Joyce’s portrait of hell makes clear the extent to which the concept and image of hell can be approached archetypally not only as Saturn’s judgment and punishment of the Plutonic id (sexuality, the bestial instincts, the demonic, the underworld) but also as the Pluto archetype’s overwhelming intensification of the Saturn principle of time (and other Saturnian themes, such as confinement, punishment, guilt, suffering, and death) to its absolute extreme. From this perspective, Joyce’s rendering of the nature of eternal damnation at the climax of the preacher’s sermon (employing as well the paradigmatic Saturnian metaphor of the clock) is especially memorable:
Last and crowning torture of all the tortures of that awful place is the eternity of hell. Eternity! O, dread and dire word. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it? And remember, it is an eternity of pain. Even though the pains of hell were not so terrible as they are, yet they would become infinite, as they are destined to last for ever. But while they are everlasting they are at the same time, as you know, intolerably intense, unbearably extensive. To bear even the sting of an insect for all eternity would be a dreadful torment. What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tortures of hell for ever? For ever! For all eternity! Not for a year or for an age but for ever. Try to imagine the awful meaning of this. You have often seen the sand on the seashore. How fine are its tiny grains! And how many of those tiny little grains go to make up the small handful which a child grasps in its play. Now imagine a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad, extending to remotest space, and a million miles in thickness; and imagine such an enormous mass of countless particles of sand multiplied as often as there are leaves in the forest, drops of water in the mighty ocean, feathers on birds, scales on fish, hairs on animals, atoms in the vast expanse of the air: and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain, how many eons upon eons of ages before it had carried away all? Yet at the end of that immense stretch of time not even one instant of eternity could be said to have ended. At the end of all those billions and trillions of years eternity would have scarcely begun. And if that mountain rose again after it had been all carried away, and if the bird came again and carried it all away again grain by grain, and if it so rose and sank as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended; even then, at the end of such a period, after that eon of time the mere thought of which makes our very brain reel dizzily, eternity would scarcely have begun.
—A holy saint (one of our own fathers I believe it was) was once vouchsafed a vision of hell. It seemed to him that he stood in the midst of a great hall, dark and silent save for the ticking of a great clock. The ticking went on unceasingly; and it seemed to this saint that the sound of the ticking was the ceaseless repetition of the words—ever, never; ever, never. Ever to be in hell, never to be in heaven; ever to be shut off from the presence of God, never to enjoy the beatific vision; ever to be eaten with flames, gnawed by vermin, goaded with burning spikes, never to be free from those pains; ever to have the conscience upbraid one, the memory enrage, the mind filled with darkness and despair, never to escape; ever to curse and revile the foul demons who gloat fiendishly over the misery of their dupes, never to behold the shining raiment of the blessed spirits; ever to cry out of the abyss of fire to God for an instant, a single instant, of respite from such awful agony, never to receive, even for an instant, God’s pardon; ever to suffer, never to enjoy; ever to be damned, never to be saved; ever, never; ever, never. O, what a dreadful punishment! An eternity of endless agony, of endless bodily and spiritual torment, without one ray of hope, without one moment of cessation, of agony limitless in intensity, of torment infinitely varied, of torture that sustains eternally that which it eternally devours, of anguish that everlastingly preys upon the spirit while it racks the flesh, an eternity, every instant of which is itself an eternity of woe. Such is the terrible punishment decreed for those who die in mortal sin by an almighty and a just God. (New York: Modern Library, 1996, pp. 177–80)
19. Mel Gibson was born during the Saturn-Pluto square in 1956, within 1° of exact alignment (with Mars in the configuration as well). This was the same year and Saturn-Pluto alignment during which Cecil B. DeMille directed and produced The Ten Commandments, another culturally influential film with a biblical subject and similar motifs—the stern religious authoritativeness of Moses, the thundering power of Yahweh as he issued the divine commandments, the ruthless punishment of evil, and so forth. The film starred Charlton Heston, who was born during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1923 and who became another leading conservative Hollywood figure. DeMille was himself born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1881. He made two versions of The Ten Commandments, the first during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1923 (when Heston was born), the second during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1956 (when Gibson was born). Many of DeMille’s other films embodied characteristic themes of the Saturn-Pluto complex: The Sign of the Cross, The Crusades, Samson and Delilah, Forbidden Fruit, Madame Satan, The Godless Girl, Temptation.
20. Such correlations were evident even in a genre as unlikely to be reflective of Saturn-Pluto archetypal themes as musical comedy. The film musical Chicago, produced and widely viewed during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition in 2002–03, was saturated with Saturn-Pluto motifs: murder and revenge, ruthless ambition, corruption, the criminal and sexual underworld, prison and death row, trials, judgments, guilt, executions, a view of human motivation as dominated by relentless selfishness, and a pervasive aesthetic of blackness and shadows, dungeons and guns. The original Broadway play was conceived and produced during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1973–75.
21. In many of Kafka’s stories, the protagonist is an entrapped animal, often a rodent or insect, the prey of life, as in The Burrow, The Metamorphosis, and Josephina the Mouse Singer, or The Mouse Folk. The same motif was brilliantly exploited by the comic artist Art Spiegelman in his two-part graphic novel published as Maus: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II: From Mauschwitz to the Catskills. Based on his parents’ experiences as survivors of the concentration camps, Maus depicted the Jews as mice and the Nazi Germans as predatory cats (“Katzies”). Spiegelman was born during the postwar Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48. The subjects of his principal works have consistently reflected the Saturn-Pluto complex; Maus’s focus on the Holocaust was followed by his 2004 work, In the Shadow of No Towers, which addressed the destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, and its devastating psychological aftereffects. Spiegelman’s all-black New Yorker magazine cover immediately after September 11 subtly rendered the towers in silhouette in an even darker shade of black.
22. Auden’s September 1, 1939 explores many Saturn-Pluto themes relevant to the events of September 11, 2001: the dark end of an era, evil done by those to whom evil is done, blind steel and concrete skyscrapers and the cold thrusting power of imperialism, a psychopathic god served by an enemy gone mad. Perhaps especially relevant is its insight concerning humiliation and violence: “The poem, as Joseph Brodsky once pointed out, is really about shame—about how cultures are infected by overwhelming feelings of shame, their ‘habit-forming pain,’ and seek to escape those feelings through violence. What drives men mad—drives them to psychopathic gods—is the unbearable feeling of having been humiliated” (Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, October 1, 2001).
23. One of the more striking patterns I found in my research was a consistent correlation between alignments of the outer-planet cycles (Saturn-Pluto, Jupiter-Uranus, Saturn-Neptune, and so forth) with the simultaneous writing a
nd publication of large numbers of books about historical events and dominant themes from earlier alignment periods involving the same planets. A comprehensive body of such evidence can readily be assessed by a systematic examination of all reviews of just-published books, both fiction and nonfiction, in any extensive weekly book review, such as the New York Times Book Review or comparable publications such as the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, or the Times Literary Supplement.
The collective psyche appears to be shaped by and spontaneously attracted toward particular motifs and phenomena that closely reflect the archetypal qualities of the current planetary alignments, qualities that were in turn dominant in the events and spirit of earlier eras with the same alignments. The relevant archetypal qualities are thus regularly visible in the writing and publication not only of books that focus on contemporary expressions of those themes but also of works that explore earlier historical manifestations. This results in an increased public awareness during such periods of both the relevant archetypal motifs and their most vivid historical embodiments—for example, during Saturn-Pluto alignments, the publication of works, both fiction and nonfiction, about the Holocaust and concentration camps, the gulag, the world wars and the cold war, terrorism and fundamentalism from other ages, imperialist domination, scandals and sins in the history of the Church, witch hunts, the Watergate scandal, the history of slavery, and so forth.
24. Edmund Morel, the British investigative journalist and the founder of the Congo Reform Association, viewed the title of Conrad’s work as synonymous with the horrific reality of European cruelty and African suffering in the Congo, and considered Leopold II to be “a great genius for evil.” Leopold himself was born with his Sun closely conjoined with a Saturn-Pluto opposition (and all three in close T-square alignment with Mars). On a separate but related note, in 1939, when Einstein wrote the letter to Roosevelt to recommend the development of the atomic bomb, the greatest known supply of the uranium necessary for producing the nuclear reaction lay in the Belgian Congo, where it was mined as ore by a Belgian mining company.
25. After finishing Answer to Job, Jung wrote to a friend, “I have landed the great whale.” Born with Saturn square Pluto, Jung wrote Answer to Job during an illness in a white-heat state of archetypal possession in 1951–52, the one time in his life that transiting Pluto crossed his natal Saturn-Pluto configuration (Pluto opposite Saturn, square Pluto).
26. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the letter from her friend, and the public outcry against the Fugitive Slave Act all also reflect the widespread awakening of antislavery feeling and heightened emancipatory impulses that occurred during the long Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1845–56 period discussed in the preceding chapter, when the abolitionist activities of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, and many others reached a height of intensity before the Civil War. The shorter Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1850–53 took place near the middle of that period at the time of closest conjunction of Uranus and Pluto, when the three planets were in a rare tight triple conjunction. The remarkable phenomenon of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—Stowe’s writing of the novel, the catalyzing circumstances, and the immense popular response to its publication—can be understood as the Saturn-Pluto and the Uranus-Pluto complexes being simultaneously constellated with unusual potency.
27. Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard, 1955, Saturn-Pluto square), The Pawnbroker (1965, opposition), Sophie’s Choice (1982, conjunction), Shoah (documentary interviews, 1981–85, conjunction), and Schindler’s List (1993, square). A similar pattern can be recognized in Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, written during one Saturn-Pluto period (2001–04) while it re-imagined another Saturn-Pluto period, focused on the year 1940. The novel is suffused with characteristic Saturn-Pluto themes and events, such as repressive conservative empowerment, anti-Semitic prejudice and hostility, an atmosphere of pervasive menace and fear, the Holocaust, global war, and helplessness in the face of dark and overpowering historical forces.
28. Because Wilde was born with a close natal Mercury-Uranus opposition, transiting Uranus was also exactly conjoining his natal Mercury at this time, a natal aspect and transit I frequently found correlated with heightened linguistic facility, brilliant and often irreverent wit, an inclination towards bons mots, wisecracks, unexpected twists of meaning, word play, and verbal irreverence (as in Wilde’s “I can resist everything except temptation” or his famous statement to the customs official upon entering the United States, “I have nothing to declare except my genius”).
29. It is important to keep in mind that personal transit correlations, such as those cited for Shakespeare, always take place within a larger, more complex context of world transits and the ongoing cycles of the outer planets. For example, the world transit of the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1598– 1601 (the one that coincided with the Inquisition’s trial and execution of Giordano Bruno) took place in exact coincidence with the beginning of Shakespeare’s tragic period (Julius Caesar in 1599–1600, Hamlet in 1601), as if the collective zeitgeist were initiating what became Shakespeare’s more sustained personal encounter with the same energies and themes during his long personal transit of Pluto to his own natal Saturn. I found this to be typical of the “overdetermining” coincidence of simultaneous personal and world transits in such correlations.
Any discussion of Shakespeare’s possible transits necessarily entails the question of the authorship of the Shakespearean canon. It is possible that the character of the natal chart and the evidence of precisely timed archetypal correlations with personal transits could contribute a new source of insight on this issue.
30. Cited in Robert Hollander, Dante: A Life in Works (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 91. Based on his own words in La Divina Commedia, Dante was born between May 18 and June 17, 1265. We therefore can be certain of his natal Saturn position with a margin of error of less than 2°.
Part VI: Cycles of Creativity and Expansion
1. Because of retrograde and direct apparent motion, the oppositions of Jupiter and Uranus (and, very rarely, the conjunctions) often move in and out of the 15° range over a longer period of up to about twenty-three months. In these cases the archetypal correlations, and in particular the cyclical diachronic patterns, were no less apparent, but the synchronic patterns were somewhat more diffuse and less sharply punctuated than in the concentrated fourteen-month alignments. The 1782–83 opposition was such an example, Jupiter and Uranus having been within 15° of exact alignment for approximately sixteen months spread out over the twenty-three month period from January 1782 to November 1783. With few exceptions, the conjunctions occurred in concentrated periods of fourteen consecutive months (as in 1775–76 and 1788–89), while the opposition periods were more often extended and discontinuous. As we will see, Jupiter-Uranus oppositions not infrequently coincided with cultural milestones and creative breakthroughs that had an especially significant and climactic nature.
2. The subsequent history of the Bounty mutineers and the Polynesian women and men who joined them, first on Tahiti and then as they lived in complete isolation on Pitcairn Island from 1789 through the 1790s, seemed virtually a precise microcosm of what happened on a larger scale halfway around the world in France in the same period: the initial successful rebellion during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction followed by a sustained eruption of bloody violence, murder, and power struggle during the longer Uranus-Pluto opposition—the plotting, revenge, and madness, the boiling over of irrational impulses in an otherwise paradisiacal setting, the self-destruction of an entire society. The Dionysian nature of this eruption was also evident in the new sexual freedom experienced by the British sailors in the Polynesian environment, and in the frequently sexual nature of the sources of conflict that resulted in the repeated outbursts of murderous aggression in the Pitcairn community.
3. When Jupiter-Uranus alignments coincided with the Uranus-Pluto cycle (i.e., took place at the same time that Uranus and Pluto were within
15° alignment), as in 1968–69, with the triple conjunction of Jupiter with Uranus and Pluto, the range of degrees within which archetypally relevant correlations were in evidence for the Jupiter-Uranus alignment consistently appeared to be extended beyond the 15°–20° range. For example, by the beginning of 1968, when Uranus and Pluto were within 7° of each other, Jupiter had moved to within 17° of Pluto and 23° of Uranus. Cultural phenomena characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle were clearly in evidence at this point and throughout the 1968–69 period, though events suggestive of the triple archetypal complex notably increased in frequency as the three planets moved into closer range in the course of 1968. The climax of the triple conjunction was the summer of 1969 (the Apollo Moon landing, the Woodstock music festival, and many other relevant phenomena) when all three planets were within 7°–8° of each other.
I believe such observations underscore the importance of recognizing the fluidity and interpenetration of archetypal principles and forces rather than assuming a more atomistic ontology and causality (i.e., expecting archetypally relevant phenomena to stop and start in mechanistic correlation with the alignments rather than to unfold in a more complex continuum of multiple overlapping wave forms).
4. The original technical meaning of “quantum leap,” as distinct from the popular use of the phrase, signifies a shift from one energy level to another by a subatomic particle, such as when an electron changes from one energy level to another in a distinct leap without passing through any of the intermediate values of energy. The archetypal theme of “quantum leap” that I observed in coincidence with Jupiter-Uranus alignments seems to embrace simultaneously the technical meaning (the sudden jump from one energy level to another without intermediate steps), the popular meaning (a sudden and unexpected major shift or radical expansion of any kind), and the link between the two (the fact that the original quantum hypothesis proposed by Planck reflected not only a sudden energy leap but also an extraordinary anomaly, a scientifically unexpected phenomenon in itself, that in turn precipitated a major leap in the growth of scientific understanding). This striking metaphoric flexibility and creative multivalence was consistently observable in archetypal correlations related to each of the planetary cycles and combinations.
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