Richard Tarnas
Notes on World Trade Center attack
September 11, 2001
“We have not understood yet
that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual
task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our
civilization.”
C.G. Jung
Many of my non-astrological
friends have asked me what has been happening in the heavens that
would make more intelligible the events of September 11 and since.
These notes are a summary of a lecture I gave in my Psyche and
Cosmos graduate seminar last Tuesday (September 18). In the lecture
there were more historical examples, elaboration of key points, and
so forth. What follows here really are just headlines, but I hope
you can glean something of the basic archetypal background of this
historically momentous drama we now find ourselves in.
The events are immensely complex,
beyond words really, with so many causes, consequences, and
dimensions. But the planetary archetypal situation was dramatically
clear. In the last few weeks the planetary alignment that
represents the heaviest—the darkest, most weighty, mortally
serious, historically grave—of all archetypal combinations, the
Saturn-Pluto alignment, reached exactitude, an opposition. The
first two weeks of this month in particular were critical, as the
Sun and Full Moon moved into a rare and extraordinarily precise
grand cross (two oppositions–Saturn with Pluto, Sun with
Moon–both 90 degree square to each other).
This Saturn-Pluto alignment lasts
around three years—it began last fall, and will be operative for
about two more years. Historically, the hard aspects between Saturn
and Pluto (conjunction, opposition, and square) have consistently
coincided with periods resembling the present one, sometimes much
worse: the beginnings of both world wars coincided with tight
Saturn-Pluto hard aspects, as did the outbreak of the Vietnam war,
the massively violent Red Guards’ Cultural Revolution in China
begun at the same time, the Terror during the French Revolution in
1793-94, and the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, to cite only
a few. The moment the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were
known, every astrologer in the country knew the Saturn-Pluto
alignment, which has coincided with so many grim periods of
historical gravity and contraction, had erupted.
Yet there is more to this
archetypal complex than these words and examples suggest. As
horrific as is its shadow, it is equally capable of bringing forth
actions, psychological transformations, and enduring
social-political consequences involving extraordinary moral
nobility and sheer physical and volitional effort—something we have
certainly already witnessed. The positive potential of the
Saturn-Pluto archetypal complex is usually inextricably intertwined
with confronting its negative manifestations—great courage in the
face of darkness, danger, and death; sustained effort and
determination, intense focus and discipline; moral discernment and
wisdom born from experience and suffering.
To understand the full dimensions
of this alignment, one has to grasp clearly the archetypal meanings
of Saturn and Pluto, and then see how the combination of the two
works. As with every major aspect or alignment between two planets,
the corresponding archetypes mutually activate each other and
combine, each in its own archetypally specific way, to create a
range of quite distinctive and powerful qualities, tendencies, and
events.
Pluto is in certain respects the
most potent archetypal principle in the planetary pantheon: it is
the archetype of power itself, as it embodies the primordial forces
of destruction and regeneration, the underworld in every sense, the
secretive and subversive, the shadow, the id, the broiling cauldron
of the instincts, the violent and the demonic, the fiery and
volcanic, the elemental energies of nature: Pluto-Hades-Dionysus in
Greek mythic terms; in Indian terms, Kali and Shiva in both their
destructive and regenerative aspects. Whatever Pluto comes into
alignment with, it greatly intensifies and compels that second
archetype, deepens and makes more profound, destroys and
transforms. It brings a titanic, overwhelming elemental potency, on
a mass scale.
The Saturn archetype is extremely
complex: It represents the principle of limit, structure, and
necessity in the universe; the principle of opposition and
negation, of heaviness and gravity—both moral and physical (weighty
as serious, and weighty as materially heavy); of rigidity and
separation, contraction and density; repression and reaction; of
hard concrete materiality. It is the reality principle, the bottom
line. It is fate and karma, the cross we bear, hardship, sweat and
labor, problems and difficulties, suffering and death, failure and
defeat, sorrow, the endings of things, the consequences of the
past, guilt, judgment, punishment. But it is also discipline,
rigor, moral determination; order, precision, control, security,
and organization. Saturn is “the Establishment”: the established
structures of control, authority, tradition—which may be rigid or
stabilizing, containing or oppressive, grounding or deadening. In
hard aspects, such as the opposition it is now in with Pluto,
Saturn consistently brings out the problematic, challenging,
negative potential in any reality; it defeats and hardens, it
grounds and forges.
As you read the following, keep
in mind that every one of these experiential qualities and
phenomena are precisely faithful to the archetypal character of
Saturn and Pluto in combination—there is nothing random or loose
about this litany of phenomena. Each archetype simultaneously acts
on and is acted upon by the other–each activates, informs,
inflects, opposes, and combines with the other.
Here then are characteristic
manifestations when Saturn and Pluto come into major hard
alignment:
1) Dark, grave, momentous, deadly
serious, profoundly weighty events.
2) Intensely dramatic times, with
enduring consequences ensuing from current decisions and actions,
with much at stake, often with life and death issues in the
balance.
3) The feeling of being caught
helplessly in the grip of overwhelming, powerful, and often dark
forces, of being the victim of large ruthless impersonal forces of
nature or of history that are both destructive and imprisoning.
More generally, a sense of larger powers of any kind—social,
historical, elemental, biological, archetypal—being in control of
one’s life. The powerlessness of the entrapped and suffering victim
is usually matched by an obsessive drive for control, power, and
domination, the two sides of the experience mirroring each other,
sometimes occurring in alternation in the same person or
community.
4) Deep humiliation effected by
violence, violation, and defeat. A compensatory need to prove one’s
steely strength, power, and invulnerability.
5) The empowerment of forces of
hatred, murderous aggression, of evil and the demonic, of the
secretive and subversive, of the underworld—elemental, instinctual,
criminal—with consequences that are punitive, defeating, traumatic,
contracting, tragic. More generally, the simultaneous experience in
extreme form of both violence and contraction.
6) Absolute determination,
courage, and sacrifice, unbending will, intensely brave silent
strenuous effort. Superhuman physical and moral exertion in the
face of horrific circumstances, perilous threat, murderous
hostility (the firemen and police in the World Trade Center, the
passengers that stopped the hijackers in the jet that crashed in
Pennsylvania from hitting their intended targets). Extreme
self-control in dangerous and terrifying situations. (These
qualities also pertain of course, in twisted form, to the suicidal
hijackers themselves.)
7) A deeply sobering awareness of
the world’s dangerousness. The potential for either a highly
grounded and experienced realism in the face of a harshly
challenging world, or paranoid fears of hidden organized plots and
dangers.
An intense focusing of
concentration on a deadly serious reality. In the extreme, the
naked encounter with one’s own death, producing in response either
mortal panic or unflinching courage.
8) The empowerment of
conservative or reactionary forces, bringing about an emphatic
increase in defensive armoring, rigid boundaries, hostile
separation.
9) A tremendous intensification
of the harshest aspects of reality—material, mortal, existential.
Negativity of overwhelming, mass dimensions. Deprivation, poverty,
hardship. Sadness intensified to anguish. At worst, intense mass
suffering, death, loss, grief, agony.
10) The encounter with that form
of the numinous which inspires awe and dread, even terror;
confronting a power—divine or natural—whose stupendous elemental
destructiveness is more than human, that stupefies the
imagination.
11) The eruption of massive,
titanic, volcanic, overwhelming elemental forces that have a
negative, collapsing, constricting effect.
12) The annihilation of the
established order and of the enduring structures symbolizing that
order. Also, established structures of power which are experienced
as being both oppressive and evil, and thus deserving of ruthless
destruction. (The World Trade Center and Pentagon as Saturn—supreme
symbols of established order and control; Pluto as violent
destruction, as the terrorist underworld, and as extreme hatred,
demonic both in intensity and as projected onto the established
structure of power.)
13) Confinement and constriction
intensified to claustrophobic, life-threatening, or even lethal
dimensions (cf. the fetus struggling in the contractions of birth;
suffocation; helpless entrapment by larger physical forces;
Saturn-Pluto is the central aspect of the perinatal trauma—both
Grof and Rank, the major psychologists of the birth trauma, had
this aspect).
14) Experiences that in their
traumatic intensity and gravity take many years to absorb,
integrate, or heal from. More generally, events that are extremely
enduring in their consequences—both destructively and
constructively—establishing new structures and orders of life,
either solidifying or oppressive, deadening or maturing.
15) In general, the emphatic
intensification of conflict and separation, of intractable
enmities, of problems, contradictions, and oppositions.
16) The tendency towards ruthless
complete “othering”: intense objectification of other subjects.
This extreme objectification combined with the projection or
experience of evil and shadow qualities, thereby impelling cruel
behavior, hatred, revenge, murder, anger, suspicion, fear, terror,
greed, fanaticism (Pluto). All made possible by establishing or
experiencing an absolute boundary (Saturn) between self and other
as separate and alien, often seeing the other as subhuman and
unworthy of life (references to beasts, devils, swamps, vermin,
lairs, hunting down animals, etc.).
17) A tendency to see things in
terms of a confrontation between good and evil.
18) Both the confrontation with
evil, with the shadow, and the constellating of it. Periods of
collective intense and heavy judgment, blame, scapegoating,
punishment, execution.
19) Historically a tendency in
the collective psyche to constellate the shadow by eliciting or
projecting archetypal “faces of the enemy,” seeing or experiencing
darkness and violent evil in the other, resulting in periodic
historical contractions bringing war, mass death. There is usually
a powerful focus of grave concern and fear in the collective psyche
onto a particular object, either as scapegoat or as authentic
danger or evil—the “Evil Empire” (Reagan against Soviet Union) in
1981-84; the apocalyptic nuclear danger of the superpower arms race
reaching its peak during the same period, with widespread fear of
World War III; the Germans and Japanese in 1939-41, the Communist
Soviet Union at start of Cold War (1946-48), international
terrorism now.
20) Experiences of irrevocable
catastrophe, intense loss, endings, death, resulting in lasting
sense of deep heaviness, darkness, and sorrow often combined with
anxiety.
21) A sense of the tremendous
inescapable weight and burden of history, the past, errors from the
past, ancient resentments and enmities.
22) The sense of an ominous,
darker reality descending on an age.
23) A sense of the irrevocable
end of an era; the destruction of the established order of
existence, the end of an earlier mode of life characterized by
naivete, inflation, or illusion. “The end of innocence.”
Cf. 1914, beginning of World War
I, the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the 20th
century; 1929-30, beginning of the Great Depression, the following
opposition; 1964-67, the beginning of the Vietnam War. The earlier
age now seems “Prelapsarian,” before the Fall: the WTC attack and
destruction have brought about a ruthless end to an age in America
of complacency, of arrogance, of hubris, of taunting indifference
to the larger world community, of naivete, of inflation, of
unthinking freedom, of self-indulgence, of illusion, of
unconsciousness. “That fat, daydreaming America is gone now, way
gone” (Frank Rich, NYT).
24) A greatly intensified and
deepened maturation of a person or a culture, leaving its
puer dream and entering a senex reality—darker,
serious, problematic, concrete, confining and challenging, aging,
burdening, maturing (cf. Manhattan’s Stuyvesant high school
students who directly witnessed and were deeply transformed and
matured by the events; almost all high school students at the time
of the Columbine school shootings and the concurrent wave of other
school shootings in the country were born under the Saturn-Pluto
conjunction of 1981-84).
25) The galvanizing of the will,
a sense of stern purposefulness, grim determination.
The man of steel., the archetypal
mother in the throes of the birth labor—the superhuman effort of
contraction and determination in the service of a life-and-death
cause. Cf. the firefighters and police entering the towers and
climbing to their deaths out of duty and service to others. “The
iron will of the ironworkers laboring at Ground Zero” (NBC
News).
Steely purposeful assertion of
control and power (Saturn and Pluto), after experiencing the horror
of utter powerlessness—by U.S. now, the president and military and
intelligence establishment; earlier by the terrorists (Pluto as
extreme life-and-death survival instincts and intensity, Saturn as
being in control or being controlled—thus the alternation of
extreme assertions of controlling power and extreme helpless
victimization under another’s controlling power).
“Grim determination”—a phrase
used many times to describe both the terrorists and the response,
in different forms, by rescue workers, the American people, or the
Bush administration, and now the Taliban and Afghani people. Saturn
brings seriousness, gravitas, focused purposefulness, which Pluto
intensifies with the desperate force of life-and-death survival
instincts.
“Perhaps the worst realization is
how low-tech this attack was. No sophisticated missiles, no stolen
nukes, no exotic bio-warfare or chemical agents. The main, decisive
weapon here was determination.” NYT
From the terrorists’ guide found
in their luggage: “Stand fast…The time of fun and waste has gone.
The time of judgment has arrived.”
Grim, driven, humorless and
merciless determination in the service of power and control—the
terrorist mass murderer, the slave driver, the tyrant, the inner
tyrant (cruel superego), the dictator, the merciless judge, the
intensely self-disciplined ascetic, the rigid authoritarian, the
obsessive-compulsive security apparatus. Totalitarianism and
terrorism, mirror images in their calculated organized violence in
the service of power and domination.
26) A quality of relentlessness,
implacability, irrevocability; of ferocious ruthlessness and
cruelty. Grim violence, the cruel ruthless enemy. Wars, jihads,
crusades, “holy” wars…
27) Murder (Saturn as death, the
Grim Reaper, Pluto as violent instinct, hatred and aggression,
predatory destruction, Kali). Also, mass murder (Saturn as personal
death; Pluto as mass death and destruction).
28) The unspeakably
difficult—physically, emotionally, logistically—task of rescue and
recovery—sifting painstakingly and perilously through the endless
gargantuan mountain of hot ash and pulverized debris, of fragmented
concrete, steel, and human bodies; the crushing failure to find
survivors.
29) The Herculean labor of
clearing and cleaning; of restoring structures, of stabilizing the
deep underground foundations and containments destroyed or
threatened by the collapse.
The task of rebuilding from the
rubble (cf., the conjunction of 1946-48, not only the beginning of
the Cold War, Iron Curtain, etc., but also the Marshall Plan and
the rebuilding of Europe from the rubble of World War
II).
30) Consider the great German
astrologer Ebertin’s telegraphic summary of Saturn-Pluto: “Tenacity
and toughness, endurance, the capability to make record efforts of
the highest possible order, the ability to perform the most
difficult work with extreme self-discipline, self-denial and
renunciation….A hard and unfeeling disposition, also
cold-heartedness, severity, tendency to violence, a fanatical
adherence to one’s principles once they have been adopted. A
martyr. Mass murderer…..Hard struggling for success. The
participation in achievements brought about by large groups or
masses of people, the pursuit of difficult work or of painstaking
and thorough research in seclusion, the process of growing
spiritually and mentally, silent activity….” (Combinations of
Stellar Influence, 188).
Saturn-Pluto is grit and grime,
fire and brimstone, ashes and horror, dust to dust, blood, sweat,
toil, and tears (Churchill rallying the British against the Nazis
during the Blitz, 1939-40). It is harrowing and galvanizing. It
traumatizes and it forges. It destroys, transforms, and bodies
forth.
Saturn-Pluto also brings forth
the possibility of wisdom, of unflinching moral discernment and
self-awareness, achieved through profound experience and
suffering.
It’s helpful to think of great
artists born with Saturn-Pluto hard aspects whose work has
especially embodied many of these qualities in diverse and richly
complex ways: Kafka and Melville, for example, throughout their
work, both born with Saturn-Pluto conjunctions; Hemingway with his
lifelong concern with (and attraction to) war, death, killing, and
the grim brutality of life; the three Saturn-Pluto directors Alfred
Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Oliver Stone in their many films of
fear and suspicion, evil and the shadow, being helplessly trapped
in the dark plots of cruel, murderous, or diabolical forces;
Giger’s many paintings and images of darkness, evil, brutality,
ruthless entrapment; Joseph Conrad’s horrific, traumatizing
experience of metaphysical and human evil in the Congo under the
Saturn-Pluto alignment of 1890, later recorded in The Heart of
Darkness (“the horror, the horror”).
Shakespeare had Pluto square
Saturn as a long personal (once in a lifetime) transit during the
entire six-year period in which he wrote all the major
tragedies—Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth—exploring and
articulating with such profundity the depths of the human
shadow.
We see it too in the metaphysical
and spiritual vision of major Saturn-Pluto theologians like
Augustine and Calvin, with their profound sense of the dark evil
and corruption rooted in the human soul, original sin, guilt and
remorse, hell and damnation, predestination, being in the grip of
an overwhelmingly powerful force and fate that rules one’s life and
destiny no matter what one might attempt otherwise, their
relentless determination to suppress evil and construct moral and
ecclesiastical structures to serve that quest, their overall focus
on moral judgment and self-judgment. (In a more contemporary, less
extreme example, we see it in Thomas Merton, born under the
conjunction of 1914-15, whose spiritual autobiography The
Seven-Storey Mountain under the immediately following
conjunction, 1946-48, wrestles with these same themes with somewhat
different results.)
The forging of the moral faculty
is a Saturn-Pluto effort, from the God of thunder and almighty
power giving Moses the Ten Commandments onwards (even our film
recreations of that event reflect the collective psyche’s
archetypal dynamics, with both cinematic biblical spectacles of
that name, The Ten Commandments, both by De Mille, produced
when Saturn was square Pluto, in 1923 and 1956).
Saturn and Pluto were conjunct
when the world faced the full horror and evil of the Holocaust,
1946-48, with the public release of the films taken of the Nazi
concentration camps (films edited for the British government by
Hitchcock), and with the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi war criminals
in 1946, with their ambience of grave moral and legal judgment,
confrontation with the shadow, horrific evil, “man’s inhumanity.”
Films precisely express the archetypal dynamics of the collective
psyche. After that conjunction, each hard aspect of Saturn and
Pluto coincided with major films about the concentrations camps and
Holocaust—Resnais’s Night and Fog in 1956, Kramer’s
Judgment at Nuremberg in 1965, Sophie’s Choice in
1982, Schindler’s List in 1993; virtually all of the 10-hour
long documentary Shoah was filmed under the conjunction of
1981-84. Kafka wrote “The Trial” under the Saturn-Pluto conjunction
of 1914 (and was himself born under the Saturn-Pluto conjunction
just before that). Saturn was opposite Pluto in 1536 when
Michelangelo began painting “The Last Judgment.”
In terms of the tendency to see
things in terms of good and evil: cf. Augustine’s epic drama of
history; the American view of Soviet Communism from the beginning
of the Cold War during the conjunction of 1946-48, “the evil
Empire” of Reagan in 1981-84; “a monumental struggle between good
and evil” of Bush in 2001; Churchill’s view of Hitler in 1939-40;
Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”; Oliver Stone’s rendering of America
in Platoon, JFK, Nixon, Wall Street, Born on Fourth of
July…Melville’s magnificent dissection of this tendency in Moby
Dick; Billy Budd.
Saturn-Pluto alignments do indeed
tend to bring genuine confrontations between good and evil—but
where the evil exists is not usually as simple a matter as the
confronter believes (cf. Keen’s Faces of the Enemy, the
perinatal projections in history analyzed by Grof and the
psychohistorian Lloyd de Mause).
Cf. Israel and Palestine, whose
implacable enmity was established with the founding of Israel under
the SA-PL conjunction of 1948; with every hard SA-PL aspect since,
including the present, coinciding with a Middle Eastern war, with
their mutual projective constellating of the shadow and the need
for suppression and attack. Modern India and Pakistan were divided
under the same conjunction, 1947, commencing a similar tragic
drama.
“We are at war”—those grim words,
creating that heavy dark weight in the pit in one’s stomach, again
and again heard during Saturn-Pluto eras. Cf. the first
Saturn-Pluto cycle of the twentieth century, beginning in 1914, and
its hard aspects coinciding with both world wars, essentially
constituting a “thirty years war” that does not end until the end
of the full Saturn-Pluto cycle at the end of World War II (the
first Thirty Years War, 1618-48, also precisely coincided with the
Saturn-Pluto cycle).
Yet it does not have to be the
full-fledge open war of the world wars: the following Saturn-Pluto
conjunction (1946-48) brought the beginning of the Cold War, with
the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the Iron Curtain, the
Berlin crisis, the beginnings of anti-Communist McCarthyism in the
U.S., the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the founding
of the CIA, National Security Council, and Department of Defense.
(Saturn as “cold” war, rigid, armored, iron boundary, containment,
fear, hardness.)
In terms of that sense of an
ominous, darker reality descending on an age—we’ve already begun to
forget what it was like, during the last Saturn-Pluto conjunction,
of 1981-84 (the one immediately following the conjunction that
coincided with the beginning of the Cold War), Reagan’s first
administration when the Cold War was at its peak, with the
tremendous nuclear build up on both sides of the Atlantic reaching
apocalyptic proportions, preparing for “nuclear overkill,” and
impelling apocalyptic fears in the collective psyche, the sense of
a nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over the world because of the
Manichaean standoff between the superpowers; Armageddon fantasies
emerging (along with the empowered fundamentalist imagination),
Helen Caldicott and the mass anti-nuclear rallies, scientists’
recognition of the “nuclear winter” probable fallout from a nuclear
war, the widely seen “The Day After,” the fears of “triggering
World War III” and the drawing of many historical parallels with
the beginning of World War I, and so forth. It is a powerful
archetypal gestalt as it emerges in and grips the collective psyche
(again, recall 1914-16, 1939-41). Saturn-Pluto as mass death: the
many wars, massacres, major terrorist attacks coincident with this
alignment.
Events with brutal and enduring
impact—it is the principal aspect of trauma.
Confrontation with darkness,
evil, hatred, bestial ferocity, the demonic, the shadow, and the
moral and physical effort to sustain that confrontation: Cf.
Churchill courageous rallying the British alone in Europe to face
Hitler and the overpowering Nazis in 1939-40. Albrecht Durer’s
woodcut “Knight, Death, and the Devil” beautifully conveys this
archetypal moment (Durer born with his Sun on a Saturn-Pluto
square).
Confronting “the beast” (cf. this
summer’s shark epidemic of attacks and fears; Spielberg’s Jaws,
Jurassic Park [Spielberg’s born with Saturn-Pluto conjunction,
visible as well in Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan,
AI, et al.]; Giger; Sexy Beast; Henry James’s “The Beast
in the Jungle”; Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” “Apocalypse Now
Redux”; NYPD Blue’s sustained confrontation with the beast
of the urban underworld, begun under the last square).
And then there is the purely
physical, material, and energetic manifestations of Saturn-Pluto in
this event:
“Steel” and “iron” are themselves
quintessential Saturn-Pluto: matter hardened by fire, powerfully
enduring concrete and steel structures, steel jet airliners, steely
responses, iron curtains, iron determination.
The World Trade Center towers
were built beginning under the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 1966-67.
They were the strongest buildings in the world, built from 192,000
tons of steel to withstand hurricanes, with steel columns
encircling the 110 stories and a massive reinforced steel core
running vertically down the center. Their capacity to withstand the
tremendous impact was so great that it saved 20,000 lives as they
remained standing for more than an hour after impact, swaying and
shuddering but allowing thousands to escape, and even then not
toppling over onto other buildings. In a sense the titanic strength
of the World Trade Center towers was met by the titanic force of
the Boeing 767s—400,000 pound jets traveling at 300 mph carrying
24,000 gallons of fuel.
Saturn-Pluto is the stupendous
weight of the twin towers collapsing, 110 stories of steel and
concrete and glass, the inconceivable amount of potential energy
(Pluto) contained by the building in its immensely elevated erect
condition suddenly destructively released as it fell (Saturn) from
its great height. The titanic cumulative weight of the collapse,
pulverizing everything below—Saturn as weight, gravity, falling,
collapse, hard materiality; Pluto as stupendously intensifying that
weight and gravitational collapse—great mass and great gravity
creating tremendous destruction.
Pluto also as the fire ball heat
of the explosion melting the steel, destroying the steel shell of
the buildings, collapsing the huge structures down upon thousands
in destructive finality (“then the fire ensues and once the
temperature gets up [to] 800 to 900 degrees, the structural shell
will start to fall. Engineers suspect the temperatures inside the
crash areas could have quickly reached well over 1,000 degrees,
perhaps approaching 2,000 degrees — beyond the melting point of any
steel” NYT). The combination of being crushed and
incinerated.
Titanically massive steel and
concrete material structures, destroyed, annihilated, atomized: the
Newtonian-Cartesian world (Saturn) of engineering meets Shiva
(Pluto). And Shiva uses the Newtonian-Cartesian “laws” of matter
and force, mass and gravity, to accomplish his
destruction.
Saturn and Pluto are both
archetypally “dark,” in different ways, including the literal;
their combination is extremely dark: hence the literal implacable
darkness after the collapse, black soot, smoke, ash, the
impossibility to see anything.
“Just as survivors of the WTC
collapse have spoken of being enveloped in dust so thick and black
that they couldn’t even see their hands in front of their faces, so
it was for me entering this cloud of emotion, thought, and energy.
All I could experience within it was sorrow, grief,
fear, and anger…” (David Spangler)
“The jaws of death.” “The gates
of hell.” “Nuclear winter” (WTC witness accounts).
All the destruction was created
from the encounter of fire and matter (Pluto and
Saturn).
The stupendous mass of debris:
from Pluto’s relationship to the results of destruction, decay,
refuse, garbage, scatology, waste; Saturn’s to materiality, dust,
death, worthlessness, grayness.
We see the unusual synthesis of
the two principles, Saturn and Pluto, in such phrases describing
the terrorist attack as “a carefully planned catastrophe— executed
with alarming precision and seemingly cold-blooded calculation.” A
company whose engineering expertise was consulted by the reporter
of the twin towers’ collapse was named “Controlled
Demolition”—disciplined, precisely calculated devastation. Other
characteristic verbal juxtapositions describing the events:
“Terrifying professionalism” (New Yorker on the hijackings),
“Organized pandemonium” (witness of the Pentagon
aftermath).
Yet Saturn-Pluto is also the
aspect of unusually enduring structures and foundations, powerful
structures and structures symbolizing power, solidly and deeply
constructed buildings and existential structures whose strength and
solidity allow them to endure for great lengths of time—Pluto in
this case intensely driving and empowering the material solidity
and enduring structure.
It is titanic structures and
titanic efforts, the building of structures and foundations that
endure through immense toil and struggle, grit and determination,
the strenuous marshalling of tremendous resources in a focused,
determined manner: cf. the Marshall Plan 1947, the skyscrapers
themselves, and now the extraordinary labor to secure the deep
underlying structural foundations seven stories below the larger
WTC area (cf. NYT, 9/18/01) to keep the entire area from
collapsing.
By the way, the World Trade
Center twin towers were completed 28_ years ago, an exact Saturn
return. The Pentagon was completed 58 years ago, thus this was its
second Saturn return. Saturn returns for individuals regularly
bring major transforming events, confrontations with mortality,
endings of an entire cycle of life, profound structural shifts,
completions, etc. (More benignly, the Berlin Wall also came down at
the end of its exact Saturn return cycle—1961-89).
Pearl Harbor took place 59 years
ago, two Saturn cycles ago.
Saturn is archetypally associated
with order, Pluto with chaos—the chaos of destruction, of
annihilation, but also the chaos of nature’s depths from which
regeneration and new structures emerge. The Saturn-Pluto
combination is profoundly embodied in the dialectic between order
and chaos. Each constellates the other, each secretly contains the
other, like the yin/yang symbol, as in chaos theory and complexity
theory. Chaotic phenomena always mask a deeper order, evolution’s
chaotic unfolding spontaneously self-organizes, every order masks
and gives way to underlying chaos.
Intrapsychically, Saturn-Pluto
expresses itself as the superego and ego structure controlling and
repressing the id. Yet it is a true dialectic, for the superego is
not only antagonistic to the id, the id drives and can even control
the superego (as Freud brilliantly saw, with the id providing both
the superego’s energy and its potential for cruelty—Freud’s
formulation of the superego and its relation to the id, by the way,
emerging precisely during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1922-23). Each
increases the reality and high-pressure potency of the other. (Cf.
the collective level of this, expressed in Freud’s Civilization
and Its Discontents under the Saturn-Pluto opposition,
1929-31.)
Saturn-Pluto brings both the
repression of the id and the return of the repressed—the id’s
eruption out of the repressive containment of the ego and superego,
the compensatory backlash, the karmic return, the consequences of
past actions, the wages of sin. (“Americans are reaping the
consequences of a monster they helped create but could not control”
Sydney Morning Herald on the U.S. financing and training of
the Afghan Islamic fundamentalist groups throughout the 1980s;
also, cf. the Gulf War fought under Bush pere to ensure flow of oil
to the West, the American-led bombings and subsequent embargoes
causing hundreds of thousands of deaths to Middle Eastern
civilians; American military presence in Saudi Arabia cited as
single greatest cause of bin Laden’s hatred of U.S.)
Concerning the characteristic
empowerment of the most reactionary, conservative forces during
Saturn-Pluto alignments, bringing about increased sense of
defensive armoring, rigid boundaries, hostile separation: cf. first
half of the 1980s, Reagan in the U.S., Thatcher in England, Pope
John Paul II in the Catholic Church, the rise of the Christian
right in the U.S., of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism
throughout the world). Cf. conservative empowerment again during
the most recent square of Saturn-Pluto, in 1992-94—the coming to
power by the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, or the Republican
right, Newt Gingerich, and the Contract on America, both in 1994;
as well as the cruelty and evil visible in the Rodney King
beatings, the trial, the LA riots; as well as atrocity and mass
death in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Rwanda….The first bombing of the World
Trade Center, by the way, took place during that Saturn-Pluto
square as well, 1993.
Saturn-Pluto is the cycle of
terrorism and repression, violence and retribution, each driving
and constellating the other (consider Israel’s and Palestine’s
incessant life cycle, with Israel born under the Saturn-Pluto
conjunction of 1948 in triple conjunction with Mars, reaching
boiling points under each succeeding Saturn-Pluto hard aspect—1956,
1967, 1973, 1982). “How does one create a terrorist? Bomb their
families.” (Which, in a sense, is what the terrorists who bombed
New York may tragically succeed in doing.)
Note the simultaneous opposites:
Saturn-Pluto is the tyranny by terrorism, and it’s the grimly
determined effort to oppose and obliterate terrorism….And it’s also
the tyranny of a society gripped by anti-terrorist fears, controls,
and rigidities; and it’s a state and military willing to murder
thousands of innocent people to effect its implacable exterminating
purpose.
Cf. Robespierre’s “revolutionary
puritanism” during the Terror in 1793-94, Saturn square
Pluto.
It is the mobilization of
structures of power against evil, which may themselves move into
the grip of evil: i.e., shadow-possession, unconscious id-driven
behavior often of a punitive kind.
Saturn-Pluto as demonic power
that is in control (cf. Hitler in 1939-40, or the images of Giger,
born in 1940).
We see a similar polarity in
Saturn-Pluto with both the Inquisition and the evil seen/projected
in witches and heretics, or the 1940s-50s Soviet Communism and
American communist underworld versus the McCarthyite anti-Communist
reaction—the evil, the shadow, the dark manipulation and perfidy
are exclusively seen in the other, never in the self.
Again, the latter phenomenon all
began under the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946-48 that brought
the beginning of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin crisis,
the beginnings of anti-Communist McCarthyism in the U.S. with the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, blacklists, also the
founding of the CIA, Department of Defense, National Security
Agency, military-industrial complex, while Stalin asserted control
throughout Eastern Europe….Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” written
during that same conjunction of 1946-48, is a classic expression of
the dark controlling power in totalitarianism.
Saturn-Pluto is the fundamental
aspect of totalitarianism, which first emerged in Germany with the
German state’s total mobilization for war in 1914. Note the
sequence of totalitarian empowerment in coincidence with the
succeeding hard aspects of Saturn and Pluto: the rise of Fascism
and totalitarian Soviet communism in 1921-24—Stalin, Mussolini,
Hitler’s putsch–and crucial empowerment with the Great Depression
1929-32; and full Nazi eruption in 1939-41; then the 1946-48
fullest extension of Stalinist Soviet power in Russia and Eastern
Europe, and the crucial period of Communism coming to power in
China.
Cf. Saturn-Pluto’s similar
relationship to the history of fundamentalism. Note the themes of
fundamentalist empowerment and ruthless “divine” judgment visible
in the terrorists’ theology of judgment and vengeance against the
Satan of the West, and also in the emblematic comments by
fundamentalist American leaders such as Falwell and Robertson to
the effect that the attacks can be recognized as God’s righteous
punishment for the sins committed by secular America, liberals,
gays, and feminists.
The rigid security measures now
instituted to combat the possibility of terrorism will precisely
resemble the classic Saturn-Pluto obsessive-compulsive syndrome of
the incessantly hypervigilant superego, brilliantly rendered in
Kafka’s great story “The Burrow” (written during the Saturn-Pluto
square of 1923—the same year and alignment that brought Freud’s
formulation of the superego-id relationship in The Ego and the
Id).
Saturn-Pluto brings those
terrifying encounters with death and danger that cause primitive
fear and the reactive rigid constriction of egoic security
controls, the traumatized tightening of the sphincter, the
obsessive-compulsive psychological structure, the mobilization of
security measures that ensure safety, boundaries, order, purity and
cleanliness, control, leading in extreme to the anal-sadistic
personality, the rigid and punitive puritanical conscience, the
judgmental fundamentalist, the cruel superego, the totalitarian
state.
Yet Saturn-Pluto is the
configuration that brings a powerful confrontation with the basics
of human mortal reality, of life and death, in such a way as to
cleanse one of illusory concerns and superficial values. “Up until
the moment the twin towers fell, America was deep in a cocoon of
self-gratification and self-improvement….Now we have to view our
solipsism and wretched excess through the prism of the ‘epic
wretchedness’ of the Afghan people, as The Times’s Barry Bearak
called it. It’s somewhat embarrassing that we didn’t look outward
sooner, that foreign wars got less TV air time than the war against
wrinkles. But our culture turns out to be about much more than its
glittery surface, and that’s been clear in all that’s happened
since Sept. 11: the exposure to the quiet lives of inspiration that
so many victims led; the valor of rescue workers; the altruistic
derring-do of the men who fought back on Flight 93; our concern
about inflicting unnecessary suffering on innocent Afghans; the
generosity and civic tolerance at the heart of our country’s
response to horrific loss. With their oxymoronic holy war, Osama
bin Laden and his
murderous disciples …succeeded in
illuminating – not just to the rest of the world but to us – how
little all our baubles and all our booty have to do with who we
really are.” (Maureen Dowd, NYT, 10/3/01)
We see the Saturn-Pluto energy in
the recent outpouring of so many writings and
communications—essays, columns, emails, lectures—characterized by
sustained grave reflection, deeply serious, penetrating thought and
analysis, evincing moral and psychological depth and earnestness,
engaged with grave issues in profound ways.
People who have these planets in
major hard aspect all their lives often have a sense of living with
special moral responsibilities, with the heavy burden of history on
their shoulders, a sense of weighty karmic duty.
Saturn-Pluto presses for the
forging of a deeper moral structure of consciousness, of
superego—which can be rigid and pathological, or a profound moral
advance in consciousness, a deepening of conscience, a profounder
awareness of evil, of the shadow, a deeper moral self-awareness, a
moral strength of purpose.
It is no accident that Jung, born
with Saturn square Pluto, was the psychologist who most brought the
modern self into awareness of the “shadow,” which he named and
dissected, and who explored its reality in 20th century
history: the shadow of European civilization, the shadow of modern
man, the shadow of modern technology, the shadow of every
individual psyche, the shadow even of God (“Answer to Job”). Note
also how so many of his writings are characterized by a tone of
intense moral gravity and penetrating analysis.
Cf. An Afghani interviewed about
the possibility of being bombed by the U.S. in reprisal: “America
is very powerful and can do almost anything it wants; but if I were
America, I would look deep in my heart and ask myself why someone
would want to attack me in this way.”
We also can see the Saturn-Pluto
complex in Jung’s acute sensitivity to the fateful determining
power of the unconscious psyche over human life. Saturn-Pluto
brings that sense of the encompassing power of the archetypes
beyond the control of the rational self:
“We have not understood yet that
the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task,
which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our
civilization.” C.G. Jung
Saturn-Pluto is the collective
psyche in a contraction of death that is also, at another level, a
contraction of birth, a hard labor of transformation within the
alembic compression chamber: Saturn-Pluto periods bring
evolutionary contractions, historical epochs that bring about a
great death, the destruction of an old order, deep transformation,
and the establishment of a new evolutionary structure. Through
suffering and experience, deeper and wiser forms of consciousness
emerge.
Saturn-Pluto is the aspect of
patriarchy—the evolutionary empowerment of the stern Father
archetype, of authority, hierarchy, control, law and order,
tradition and stability, discipline, domination, oppression,
structure, maturation—and at another level, it is the aspect of the
Great Mother’s hard birth contractions pressing and impelling new
life and a new form of being. Thus patriarchy as the birth canal of
the Great Mother Goddess, just as History is the birth labor of
Nature. “All creation groaneth in travail” for the birth of this
new being.
Saturn-Pluto is the crucifixion,
on the cross of opposites, where the divine embrace of absolute
defeat and death gives birth to a new humanity. (Saturn and Pluto
were in opposition in 29-31 AD.) It is the hard structure of death
and rebirth. It is the sacrifice that transforms reality. It is the
dark and brutal storm which brings in its wake, in the fullness of
time, slowly but inevitably, the luminous serenity of a new
dawn.
This is the essential insight of
the death-rebirth mystery: that every death is on another level
actually a birth.
Thus Saturn-Pluto hard aspects
consistently bring those epochal periods in history of great
darkness, moral gravity, and disciplined determination that, while
confronting evil—within as well as without—ultimately serve to
build the enduring spiritual, moral, and social-political
foundations for the future. They are the death contractions of
history, but also its birth contractions.
Again, the Saturn-Pluto
opposition, which first moved into orb last fall during the
election season, and just now in the past few weeks reached
exactitude for the first time, will last about two more years,
until 2003.
A shorter term alignment that
began about the time of the attacks and lasts about six weeks, is
the Mars-Jupiter opposition, typically bringing enthusiasm for
assertive and militaristic action, strong displays of patriotism,
proud flag-waving (especially at sports and military events),
nationalist bravado, jingoism, saber-rattling, and, less
problematically, an overall energetic optimism and increase in
courage and ardor.
While many other specific
astrological factors can be adduced to fill out the picture,
bottom-line it’s the Saturn-Pluto alignment that symbolically and
multivalently informs virtually every element of the phenomenon.
The several other astrological factors that played a role in the
timing and the nuances of the event—the Full Moon grand cross; the
Pluto and Saturn stations; the Mars retrograde cycle (including
what Mars aligned with during that cycle); the background of
specific eclipses; the Mercury grand trine with the extraordinary
calculating smoothness of the hijacking operation; the Moon and
Saturn both in Gemini, with the twin towers, twin airliners, two
cities attacked, and so forth—all these basically supported the
larger, deeper, more powerful archetypal reality of the
Saturn-Pluto complex. It is this great outer-planet alignment that
constituted the simple–yet in another sense infinitely
complex—essential archetypal background of these profound
events.
We must also take into account
that this alignment is taking place in the immediate aftermath of
the long Uranus-Neptune conjunction, lasting from the mid-80s to
the present year, which has left humanity in a condition that is
more globally united and interconnected, more sensitized to the
suffering and realities of others, in certain respects more
spiritually awakened, more capable of collective healing and
compassion, and, through technological advances in communications
media, more able to think and feel and respond together in a
spiritually evolved manner to these grave realities than has ever
been possible before.
I hope these notes, combined with
David Spangler’s message, may provide a larger perspective on the
deep and grave events that have irrevocably shaped our
lives.
Richard Tarnas
September 21, 2001
http://PCC.CIIS.EDU
