6. Kennan’s preference for the containment strategy was for skillful and steadfast political, diplomatic, and cultural efforts rather than military interventions, with his greatest emphasis placed on the importance of strengthening the spiritual and moral vitality of American society. The following sentence adds further nuances that reflect the Saturn-Pluto complex’s distinctive qualities: “It is important to note, however, that such a policy has nothing to do with outward histrionics: with threats or blustering or superfluous gestures of outward ‘toughness.’” His concluding paragraphs underscore these qualities:
Thus the decision will really fall in large measure in this country itself. The issue of Soviet-American relations is in essence a test of the overall worth of the United States as a nation among nations. To avoid destruction the United States need only measure up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy of preservation as a great nation.
Surely, there was never a fairer test of national quality than this. In the light of these circumstances, the thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin’s challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude to a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear. (“The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, July 1947)
7. William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, which was written in part as a response and counterpoint to Spengler’s The Decline of the West, was published during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in 1963, and reflected that era’s zeitgeist of propulsive evolutionary advance on many levels—political, social, technological, intellectual—as compared with the Saturn-Pluto complex that is more evident in Spengler’s historical vision.
8. Reflecting a related Saturn-Pluto motif, Cheney’s characteristic modus operandi after September 11, 2001—working in a secret underground bunker from which he exerted control over foreign policy and domestic security activities—bore a striking resemblance to the strategies and psychology of the underground mole depicted in Kafka’s The Burrow.
9. The biographical parallels to the sequence of Saturn-Pluto conjunctions during the life of Schopenhauer is instructive. There were three Saturn-Pluto conjunctions in his life. The first coincided with his birth in 1788. The second coincided with the publication of The World as Will and Imagination in 1818, at which time the book was almost entirely ignored. This did not change until many years later, when Schopenhauer published his more accessible collection of essays and aphorisms entitled Parerga und Paralipomena. This occurred in 1851 during the very next Saturn-Pluto conjunction, the one that coincided with the publication of Melville’s Moby Dick. This was also the period of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the revolutionary 1845–56 epoch, an era marked by many events and movements in the collective psyche that suggest the liberation of the id, nature’s struggle for survival, and an opening to the deep instinctual ground of life. It was only from the time of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction—in rare triple conjunction with Saturn at the time of the publication—that Schopenhauer’s ideas begin to exercise their deep influence on European thought and culture, from Wagner and Nietzsche to Freud and Jung.
10. Many of these same themes again arose with renewed force and in new forms during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2000–04. A characteristic reflection of this archetypal complex’s again being constellated during this period is the summary of world events and geopolitical tendencies contained in a widely discussed essay by Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, entitled “It’s the Dawning Age of the Apocalypse…” (The Washington Post, February 2, 2003). The various motifs, current realities, and rising fears cited in the brief essay, written when the alignment was close to exactitude, represent a dense litany of Saturn-Pluto themes and historical references: mass terrorism; September 11; weapons of mass destruction brandished by nations of the Axis of Evil; widespread fear of terrorist nuclear attack by rogue nuclear weapons; threats by North Korea that “the United States is in danger of falling into the grave that it has dug” and if it does, it “will never again survive”; nuclear threats by Pakistan against India and vice versa; references to World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, and Hiroshima; the doomsday clock on the cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that shows how close the world is to annihilation; the federal government’s implementation of Big Brother security measures; the drastic and sustained fall of the stock market and widespread economic depression; fear of technology in the hands of enemies as turning like a Frankenstein monster against its creators; the global epidemic advance of AIDS and malaria; the belief of a majority of Americans polled by Time/CBS that the biblical apocalypse will come true, 17 percent believing that the end of the world will happen in their lifetimes; the belief of fundamentalist Christians that Israel’s victory in the Six Days’ War of 1967 and its annexation of the West Wall signified the hand of God in history; the Islamic fundamentalist response to Western influence in the Middle East; escalating zealot actions and reactions to Israel-Palestine conflicts and fundamentalist Christian support of Israel that potentially can lead self-fulfillingly to Armageddon—all of which has created a “witches’ Sabbath of madness and turmoil.” Mead concludes by stating: “Apocalypse anxiety has moved into the mainstream of American politics and culture…. [A] line has been crossed…. The Age of Progress is in the past and this is the era of Shiva, destroyer of worlds.”
11. Cf. journalist Bill Moyers’s observation about the Republican right and the 2001–04 Bush administration, in a New York Review of Books essay entitled “Welcome to Doomsday”: “Many of the constituencies who make up this alliance don’t see eye to eye on many things, but for President Bush’s master plan for rolling back environmental protections they are united. A powerful current connects the administration’s multinational corporate cronies who regard the environment as ripe for the picking and a hard-core constituency of fundamentalists who regard the environment as fuel for the fire that is coming” (March 24, 2005, p. 10).
12. The radical deepening of gravitas that tends to emerge in the collective psyche during Saturn-Pluto alignments is well conveyed in an essay by Charlene Spretnak written within a month of the events of September 11, 2001:
The initial shock and grieving after the terrorist attacks instilled in the American psyche a gravitas, a deep sense of grounding that seemed to slow time in our mad-dash world and draw us into silent reflection rather than quick talk. Thinking felt as if it were weighted in our entire body. It refused to click into easy patterns as we sought to grasp the unimaginable new reality. In that palpable grounding the first week, we were all bonded with the dead and with each other, causing us to reach out to family and friends around the country in shock and loving support. It felt as if our suddenly having to bear the unbearable had delivered us to another way of being, one shaped by the trauma of immense tragedy and the movement into regeneration. Even mainstream commentators noted that the trivial concerns of our consumer culture seemed extremely irrelevant. We had entered a new time and a new psychological space. (The San Francisco Chronicle, October 5, 2001)
13. John Hersey, whose Hiroshima galvanized the American public’s moral response to the dropping of the bombs and helped set the terms for the nuclear debate during the following decades of the Cold War, was born during the preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction in 1914. As with many other authors and artists born with this aspect, the themes of his most significant work were consistently reflective of this archetypal complex. Hersey’s most famous novel, The Wall, depicted both the extreme inhumanity and the extreme courage displayed during the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto during World War II.
14. An especially enduring and consequential embodiment of the many conflicting and interpenetrating qualities, both positive and
negative, intrinsic to the Saturn-Pluto complex can be recognized in the distinctive character and legacy of the the U.S. Constitution, which came into being during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1785–88. Created at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia of 1787, analyzed and defended in The Federalist Papers, and ratified in succession by the individual states in 1787–88, the Constitution was both forged and legally established entirely during that conjunction. (Reflecting other characteristic themes of the Saturn-Pluto complex, this was the same conjunction that coincided with the period of severe economic depression and widespread famine, affecting many parts of the world, that in France established the critical social conditions and immediate provocation for the French Revolution, which began the next year as Jupiter and Uranus moved into conjunction.)
In the U.S. Constitution, several motifs that suggest the positive synthesis of the two principles associated with Saturn and Pluto can be discerned: the enduring and firmly established powerful authoritative structure, legally binding and hallowed by tradition, history, and longevity, that provided for a stable organization (Saturn) of power (Pluto) in a complex system of checks and balances that would carefully hold the tension and interplay of conflicting political forces and impulses. All these qualities precisely represent the characteristic dynamics of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex.
Reflecting a diachronic cyclical pattern, James Madison, the principal architect of the Constitution, was himself born in 1751 during the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction, exactly one full cycle and thirty-six years before the birth of the Constitution he designed. The sustained effectiveness of the Constitution’s structural control of immense power, its stable containment of the tension of opposing forces, and its enduring character and continued potent authority all owe much to Madison’s mind and character. Madison was himself inspired by the writings on the separation and balance of powers by John Locke, who was born under an exact Saturn opposite Pluto a century earlier (in 1632, the same alignment that coincided with the trial of Galileo).
We can recognize the characteristic spirit and ambiance of this complex as well in the grave and weighty intonations that accompany almost all public pronouncements about the Constitution, such as “the great wisdom of our American Constitution” or “What our Founding Fathers established over two centuries ago.” Similarly, the grave accusation, “That is unconstitutional!” or the dire warning, “Our nation is in a constitutional crisis,” as at the time of Watergate and also after the 2000 presidential election. Both crises were exactly coincident with Saturn-Pluto alignments. We also see the relevant themes in the Constitution’s virtually unassailable authority, which is in certain respects suggestive of a structure of religious law that has been invested with the legitimacy of omniscient wisdom and unquestionable divine authority.
Here we can begin to observe the shadow side of the same archetypal complex, the very strengths and virtues of the Constitution being linked with its profound flaws. Thus, for example, its extreme resistance to modification even when such change is crucial to save its democratic principles and even when a majority of citizens wish to modify it. Especially reflective of the shadow dimensions of the Saturn-Pluto complex, despite the better intentions of its principal architects, was the Constitution’s authoritative sanctioning of slavery that was carefully built into its original structure because it was required by the slave-holding southern states as the price of ratification.
This enduring legacy of what has been called the nation’s “original sin” permitted and sustained the immeasurable suffering of countless enslaved men, women, and children—as well as the immeasurable corruption and hardening of the slavemasters’ souls—and led to the catastrophic cleansing of the Civil War. Its legacy continued with the many laws, such as Jim Crow and poll taxes, to disenfranchise and segregate blacks that were enacted and extended with almost systematic regularity in coincidence with subsequent Saturn-Pluto alignments. That legacy continued as well in the stubbornly enduring effects of racism that pervade and wound American society, which become especially evident during Saturn-Pluto alignments such as the 1964–67 opposition, or again during the most recent square of 1992–94, when urban riots touched off by racial injustice shook the nation.
Moreover, as the nation discovered in the 2000 election at the start of the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, the distortions that the Constitution and the Electoral College wrought in the structure of presidental elections continued as well, resulting, in 2000, in the election of a candidate with half a million fewer votes than his opponent. The further significant role played during this election by the thousands of confirmed cases of systematic disenfranchisement of African-American voters and, finally, the determinative role played by the Supreme Court also represent characteristic expressions of the archetypal complex associated with Saturn-Pluto alignments. The victim’s side of the Saturn-Pluto complex was vividly reflected in the widespread conviction that an historic defeat of democratic values had occurred in the 2000 election, accompanied by a sense of electoral disenfranchisement and judicially enforced impotence that was experienced by many in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.
The Supreme Court itself, which was established by the Constitution during the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1787–88, has long carried with it much the same mantle of solemn authority: the dark gravitas of its black robes, its hallowed chambers, the granite and marble solidity of its temple, the patriarchal authority of its considered pronouncements, its reverence towards the Founding Fathers, its overwhelmingly male-dominated bench of aging justices, its long, slow deliberations and penetrating consideration of deep judicial problems and conflicts, its solemn and binding judgments. We also see the Saturn-Pluto complex in the Court’s persistent concern with “the original intent” of the Founding Fathers, and the tremendous power of precedent and past judgments in its debates and the determining of decisions. It is visible as well in the highly conservative tendencies of the Court (with significant exceptions, such as the liberal activism of the Warren Court during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s). Finally, in its status as the last court of appeal and its authoritative determinations and final judgments, particularly with respect to death sentences and executions, another archetypal theme of the Saturn-Pluto complex can be discerned, that of the Last Judgment. The installation of a 5,280-pound granite monument bearing the Ten Commandments in the Alabama State Supreme Court lobby by the state’s chief justice from 2001 to 2003 during the most recent Saturn-Pluto alignment suggests the close archetypal association in the American unconscious between the U.S. Constitution and biblical authority.
15. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung spoke of Schopenhauer as “the great find”:
He was the first to speak of the suffering of the world…and of confusion, passion, evil…. Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe. He spoke neither of the all-good and all-wise providence of a Creator, nor of the harmony of the cosmos, but stated bluntly that a fundamental flaw underlay the sorrowful course of human history and the cruelty of nature: the blindness of the world-creating Will. (p. 69)
16. Both the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camelia, the two principal organizations in the South founded by former Confederates to oppose Reconstruction and terrorize African-Americans, were founded during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1866–67. The Plutonic character of the Klan pervaded the mythos of its organization: each state or Realm was governed by a Grand Dragon, aided by eight Hydras as staff; clusters of counties were ruled by a Great Titan and six Furies; each county was overseen by a Grand Giant aided by four Night Hawks; and each Den was governed by a Grand Cyclops with two Night Hawks. Members were known as Ghouls.
Moreover, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1915 during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that coincided with World War I. This incarnation of the Klan spread throughout the United States, north and south, with a fund
amentalist religious orientation and a virulently nativist political program, and with hundreds of thousands of members as it broadened its agenda of white supremacy and the violent suppression of African-Americans to include anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism.
17. Holst was familiar with astrology, and he composed each movement of The Planets to reflect the distinct archetypal character of each planet: Mars, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. (In 1914 the planet Pluto had not yet been discovered.) The opening movement, “Mars,” accurately reflects the aggressive, military qualities associated with the Mars archetype, but at a deeper level the music is clearly pervaded by the archetypal complex that we have seen associated with the Saturn-Pluto cycle: the overwhelming elemental power, the highly ordered relentlessness of its titanic driving force, the destructive violence on a mass scale, the chthonic depths of darkness and horror, the suggestion of mechanized warfare and totalitarian terror with thousands of armored tanks, planes, and jackbooted regiments that destroy everything in their path—all evoked in music composed before the events they portray took place.
18. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was published in installments as Joyce completed them in Ezra Pound’s The Egotist in 1914–15, then as a book in the United States in 1916, all during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction. Joyce himself was born in 1882 at the cusp of the immediately preceding Saturn-Pluto conjunction one cycle earlier, near the beginning of the rare (occurring once in five hundred years) Saturn-Neptune-Pluto triple conjunction of 1881–84 that also coincided with the births of Kafka, Stravinsky, and Virginia Woolf, and Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God.
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