A different expression of the mid-Sixties’ combination of the Uranus-Pluto revolutionary impulse with the Saturn-Pluto complex was Bob Dylan’s epoch-making Like a Rolling Stone, recorded in 1965. The intensity of stark judgment expressed with incantatory power that was heard again and again by millions seemed to serve as an initiatory catalyst for the era, moving it towards a harder existential maturity from a prelapsarian state of unconscious presumption and inauthenticity. Dylan’s searing words and voice invoked such characteristic Saturn-Pluto themes as the end to naïveté and inflated privilege, the hard fall, the outcast, poverty and exile, the urban wilderness, relentless realism, the necessary descent into the fate of common humanity:
How does it feel…
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
So also in the other arts. In the history of film, Ingmar Bergman’s stark, black-and-white masterpiece The Seventh Seal, an archetypal portrayal of the human encounter with death, was made during the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto square of 1956. In the history of painting, an especially iconic example of this archetypal complex of themes, which coincided with the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1536, is Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, with its powerful evocation of the fall into the underworld of damnation, mass suffering, absolute helplessness in the face of overwhelming divine condemnation.
Reflecting the same archetypal domain is Jonathan Edwards’s most famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, with its classic Calvinist portrayal of human corruption and God’s omnipotence. Its vivid rendering of the damnation that awaits those who are not among the elect, with the sinner clinging like a spider to God’s outstretched hand above the pit of hell, was delivered to his concerned Northampton congregation in July 1741 when Saturn and Pluto were within 1° of exact square alignment. This was exactly the same aspect—Saturn square Pluto—with which Calvin was born over two centuries earlier, and with which Augustine was born a thousand years before that—the two theologians most crucial in forging the metaphysical framework that underlay Edwards’s vision of sin, hell, divine judgment, and the human condition.
Many of the most characteristic theological and psychological features of Puritanism, with its roots in Augustine and Calvin, can be recognized as direct expressions of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex in a peculiarly enduring and potent synthesis: the intensified forging of the moral consciousness, emerging from an inward struggle with opposing impulses and often self-contradictory theological doctrines; a view of God that combines extremely strict and punitive moral judgment with divine omnipotence and unquestionable goodness; the doctrine of predestination and the absolute determinism of God’s will over all humanity; the pervasive consequences of the Fall, the inborn corruption of every human being because of Adam’s original sin; the resulting loss of free will and incapacity of the human will on its own to choose other than sin; the eternal damnation that awaits the unelected majority of humankind; the cruelty of God’s divine retribution. All these constitute a doctrine that Calvin described as horribilis, to suggest both the terrifying and the awe-inspiring. Further expressions of the same complex in Puritanism are its characteristically negative judgment of sexuality and the rigorous suppression of the erotic and other natural instincts, including any activities suggestive of frivolity, sensual pleasure, and self-indulgence.
All of these themes find their most absolute expression in the ancient and medieval theological conception of hell, which can be understood as an exact synthesis of specific archetypal aspects of the two principles. On the one hand, from Saturn hell receives the motifs of finality and judgment, death and guilt, retribution, punishment and imprisonment, the consequences of error and sin, the strictures of divine law, the pervading experience of defeat and failure, suffering and affliction, separation and loneliness, bondage and constraint, the confinement to darkness and deprivation. On the other hand, reflecting the domain of Pluto, hell is the supreme embodiment of the fiery underworld. Hell’s vividly Plutonic motifs include the unleashed instincts both human and divine, the demonic, the bestial, the scatological, decadence and decay, the grotesque, boundless horror, the ravenous flames of the chthonic depths. Here too can be seen Pluto’s characteristic tendency towards extreme intensification of whatever archetype it interacts with, here serving to intensify all the Saturnian qualities to absolute and overwhelming extremes—horrific punishment, unspeakable suffering, absolute imprisonment, bottomless guilt, the relentless burden of infinitely extended time, eternal death, the end without end.
The most powerful depiction of hell in modern literature is the celebrated sermon from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In general, other archetypal dynamics are more prominent in Joyce’s work, particularly ones associated with the Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune configuration of his birth. However, the familiar motifs of the Saturn-Pluto complex are given a richly expansive imaginative realization in the famous third chapter of the Portrait, which was published in 1914–15 during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction coincident with the beginning of World War I. The Irish Catholic preacher’s vivid description of eternal damnation, heard in a state of terror by the young student stricken with sexual guilt, explores with exquisite precision and a darkly sublime eloquence every dimension of hell’s eternal physical and spiritual agony. The solemn portrait of horror that unfolds is a summation of all the sermons on hell that had ever been given from ancient and medieval times to the moment of Joyce’s rendering:
Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, Saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it….
Our earthly fire…no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up in an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.
And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments
of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead….18
Here too could be cited iconic works brought forth by artists at the time they underwent personal Saturn-Pluto transits, such as Dante’s Inferno, the urtext of all subsequent renderings of hell, and Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, his modern existentialist version of hell where the condemned can never escape a self-tormenting state of endless interpersonal cruelty. So also works of artists who were themselves born during Saturn-Pluto alignments, such as Albrecht Dürer’s classic woodcut of darkness and peril Knight, Death, and the Devil (anticipating both the themes and the aesthetic of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal); Goethe’s Faust, with its Mephistophelean tempter from hell who is the destructive “spirit who always negates”; Henry James’s study of self-imprisoning obsession, The Beast in the Jungle; Frida Kahlo’s many vivid paintings of death, extreme pain, and relentless constraint; and Arthur Miller’s dramatic depiction of the Salem witch trials, The Crucible.
The characteristic upsurge of religious conservatism that coincides with Saturn-Pluto alignments often manifests in books and films that emphasize the aspects of Christian tradition that invoke the suffering and crucifixion of Christ, the darkness of the world, guilt and judgment. One of the most widely viewed and intensely discussed films of the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition was The Passion of the Christ, produced and directed by Mel Gibson, who was himself born with Saturn and Pluto in hard aspect.19 Many characteristic motifs of this archetypal complex were evident both in the film and in its larger cultural influence: the brutal realism, the confrontation with death, torture, excruciating suffering, judgment and execution, the crucifixion motif, the moral darkness and hatred, the continuing weight of the past, the conservative religious sensibility that was both expressed and empowered by the film, the religious divisiveness between Jews and Christians that was experienced in its wake, the atmosphere of grave accusation both within the film and against the film.
On occasion a work of art will portray a character whose qualities and motivations are so potently rendered as to become a kind of archetype in itself, to which actual individuals of similar qualities will be compared. Victor Hugo, for example, born with the Saturn-Pluto opposition, brought forth in Les Misérables an epic rendering of many Saturn-Pluto themes—vast human suffering and striving, crime and punishment, imprisonment and entrapment in a system of overwhelming social injustice—and a character who stands as an epitome of relentless persecutorial obsessiveness, Inspector Javert. Over a century later, the similarly relentless prosecutor Kenneth Starr in his obsession with the sexual transgressions of Bill Clinton was often compared to Javert. Starr was himself born with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction (in a quadruple conjunction with the Sun and Mercury). In these cases we can recognize the id-driven superego so characteristic of the Saturn-Pluto complex. Another literary precedent frequently cited by commentators during the Starr prosecution was Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—again, published under the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction as Moby Dick with its own obsessed persecutor Captain Ahab.
It is typical of artists born during Saturn-Pluto alignments to express many different facets of that archetypal complex in work after work, as if compelled to explore new possible inflections not yet fully enacted and embodied. Alfred Hitchcock, for example, who was born in 1899 during the Saturn-Pluto opposition, brought forth an extraordinary succession of meticulously wrought films—The 39 Steps, Sabotage, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, I Confess, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds—that addressed a specific spectrum of motifs all associated with the Saturn-Pluto complex: mortal danger, extreme fear, murder, guilt, the hidden dark depths of human existence, sinister plots, helpless entrapment, horror and terror.20
The same year, 1899, and the same Saturn-Pluto opposition that coincided with the birth of Hitchcock also coincided with the birth of Ernest Hemingway, whose many novels and stories were equally emblematic of this complex, though they took a somewhat different range of inflections. Hemingway’s lifelong concern with (and attraction to) war, death, killing, the grim brutality of life, and unflinching realism in the face of death and life’s harshness are all suggestive of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal gestalt. Yet another side of the same complex is vividly expressed in Hemingway’s late novel, The Old Man and the Sea, by the old fisherman’s brave, unbending determination despite extreme hardship in a long battle with sharks, nature’s elements, and death. Here too was the characteristic Saturn-Pluto theme, notable in Camus as well, of the inevitability of human defeat in an indifferent universe, yet also, like Sisphysus, the dignity of stoic endurance in the face of that dark truth.
In writers and artists born during Saturn-Pluto alignments like Hemingway and Hitchcock, I found that the creative work, the personality, and the life all tended to reflect the relevant archetypal motifs in an immediately recognizable manner, though, as always, in a multivalent diversity of forms. An especially poignant example is that of Franz Kafka, born in 1883 during the conjunction immediately preceding the opposition just cited for Hitchcock and Hemingway. Kafka’s creative imagination seemed to serve as a lifelong stage upon which the characteristic motifs of this archetypal complex were enacted to an extreme, not only in those works already cited such as The Trial, In the Penal Colony, and The Burrow, but also in The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, The Castle, and A Hunger Artist, among many others. The titles themselves evoke many of the Saturn-Pluto themes—trial, judgment, punishment, imprisonment, torture, self-starvation, unspecified yet all-encompassing guilt—which are all portrayed with measured lucidity. Behind their particular renderings loomed a pervasive sense of the futility of the human condition before the incomprehensibility of God: “The state in which we find ourselves is sinful, quite independently of guilt…Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name: in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.”
We also know that the external circumstances of Kafka’s life conspicuously reflected such motifs as well: his tyrannically critical and punitive father, the stultifying constraints of his work in the government bureaucracy, the oppressive confinement of Jewish life in Prague. These in turn paralleled the drama and tone of his inner life and personality, which are movingly depicted in his diaries: the private hell of his ruthless self-judgment, his feelings of intolerable humiliation and impotence, his sense of helplessness against his father’s overpowering patriarchal domination. Contemplating the full gestalt of Kafka’s life and work, one would be hard-pressed to conceive of an overarching principle of order and meaning more apt than the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex in its capacity to bring all the diverse motifs we recognize as quintessentially reflective of Kafka’s universe—as “Kafkaesque”—into a coherent unity. Whether he was depicting the insanely pointless and diabolically defeating procedures of a totalitarian bureaucracy or an internal prison of relentless shame and self-disgust, his imaginative world possessed a pervasive consistency easily discerned by every reader. It was saturated with a particular ambiance and spirit that was diffracted in multiple yet deeply coherent ways, with nightmarish clarity and intensity.21
While it was in Kafka’s art rather than his external circumstances that the full depths of the many archetypally relevant themes were explored, even here the ambiguity between inner and outer realities again arises. For the highly wrought character of Kafka’s imaginative vision prophetically anticipated such all-too-real historical developments as totalitarianism and the Holocaust, which were associated with the same archetypal complex and the same planetary cycle as it unfolded after his death. This prophetic and anticipatory dimension of art has often been noted (as in Oscar Wilde’s well-known statement, so acutely prophetic of his own life: “Life imitates Art far more than Ar
t imitates Life”). Yet the consistent coincidence of works of art and the events they anticipate with different alignments of the same archetypally appropriate planetary cycle presents a new dimension to the mystery of the creative imagination.
W. H. Auden, for example, who was born in 1907 with Saturn square Pluto, wrote September 1, 1939, the poem that was widely circulated beginning on the day of the World Trade Center attacks with a sense of wonder at its prophetic relevance. The poem itself was written during a Saturn-Pluto square exactly one full cycle after the birth of Auden. Saturn and Pluto were 1° from exact alignment on the day commemorated in its title, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland—just as the same two planets were again in nearly exact alignment on the fateful September 11 of 2001.
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night….
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
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