I must say to myself that I ruined myself, and that nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand…. This pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible still. I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it.
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
A different example of a creative writer suffering extremely oppressive—and mortally threatening—judgment with the same personal transit is that of Salman Rushdie, who was born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1947. In 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued the fatwa, or death sentence, for the blasphemy he accused Rushdie of having committed in writing The Satanic Verses, published that year, Rushdie was undergoing the once-in-a-lifetime personal transit of Pluto in a square to his natal Saturn-Pluto conjunction. This transit had begun during the immediately preceding years when he was writing The Satanic Verses, many of whose themes reflect the characteristic motifs of the Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex.
As compared with the world transit cycle of Saturn-Pluto alignments we have been examining, in personal transits of the same planets the relevant phenomena occur specifically in the individual context rather than the collective. Yet ultimately such transits can also leave a mark on the larger cultural psyche. Such an influence can occur even when that transit does not coincide with dramatic external events visible to others, as with Wilde or Rushdie, but is instead reflected more potently in the inner life, which in a creative artist tends to be readily discernible in the dominant themes and spirit of the work produced during these years.
To give just one example: If, as most Shakespeare scholars believe, William Shakespeare was born in April 1564, we know that the one time in his life that he underwent a personal transit of Pluto in hard aspect to his natal Saturn was from 1599 to 1607. According to scholars’ best estimates, this period precisely coincides with the years in which all the major Shakespearean tragedies were written and first performed, beginning with Julius Caesar in 1599–1600 (when the transit first reached 5° from exact alignment, the usual outer orb for personal transits), followed by Hamlet in 1600–01 (as the planets reached 3° from exact), then Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth in 1604–06 (the years the transit was most exact, within 1°). Even Shakespeare’s comedies of this period, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure For Measure (1602–04), are traditionally called the “dark comedies.” As the Pluto-Saturn transit moved to its last stages in 1606–07, at 3° past exact, Antony and Cleopatra was produced.29 (As happened with Wilde as well, Shakespeare’s long personal transit of Pluto to natal Saturn was twice as long as the same transit would be in our own time; this difference in duration is because Pluto was farther from the Sun and therefore moved slower during those eras.)
Many of the principal themes of the Saturn-Pluto complex discussed in these pages are expressed by Shakespeare in just these plays in profoundly archetypal form: the sustained exploration and articulation of the shadow side of human existence, the deep engagement with moral darkness, the constant focus on death and the significance of mortality, the concern with the fate of human beings caught in the grip of intractable contradictions. The dominant motifs—murderous ambition, jealousy and revenge, crime and retribution, the stain of guilt that cannot be removed, the horror of self-willed catastrophe, the overwhelming loss and suffering—are all reflective of the Saturn-Pluto gestalt. Throughout the sequence of the great tragedies, human life and death are viewed with the most extreme gravity. Immediately after this transit was over, Shakespeare’s plays distinctly shifted in theme and spirit as he assimilated the tragic vision to the tragicomic romances of his final creative years: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest in 1609–11, plays that are highly characteristic of the Uranus-Neptune and Jupiter-Uranus alignments that occurred at that time and represent the two cycles we will explore next.
Remarkably, an exactly parallel correlation can be observed in Dante’s life and work. Based on his own birth information given in La Divina Commedia, Dante underwent the same long, once-in-a-lifetime personal transit of Pluto square natal Saturn in the years between 1304 to 1316, centering on the eight-year period 1306–13. The years that he was writing the Inferno and the Purgatorio precisely coincide with this once-in-a-lifetime transit whose archetypal character corresponds so vividly to those two poems and the specific domains they portray. According to the widely accepted estimates of Giorgio Petrocchi, Dante composed the Inferno beginning in 1304 but mainly during the years 1306 to 1308, and he composed the Purgatorio from 1308 to 1312. In 1316, soon after the Pluto-Saturn transit was over, he began the Paradiso.30 As we will see, the timing and the archetypal character of the Uranus-Neptune and Jupiter-Uranus cycles were highly relevant to the entire writing of La Divina Commedia and the expansive poetic-spiritual character of its vision.
Forging Deep Structures
As the foregoing chapters suggest, the positive potential of the archetypal complex associated with Saturn-Pluto alignments seemed to be inextricably intertwined with confronting its negative manifestations: moral discernment and wisdom born from difficult experience and suffering; fortitude and courageous acts of will in the face of darkness, evil, danger, and death; a capacity for sustained effort and determination; disciplined control of intense energies both inner and outer. Generally speaking, the Saturn-Pluto complex appeared to press the psyche, individual or collective, towards the forging of a deeper and stronger structure of moral consciousness. The superego forged could be rigid, pathological, and prone to projection and splitting, or represent a profound moral advance, a lasting deepening of conscience and critical self-awareness. When well integrated, it could bring forth a more penetrating understanding of the complexities of human motivation both in oneself and others, with a resulting strength of moral purpose in a world of grave drama where weighty consequences are at stake. We see this multivalence well embodied in the famous final words of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the young protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, ultimately rejects the narrow theological vision of sin and eternal damnation of his childhood religion to engage, with equal moral gravity, his calling to be an artist:
Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race…. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
I found that individuals born with Saturn and Pluto in hard aspect often seemed to be possessed of an underlying sense that they were living lives with special moral responsibilities, sometimes with the heavy burden of history on their shoulders. Such a tendency w
as evident in the biographies of many of the figures we examined above, such as Augustine or Marx, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Jung. A contemporary example is the theologian and ecologist Thomas Berry, born in 1914 during the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction that coincided with World War I and with Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist just cited. In his influential writings and lectures, Berry expressed a vision of human history and evolution that synthesized many of the themes we have examined as characteristic of the Saturn-Pluto complex: the confrontation with the moral shadow of human activity, the acute concern with modern civilization’s obsessive commercial-industrial exploitation and plundering of the natural world, the decimation of indigenous peoples and the mass extinction of species, the recognition of deep evolutionary structures and the ending of vast evolutionary epochs, and the experience of the dark periods of history as crucibles of transformation. Throughout Berry’s analysis, as in these passages from his culminating book, The Great Work (published when he was eighty-four during his Uranus return transit), can also be found a view of human existence as ordered by weighty collective responsibilities, enormous generational tasks, and larger forces of destiny that assign us roles and labors beyond our conscious choosing:
History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a people…. The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.
The Great Work before us…is not a role that we have chosen. It is a role given to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves. We are, as it were, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that is beyond any personal choice. We did not choose. We were chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task. The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role.
This same spirit and vision of history was evident on a collective level during many eras of Saturn-Pluto alignments, as in the most recent such period, 2000–04. The zeitgeist is affected by a characteristic mood, one of confronting a dark epoch, of carrying the heavy burden of history with special moral responsibilities, and is often tinged with a sense that fate or larger forces determine one’s life. In retrospect it was often possible to see that such periods of crisis and gravity, in history and in personal lives, served ultimately to build enduring moral-psychological and social-political foundations for the future. The deprivations, losses, and hard labors of these periods pressed individuals and societies out of an old form of life and into a new one, though during these alignments the new was often not readily visible, while the grim realities of hardship and oppression, contraction and decline were conspicuously in evidence.
All the events and experiences coincident with both of the cycles we have examined so far, Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto, display the deep bivalent ambiguity of the archetypal principle associated with Pluto, at once destructive and regenerative. These polar tendencies are especially clearly reflected in Dionysus in the Greek pantheon and in Kali and Shiva of the Indian pantheon, sovereign deities of the death-rebirth mystery. In the Saturn-Pluto cycle specifically, the combination of this powerful Plutonic archetype with the Saturn principle of hard contraction, critical endings, mortal finality, and grave turning points consistently marked what appeared to be the death contractions of history. Yet paradoxically, at another level less obvious to the empirical eye of the moment, this complex also seemed to bring about the inexpressibly hard labor of the birth contractions of history: the throes and travails of deep transformation, the destruction of an old order, and the forging of what became the enduring foundation and structure of a new evolutionary development.
Perhaps something like this deeper process could be discerned in the most recent such alignment period, when in the winter of 2002–03 the longer Saturn-Pluto opposition coincided with shorter alignments of Jupiter with Uranus and Neptune in succession, cycles associated with a very different, more expansively rebellious and idealistic spirit. The unprecedented worldwide wave of protest demonstrations in February 2003 against the Bush administration’s drive for preemptive war against Iraq, a spontaneous coordination of tens of millions of marchers in Australia, New Zealand, Asia, Europe, and North America, represented a virtually global moral judgment against unprovoked war. The historic confrontation of diametrically opposed values and wills, the unarmed people on the world’s streets versus a military superpower pressing for war, produced a clash of immensely potent forces “like two behemoth icebergs colliding in the North Atlantic.” Whatever its short-term outcome, this enormous nonviolent statement of principled democratic resistance against the destructive use of power by established governments was indicative of a longer-term moral evolution within the collective psyche: the gradual forging of a collective conscience against the perceived moral shadow of a powerful governing authority. The difference between the international public response to the call for war in 2003 from that of 1914 could not be more vivid. The multitude of marches across the planet seemed to reflect a kind of collective individuation process in the global psyche of which both Jung and Gandhi would no doubt be proud—as would, in their several ways, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and King (all figures whose words and ideals were repeatedly cited in the period leading up to the marches). Despite the vast “shock and awe” destruction and suffering unleashed just weeks afterwards, the deeper moral structure in the collective consciousness that these marches reflected was not destroyed but will go on to express itself again and again, because it is not limited to any one individual or group of individuals who might be silenced, imprisoned, or killed. The forging has been slowly and gradually, often painfully, taking place on some other level of the ever-evolving human spirit, where it will endure.
I believe we can approach a deeper understanding of these and many other important developments, including our own moment in history, if we now examine the remarkable correlations and archetypal character of two other planetary cycles to which our discussion points.
VI
Cycles of Creativity and Expansion
There are a thousand paths that have never yet been trod-den…. Humanity and humanity’s earth are still unexhausted and undiscovered. Watch and listen, you solitaries! From the future come winds with a stealthy flapping of wings; and good tidings go out to delicate ears.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Opening New Horizons
Historians and psychologists have long wrestled with the mysterious phenomenon of individuals and societies becoming swept up into particular ways of perceiving their reality and acting on the basis of those highly charged perceptions. The evidence we have been examining suggests that at certain times the constellation of a powerful archetypal complex can so dominate and inform every dimension of experience, both internally and externally, that the individual or society thus affected sees the world entirely through its compelling lens and acts accordingly. It is as if at different times of life or history one has entered into a different imaginative and emotional universe with its own distinct parameters, assumptions, and ambiance. The contrast between the two periods can be as vivid as that between, say, Macbeth and Much Ado About Nothing, or between The Seventh Seal and The Sound of Music.
Again, as James Hillman well described, “One thing is absolutely essential to the notion of archetypes: their emotional possessive effect, their bedazzlement of consciousness so that it becomes blind to its own stance. By setting up a universe which tends to hold everything we do, see, and say in the sway of its cosmos, an archetype is best comparable with a God.” Indeed, the very image of God and the divine as experienced and articulated by different individuals and in different eras appears to be profoundly affected by the archetypal complexes that are then most constellate
d and active. Whether in religion or art, in personal biography or the great events and epochs of history, it is this archetypal dimension of experience that gives life its depth of meaning and informs the shifting contours of its unfolding drama. Yet it is precisely this subtle power to shape and reinforce our conscious perceptions and beliefs that holds such danger.
This power is not, however, simply a matter of inner distortions and perceptual filters by which different archetypal gestalts merely produce different inner states of being. The drastic difference in spirit and vision between Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and his De Profundis three years later was not caused simply by an inner shift, a change of mood. Nor was the difference in American attitudes towards national security issues before and after September 11, 2001. Decisive outer events took place that set in motion the archetypal complex. Yet even where the causal factors are not so self-evident, external events and interior attitudes tend to mirror each other. This mirroring of inner and outer, observed repeatedly by all of us in the course of life, seems to reflect their underlying coherence as two mutually implicated manifestations of a larger reality. The world in some sense conspires with our inner states, and vice versa. “Fate” plays a hand, with the occurrence of precisely appropriate synchronistic phenomena both affecting and reflecting the state of consciousness. One is seldom simply imagining things.
That is the great ambiguity that pervades so many of the phenomena we are examining. Archetypally informed perceptions of the world can be simultaneously “realistic” and yet highly partial, biased, and self-fulfilling in such a way as to render one increasingly blind to other realities and potentialities. These perceptions lead to assumptions and convictions that subtly move us to act one way rather than another, and elicit further confirmation of the initial perception, further enforcement of the initial event. Soon, in a complexly dynamic interaction with the environment, one has established an enduring structure of reality that is strongly determinative for the future, such as a state of “war against terror” that is fought by terror, a perpetual cycle of violence and repression, bombings and retribution, fear and hostility. Or, as during the Cold War, a state of global nuclear peril in an ever-worsening Manichaean schism driven by mutual demonization and worldwide hostile activity. Or in religion: a state of metaphysical fear and judgment, sin and guilt, heretics and inquisitions, expectations of apocalypse, eternal damnation, the soul’s predestined fate in the hands of an angry God, the world sharply divided between the born again and the unredeemed, between good and evil, with all the social and psychological consequences of such beliefs. Or even in science: a state of empirically validated cosmic disenchantment, with the genetically programmed human being existentially isolated in a meaningless, purposeless universe, the inexplicably solitary locus of intelligence and idiosyncratic spiritual aspiration in a vast cosmos of random processes signifying nothing.
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