This same cycle is also clearly visible in and closely correlated with the series of Middle East crises and Arab-Israeli wars that began with the period of Middle Eastern war and terrorism in 1946–48 out of which was founded modern Israel in Palestine during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the start of the Cold War. This was followed in almost clocklike fashion by the consecutive sequence of wars in the Middle East: the Suez War of 1956 (square), the Six Days’ War in 1967 (opposition), the Yom Kippur War in 1973 (square), and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (conjunction). This last alignment, the conjunction of 1981–84, coincided as well with the sustained massive slaughter of the Iran-Iraq War, the Falkland War between Britain and Argentina, and the depths of the Soviet war in Afghanistan that led to the rise of the Islamic jihadist movement, fueled by clandestine U.S. support. The entire sequence of the Middle East wars just cited occurred in uncannily close coincidence with the sequence of quadrature alignments between Saturn and Pluto. This pattern has continued unabated during the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, both with the United States–led Iraq War in 2003 and the sustained Israel-Palestine crisis of 2000–04, with its traumatic cycle of suicide bombings and retaliatory repression.
A parallel pattern is evident in correlation with the same cycle during the same period for India and Pakistan, beginning with India’s independence and partition in 1947–48 and the massive destruction that occurred at that time, the assassination of Gandhi by a Hindu extremist, and the deaths of millions in the unleashed sectarian violence. The quadrature correlations again continued in succession up through the most recent Saturn-Pluto opposition, which coincided with the Kashmir crisis, nuclear standoff, and repeated acts of mass violence and retribution between Hindus and Muslims in 2000–04.
Thus the first Saturn-Pluto cycle of the twentieth century correlated closely with the world wars and the second with the Cold War. The events that have coincided with the successive quadrature aspects of the third, though we are still in the middle of it, have up to this point closely correlated with the phenomenon of international terrorism and the ensuing war on terror. The conjunction of 1981–84 discussed above in relation to the Cold War and the Middle East wars also coincided with the initial terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassy in Beirut and of U.S. and French barracks in Lebanon (which have been called the most consequential terrorist acts before the World Trade Center attack that occurred under the following opposition). This same conjunction of 1981–84 also coincided with a sudden wave of other major terrorist acts (in Northern Ireland, France, Iran, the Philippines, Central America), assassinations (Anwar Sadat in Egypt, Indira Gandhi in India, Benigno Aquino in the Philippines), and assassination attempts (Pope John Paul II, Ronald Reagan) in many parts of the world. In turn, the following Saturn–Pluto square of 1992–94 exactly coincided with the first World Trade Center bombing, Osama bin Laden’s first call for a jihad against America, and the coming to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Finally, the most recent opposition coincided with the full emergence of international terrorism and the war on terror with the events of September 11, 2001, and the many measures of repression, retribution, government-sponsored violence, and further acts of terrorist response that followed in their wake.3 The alignment first reached exactitude in August-September 2001, in coincidence with the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon, followed by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan; and its final pass to within 3° of exactitude occurred in March 2003 in coincidence with the invasion of Iraq and its “shock and awe” tactics of overwhelming destruction. The long period of violence and terror in Iraq that continued after the invasion, which included the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military and paramilitary personnel and gruesome beheadings and suicide bombings by Islamist and Iraqi resistance forces, began in coincidence with the later stages of the Saturn-Pluto opposition in 2003–04. This phase of the transit included the terrorist bombings in Madrid and the prisoner abuse and torture scandal of Abu Ghraib, which emerged as the alignment approached the final 15° point. In a parallel with the larger cyclical unfolding of geopolitical structures and historically consequential events, the United States’ invasion of Iraq was also widely viewed as bringing an end to the postwar world order that had been based on the multilateral Western European– American alliance and its fundamental support of the United Nations. Parallel developments in terror, retaliation, oppression, and conservative empowerment took place in these same years in Russia under Putin, where continuing violent conflict with Chechnyan insurgents served as justification for a more general neo-Stalinization of Russian political life.
Remarkably, the age of modern terrorism is widely considered to have begun in 1946 with the bombing of the King David Hotel by Zionist radicals, in coincidence with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 that also coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. Such historically defining Saturn-Pluto cycles consistently took place in earlier centuries, such as the conjunction that occurred in 1618 at the beginning of the original Thirty Years’ War that started in that year and soon spread throughout Europe. All of the continent was ravaged by a state of nearly continuous, unprecedentedly brutal warfare for thirty years, until 1648, precisely coincident with the next Saturn-Pluto conjunction one full cycle later—as also happened in the thirty-year period encompassing World War I and World War II in the twentieth century.
Another such defining conjunction was that of 1348–51 that coincided with the eruption and spread of the Black Death, which similarly devastated Europe and set in motion cultural and economic shifts that permanently transformed European life in the late medieval period. The Black Death, or bubonic plague, began in China in 1333 in coincidence with the preceding Saturn-Pluto opposition and reached a climax in Europe in the 1348–51 period during the conjunction. A comparable pattern can be discerned in the AIDS epidemic, which first widely emerged and was identified during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84, and which reached pandemic proportions worldwide, especially in Africa, during the following Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2000–04.
Whenever adequate historical records were available, I found that the simultaneous occurrence of multiple categories of diverse but archetypally connected events during Saturn-Pluto alignments occurred consistently throughout history. To take one example of such a synchronic wave, the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the thirteenth century took place during the years of 1210–13. Much like the first conjunction of the twentieth century in 1914–16, wars and mass violence pervaded much of Europe during the period of this alignment, driven by conflicts between the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire and by the efforts of Pope Innocent III to extirpate heretics and infidels and subjugate the political enemies of the Church. In these same years the peace-loving Cathars in southern France were persecuted and burned at the stake as part of the Albigensian crusade. In 1212, during the same period, the Children’s Crusade set out for the Holy Land; the result was the loss of approximately fifty thousand children, many kidnapped by slave dealers. In Asia during the same conjunction, in 1211–12, the Mongol conqueror Genghis Khan began his massive invasion of China.
The correlation of the Saturn-Pluto cycle with genocide, ethnocide, and mass killings is striking: In the past century these include the mass killings of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the conjunction of 1914–15, the death of millions of kulaks under Stalin that began during the opposition of 1930–33, Hitler’s conceiving of the Final Solution and the mass killing of Jews that began during the square of 1939–41, the slaughter of nearly a million Indonesians by the right-wing military regime in 1965–66, the Khmer Rouge’s killing of over a million Cambodians that began during the square of 1973–75, the death squads in El Salvador and Guatamala during the conjunction of 1981–84, the mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda during the square of 1992–94, and, most recently, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese in the Darfur region at the hands of their own government du
ring the conjunction of 2000–04.
Finally, one example of many from classical antiquity is the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that coincided with the most intensive period of the barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire, those of 410–12 by the Huns, Vandals, and Visigoths. Led by Alaric the Visigoths sacked Rome, burning and pillaging the ancient world’s most powerful city, in August 410, when Saturn and Pluto were 2° from exact alignment—strikingly suggestive of a parallel with the terrorist destruction in New York, the modern world’s most powerful city, on September 11, 2001, when the same two planets were again 2° from exact alignment.
Historical Contrasts and Tensions
A consistent theme of Saturn-Pluto alignment periods was that of widespread conservative, reactionary, or repressive empowerment, in precise agreement with the archetypal principles associated with these two planets—the Plutonic empowering and intensifying of the Saturn impulse towards conservative reaction or repression. For example, the most recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction during the 1981–84 period coincided with both the first Reagan administration and the last years of the old regime of the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. These specific years brought a nearly universal ascendancy of conservatism, in distinctly different forms yet nevertheless showing clear commonalities. This took place not only in the United States and the Soviet Union (visible, for example, in the Kremlin’s imprisonment of dissidents like Sakharov and Sharansky at this time) but also in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and, in more extreme dictatorial forms, in Poland under General Jaruzelski (bringing martial law and the repression of the Solidarity movement), in Chile under General Pinochet, in Panama under Manuel Noriega, in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, among many others.
Similarly, in the religious context, this same period established a new era of conservatism in the Roman Catholic Church under Pope John Paul II and the rise to power in the Vatican of the conservative Opus Dei organization, in sharp contrast to the radical reformer Pope John XXIII who oversaw the Second Vatican Council during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. More generally, the period of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction during the early 1980s brought the decisive emergence and empowerment of religious fundamentalism throughout the world—Christian (both Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, Islamic, Hindu. Again, each of these conservative or reactionary ascendancies possessed its own character highly distinct from the others, each one defining itself as radically opposed to others mentioned, but the underlying archetypal parallels between them are nonetheless evident. As with the Uranus-Pluto cycle discussed in the preceding chapters, this remarkable combination of archetypal multivalence and coherence during the same planetary alignment—here, sharply different forms of the empowered conservative or reactionary impulse—was altogether characteristic of such synchronic patterns for outer-planet cycles.
We can readily discern the vivid difference in the underlying spirit of the various historical periods coinciding with these two different planetary cycles if we examine the acute contrast between the most recent Saturn-Pluto conjunction period, that of 1981–84, and the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction period, that of 1960–72. Where the 1960s had brought a decisive widespread empowerment of the emancipatory, innovative, destabilizing, revolutionary impulse that produced liberal reform or radical change in virtually every area of human activity—religion, politics, sexuality, civil rights, human rights, feminism, environmentalism, the arts—the first half of the 1980s brought an equally decisive empowerment of the conservative, reactionary, or repressive impulse in the same areas. In the United States, a systematic backlash against the various movements that dominated the 1960s was evident at this time. The Equal Rights Amendment for women’s rights was defeated. New federal policies that opposed affirmative action were instituted by the Reagan administration. Antienvironmental policies that opened national forests to clear-cutting and federal lands to oil drilling were initiated and enforced, and previously established limits on industrial pollution were removed. Identical tendencies were visible during the same years in Britain under the Thatcher administration and in many other countries throughout the world. Again, in the first half of the 1980s, Pluto’s principle of intensification and empowerment seems to have been potently united with the archetypal principle of contraction and conservatism associated with Saturn, just as it had been with the archetypal principle of emancipation and innovation associated with Uranus in the 1960s.
While the archetypal complex associated with Uranus-Pluto alignments consistently expressed itself in the form of radical liberatory and revolutionary impulses, Saturn-Pluto alignments tended to coincide with the emergence of “radical conservatism.” The common factor in both tendencies, the radical component in each complex, seems to reflect the characteristic quality and vector given to any complex by the presence of the Pluto archetype. The nature of the Plutonic-Dionysian principle is to press towards greater intensity, to the extreme, to be compelling, deep—radical as radix, root, grounded in the depths, drawing on the power of the underworld, driving whatever it touches to an overwhelming potency that has a compulsive, destructive, even self-destructive potential.
But what happens when two planetary cycles associated with such different archetypal complexes coincide or overlap during the same period? I found that when the shorter-period alignments of the Saturn-Pluto cycle (three to four years in length) coincided with longer-period alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle (generally twelve to thirteen years), as took place in the middle of both the 1960s and the French Revolutionary period, complicated archetypal tensions were strongly in evidence. A sustained three-planet configuration of this kind, when Saturn opposed the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, occurred during the critical period of 1964–67 (extending partly into 1968). These years coincided not only with the outbreak and escalation of the war in Vietnam under Lyndon Johnson but also with widespread urban riots and violent civil disturbances throughout the United States (Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and over 120 other cities), as well as the Cultural Revolution in China under the Red Guards, among many other similar phenomena in those critical years throughout the world from Central and South America to Africa and Indonesia.
In such periods there seemed to be constellated a dynamic tension, dialectic, and synthesis of the three distinct archetypal complexes: the more revolutionary, rebellious, innovative impulse associated with Uranus in various compromise formations with the more limiting, contracting, and controlling impulse associated with Saturn, with both impulses empowered and intensified, often violently, by the principle associated with Pluto. Alignments of these three planets in hard aspect were consistently associated with periods of intensified emancipatory and revolutionary activity as well as intensified efforts at order, control, conservative reaction, and repression, all combining to produce a state of extreme tension and crisis. The schisms both in society—generational, political, cultural—and in the world tended to be exacerbated, as in the “generation gap” that emerged during this period in the 1960s (the Who’s My Generation, 1965, “Hope I die before I get old”). More generally, it was in these years that there arose the “culture wars” that still drive the tense divisions within the social and political body of the United States.
Especially problematic in such eras was the extreme intensification of both widespread revolutionary upheaval and violent authoritarian repression in a tightly bound dialectic, mutually activating each other. Sometimes these opposing impulses were present simultaneously in the same political movement or historical phenomenon, often with catastrophic consequences, as with Mao’s Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, who rampaged through the countryside in a destructive frenzy of repressive “revolutionary” activity.
When these same two cycles overlapped during the French Revolution to form another such multi-planet alignment of Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto, this configuration took place in 1793–96 in precise coincidence with the Reign of Terror. Again, this was an er
a that was simultaneously intensely revolutionary and intensely repressive, as in the dictatorial powers arrogated by the Committee of Public Safety led by Danton and then Robespierre with his “revolutionary puritanism.” Unprecedentedly rigid control over the nation was attempted through a regime of conformity and fear. Neighbors and family members were pressured to inform on each other, and there were hurried trials for the accused and death sentences for those found guilty. Women’s societies were suppressed, and leading women of the revolution such as Olympe de Gouges were imprisoned and then guillotined. In less than one year between September 1793 and July 1794, over 25,000 suspected enemies of the revolution were beheaded by guillotine in the public squares, including finally Danton and Robespierre themselves. The entire period of the triple alignment was marked by scarcely imaginable massive social turmoil, orgies of unbridled violence, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of the French people by its own revolutionary army. The later part of this same period of the three-planet alignment brought the conservative Thermidorean Reaction, which in revulsion against the Terror undid many of the democratic reforms of the earlier part of the Revolution and initiated a period of retribution against the radicals. Here too can be seen a further expression of the two opposing tendencies, revolutionary and conservative, producing a tense compromise formation.
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