The spiritual power and potent dualism of Augustine’s conversion produced an authoritative structure of religious belief and psychological attitude that permeated the subsequent evolution of the Western spirit. The inward conflict between opposing drives that precipitated his conversion experience was directly passed on to future generations of striving Christians in the form of a continuing impossible tension between the spiritual quest and the sexual instincts. Underlying and informing this continuing legacy was the larger tension Augustine experienced between the transcendent divine and the embodied human, with the interior struggle, guilt, and morally tinged polarization between the sexes that this tension undergirded.
We turn now to Jung, in whose work and sensibility the sustained, penetrating contemplation of the human shadow was so strongly marked. Like Augustine, Jung himself was born with Saturn and Pluto in square aspect, within 1° of exact alignment. Throughout his life, Jung stressed the critical need for the modern self to become aware of its shadow, which he named, recognized as an archetypal principle, and examined in the traumas of twentieth-century history: the shadow of European civilization, the shadow of modern man, the shadow of modern technology, the shadow of patriarchy and masculine one-sidedness, the shadow of Christianity, the shadow of the conscious ego, the shadow within each individual. “It is indeed no small matter to know of one’s own guilt and one’s own evil, and there is certainly nothing to be gained by losing sight of one’s shadow…. Without guilt, unfortunately, there can be no psychic maturation and no widening of the spiritual horizon.” For Jung, even the evolving God (or God-image) of the biblical tradition has been compelled to encounter and assimilate his own shadow in the course of his coevolving relationship with the human self. In Answer to Job, his most historically incisive and consequential work from the last years of his life, Jung wrestled with the Yahweh of stern omnipotence and apocalyptically violent retribution—like Augustine and Calvin, like Melville, like Job himself—as if in an historical lineage of powerful prophetic encounters with the Saturn-Pluto dimension of the divine.
The very notion of the shadow as Jung conceived it represents an intricate synthesis of the two planetary principles: from Saturn, the motifs of judgment, guilt and shame, suppression and repression, splitting and separation, denial, the inferior, that which is regretted and negated; and from Pluto, those aspects of the self that constitute its “underworld,” the instincts, the dark depths of the personality, the animal-like, the often ruthless and ugly, serving impulses for power, domination, lust, and other drives yet also representing that healthy instinctuality from which healing, wholeness, and a higher consciousness can ultimately emerge.
The frequent tone in Jung’s writings of intense moral urgency and historical gravity was highly characteristic of this archetypal complex, as was his tendency towards sternness of judgment. So also was his continuing emphasis on the fateful determining power of the archetypal unconscious over human life and history, beyond any assumed control of the rational self, if not attended to, differentiated, articulated, made conscious. At times, Jung’s sensitivity to this power of archetypal forces to shape and dominate human life from the depths of the collective unconscious, and his awareness of the powerful apocalyptic tendencies at work in twentieth-century history, almost overwhelmed his belief in the capacity of the individual self to be the “makeweight that tips the scales,” “that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends.”
Many of the themes that we see in Jung involving moral gravity and historical judgment, guilt and responsibility, the power of fate and determinism, divine omnipotence and the existence of evil can also be recognized in other figures we have discussed in these chapters on the Saturn-Pluto complex, from Augustine to Calvin to Schopenhauer, who deeply affected Jung in his formative years.15 But in Jung these themes took a new form of psychologically complex reflection, with new possibilities for moral and historical evolutionary development. Especially relevant to this new psychological potential is Jung’s central recognition that the shadow contains sources of vital energy whose suppression in the unconscious contributes to its destructive, distorting, and corrupting character, yet whose integration permits its regenerative and creative potential to be released.
There was another crucial motif in Jung’s life and thought that clearly reflected the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex in a manner different from that of facing the shadow, though in the end highly relevant to that very task. This was the importance Jung gave to the challenge of fully engaging the inevitable conflict of opposing forces in life, of holding the often unbearable tension of opposites in the psyche, even to the point of its feeling like a crucifixion. Here we see the Saturn principle of tension, polarity, contradiction, and conflict intensified to titanic proportions by the Plutonic principle, sometimes constellating an experience of agonizing pain, either psychological or physical, as we saw in Augustine. What seems to have made this tension of opposites both so dominant and so fraught with what seemed to Jung impossible complexity in his own psyche and biography was the additional factor, evident throughout his work, of the Promethean impulse towards emancipation and change (Uranus) being simultaneously bound by yet working through and by means of this unbending conflict of opposing forces (Saturn-Pluto).
Like Augustine, Schopenhauer, Marx, and Melville, Jung was born with both Saturn-Pluto and Uranus-Pluto in hard aspect (in Jung’s case this was in a T-square configuration, with Saturn and Uranus in opposition, and Pluto square to both). Again, in the lives of these several individuals who were born with all three planets in hard-aspect configuration, and also in the historical periods in which such three-planet alignments have occurred, I found this planetary combination to be associated with an especially challenging archetypal dynamic in which the entire range of conflicts that characterize the dialectic between the Promethean principle and the Saturnian—between change and resistance to change, future and past, creative unpredictability and ineluctable order, freedom and oppression, disruption and stability, innovation and tradition, puer and senex—tended to be intensified to the extreme. The period of the mid-1960s, the last time these three planets were all in hard aspect with each other (Saturn opposite the Uranus-Pluto conjunction), provides us with an easily recalled example of this complicated archetypal dialectic, with that era’s extraordinary social and political turmoil, and the many deep schisms that emerged in those years that continue to influence American society and the global community.
Yet in Jung, as in other individuals or eras with this alignment, I found that the presence of the Promethean principle as a third factor in the Saturn-Pluto complex of overwhelmingly intensified conflict appeared to provide not only a further problematic dimension to the conflict that increased its seemingly impossible challenge, but also a new possibility for creative resolution of the antagonistic polarities. On the one hand, it produced a situation in which the impulse for change and freedom was simultaneously activated yet bound and imprisoned by the Saturn-Pluto complex, a state of “Prometheus Bound”: Saturn/ Pluto?Uranus. On the other hand, in keeping with its archetypal nature, the Promethean principle also appeared to provide a certain potentiality of unexpected liberation by means of and through the titanically intensified and ineluctable conflict: Uranus?Saturn/Pluto. Remarkably, Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, in which Prometheus is finally liberated in the dramatic unfolding of just such an archetypal dialectic, in 1820 when just this configuration occurred—the same triple Saturn-Uranus-Pluto alignment that coincided with the births of Melville and Marx, whose work similarly engaged this dialectic.
At its most profound, this resolution to the archetypal tension of opposites seemed to occur not by means of a successful one-sided identification with one pole that somehow eventually defeated the other, as happened with, for example, Marx and Augustine (labor over capital, or spirit over nature), but rather—as Jung so often emphasized—by sustaining the tension that relentlessly pulled at one from both sides. By strenuously maintaining fid
elity to each of the opposing principles—conscience and instinct, superego and id, individual and community, tradition and innovation, masculine and feminine, conscious and unconscious, fate and free will, or whatever other polarity is present—there then may arise, though with no assurance of when or how, the sudden resolution of the tension and a deep structural transformation, despite the apparently irresolvable imprisonment and darkness of the current polarized condition.
As regards the long historical evolution of the Western psyche and spirit, these two paradigmatic figures, Jung and Augustine, were born with nearly identical configurations of the three planets we have been studying, and in their lives and thought they worked with highly similar archetypal dynamics and tensions. Because Jung came at a much later stage of the immense historical development in which Augustine stood nearer the beginning, he was able to draw upon what had been suffered through, discovered, and forged over the intervening centuries. This long development included the increasing incarnational movement towards the natural world and the body as represented in their various, often conflicting ways by so many protagonists of the later Western spiritual tradition, Rousseau, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud, among many others. In this task Jung also benefited by the crucial influence of the extraordinary women in his life, above all Emma Jung and Toni Wolff.
Supported and impelled by this enormous historical development as well as these enduring relationships, Jung was able to engage and work through in a new way many of the sharp polarities presented to him by both the Christian tradition and the modern mind, and to confront, as much as he was able, the shadow within Christianity, within the modern mind, and within himself. With considerable courage and fortitude, he also attempted to sustain the tension of opposites in the larger human condition, and to bring forth a new and different resolution to the spiritual demands of the modern age. Hence we see Jung’s immense labors and genuinely titanic struggles with the great cultural schisms of his and our time, to integrate the opposites between science and religion, spirit and nature, inner and outer, feminine and masculine.
When he was seventy years old, Jung movingly articulated just this archetypal drama and dynamic in a letter to a woman who experienced herself as trapped between conflicting demands of career and family:
Dear Frau Frobe,
…There can be no resolution, only patient endurance of the opposites which ultimately spring from your own nature. You yourself are a conflict that rages in itself and against itself, in order to melt its incompatible substances, the male and the female, in the fire of suffering, and thus create that fixed and unalterable form which is the goal of life. Everyone goes through this mill, consciously or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly. We are crucified between the opposites and delivered up to the torture until the “reconciling third” takes shape. Do not doubt the rightness of the two sides within you, and let whatever may happen, happen. The apparently unendurable conflict is proof of the rightness of your life. A life without inner contradiction is either only half a life or else a life in the Beyond, which is destined only for angels. But God loves human beings more than the angels.
With kindest regards,
C.G. Jung
Here, in the depth of authority and solidity of character that permeates these words, we see a further theme often evident in individuals born with Saturn-Pluto configurations. The experience of having suffered through an intense confrontation with the opposites and its relentless contradiction and inward compression, combined with a deep encounter with the shadow dimension of oneself and of existence, can sometimes result in a profound existential authority that communicates itself in the work and personality of such an individual. We see this in Jung, we see it in Augustine, we see it also in Melville and Marx. Depending on the extent of the confrontation and the depth of the resolution, the resulting qualities can be expressed as a rigid dogmatism and driven authoritarianism or as the authentic gravitas of a wisdom forged through suffering, time, and experience.
The same year that brought the birth of Jung, 1875, also brought the birth of Rainer Maria Rilke, who was born with the same T-square between the three planets Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto. Remarkably, Rilke engaged precisely the same dialectic we have seen in Jung: the long psychological and spiritual challenge of struggling with and sustaining the tension of life’s opposites to bring forth the new creation, the poetic birth, the divine child. Near the end of his life, after many years of deep striving and patient waiting for the inspiration that finally and fully graced him in the Duino Elegies, Rilke wrote the famous words that speak so directly to this challenge, with a vision virtually identical to Jung’s, hard-won and epiphanic:
Take your well-disciplined strengths
and stretch them between two opposing poles.
Because inside human beings
is where God learns.
Paradigmatic Works of Art
The archetypal dimension is expressed in especially vivid and tangible form in the realm of art. Throughout our survey, we have seen the Saturn-Pluto cycle and archetypal complex associated with such themes as harsh oppression and constraint, crime and punishment, sin and judgment, trauma and retribution, rigid control and dark consequences, intensely challenging contradictions and tensions, the depths of shadow and moral discernment. I found that these same themes were consistently visible when I examined the creation of literary works produced during periods of Saturn-Pluto alignments. Orwell’s 1984, Melville’s Moby Dick, and Kafka’s The Trial, cited earlier, each eloquently reflective of this archetypal domain, were all written when Saturn and Pluto were in conjunction. I found that these correlations were part of much larger synchronic and diachronic patterns involving other paradigmatic works of literature equally reflective of the same archetypal field.
Thus Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, her prophetic Gothic masterpiece that depicted the monstrous shadow of the technological will to power, during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1818—during the same year and conjunction that Schopenhauer published his dark masterwork of blind struggling will, The World as Will and Idea. During the immediately following Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1850, Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter, his powerful rendering of Puritan judgment and guilt, dark secrets and sexual transgression, scapegoating and public humiliation, unforgiving hardness and obsessive pursuit—this being the same conjunction that coincided with the writing and publication of Melville’s Moby Dick. During the immediately following Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1865–67, Dostoevsky wrote and published Crime and Punishment, one of the supreme explorations of this archetypal domain. The immediately following Saturn-Pluto opposition in 1898–99 coincided with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which depicted the horrific cruelty and evil of European exploitation of Africans in the jungles of the Congo (“the horror, the horror”).
T. S. Eliot’s classic poem of modernist pessimism, The Waste Land, was written during the Saturn-Pluto square in 1921–22. John Steinbeck’s epic of human hardship, oppression, and endurance, The Grapes of Wrath, was published in 1939 during the immediately following square. During that same alignment of 1939–41 that coincided with the start of World War II, Albert Camus wrote both The Stranger (finished May 1940) and The Myth of Sisyphus (finished February 1941). Camus himself, so strongly identified with the figure of Sisyphus, and the author of other major works such as The Fall and The Plague that confronted the dark, inescapable, and morally problematic aspects of human existence, was born in November 1913 at the beginning of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that coincided with the start of World War I. Similarly, Arthur Miller, whose plays consistently dealt with grave issues of moral conscience and oppressive social forces, was born during that same Saturn-Pluto conjunction, in 1915, and wrote the paradigmatic American tragedy Death of a Salesman in 1948 during the very next Saturn-Pluto conjunction—the same alignment that coincided with Orwell’s writing of 1984.
The common archetypal spirit, ambiance, and motifs that unite these many
disparate works are easily recognizable and are all clearly associated with the Saturn-Pluto complex. These works are iconic in part precisely because of the eloquent intensity with which they articulated and embodied the profound and mysterious themes of this many-sided archetypal complex. Equally expressive were major works in other arts, such as the music composed during such alignments. For example, during the same Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1865–67 as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Mussorgsky composed his dark symphonic poem Night on Bald Mountain, which depicted the satanic rites of the Witches’ Sabbath. This was the same alignment that coincided with the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, with its own dark rituals of burning crosses, death, hatred, and terror.16
Igor Stravinsky was born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1882 (the same one as Kafka) and composed The Rite of Spring in 1913 at age thirty when transiting Saturn crossed his natal Saturn-Pluto conjunction (hence during his Saturn return as well). Both the music of The Rite of Spring and its riot-torn premiere were prophetic of the eruption of destructive forces that would devastate European civilization during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction world transit of 1913–16. A few months later in 1914 during that same conjunction, Gustav Holst’s darkly titanic opening movement of The Planets gave a more militaristic embodiment to the same primordial energy, in vivid anticipation of the totalitarian armies that would march, kill, and die across Europe in the three decades that started within a few weeks of Holst’s completing the composition.17 More recently, in 1967 Jim Morrison and the Doors’ iconic song of apocalyptic descent and the eruption of murderous instinct, The End, coincided with the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1964–67 and the American war in Vietnam.
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