In addition to Augustine, Hobbes, and Freud, there is a fourth major figure whose most influential work, with notably similar themes and character, involved the identical sequence of correlations with the two cycles we have been examining. While the resonances with Hobbes and Augustine can be discerned in Freud’s historical vision, in the more immediate background was Schopenhauer’s conception of a blind striving will or energy that dominates life and impels all human desire and instinct. Schopenhauer was born in 1788 at the start of the Uranus-Pluto opposition of the French Revolutionary epoch, as discussed earlier, and at the end of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1785–88 (whose severe economic depression and widespread famine helped precipitate the French Revolution). Moreover, he published his major work, The World as Will and Idea, in 1818 during the immediately following Saturn-Pluto conjunction—the one that coincided with the births of Marx and Melville—which happened also to be the very next time Uranus was in quadrature alignment with Pluto, as discussed above with Marx and Melville. Again, it seems that when these two planetary cycles, Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto, overlap, with a corresponding activation of the two powerful archetypal complexes, the human effort to assimilate and articulate the titanic clash of the forces involved regularly seems to bring forth especially potent and influential works of the individual and cultural imagination.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy vividly reflects both the Uranus-Pluto and the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complexes, not simply as two separate themes but rather with the two closely integrated in a potent synthesis. In Schopenhauer’s vision, the ceaselessly striving universal will to live is an irresistible impulse that grips human existence and produces struggle, competition, and unsatisfiable cravings whose inevitable frustration produces constant misery. The will constantly seeks to perpetuate itself through us by using our never-satisfiable desires and drives without our conscious awareness as mere devices and strategies to fulfill its endless goal of propagation and self-preservation—in certain respects a nineteenth-century philosophical anticipation of sociobiology, which was itself founded during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1973–75 with the publication of Edward O. Wilson’s Sociobiology. (This was the Saturn-Pluto alignment that began just as the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s and early 1970s ended, the period that coincided with Watergate and the height of Kissinger’s geopolitical activity, among many other archetypally related phenomena cited earlier.)
In Schopenhauer’s perspective, the primordial will pervasively shapes and reifies our perceptions, our ideas, our world. Yet the Saturnian dimension of this reality and philosophy asserts itself not only in the imprisoning and frustrating power of the Plutonic will, but also in Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the “denial of the will.” For in his view, only through the ascetic denial of this all-consuming will to live, constraining its power through self-knowledge or transcending it through art, can one attempt to find some equilibrium amidst the pervasive pain of existence. All these themes were driven by the conviction, so reflective of the Saturn-Pluto complex, that no philosophy or religion that fails to face the dark, genuinely evil nature of the world as it is actually experienced by living beings can pretend to be adequate or valid. Thus Schopenhauer pushed the European mind as never before to recognize the immense suffering of all life, not only human but animal, and the animal in the human. He brilliantly confronted the cruelty of the widespread Christian belief in a punitive God who would create a world in which only a tiny minority would be saved and the vast majority condemned to eternal suffering, and compared this to the actual hell of life on Earth and the actual cruelty of human beings in their treatment of other humans and animals. He relentlessly demanded a confrontation with the shadow side of existence and an engagement with those depths of one’s being—instinctual, irrational, wild, blind, overpowering—that did not fit neatly into the light-filled optimisms of Enlightenment rationalism, shallow versions of Romantic idealism, or conventional Christianity.9
I consistently observed that perspectives which emphasized the darkly problematic aspects of existence—intense struggle, suffering and death, the relentless tension of opposing forces, and more generally the overwhelming power of impersonal forces determining human life—emerged with extraordinary regularity during periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments, as did philosophical and religious visions of a highly dualistic or apocalyptic character. Given the Manichaean overtones of Freud’s and Augustine’s works, it is striking that Saturn and Pluto were in conjunction in the years 243–45 CE when Mani, the founder of Manichaeism itself in ancient Persia, first proclaimed his ascetic religion of cosmic dualism in which all existence is determined by a universal battle between the good forces of Light and the evil, chaotic forces of Darkness, with Light identified with God, and Darkness identified with matter and embodiment.
Similarly, the rise to power of the fiery fundamentalist preacher Savonarola in Florence, where he denounced the vanity and corruption of Renaissance culture and initiated a strict moral reform under the threat of eternal damnation and imminent apocalypse, began during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1490–92. Here again both the synchronic and the multivalent nature of these correlations was strikingly visible. For this was the same Saturn-Pluto alignment that coincided with the start of what turned out to be in many respects the apocalyptic transformation of the Western hemisphere that began when Columbus reached the Bahama Islands on October 12, 1492. This event coincided both with the Saturn-Pluto square and with the long Uranus-Pluto square of the 1490s cited earlier for the era of initial European penetration to the West and to India by the navigators and explorers of Spain and Portugal.
Moreover, it was also in 1492 that King Ferdinand in Spain conquered Granada and expelled the Moors, thus completing the long crusade against Islam in Europe, immediately after which the Spanish Inquisition expelled the Jews from Spain. Over fifty thousand Jewish families were ordered to leave the country within four months of the Inquisition’s edict “for the honor and glory of God,” thereby forcing into motion a vast migration of Jewish refugees not unlike the one that began during the similar configuration of Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto in the 1930s.
Apocalyptic Scenarios
I must emphasize again the extent to which such archetypal correlations transcended simple dichotomies of subjective and objective, of distorted projection versus accurate discernment. When a powerful archetypal field was constellated, the domain of its influence was not merely intrapsychic. The widespread conviction that human individuals live lives that are helplessly bound in the grip of overwhelming impersonal, destructive, or dark forces, a conviction that consistently emerged during Saturn-Pluto alignments (including the most recent, that of 2000–04), often arose on the basis of strongly suggestive evidence. It is true that such alignments also coincided regularly with a religious belief that the end of the world was imminent. Yet apocalyptic and doomsday scenarios also emerged during such alignments in sober political and military analyses, even in the natural sciences and with considerable empirical support.
For example, the “nuclear winter” scenario of the probable fallout from nuclear war was hypothesized by Carl Sagan and other scientists during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84, when the widespread experience of a nuclear “sword of Damocles” hanging over the world reached a climax during the first Reagan administration. In those years the tremendous nuclear buildup on both sides of the Atlantic, in preparation for “nuclear overkill,” reached what was recognized by many to be genuinely apocalyptic proportions, and gave rise in the collective psyche to pervasive fears of nuclear holocaust in a Manichaean battle between the superpowers. Widespread anxiety concerning the possibility of “triggering World War III,” the drawing of many historical parallels with the disastrous beginning of World War I (which had occurred during the same planetary alignment, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, two cycles earlier), the widely seen television program of nuclear catastrophe, The Day After, were all expressive of this activated archetypal field during that pe
riod. These themes and concerns were similarly embodied at this time in the intense antinuclear activism and apocalyptic warnings of Helen Caldicott and the Physicians for Social Responsibility as well as in Jonathan Schell’s influential The Fate of the Earth, all during the same alignment. Again, it is true that these fears and images of a nuclear Armageddon catalyzed the fundamentalist imagination, but such anxieties were nearly universal at the time, among the reasonable and the unreasonable alike, and helped drive the Cold War to its conclusion.10
During the most recent Saturn-Pluto alignment in 2003, the U.S. Department of Defense produced the widely discussed scientific report “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security: Imagining the Unthinkable” on the possible effects of abrupt changes in the global climate if global warming continues. Drawing on empirical data and computer models, like the nuclear winter scenario of the preceding conjunction, the report suggested that catastrophic consequences could result for much of the world in the next two decades—worldwide flooding, mega-droughts, freezing cold, famine, and endemic war and chaos—a warning that reflected the same Saturn-Pluto themes in its rendering of an apocalyptic future as the fundamentalist literature of the same period. The widely viewed film The Day After Tomorrow of 2004 presented a cinematic version of a global warming catastrophe, remarkably paralleling the character and cultural effect of The Day After of 1983 with its rendering of nuclear catastrophe during the immediately prior Saturn-Pluto conjunction.
Paradoxically, alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle have coincided not only with the intensified collective awareness of dire threats to the human species and to the planetary biosphere, but also with another frequent expression of the same archetypal complex in an almost opposite form: namely, the intensification of strenuous antienvironmental efforts, particularly in the United States, on the part of corporate and political establishments. Here a characteristic combination of predatory materialism and a relentless impulse for control and domination over nature strongly suggests the presence of the negative Saturn-Pluto complex. Equally suggestive is the frequently observed association of antienvironmental policies with conservative social and political views, fundamentalist religious beliefs, and corporate pressures for regulatory autonomy and increased profits. The systematic empowerment of antienvironmental forces and policies took place with unusual intensity during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2001–04 under the first Bush-Cheney administration, as it did during the preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84 under the first Reagan administration, especially through the policies of the Secretary of the Interior James Watt.
Here too the synergy working between different forms of this archetypal complex is evident, as the Republican constituencies that elected Reagan and the younger Bush included many fundamentalist Christians with explicitly apocalyptic expectations that similarly reflected the Saturn-Pluto complex in one of its possible inflections. The cultural ascendancy of individuals and groups that hold apocalyptic beliefs, whether in the manner of fundamentalist preachers like Savonarola in 1490–92 and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians in 1992–93 or politicians influenced by fundamentalism like Reagan in 1981–84 and Bush in 2001–04, coincided consistently with periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments. Apocalyptic attitudes were regularly interconnected with antagonistic or indifferent attitudes towards nature and the present world, which encouraged policies of exploitation or destruction that at once ratified the sense of religious separation from nature and served to hasten the anticipated apocalypse.11
The War Between Man and Nature
The Saturn-Pluto planetary cycle and archetypal complex appears to be closely associated with many phenomena and tendencies in which the “war between man and nature” is a central theme. Freud’s battle between the superego and the id, Hobbes’s conflict between a controlling government authority and nature’s state of endless war, Augustine’s and Calvin’s obsessive drive to negate the claims of instinct and repress sexuality, related motifs of world rejection in Puritanism and fundamentalist Christianity, apocalyptic beliefs, punitive asceticism and body hatred, fear of or disgust towards sexuality, fear of nature’s elemental power, the impulse to dominate or avenge oneself on nature, whale hunting and big-game hunting, corporate devastation of the environment, the objectification of nonhuman nature, certain forms of mechanistic science and industrial technology—are all diverse expressions of this archetypally constellated tension.
Each of the terms in the familiar phrase “the war between man and nature” reflects presuppositions that are usually unconscious and are rooted in themes central to the Saturn-Pluto complex: the metaphor of “war,” with its implication of an established state of ongoing intentional mutual mass violence and murderous antagonism; the narrow masculine heroic symbolization implicit in “man,” used to represent the larger human condition and human community, this long-conventional term in Western and modern thought deeply grounded in and dependent upon its implied gendered exclusivity; and finally “nature” itself as a distinct substantive noun, a defined and objectified entity that is at some level essentially separate from and antagonistic to “man,” with the unconscious image of a powerful and threatening Mother Nature lurking in the background.
Several characteristic motifs of the Saturn-Pluto complex are visible in this archetypal “war”: first, a focus on those aspects of nature that are harsh, punishing, problematic, constricting and depriving, overpowering, mortally threatening; second, the fear of nature producing a compensatory need to defend against, control, defeat, punish, or destroy nature; third, an emphasis on predatory and murderous instincts in both human beings and the rest of nature; fourth, a tendency to draw a sharp and rigid boundary between man and nature in such a way as to see the latter as radically “other,” inferior, unconscious, soulless, insensitive to pain, incapable of suffering, bestial, subhuman, and self-evidently undeserving of the rights and respectful treatment as would be merited by a human being; fifth, in a scientific variant, the impulse to objectify and constrain nature to master it (vividly embodied in Francis Bacon, born with the Saturn-Pluto square), often combined with a belief in nature’s ultimate calculability and absolute causal determinism (as in the paradigmatic figure of the Enlightenment scientist–mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, born with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction); and sixth, in counterpoint to all of the above, an ecological perspective dominated by a view of nature as the victim of ruthless human exploitation: objectified, dissected, imprisoned, factory-farmed, clear-cut, cruelly experimented upon, devastated, made extinct. (Thus Schopenhauer: “One might say with truth, Mankind are the devils of the earth, and the animals the souls they torment.”)
Natal hard aspects involving Saturn and Pluto are regularly found, for example, in the charts of individuals with a pronounced impulse to kill wild animals, such as big-game hunters like Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt, or leaders of organizations like the National Rifle Association such as Charlton Heston. (Historically, the close relationship between European imperial ambitions for dominance in Africa and Asia and demands by European elites for ever-expanding access to territories for big-game hunting is also relevant to this archetypal complex.) Sometimes, however, as with the three whaleships, the Essex, the Ann Alexander, and the Pequod in Moby Dick, the tables are turned.
The theme of nature’s destructive and elemental power, and the need for extreme feats of human fortitude in response, can be seen in the case of the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1914–16. The expedition’s ship, Endurance, became entrapped in the pack ice of the Antarctic Weddell Sea and then crushed by the ice pressure. For nearly two years the twenty-eight men were stranded in relentless cold and dark with little shelter or food before finally making their harrowing escape. Jack London, born with the Saturn-Pluto square, repeatedly explored identical themes in his writings, as in his memorable short story To Build a Fire. The starkly realistic film Quest for Fire, pr
oduced during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction 1981–82, wordlessly depicted the primordial life of Ice Age humans in a state of nature that constantly threatened individual and group survival, was brutally indifferent to human existence, and required acts of desperate courage and extreme physical stamina merely to endure.
Conversely, this same planetary cycle and archetypal complex was closely associated with both eras and individuals possessed by a pronounced sense of nature’s ruthless exploitation by human activity—rapacious corporate treatment of the environment, the destruction of the subtle balance of nature, cruelty to animals, and so forth—with the felt need to take decisive action in response. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for example, was founded during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1866, the one immediately following the conjunction coincident with the publication of Moby Dick. Similarly, Rachel Carson, the mother of the modern environmental movement, was born during the first Saturn-Pluto square of the twentieth century, in 1907. The Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, the founder of the animal rights movement and the International Association of Bioethics, was born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946. Singer’s Animal Liberation, the seminal work in this field, which grew out of developments during the 1960s’ Uranus-Pluto conjunction, was written and published in coincidence with the Saturn-Pluto square of 1973–75. The Endangered Species Act of 1973 was passed by the U.S. Congress during the same alignment. The very first law in the United States protecting endangered species was passed in 1966 during the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto opposition.
Both of the two most recent Saturn-Pluto axial alignment periods, 1981–84 and 2000–04, brought not only the empowerment of antienvironmental administrations and policies but also a marked intensification of environmentalist commitment and a rapid increase in membership in major ecological organizations. The perceived empowerment and depredations of the one side catalyzed and galvanized the will of the other to defend and protect. Both sides were informed and driven by the same highly activated archetypal complex but in diametrically opposite ways. During the latter period, there was decisively constellated in the collective psyche a set of interconnected Saturn-Pluto motifs: a sharply heightened consciousness of nature’s inherent limits, the accelerating reality of the mass extinction crisis, the potential exhaustion of the Earth’s resources that threatened to destabilize international relations and cause devastating wars, and the looming possibility of severe climate change that would lead to catastrophe.
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