One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star.
And in his celebration of struggle, strife, and danger as necessary for greatness of spirit:
For believe me!—the secret of realizing the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius! Send your ships out into uncharted seas! Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves!
All these show the Sun?Pluto dynamic, the solar principle as it illuminates and heroically embodies the Plutonic principle, identifies with it, descends into it, is overcome by it and reborn through it:
And only where there are graves are there resurrections.
Yet equally vividly throughout Nietzsche’s life we can also see the converse archetypal dynamic, Pluto?Sun, above all in the titanic intensification and empowerment of the will to be, to manifest, to radiantly give forth one’s being and light into the world, to actualize to the fullest the individual heroic self, to become (“Become what you are!”). This archetypal vector from Pluto towards the Sun is also evident in Nietzsche’s profound sense of an evolutionary drive at work within himself and in the human species to bring forth, through struggle, destruction, and transformation, a new form of human being, a new and more powerful self. He articulated this evolutionary impulse as he simultaneously identified his own self and being as a force of nature, becoming possessed, at times, by the Dionysian principle itself. This complex reciprocality of archetypal dynamic, each principle activating the other as in a recursive feedback loop, would come together in Nietzsche’s central vision of the Übermensch, the ultimate embodiment of creative will and empowered selfhood that he sensed was emerging within him in anticipation of a larger development within humanity.
But Nietzsche’s Sun-Pluto aspect was not simply given boundless free play and bold articulation, as if his only other natal configurations were the Jupiter-Uranus and Mercury-Mars conjunctions. For Nietzsche was also born with Saturn in a 90° square hard aspect to both the Sun and Pluto in a T-square configuration. The juxtaposition of these two larger natal configurations associated with such powerfully opposite archetypal vectors and qualities—the Jupiter-Uranus and the Saturn-Pluto, the two complexes we have been examining in this section and the one previous—precisely parallels the extraordinary tension of opposites that marked Nietzsche’s life and thought. On the one hand, his impulse for unbounded creative freedom brought forth in him a certain gleeful lightness of spirit and a willingness to defy any limit he discerned as being no more than the arbitrary imposition of a constraining belief despite how culturally sanctioned and widely accepted that belief might be—traits clearly characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus complex. Yet on the other hand, reflecting the Saturn-Pluto on his Sun, Nietzsche was possessed by an overwhelming sense of fate, the ineluctable power of necessity governing his life both positively and negatively. He knew the prison of lifelong solitude, and of being almost completely unheard and unrecognized. He was preternaturally alert to the impoverishment of life produced by inherited codes and dogmas, the table of values hanging over every people that controls the herd but also produces mediocrity and kills healthy life. He discerned everywhere the crushing weight of history, habit, unconsciousness, and compulsion shackling the life force and passion inside the human being. For decade after decade, he himself suffered incessant illness, debilitating weakness, blinding headaches. “I have a subtler sense for signs of ascent and decline than any man has ever had, I am the teacher par excellence in this matter—I know both, I am both.”
The multivalent Saturn-Pluto complex expressed itself with great potency in many other aspects of Nietzsche’s character and vision as well. He felt compelled to gaze long and unflinchingly into the dark abyss of existence, the purposeless chaos that lay beyond all human constructs of order and value. He recognized nihilism as the inevitable price of a truly free mind, the price of one’s fully embracing the human condition of life in a universe of random necessity devoid of meaning. He discerned the baser biological instincts that concealed themselves behind the metaphysical beliefs and moral pretenses of the human animal, which he judged with unprecedented acuity and harshness. Nietzsche’s implied political philosophy, grounded in the will to power, possessed an un-apologetically ruthless realpolitik character. He constantly focused on the nature of evil, its relation to the instincts, its culturally constructed character. At times he seemed to identify himself with evil and the “wicked,” but in an ambiguous manner, sometimes with a certain playful insouciance, at other times with an intensely driven seriousness as if reflecting virtually a moral commitment to the amoral abyss within.
Yet Nietzsche also came to embrace and express another side of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex that was specifically directed towards the self, invoking Saturnian qualities to be deployed with Plutonic intensity. This was expressed in his repeated demand that one be capable of the most rigorous discipline, capable of unsparing hardness towards oneself, committed with unbending silent resolution to a solitary quest, willing to embrace every defeat and loss, to shoulder the heaviest burdens of life, to become one’s own sternest judge and master: “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”
Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law? Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law? It is terrible to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. It is to be like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude.
As each year passed, Nietzsche engaged this struggle of opposing tendencies, between soaring boundless freedom and ruthless constraint and dark suffering, with increasing intensity. By the early 1880s, in book after book written “for free spirits” that were all virtually unread in their time, he had pushed the boundaries of his thinking as far into the skeptical and nihilistic crisis of the modern condition as anyone ever had. Saturn had now moved into an extremely rare triple conjunction in the sky with both Pluto and Neptune, the only such alignment in the modern era. It was at this moment that Nietzsche declared the irrevocable reality of the death of God: the destruction of the powerful projected Being in “the beyond” who had presided over civilization and provided both its sustaining moral structure and its life-oppressing constraints. This death he recognized—again, the precise archetypal polarity and tension seems to have run through everything Nietzsche thought and wrote—as both a liberation and a dark, awesome, terrifying event:
How have we done this? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?
It was an epochal turning point whose reality he knew had scarcely begun to register in the collective psyche but whose consequences he foresaw would be momentous, even catastrophic. At this furthermost frontier of reason, Nietzsche himself then underwent a sustained crisis, both philosophical and emotional, in which the humiliating failure of his romantic hopes for love with Lou Salomé played a central role. By December of 1882, he had become suicidal.
Then, just as transiting Uranus first reached the opposition point to his natal Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in January 1883, “as a result of ten absolutely fresh and cheerful January days,” the long-building tension suddenly broke. An explosion of creative power overtook him, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra poured forth in an onrush of inspired clarity, pathos, and beauty. Nietzsche later described the state of inspiration that overcame him in a manner that, again, precisely reflected the two archetypal complexes in synthesis:
Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century a distinct conception of what poets of strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will desc
ribe it.—If one had the slightest residue of superstition left in one, one would hardly be able to set aside the idea that one is merely incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. The concept of revelation, in the sense that something suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and subtlety, becomes visible, audible, something that shakes and overturns one to the depths, simply describes the fact. One hears, one does not seek; one takes, one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes up like lightning, with necessity, unfalteringly formed—I have never had any choice. An ecstasy whose tremendous tension sometimes discharges itself in a flood of tears, while one’s steps now involuntarily rush along, now involuntarily lag…a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but as conditioned, demanded, as a necessary colour within such a superfluity of light…. Everything is in the highest degree involuntary but takes place as in a tempest of a feeling of freedom, of absoluteness, of power, of divinity…. This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that one has to go back thousands of years to find anyone who could say to me “it is mine also.”
Here we encounter in one vivid epiphany the precise synthesis of the two archetypal complexes in the closest possible interpenetration: an experience that is simultaneously deeply involuntary (Saturn-Pluto) yet paradoxically marked by an exalted freedom (Jupiter-Uranus); an experience of the most painful and gloomy (Saturn-Pluto) that appears within a superfluity of light and happiness (Jupiter-Uranus), not as its antithesis but as its necessary condition. As Nietzsche wrote after he finished Zarathustra:
You want if possible…to abolish suffering; and we?—it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been!…The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul during misfortune which transmits to it its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting and exploiting misfortune; and whatever depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
In the two years from January 1883 to January 1885, in coincidence with the once-in-a-lifetime personal transit of Uranus crossing his natal Jupiter-Uranus aspect (essentially the same personal transit across their natal Jupiter-Uranus aspects that Einstein and Napoleon underwent at their respective peak moments) and also in coincidence with the once-in-an-age world transit of the triple Saturn-Neptune-Pluto conjunction in the sky, Nietzsche composed the four parts of Zarathustra, as in a storm wind of freedom and power. The long-held dialectical tension between the two great archetypal dominants in his life—and in the collective psyche—now seemed to come together with volcanic intensity in a creative synthesis that transcended each complex on its own yet fulfilled them both at a higher level. The contradiction of opposites had reached fever pitch and then erupted, bringing forth a prophetic testament that carried the characteristic gravitas, authority, judgment, fatefulness, and power of the one complex and the rebellious defiance, transcending freedom, lightness of spirit, and creative joy of the other.
Here the will to power and its dominion over human life was both preserved and radically reconceived: Through the heroic individual who possesses the strength to master his passions rather than weaken or extirpate them, who has the courage to overcome himself, through such a person the universal Will in all its potent and fateful inevitability becomes the very instrument of freedom and brings forth the birth of a new form of being—the unconditionally life-affirming joyful creator who has become his own law, and who realizes within his own being the meaning of the Earth.
You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?
Nietzsche confronted the inhibiting power of the dark senex:
And when I beheld my devil, I found him serious, thorough, profound, solemn: it was the spirit of Gravity—through him all things are ruined. One does not kill by anger but by laughter. Come, let us kill the Spirit of Gravity.
He affirmed the creative miracle of the eternal puer:
The child is innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.
I have learned to walk: since then I have run. I have learned to fly: since then I do not have to be pushed in order to move. Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.
And finally:
I flew, an arrow, quivering with sun-intoxicated rapture: out into the distant future, which no dream has yet seen, into warmer Souths than artists have ever dreamed of, there where gods, dancing, are ashamed of all clothes…. Where all becoming seemed to me the dancing of gods…where necessity was freedom itself, which blissfully played with the goad of freedom.
O my Will!…Preserve me from all petty victories! Preserve and spare me for a great destiny!…That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noontide…a bow eager for its arrow, an arrow eager for its star—a star, ready and ripe in its noontide, glowing, transpierced, blissful through annihilating sun-arrows…. Spare me for one great victory!
In all its titanic power and exalted grandeur, Zarathustra is at once a hymn to solitude and necessity and a manifesto of creative freedom and joy.
By my love and hope I entreat you: do not reject the hero in your soul! Keep holy your highest hope! Thus spoke Zarathustra.
I will examine elsewhere the remaining years of Nietzsche’s creative life and its tragic denouement in the mental collapse of January 1889. To do so will require an understanding of archetypal complexes we have not yet explored, particularly the Saturn-Neptune and Neptune-Pluto combinations. Maintaining our focus here on the Jupiter-Uranus complex, we can follow the subsequent cultural unfolding of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where a remarkable pattern of similar planetary correlations continued. In homage to Nietzsche’s masterwork, Richard Strauss composed the symphonic poem Also Sprach Zarathustra in 1896, precisely when transiting Uranus moved into conjunction with his natal Jupiter, again, a once-in-a-lifetime personal transit, and when transiting Saturn opposed his natal Pluto. The startling synthesis of dark titanic power and soaring brilliance in its opening passage, “Dawn,” well conveys both its Nietzschean inspiration and the corresponding archetypal forces. On a larger scale, we can also recognize the continuation of the longer Uranus-Pluto cycle and its archetypal complex: Nietzsche’s birth at the start of the mid-nineteenth-century Uranus-Pluto conjunction period and Strauss’s composing of Zarathustra at the start of the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition in 1896 both reflected, in a cyclical sequence, the theme of titanic struggle and liberation.
Finally, it was during the next Uranus-Pluto conjunction, when Jupiter and Uranus were also in conjunction at the time of the triple conjunction with Pluto in 1968–69—the only such alignment of the twentieth century, which brought together the three planets that were conjoined more broadly in the preceding century at Nietzsche’s birth—that this powerful opening passage from Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra first entered into broad public awareness when it accompanied the opening images of Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. With its distinctive expression of such themes as sudden evolutionary and technological breakthrough, “The Dawn of Man,” unexpected radical expansion of consciousness, cosmic grandeur, and the prophecy of a coming birth of a new form of human being, the film well embodied the archetypal symbolism of the triple conjunction. This was the same 1968–69 alignment that coincided with the Apollo Moon landing, the proposal of the Gaia hypothesis, the photograph “Earthrise,” the climax of the Sixties’ counterculture and its exuberant celebration of creative freedom, and the rapid emergence of a conviction widely shared throughout the world, evident in the social movements, music, writings, and many other cultural phenomena of the time, t
hat a new age was dawning.
Hidden Births
The flow of human activity and thought, needless to say, hardly stops and starts in lockstep accordance with planetary alignments. Many significant cultural phenomena take place every year and every decade. Yet it does indeed seem that with extraordinary consistency the conjunctions and oppositions of Jupiter and Uranus tend to coincide with a palpable intensification, a visible cyclic climax, of ongoing cultural creativity, liberation, and a sense of new beginnings, in both individual lives and the life of the human community. Each such alignment seems to serve as a punctuation point in the continuing cycle: as a culmination of what preceded it, a fruition of the creative processes of the immediate past, yet also a breakthrough into a new level of creativity that unfolds through the succeeding years—with revolutionary ideas entering public discourse, with long-germinating creative processes suddenly breaking the surface, with new works born and disseminated, new horizons explored, new associations begun, new movements initiated, new freedoms won, new understandings awakened.
Yet one of the less obvious characteristics of the correlations cited here is that the significance of many events that coincide with the Jupiter-Uranus world transit alignments was not visible at the time they occurred, nor in the immediately following years. In numerous instances that we have seen, the significance was indeed self-evident and widely recognized—the Moon landing, the fall of the Bastille, the fall of the Berlin Wall. But few people in 1858 realized the significance of Darwin and Wallace’s joint paper on the theory of evolution when it was read before the Linnean Society. It received only a muted response at the time, and when it was published in the society’s minutes the response was largely a critical one. Several months afterwards, when the president of the society summarized the events of the preceding year, he remarked with regret:
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