A concise reflection of several such themes is the widely read book by the geologist and evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, written during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2000–04. Examining the histories of a wide range of extinct civilizations, Diamond analyzed the ways in which societies, blinded by fixed cultural assumptions, determine their own fate and destroy themselves through systematic mismanagement of natural resources that leads to a general ecological collapse.
At the same time Diamond was writing Collapse, a very different concise statement of Saturn-Pluto themes was issued by the U.S. Air Force Space Command, under the leadership of Donald Rumsfeld. The Space Command’s Strategic Master Plan 2004 and Beyond declared its mission to attain ultimate warfare advantage and global military dominance by achieving “ownership” of space, which would provide the capability for launching an instant attack against any location on the Earth: “A viable prompt global strike capability, whether nuclear or non-nuclear, will allow the US to rapidly strike high-payoff, difficult-to-defeat targets from stand-off ranges and produce the desired effect.” But, the Master Plan warned, “we cannot fully exploit space until we control it.” (Emphasis in original.)
As with all archetypal complexes, it seems that both sides of the larger Saturn-Pluto gestalt are always carried within its dynamic interplay, as polar complements that are mutually implicated and that together constitute the larger complex. This observation represents an essential element of the archetypes’ multivalent potentiality—and thus the corollary human choice and responsibility—that is intrinsic to the perspective and the correlations set forth in this book. Here one thinks of the moral realism, expressed in a vivid Saturn-Pluto metaphor, in this utterance by Melville’s old black cook on the Pequod: “If you gobern de shark in you, why den you be angel; for all angel is not’ing more dan de shark well goberned.”
Moral Courage, Facing the Shadow, and the Tension of Opposites
It is always necessary to remind ourselves of the complex nature of these archetypal principles and the multivalent potential of their concrete enactments. In particular, it is important to call attention here to the profoundly noble dimension of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal gestalt that was evident in many of these phenomena and that was equally expressive of the principles involved. For alignments of Saturn and Pluto regularly seemed to coincide with the calling forth, both individually and collectively, of unusually sustained effort and resolution, intense focus and discipline with minimal resources, and exceptional courage and acts of will in the face of extreme danger, hardship, death, and moral darkness. The firefighters and police who ascended the World Trade Center towers after the terrorist attacks in 2001 are paradigmatic examples. So too are Churchill and the British when they stood alone against the overwhelming dominance of Nazi Germany in the dark days of 1939–41.
Another example was the situation of committed environmentalists and indigenous peoples who confronted the grim realities of mass species extinction, habitat destruction, global warming, and the Earth’s vast ecological crisis, all unfolding and accelerating at the same moment as government and corporate antienvironmental forces, especially in the United States, were unprecedentedly empowered and their policies became dominant beginning in the 2000–04 period. The experience of confronting, and perhaps achieving, what absolutely must be accomplished in the face of overwhelming, apparently insurmountable obstacles and resistance—as in the virtually inexpressible experience of a mother in hard labor at excruciating stages of the birth process, or Sisyphus’s persevering against all hope to push the massive boulder up the mountain—seems to be close to the heart of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex.
As dark and problematic as was its shadow, this archetypal complex seemed equally capable of constellating actions, transformations, and enduring social-political consequences involving extraordinary moral determination as well as sheer physical and volitional effort. Whether for good or ill, such periods seemed to coincide consistently with a collective sense of stern purposefulness and determination, a galvanizing of the will against overwhelming odds, grim resolution in the face of extreme danger. Acts of personal or societal self-denial, intense hard labor, sustained commitment to an arduous task, and a radical deepening of gravitas in the collective psyche were typical.12
A frequent theme of correlations with this cycle was the sustained mobilization of collective will and resources to meet a life-and-death emergency, as was visible in the September 11 catastrophe. A paradigmatic example was the American and British airlift in response to the Soviet blockade of West Berlin during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1948, in which thousands of aircraft flew in 4,500 tons of food and supplies every day for over a year to prevent the two million residents of West Berlin from succumbing either to starvation or Soviet occupation. All of these themes were archetypally relevant—the sustained fortitude and disciplined organization and deployment of massive resources on the one hand, the threat of starvation and oppression on the other, in a darkly encompassing atmosphere of mortal danger and grave geopolitical consequences—each reflecting a different dimension of the Saturn-Pluto complex.
Equally characteristic of this archetypal complex was the task of rebuilding out of the rubble of destruction, as in the deployment of the Marshall Plan and the vast rebuilding of Europe after World War II during the conjunction of 1946–48. A more recent expression of this same theme was the herculean labor of clearing and cleaning the immense mass of destruction at Ground Zero, the site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, restoring structures, and stabilizing the deep underground foundations and containments destroyed or threatened by the collapse.
During these same alignments, many less dramatic and less extreme versions of all these tendencies—rebuilding from the ashes of destruction, coping with apparently insurmountable problems, the sustained mobilization of resources and will in situations of mortal crisis, the courageous encounter with danger or evil, facing death and intense suffering, unflinching realism of judgment, relentless discipline—were evident in other contexts and were expressed on a smaller scale, in more personal and private circumstances, and with less graphic intensity.
We see during Saturn-Pluto alignments a greatly increased collective tendency to confront the moral shadow of humanity. This was visible, for example, during the conjunction of the 1946–48 period, when the world for the first time faced the full horror and evil of the Holocaust, with the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi war criminals, the showing of films of the Nazi concentration camps taken at the end of the war, and the publication of the first books about the camps. The atmosphere at those trials of grave moral and legal judgment, of the confrontation with horrific evil, of “man’s inhumanity to man” were all highly characteristic of this archetypal gestalt.
That same Saturn-Pluto conjunction also coincided with widespread public assimilation of and reflection on the American dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as articulated, for example, in John Hersey’s powerful 1946 account, Hiroshima.13 In a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during this conjunction in 1947, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project which produced the bomb, expressed this emerging dark awareness with an Augustine-like confession of collective moral responsibility and fall: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” Together, the Holocaust and the atomic bombings brought forth a wave of intensive moral reflection on the dark reality of human cruelty and violence, the horror of mass death and suffering, and the nature of individual and collective moral responsibility and guilt in the face of such events. This same phenomenon was again evident in the period after September 11, 2001, in the extraordinary outpouring of moral reflection on the human capacity for evil and violence, and on the dark side of both religious fundamentalism and Western economic triumphalism.
/> Another wave of moral deliberation on these same themes, and on the nature of war and the violent deployment of unilateral power in an interdependent world, occurred in the period just before and after the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in March 2003 during the later part of the same Saturn-Pluto opposition. During the immediately preceding opposition, in 1964–67 during the escalation of the United States’ war in Vietnam, there occurred a similar emergence of collective moral judgment against the Johnson administration’s war policies and what was regarded by many as unprovoked military aggression and destruction being visited upon many innocent people. In both cases during these two consecutive Saturn-Pluto oppositions, the actions taken by those in power, with motivations and tactics very much reflective of this archetypal complex, commenced a long, unanticipated (by those in power) cycle of chaotic violence, suffering, and destruction.
During the 2000–04 opposition period there also took place major Nuremburg-like trials before the World Court in The Hague for war crimes that had taken place in Bosnia and Rwanda during the preceding square of Saturn-Pluto in 1992–94. This period also coincided with the international revulsion against the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners by the United States in Iraq, which brought widespread calls for judgment and the prosecution of the guilty. A similar dynamic was evident in the Bush administration’s sanctioning of cruelly abusive treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the wake of the war in Afghanistan, its rejection of the international human rights standards defined by the Geneva Convention, and its clandestine exporting of suspects to other countries to be interrogated and tortured.
The archetypal dynamic at work in these phenomena—from Nazism and the Nuremburg trials to the Vietnam War, September 11, and the war in Iraq—is complex. The two principles combine in multiple ways within the same phenomenon: The Saturn-Pluto complex is at once the tyranny exerted by terrorism (the Pluto?Saturn vector) and also the grimly determined effort to oppose and obliterate terrorism (the Saturn?Pluto vector). It is also the tyranny of a society imprisoned by its own antiterrorist fears, controls, and rigidities, like the obsessive mole in Kafka’s The Burrow. And it is a state that is willing to murder thousands of innocent people to effect its implacable purpose of exterminating the evil enemy. The mobilization of structures of power against evil often moves the agents of that power, when possessed by their shadow, into the grip of the very forces they perceive so vividly in the enemy.
In one sense, the negative Saturn and Pluto principles synergistically combine in the various events and acts being confronted: the trauma and crisis of war, the efficiently organized violence and deployment of vast destructive power, the victimization of the powerless, the mass death and end of innocence. We also see the negative Saturn principle acting against an at least partly projected Plutonic principle, the evil without, and simultaneously being driven by inner Plutonic impulses, as in Freud’s sadistic superego: the deployment of violence and terror under the guise of moral rightness, a just cause, God’s will, national security, law and order—the harsh repression by an established government, the objectifying of the other, the radical splitting between good self and evil enemy.
Yet in another sense, in the ensuing drama of critical moral reflection, we see the Saturnian conscience standing in judgment against the Plutonic forces of war and unleashed instincts, reflecting a positive expression of the superego countering and judging the id: confronting and naming the inhuman cruelty and violence, the bestial evil, the holocaustal and nuclear horror, the ethnic cleansing, the predatory imperialism. Finally, the Pluto archetype gives intensity and depth to Saturn’s judgment, profundity to its moral assessment. It empowers the impulse to penetrate to an underlying, foundational hard truth, a moral confrontation with the self or other, sometimes on a mass scale. The positive and negative manifestations of the same complex are inextricably intertwined. All these dimensions of the archetypal dialectic, all these distinct embodiments of both a Saturn?Pluto vector and a Pluto?Saturn vector, are working simultaneously in the phenomena we are examining.14
We see this complexity embodied in an especially paradigmatic form in the great figure of Augustine, the originator of so much that shaped the Western spirit and forged its conscience. Writing during the death throes of the western Roman Empire and classical civilization, Augustine was painfully aware of the cruelty, evil, and suffering that human beings inflict on each other. He saw the ravages of war and mass violence, rape, murder, and corruption that so pervaded his age. He shrewdly dissected the psychological processes by which small decisions lead to enduring habits, which in turn forge ineluctable chains binding the human spirit. In his own dramatic spiritual journey, Augustine brought a relentless intensity of moral judgment to bear on his own soul and life, always in the service of forging a deeper relationship to the God of absolute goodness and light he so fervently loved. Yet it was this very luminosity of the divine and the transcendent that by contrast placed the human being and the created world in such deep shadow.
In view of the great diversity with which revelations of the divine have been experienced by human beings over the millennia, I found it of considerable interest that when Augustine had his powerful conversion experience in the garden of Milan in September 386, Saturn was square Pluto in the sky—just as it was at his birth, precisely one full cycle earlier—having moved at that time to within 2° of exact alignment. The entire character of Augustine’s famous conversion experience as he later described it in the Confessions, from the acute physical torment produced by the extremity of his interior conflict to the specific message conveyed by the words from Paul’s Letter to the Romans that produced Augustine’s revelatory transformation, bear the unmistakable signs of a highly activated Saturn-Pluto complex.
As his ordeal that dramatic day reached a climax of intensity, Augustine groaned and thrashed about in a frenzy of spiritual agony, tearing his hair out and battering his forehead. He felt imprisoned by his base instincts and frustrated beyond words by his incapacity to turn his will in the chaste spiritual direction he wished. Finally, after hearing a child’s voice mysteriously repeating “Tolle, lege, tolle, lege” (“Pick up and read”), in desperation he took in hand the nearby book of Paul’s epistles, opened it at random, and read in silence the first passage upon which his eyes fell: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Romans, 13:13–14). With those fatefully relevant words, he “did not want to read further, there was no need to. For as soon as I reached the end of this sentence, it was as though my heart was filled with a light of confidence and all the shadows of my doubts were swept away.”
The scriptural passage that opened the way for the subsequent unfolding of Augustine’s spiritual life—and the spiritual life of those millions of Catholics and Protestants who would be shaped by his experience in the following fifteen hundred years—was one that seemed to speak a decisive judgment against the sinful futility of his past life and called upon him to turn away from his submission to licentiousness to surrender to the absolute transcendent purity of God’s will. Augustine’s failing struggle with his own will and instincts, his sense of being enslaved by physical desires, the excruciating birth-labor frenzy of his interior ordeal: all these classic expressions of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex were suddenly resolved in a powerful numinous experience.
Augustine also had at this time a once-in-a-lifetime personal transit of Neptune crossing in exact conjunction with his natal Pluto. As we will see later when we discuss Dostoevsky, this is a transit that I found frequently coincided with unusually intense imaginative and spiritual experiences (Pluto, in exceptional cases marked by an overwhelming Neptune), in exceptional cases marked by an overwhelming numinosity. Often these experiences constituted a dialectic of some kind between the biological-instinctual (Pluto) and the spiritual-imaginal (Nept
une) dimensions of existence, between nature and spirit, as the two interpenetrated in an experience at once visceral and numinous.
The elemental potency of that day’s spiritual resolution to Augustine’s long ordeal never left him. The terms of that resolution were pervaded by an overpowering sense of a divine light of goodness that was sharply opposed in character to the shadows of his own bodily passions. The negation of his erotic instincts, the characterization of sexuality as a kind of enslavement, the affirmation of a higher morality as based upon a life of sexual constraint, the continuing presence of remorse and guilt in his inner life—all suggest that this dominant Saturn-Pluto complex in Augustine’s psyche and biography was strongly constellated, but now with all the elemental force of an overpowering spiritual transformation.
Throughout his stormy interior journey, Augustine had been drawn to religious and philosophical positions, such as Platonism and Manichaeism, that were marked by a dualistic depreciation of the physical body and the natural world in favor of a transcendent spiritual purity. This profound polarity, so characteristic of many of the Axial Age religions across much of the ancient world, was one that Augustine, by all accounts the most complexly self-reflective person of his age, seems to have experienced as an especially acute tension of opposing impulses within himself. When his spiritual crisis finally reached its breaking point, the resolution he experienced was a decisive affirmation of one side of the polarity and an equally emphatic negation of the other. The many implications inherent in that negation—his theological views of the body, nature, sexuality, women, conception and birth; his understanding of evil, guilt, original sin, hell, damnation, predestination; his commitment to the absolute authority of the Church, his dualistic vision of history, his image of God and redemption—all seem to have reflected his personal resolution of conflicts and themes that are deeply associated with the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex.
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