine’s life and character and these historic upheavals and traumas closely reflect the archetypal forces of the two planetary cycles we have been examining, Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto, in tense and often violently destabilizing interaction.
We see a closely analogous pattern over a millennium later in Hobbes’s milestone of early modern political philosophy, Leviathan, with its similar obsession with violent social disorder, its perception of nature as a state of perpetual war, and the consequent need for absolute authoritarian control by a sovereign ruler (Hobbes’s call for absolute monarchy substituted for Augustine’s call for the sovereign authority of the Church). Leviathan was written in 1648–50 under the impact of the Thirty Years’ War just ending and the execution of King Charles I during the political turmoil of the revolutionary epoch of the English Civil War. This coincided with both the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1647–50 and the longer Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1643–55 during the English revolutionary epoch, which we examined earlier.
Like Augustine’s City of God, therefore, the period that brought forth Hobbes’s influential historical vision was one of those—like that of the barbarian incursions and sack of Rome in 410–12, the Reign of Terror in 1793–95, the 1929–33 period of global economic and political collapse and fascist empowerment, and the 1964–67 period of violent revolutionary insurgency, oppression, and upheaval throughout the world—when Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto were all in hard-aspect alignment with each other. All of these periods were marked by an extraordinarily intense, violent, even cataclysmic clash of opposing forces.
There is one other major work whose historical vision is strikingly similar to Leviathan and The City of God in both cultural influence and archetypal character, Freud’s late work Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930 when Saturn was opposite Pluto. It was especially in the two works of Freud’s cited in this chapter, The Ego and the Id and Civilization and Its Discontents, that this particular archetypal dynamic associated with the Saturn-Pluto complex was most dominant in Freud’s work—one at the individual level, the other at the collective—and those two works coincided precisely with the successive Saturn-Pluto hard aspects following the conjunction of World War I. In both works, Freud emphasized the intense conflict and intricate interaction between the id and the superego, between Pluto and Saturn, whether played out on the battlefield of the ego and the individual life or the battlefield of civilization and history.
Thus here again, as in The City of God and Leviathan, the historical vision set forth in Civilization and Its Discontents was informed by a perception of life as dominated by inevitable conflict, struggle, and the overwhelming power of impersonal forces. Moreover, like the earlier works by Augustine and Hobbes, this work coincided with not only the Saturn-Pluto cycle but also the Uranus-Pluto cycle, at one of those relatively rare times when all three planets had moved into mutual hard aspect. Freud’s book was deeply influenced by the terrible impact of the First World War, which coincided with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, and was written and published against the backdrop of the rapid rise of Nazism during the opposition point of that same cycle, the 1929–33 period when Uranus was in square to both Saturn and Pluto. Thus like The City of God’s relation to the barbarian invasions and sack of Rome, and Leviathan’s relation to the Thirty Years’ War and the upheavals of the English Civil War, so Civilization and Its Discontents was shaped by the historically traumatic events coincident with the Saturn-Pluto cycle, with the added intensity and conflict contributed by the emancipatory impulses and unleashing of titanic forces associated with the Uranus-Pluto cycle.
The archetypal complex connected with this three-planet combination corresponds closely to both the philosophical tenor of the three works and the times in which they were born: the revolutionary turmoil, the threat of catastrophic collapse of established structures, the violent unpredictability of life, the inevitability of conflict between forces of disruption and forces of order, and thus the need for firm or even absolute control of unconstrained instinct and rebellious elements lest civilization be lost to licentiousness, war, and chaos. With these three paradigmatic historical visions before us, we can perhaps recognize the family resemblance between works produced in widely separated eras and in altogether different genres yet during identical planetary alignments and reflecting identical archetypal dynamics. On the one hand, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is an analysis explicitly in the tradition of Hobbes, with its view of humanity’s natural state as an instinctually violent condition of anarchy and war, and thus the need for strict socially imposed constraints to prevent endless catastrophe. Yet on the other hand, at a deeper level of the archetypal imagination, the work reflects the tradition of Augustine, with its variation on the Manichaean view of life as an eternal battle between light and dark—but expressed in the Freudian terms of a battle between Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, the drive of life and the drive of death and destruction.
In Freud’s vision, this eternal conflict is interwoven with and complicated by the perpetual battle between civilization and nature’s instincts by which human society is both driven and threatened. All human instinct and desire (Pluto), whether libidinal or aggressive, is forever necessarily constrained and frustrated by the needs of civilization and the cultural superego (Saturn), with the outcome of humankind’s fate perilously uncertain (much as in Augustine’s vision, though in certain respects from an almost opposite perspective). For Freud, the survival of humanity depends on civilization’s suppression of erotic passion and destructive aggression, a never successful but always necessary coercion that results in incurable misery. The human condition is thus an insolubl
e predicament.
In popular culture, Freud’s analysis in Civilization and Its Discontents of the libidinal instincts as frustrated by the constraints of civilization was given iconic embodiment in the Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, recorded in early 1965 and listened to endlessly by millions during the Saturn opposition Uranus-Pluto alignment in 1965–67. Throughout the song, the dominant Promethean-Dionysian impulse of the 1960s towards erotic emancipation and release is simultaneously expressed in defiance of convention and yet with equal force held in check by the empowered Saturnian principle. The characteristic Saturnian motifs appear in the song on several levels at once: in the repeated experiences of sexual rejection, in the mind-numbing vapidity of commercial advertisements and the conformist society they epitomize, and in the bass-heavy simplistic regularity of the music itself. The two opposing archetypal complexes, Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto, are locked in tense confrontation, at once tautly balanced and rhythmically discharged through the sledgehammer repetition of the Dionysian complaint. The sustained popular success of Satisfaction can be viewed in part as a natural consequence of its articulating so directly and emphatically an archetypal conflict at the very moment that the collective psyche was experiencing a heightened tension between just those opposed forces.
Remarkably, Civilization and Its Discontents of 1930 and Satisfaction of 1965 coincided with the only two times in the twentieth century that the three relevant planets—Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto—were all simultaneously in hard-aspect alignment with each other. The two celebrated works, each in its own idiosyncratic and eloquent manner, precisely embodied the Dionysian-Promethean impulse for erotic liberation that is relentlessly inhibited by the cultural superego and rigid constraints of the Saturn-Pluto complex.
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