What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return….
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong…
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies….22
Even without such uncanny specificity, an implicit collective awareness of the close archetypal kinship between such eras occurs consistently—books written, films produced, historical references spontaneously cited in essays and conversations—with of course no conscious knowledge that the same planetary alignment took place in both cases. While it is the parallel concrete details that are called attention to, it is the unspoken but potent archetypal identity and kinship between such eras that often underlies what is recognized and evoked. As discussed earlier, such spontaneous associations were widely in evidence during the 1981–84 period of climactic Cold War antagonism, when many observers anxiously recalled the similarly grave geopolitical tensions and crises that brought forth World War I during the same alignment in 1914. So also, in a different spirit of revolutionary upheaval and radical change, with the 1960s, the 1848 revolutions, the French Revolution, and other Uranus-Pluto eras we discussed in earlier chapters. Yet the occurrence of such spontaneous linkings is far more pervasive and remarkable than these particular connections between large-scale historical events might suggest.23
Often the unconscious resonance between such periods in an individual’s personal life serves as a creative catalyst, as with experiences that are undergone earlier in an artist’s life during one alignment and then given artistic embodiment at the time of the next such alignment. Joseph Conrad, for example, wrote Heart of Darkness in two months during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1898–99 (the one during which Hitchcock and Hemingway were born). The story was closely based on his deeply disturbing experience of witnessing atrocities in the Belgian Congo in 1890 during the exactly preceding Saturn-Pluto square. There he confronted the horrific consequences of European policies of imperial colonization of the “dark continent” that were promulgated in particular by Belgium’s King Leopold II in 1889 during the same alignment. This was the same alignment that coincided with the battle of Wounded Knee, the 1890 massacre by the U.S. cavalry of three hundred unarmed Sioux men, women, and children in their encampment in South Dakota. This event marked the end of the last major Native American resistance to white settlement of the American continent.
In turn, the publication of Heart of Darkness in England in 1898 and the United States in 1899 during the immediately following Saturn-Pluto opposition played a major role in the emerging public debate on the dark reality of Western imperialism as it was reflected in European atrocities and systematic abuses in the Congo (“the most powerful thing ever written on the subject”).24 A parallel example of the same cultural phenomenon was the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s immensely influential Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1852. It sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies within the year in the United States alone, going through 120 printings, and with comparable numbers of books sold abroad. Stowe’s graphic descriptions of the cruelty of slavery were viewed by many, including Lincoln, as having played a crucial role in catalyzing the antislavery sentiment in the North that led to the Civil War. In the following letter written to Stowe by a friend, one glimpses both the power of the book’s immediate effect on readers during that conjunction and the dual aspect of the Saturn-Pluto complex—the horrific suffering and oppression of slavery on the one hand, and the depth of moral passion and judgment in response:
My Dear Mrs. Stowe,
I sat up last night until long after one o’clock, reading and finishing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” I could not leave it any more than I could have left a dying child; nor could I restrain an almost hysterical sobbing for an hour after I laid my head upon my pillow. I thought I was a thorough-going abolitionist before, but your book has awakened so strong a feeling of indignation and of compassion, that I seem never to have had any feeling on this subject till now. But what can we do? Alas! Alas! what can we do? This storm of feeling has been raging, burning like a very fire in my bones all the livelong night, and through all my duties this morning it haunts me—I cannot away with it. Gladly would I have gone out in the midnight storm last night, and, like the blessed martyr of old, been stoned to death, if that could have rescued these oppressed and afflicted ones. But that would avail nothing. And now what am I doing? Just the most foolish thing in the world. Writing to you, who need no incitement; to you, who have spun from your very vitals this tissue of agony and truths; for I know, I feel, that there are burning drops of your heart’s best blood here concentrated. To you, who need no encouragement or sympathy of mine, and whom I would not insult by praise—oh, no, you stand on too high an eminence for praise; but methinks I see the prayers of the poor, the blessings of those who are ready to perish, gathering in clouds about you, and forming a halo round your beloved head. And surely the tears of gentle, sympathizing childhood, that are dropping about many a Christian hearthstone over the wrongs and cruelties depicted by you so touchingly, will water the sod and spring up in bright flowers at your feet. And better still, I know—I see, in the flushing cheek, the clenched hand and indignant eye of the young man, as he dashes down the book and paces the room to hide the tears that he is too proud to show, too powerless to restrain, that you are sowing seed which shall yet spring up to the glory of God, to the good of the poor slave, to the enfranchisement of our beloved though guilty country.
Like so many in the antislavery movement, Harriet Beecher Stowe was deeply shaped by her Puritan religious background with its Calvinist and Augustinian roots. Her father and seven brothers were Congregational ministers, as were her husband and her son, and throughout her life Stowe’s writing was driven by a moral passion that sought to instruct and reform, correct and edify, with literature as her pulpit. Like a healthy superego, the highly developed moral conscience that Puritanism helped forge can be seen as the positive form of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex, here associated with the religious experience of an all-powerful deity identified with absolute good governing a moral universe. The shadow side of the same complex can be recognized in the oppressive cruelty of the pathological superego, the internal slavemaster, the obsessive-compulsive neurotic structure, the life-denying puritanical conscience, the relentless compulsion for order, control, judgment, and inhibition. On the religious level, these themes are often associated with theological doctrines of primordial guilt, predestination, last judgment, and eternal damnation, and with the biblical portrait of apocalyptic vengeance and punitive tyranny embodied in the omnipotent Jehovah. (Thus Jung’s distinctive combination of intense moral judgment and confrontation with the shadow side of the Judaeo-Christian God expressed in Answer to Job, with Jung gravely judging God’s shadow.)25 It is at this archetypal level that we can observe that paradoxical association of the merciless slavemaster, the inquisitional torturer, and the terrorist with absolute religious convictions and self-justifications, as they identify with the implacable righteousness of a deity—whether Jehovah or Allah—whose rigid boundaries and harsh judgments are absolute. Drawing on other resources in the biblical tradition and the evolving collective psyche, Stowe was able to assimilate from her Puritan Christian background the benign conscience-forging qualities of the Saturn-Pluto complex while recognizing and confronting the latter’s shadow in the institution of slavery.
Similarly, Melville’s Moby Dick was written and published at precisely the same time and during the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It to
o was shaped by the Puritan sensibility that Melville explored so penetratingly not only in the character of Ahab but in the novel’s unfolding drama from its opening sermon to its apocalyptic climax. Both Stowe and Melville were born with Saturn and Pluto in hard aspect (in 1811 and 1819, respectively, during the successive square and conjunction), and both these works and their authors reflect the deep archetypal complexity of the Saturn-Pluto gestalt, and of Puritanism and the biblical religions generally. Completing this trinity of Saturn-Pluto masterworks of nineteenth-century American literature is Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, another paradigmatic exploration of the Puritan sensibility that was, remarkably, published in coincidence with the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction (1850–52) as Moby Dick and Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
In their characters, plots, and moral vision, these three exactly synchronous novels exemplify the multiple, intersecting ways in which the Saturn-Pluto complex can be present in a single phenomenon. With Stowe, that complex was simultaneously visible, first, in her portrait of the sadistically tyrannical overseer Simon Legree; second, from the opposite side of the gestalt, in her rendering of the cruel suffering of the slaves; and third, in the intensity of her own moral passion, revulsion, and judgment. Similarly, in Melville’s Moby Dick, the Saturn-Pluto complex was diffracted and diversely embodied in the extraordinary character of Ahab, in the figure of the whale as both victim and destroyer, and in Melville’s own penetrating moral and psychological insight. So also in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, where the same complex is simultaneously embodied in the obsessive persecutory character of Roger Chillingworth, in Hester Prynne’s experience as both moral outcast and helpless victim, and in the depth of Hawthorne’s own moral and psychological vision.
The polarized manifestations of a single archetypal complex during the same alignment can also be seen in the immediate historical context of Stowe’s decision to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was especially driven to undertake the task by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act by Congress in 1850 during this same Saturn-Pluto conjunction. The act made it a crime for citizens of free states to aid enslaved people who had escaped from slave states. The Fugitive Slave Act aroused widespread moral debate in the North on its legal enforcement of the “rights” of slaveowners to have runaway slaves arrested and returned to the South for punishment and continued enslavement.26 The legalized empowerment of oppression, the compelling artistic rendering of that oppression from both sides of the slavery experience, the intense public encounter with and overwhelming response to that portrait, and finally the profound moral judgment against slavery’s evil and cruelty—all reflect different yet intricately interconnected expressions of the Saturn-Pluto gestalt.
A comparable instance of this constellation of themes, which echoed Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, was visible during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, between 2002 and 2004, in the decision by a Nigerian court under Islamic Shariah law that condemned a young woman to death by stoning for adultery, the worldwide horror against that decision and judicial practice, and the collective pressure that was exerted on the Nigerian government to spare the woman’s life.
Whether it is Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Fugitive Slave Act or Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Shariah adultery judgments (or, in another category, Melville’s Moby Dick and the sinking of whaling ships by whales), the evidence suggests that specific archetypal gestalts become broadly constellated in the collective psyche in coincidence with specific planetary alignments, and that these are visible, both synchronically and diachronically, both in the artistic and philosophical expressions of a culture and in concrete historical events. Often, the two categories are closely linked. We have seen the same pattern in many other cases cited above, such as Augustine’s The City of God, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and Auden’s September 1, 1939.
The Final Solution was conceived by Hitler and began to be deployed by the Nazis during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1939–41. The making or release of the most culturally influential films about the Holocaust coincided with extraordinary consistency with the following quadrature alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle. The sequence began during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 with the public showing of the original documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps, which with the Nuremberg trials of the same period first exposed the world to the full reality of the Holocaust’s horror. This was followed in subsequent decades by Resnais’s classic documentary Night and Fog, Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, Pakula’s Sophie’s Choice, Lanzmann’s Shoah, and Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, all produced in coincidence with Saturn-Pluto alignments.27 The most recent such alignment, the Saturn-Pluto opposition, coincided with the making and release in 2002 of the most recent major Holocaust film, Polanski’s The Pianist.
The characteristic spirit and aesthetic of the Saturn-Pluto complex, as well as the clear diachronic relationship to earlier historical events in the same cycle, are powerfully embodied in the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington that was designed by Maya Lin in 1981 and dedicated in 1982 in coincidence with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84 during the first Reagan adminstration. Here too is visible the diachronic pattern: the Vietnam War itself began—with fateful decisions made in that same city—during the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1964–67. The memorial, with its immense solemnity and dark gravitas, its mute judgment on the war and on all war, its meticulous commemoration of death and suffering—57,692 names of Americans killed or missing in action in that war, etched in black granite—is itself an eloquent, enduring icon of the many historical and archetypal themes we have been examining.
This striking cyclical patterning continued during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, when in 2002, at the same time that the first steps were being taken in the design of the World Trade Center Memorial, and as the Jewish Holocaust Memorial was being constructed in Berlin, Maya Lin began working on a large memorial for the extinct species of the world.
The Dynamics of Tragedy
I should emphasize that not only world transits and natal aspects but also personal transits involving the Saturn-Pluto combination were highly relevant in examining these distinctive archetypal patterns. In such cases, like those of Dante’s Inferno and Sartre’s No Exit mentioned above, I found that the same archetypal complex we have been examining on the collective level tended to be constellated in the life and experience of an individual during the particular months or years that he underwent a personal transit of Pluto crossing his natal Saturn, or of Saturn transiting his natal Pluto. While most individuals are not born with Saturn and Pluto in hard aspect, everyone undergoes not only the collective epochs of Saturn-Pluto cyclical alignments discussed in these chapters but also periods in their personal lives when they undergo personal Saturn-Pluto transits. These periods are characterized by highly similar phenomena, except that they are more locally constellated within the life experience of the individual. For artists and writers, the archetypal complex can be visible in their internal world and creative work, in external biographical events—or both.
An especially dramatic example of the latter is Oscar Wilde, who was at the height of his creative powers in 1893–95 when transiting Uranus reached the opposition point of its cycle in his life, 180° from the position it had been in at his birth. Again, this was the same personal transit Galileo had when he turned the telescope to the heavens, Freud and Jung when they had their psychological and intellectual turning points, Betty Friedan when she wrote The Feminine Mystique, Rosa Parks when she refused to move from her bus seat, and so forth—a transit that typically coincided not only with major creative breakthroughs but also pivotal events of rebellious, unpredictable, and disruptive character. For Wilde, it was during this three-year personal transit that he composed his comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, in a burst of creativity during August and September 1894 when the transit was virtually exact.28 A few months later during this t
ransit in early 1895, Wilde had both An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest playing simultaneously on the London stage to great critical and public acclaim.
However, the year of 1895 also coincided with the beginning of a long once-in-a-lifetime personal transit of Pluto in conjunction with Wilde’s natal Saturn. Simultaneously, in a convergence of personal transits that made the transiting situation even more rare, Saturn in 1895 moved into opposition to Wilde’s natal Pluto in a shorter, twelve-month-long personal transit. Thus the same two planets, Saturn and Pluto, were involved in each transit—one as transiting planet, the other as natal—which I found consistently coincided with a heightened intensification of what appeared to be a doubly activated archetypal complex. Precisely as these two transits converged in the period from February to May 1895, in a series of fateful, partly self-initiated events, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensbury, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, for libel, as a result of which he was himself brought to trial for his homosexual practices, found guilty, and sentenced to hard labor in prison for two years.
The trial, verdict, and commencement of his prison sentence took place precisely as these two transits converged. Publicly humiliated, his health and spirit broken by the imprisonment, his plays shut down and declared unproduceable, Wilde left England upon his release for Paris, where he lived in impoverished exile until he died in 1900—all precisely during the longer transit of Pluto conjoining his natal Saturn. From this period came his final somber works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a study of a prisoner condemned to death, and De Profundis, his moving apologia and cri de coeur. As one example of the many poignant expressions of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex evident in these late works, in De Profundis Wilde reserved for himself the sternest judgment, for his betrayal of his rare spiritual and imaginative gifts through his choice to abandon himself to what he had come to regard as years of mindless dissipation and promiscuity unworthy of the cultural role he should have fulfilled.
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