From the survey of planetary cycles we have already studied we can tentatively extrapolate from previous correlations as well as from current trends to assess what kinds of cultural and historical phenomena might coincide with these next alignments. The immediately preceding alignments of any cycle tend to be especially relevant. For example, the already approaching Uranus-Pluto square alignment that will extend through 2020 points to the possibility of a significant cyclical development of the cultural impulses and archetypal dynamics that emerged during the 1960s. Characteristic themes we have observed for this cycle in past centuries include heightened impulses for radical social change and cultural creativity, accelerated technological and scientific advance, the empowerment of progressive and reformist political movements, intensified feminist, civil rights, and countercultural activity, increased drive for freedom and autonomy at both the individual and collective level, pressure towards radicalization in many spheres of action and ideas, intensified ecological activism, an awakening of the instincts and nature in many senses, changes in the global balance of power, large demographic shifts, and the activation of mass energies and mass movements of various kinds. Generally speaking, Uranus-Pluto eras have tended to bring forth the catalyzing of powerful forces in many forms, the awakening of a will to power that can be both creative and destructive, and a tangible intensification and acceleration of human experience.
All of these specific themes have been strongly in evidence during past Uranus-Pluto alignments with considerable consistency. Yet as to which of them will be visible during these next fifteen years, we of course cannot know. If we consider feminism, for example—from Mary Wollstonecraft and the women of the French Revolution through the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848 and the suffragettes of the early 1900s to the women’s liberation awakening of the 1960s—the Uranus-Pluto cycle has been highly consistent in its correlations. The developing diachronic pattern suggests that with this next dynamic alignment of Uranus-Pluto another period of both the spontaneous empowerment of women and an intensified striving for equality and self-sovereignty is on the immediate horizon. Because the alignment is a square, the potential for stress and struggle in that process is high, but considering the clear sequence of past correlations, it seems to me altogether likely that another feminist propulsion will infuse itself into the culture and that women will emerge from the next decade and a half with considerably more political and economic power than now. Yet one can never be certain how these archetypal forces will become concretely embodied, only that they will tend to do so in a way that is consistent with their character and grounded in the developing cultural context.
The several upcoming alignments involving Jupiter or Saturn are shorter in duration and have their own characteristic archetypal vectors—the Jupiter alignment periods tending towards the expansive and elevating, the Saturn towards the problematic and restrictive. Yet more subtly, the converse is also true: Jupiter always has its complicating shadow, Saturn its hard-earned gifts.
The natural human tendency is to want to know that the general outlook for the foreseeable future is uniformly positive and will only get better, with blue skies as far as the eye can see. Yet there are advantages to knowing of a potentially challenging reality in advance, facing it squarely, preparing for it, and recognizing its signs and characteristic motifs, its dangers, and its positive potential when it is consciously assimilated and enacted. Perhaps equally important, it can be psychologically centering and spiritually fortifying to recognize that such periods may represent the unfolding of larger cycles of archetypal development and human evolution in a context that is in some sense cosmic, subtly ordered and intelligible, rather than arbitrary, random, and meaningless.
Of all the cycles listed, the Saturn-Neptune opposition will be of special relevance for understanding the immediate period, from later 2004 to 2008. The archetypal combination of Saturn and Neptune is an exceptionally complex and profound one. The two archetypal principles are radically different from each other in character, even in ontology—they rule two entirely different universes of meaning. The many ways in which those meanings can interact, oppose each other, interpenetrate, and be synthesized deserve as extensive an exploration as we have given to each of the four combinations already surveyed. Without an extensive survey of historical and biographical correlations, one cannot convey the rich diversity of possible inflections inherent in this archetypal complex, nor can we glimpse the diachronic and synchronic patternings that preceded—and form a context for understanding—the current alignment. Before such an analysis, however, a few headlines may be helpful, as long as we keep in mind the considerable simplification that such a brief overview necessitates.
For our present purpose, the earlier chapters’ survey of Saturn and Neptune in the context of other planetary cycles can suggest some of the characteristic themes that tend to be constellated in the collective psyche when these two archetypes are combined. The Saturn-Neptune complex can be seen as in many ways comparable to the Saturn-Pluto complex because of the dominance in both of Saturnian themes and an unmistakable Saturnian atmosphere. The enormous difference between the two complexes is that this general Saturnian cast is now pervaded with a Neptunian quality rather than a Plutonic one.
Saturn-Neptune can also be compared to the Uranus-Neptune complex, but instead of the Promethean impulse interacting with Neptune, we have Saturn. The dominant tendency is thus not that of awakening and liberating the Neptunian dimension but rather setting up dichotomies and tensions with it, bringing out its problematic qualities, opposing and negating them, judging them; or disciplining, structuring, grounding, forging, and maturing them, thus giving the Neptunian dimension concrete embodiment.
A characteristic motif of Saturn-Neptune eras is a heightened tension and dialectic between ideals, hopes, and beliefs on the one hand and the hard realities of life on the other. The same complex can express itself in the form of heightened conflicts between religion and secularism—“belief and facts,” “faith-based and reality-based” (and in the United States, “red states” and “blue states”)—each side perceiving the other to be living in a state of delusional self-deception. Intensified secular skepticism towards religious beliefs of any kind tends to be constellated at the same time as intensified commitment to conservative religiosity, which often takes the form of antiscientific biblical literalism (“God vs. science”). The conflict between creationism and evolution is a characteristic expression of this archetypal polarity, as in the case of the Scopes trial during the Saturn-Neptune square of 1925, and of Darwin himself, born during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1809. Sensitivity to the oppressive and constraining aspects of religious belief tends to be heightened, bringing forth sharp criticism of religion as “mere myth”—superstitious nonsense, naïve fantasy, the “opium of the people” in the words of Marx, born during the Saturn-Neptune square that followed Darwin’s conjunction; a psychologically motivated illusion, in the view of Freud, born during the Saturn-Neptune square exactly one cycle later. Issues surrounding skepticism generally—the discernment of truth and illusion, and the confronting of deception and delusion—frequently emerge.
There is also a tendency during Saturn-Neptune eras to experience a subtle but pervasive darkening of the collective consciousness, sometimes as a diffuse and difficult-to-diagnose social malaise, at other times as a direct response to deeply discouraging or tragic events. Reflecting the complex in its most intense form, such eras are frequently marked by collective experiences of tragic loss, the defeat of ideals and aspirations, the death of a dream, which are accompanied by a sense of profound sorrow. The current Saturn-Neptune opposition first reached the 15° range in November 2004. The bitter disappointment and vast sadness that overcame half the U.S. population and much of the rest of the world as a result of Bush’s reelection just as the alignment reached the 15° threshold is highly characteristic of the Saturn-Neptune complex. The pervading sense that an ideal had been
lost took many forms—the loss of the ideal image of what the United States had once represented both to its citizens and to the world, the defeat of widespread hopes for a change in the world’s leadership at a critical time in history, the sense of futility felt after so much work on behalf of that cause, the loss of faith in the democratic process, lingering doubts about the truthfulness of the vote count and the legitimacy of the election. Highly characteristic of the Saturn-Neptune complex was the pervasive experience of discouragement and depression, resignation, pessimism, despair, and dazed disorientation that descended on many in the following weeks and months like an immense dark cloud.
The same complex was visible even more acutely one month later in the wake of the tsunami in Asia, with its tidal wave of grief, inconsolable loss and anguish, and mass rituals of mourning. Here too were other characteristic Saturn-Neptune themes: death caused by water, the ocean as source of suffering and loss, contamination of water, water-borne and infectious diseases, numberless haunting images of death and sorrow transmitted throughout the world and permeating the collective consciousness.
As the Saturn-Neptune alignment moved closer in orb in the late summer of 2005, virtually all of these themes dramatically repeated themselves in the catastrophic flooding that overwhelmed New Orleans after the Gulf Coast hurricane Katrina. Many characteristic motifs of the Saturn-Neptune complex pervaded the event and its aftermath: death and disaster through water; the floodwaters breaching the protective levees; the stream of globally televised images of suffering and death; the drowning of a city and legacy that represented the soul of much of American culture; floating corpses, the contaminated and diseased water, the widespread dehydration, the lack of critical drugs, the countless medical crises, the powerless hospitals and nursing homes; the strange paralysis of the government; the collective sense of hopelessness and despair; the steady focus on the suffering of the poor, the abandoned, the sick and the frail, the very old and very young, the dying, the homeless, the grieving.
A comparison of the central crises of the two consecutive Saturn oppositions—first with Pluto, then Neptune—that have marked this first decade of the twenty-first century is instructive. The fiery hell and ashes of Ground Zero in New York on September 11 followed by the “shock and awe” destruction of the Iraq invasion during the Saturn-Pluto alignment stand in sharp contrast with the tragic water nightmares of the Asian tsunami and the New Orleans flood during the Saturn-Neptune alignment. The difference in the collective emotional responses of the two crises is striking as well—the intensified power struggle, conservative empowerment, grave determination, armored security, and mutually demonizing hostility during the Saturn-Pluto alignment, compared with the widespread sense of diffuse helplessness, disillusionment and despair, bitter disappointment with the government’s massive failure and negligence, and private outpouring of compassion, prayer, sacrifice, and aid during the Saturn-Neptune alignment.
Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis during the Saturn-Pluto period the focus of collective judgment and division (Saturn) was on power, violence, terrorism, and war (Pluto), both in the United States and abroad, the focus of collective judgment and division in the aftermath of the 2005 crisis during the Saturn-Neptune period was on empathy and the failure of empathy, on systemic negligence, the acute as well as chronic lack of care for the poor and disadvantaged, the narcissistic bubble enclosing the current U.S. leadership and its policies, and the immense human cost of that blindness and insensitivity. With a kind of precision of symmetry and aesthetic coherence, the reactionary structures that were empowered by fiery events and ruthless violence in the earlier period were now weakened or dissolved by watery events and compassionate concern. As often occurs during Saturn-Neptune alignments, the hidden shadow of past actions and policies became visible, haunting the present.
While only an extensive historical overview of the Saturn-Neptune cycle could give the reader an adequate basis for discerning the full range of correlations that will be relevant for understanding the current alignment, it is worth mentioning here that one of the most frequent themes historically has been a widespread sense of discontent and loss of faith pervading the social and political atmosphere, as in the sustained “crisis of confidence” of 1978–79 during the Saturn-Neptune square that occurred in the later years of the Carter administration. In wartime, Saturn-Neptune alignments often coincide with the later stages of a war when a collective sense of physical and spiritual exhaustion, disillusionment, and low morale—often on both sides—is dominant, as happened at the end of World War I (conjunction of 1916–19), World War II (square of 1943–45), Vietnam (opposition of 1970–73), and the Cold War (conjunction of 1987–91). Virtually the entire American Civil War was fought during the Saturn-Neptune opposition of 1861–65. The sense of being caught in a futile and endless “quagmire” is often felt and voiced, as in the current case of the Iraq War in 2004–05.
To the above list could be added the Korean War, most of which was fought during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in 1951–53. One of the most characteristic responses to periods informed by this archetypal complex is the acute sense of irony, wry or bitter humor, a deep awareness of the absurd and insane in life. The dark humor reflects a response to suffering and hopelessness that in some sense is an attempt to preserve one from going insane or succumbing to despair. To mention one example to stand for many, the film M*A*S*H was based on the experiences in 1951–52 of a surgeon who served in a military medical unit attempting to cope with the endless casualties and horror of war during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of the Korean War. The film was released in 1970 (followed by the television series in 1972) in coincidence with the immediately following Saturn-Neptune opposition of 1970–73, when it precisely captured the mood of the nation and its soldiers trapped in the demoralizing war in Vietnam. The film was directed by Robert Altman, who was born with the Saturn-Neptune square, and whose many films have been consistently notable for their deeply ironic spirit.
Frequently seen on the spiritual level during Saturn-Neptune eras are dark nights of the soul and severe challenges to religious faith, such as Nietzsche’s announcement of the “death of God” during the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1881–82, or John Lennon’s song “God” in late 1970 (“God is a concept by which we measure our pain”), as well as his bitter postmortem for the 1960s during that same 1970–73 alignment: “The dream is over.” Often individuals during these periods question the existence of an all-loving God who would permit tragic events and vast human suffering, as many voiced after the tsunami in Asia in the winter of 2004–05, or as countless people experienced in 1943–45 during the period of greatest horror and anguish in the concentration camps. A more particularized form of this sense of collective tragedy took place during the Saturn-Neptune square in 1963 with the worldwide grief and the mass ritual of mourning after the assassination of John Kennedy. Yet an equally strong expression of the Saturn-Neptune archetypes in combination is the impulse to sustain faith and hope in the darkness, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s courageous, inspired and inspiring “I have a dream” speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 during the same Saturn-Neptune alignment, or Lennon’s influential song “Imagine” during the following one in 1971.
Paradoxically, as we have often seen with other cycles, such periods tend to coincide with collective expressions of opposite sides of the same complex: loss of faith and disillusionment but also a forging of a deeper faith in the face of harsh or tragic realities. The latter response can take many forms: a search to discover a foundation of hope in a greater though not-yet-visible reality, an inward-turning withdrawal from the world to contact inner spiritual resources and ideals, a strengthened commitment to religious tradition, a turning to spiritual discipline and practice, ritual, prayer, and meditation. The same archetypal complex can also constellate an individual or collective impulse to engage the world in a manner that is both spiritual and pragmatic, to devote oneself to overcoming t
he disparity between the ideal and the actual through service and spiritually informed action. Here the synthesis of Saturn and Neptune is expressed through the strenuous effort to embody spiritual values and compassionate ideals by enacting them within the concrete realities and challenges of the human community. A call for service and sacrifice is strongly felt. The Dalai Lama, who was born with Saturn opposite Neptune, is a paradigmatic example of this potential expression of the complex. Frequently, the experience or witness of suffering serves to dissolve rigid boundaries and past enmities, and to call forth unitive and compassionate healing impulses (as was visible, for example, in many instances in the wake of the tsunami, such as in Sri Lanka).
Nevertheless, as with the many Saturn-Pluto hard aspects we have examined, Saturn-Neptune periods generally present a significant challenge to the collective spirit of an age. Social anomie and spiritual malaise are frequent, sometimes intensified to a state of profound alienation. (Salman Rushdie in 2005: “The cold war is over, but a stranger war has begun. Alienation has perhaps never been so widespread.”) In their milder expression, these tendencies can take the form of an underlying mood of confusion, doubt, uncertainty, and ambivalence. A range of psychological symptoms tends to be more in evidence: free-floating anxiety, narcissism, apathetic inertia, escapism and denial, psychic numbing, dissociation, autistic introversion, tendencies towards addiction and dependency of various kinds, insomnia and dream disturbances, physical and spiritual fatigue, world-weariness, listlessness and weakening of the will, concern with chronic and debilitating illnesses, with influenza and malaria and other infectious diseases, viruses and vaccines, posttraumatic stress disorders, “phantom diseases,” and difficult-to-diagnose mental and physical conditions (as in chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf War syndrome, both of which emerged during the last Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1987–91).
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