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Limiting the Dark, Deepening the Light:
The Saturn-Pluto Opposition
by Jessica Murray
Autumn 2001
Published in Reclaiming Quarterly, Winter 2002
as "Facing Our Shadow"
The
Flaming Arrow
Astrologers
have been talking for years about the likelihood of holy wars during Pluto's
tenure in Sagittarius, the sign of religion. On September 11, the fiery
arrow that is this sign's symbol took the form of a speeding airplane (Sagittarius
again) crashing into New York's proud mercantile towers.
The
Twin Towers
Practitioners
of the tarot will have recognized the televised image immediately. The
Tower is the card of cataclysmic change, wrenching a people out of complacency.
Barbara Walker's version of this card depicts the pope (the church) falling
off one side of the tower, and Caesar (the state) falling off the other,
as a bolt of lightning shatters the structure in the middle.
As many
have noted, the twin towers represented the dual sign Gemini, in which
Saturn (the planet of consensus reality)
has been opposing Pluto since August 2001. This opposition will be with
us through the spring, though its lessons of responsibility and karma will
not be confined to these months, nor should its teachings be singularly
identified with the events of September 11th.
Pluto:
Invisibility and Lawlessness
From what
bow did this arrow shoot forth? Not from a source we recognize. Not from
a familiar old-fashioned enemy like Russia or any mappable nation state
at all. Pluto, planet of the underground and unseen, governs terrorism
as well as the criminal underworld, the CIA and the unsavory "moles" such
groups employ.
Pluto's
job in this transit is to undermine those societal values that need an
overhaul. The opposition we are experiencing teaches that when the time
has come for immense change, a culture's civilized self-image (Saturn)
will be traumatized, and its unacknowledged underbelly revealed. There
is rot (Pluto) within every structure (Saturn).
The lesson
here is not to demonize the forces that exist within the structure, but
to look at the whole pattern. Energies kept covered up for a long time
become distorted. What is being revealed is the dark side of global politics.
Pluto
and Decay
The process
of decay is not "evil"; worms, which decompose matter, are neither bad
nor good. To make any astrological sense of what has happened, we must
dispense with our coveted judgments. They will not lead us to a greater
truth. From the point of view of a court of law or public opinion, most
certainly they are important. But from the point of view of Pluto, they
are irrelevant.
Responding
from our emotional and moral layers of self (governed by the Moon,
Venus and Jupiter),
we may throw around terms like "evil", as Ronald Reagan did when he called
the Soviets "the Evil Empire" (back when they were our enemies). The same
sort of symbolic projection is at work when churchmen call sexual urges
the work of the devil. But as metaphysicians, we need to be wary of these
appellations. We are not seeking to proclaim what we like, feel comfortable
with, approve of, or find tolerable. We are seeking to understand archetypal
forces.
The
Individual Shadow
Psychology
has much to teach us about the Saturn-Pluto opposition from the point of
view of an individual chart. Every one of us has something in our lives
which we have stuffed underground, and this is the transit that requires
us to dig it up, examine it carefully, and give it a respectful burial.
There are crimes of the heart unresolved, perfidies unadmitted, and grievances
long overdue to be addressed. It is time to go down the basement stairs
and clean up what is down there.
The
Collective Shadow
Doing
this transformative work on an individual level is anything but easy; but,
as Liz Greene has pointed out, it is far easier than managing it in the
collective. It takes an especially enlightened leader to impact a group
this way, and Goddess knows there is no Gandhi in sight.
The
Individual and Group Karma
What is
the responsibility of the individual for the dark karma of the group?
The most
basic fact of astrology is that one is born at a specific time and into
a specific place for a reason. One starts where one is. We are here. Our
government is what we have. We created it and finance it. Let us begin
taking responsibility for what it has done, is doing and is planning to
do.
Taking
responsibility starts by waking up to our pattern of denial. There have
been troubling developments leading up to the present crisis which even
our xenophobic daily newspapers have duly reported. Had we been informing
ourselves all along about the truth of what goes on outside our national
borders, we would not be in such a state of stricken incredulity now. For
example, the income gap between the highest and poorest countries was 30-to-one
forty years ago. By 1997 it was 74-to-1. There is a direct connection between
those numbers and the globalization of organized crime.
Saturn
and Ignorance
Saturn,
the planet of denial, is now in Gemini, the sign of information. The transit
challenges us to postpone action until we have informed ourselves. Actions
based on ignorance of our role in the world are not responsible actions;
they are reactions, and they will cause terrible harm. Incredulity, a product
of insufficient information, as well as propaganda, a system of disinformation,
are among the themes raised by this part of the transit.
Does the
average American have any real understanding of where the Muslim extremist
gets his rage? We are shocked and appalled when we see on television anti-American
demonstrations taking place in areas of the world which, up to this point,
we could not even find on a map. Many Americans were unaware until recently
of the ongoing U.S. bombing of Iraq, or of the mass child starvation there
due to the campaign euphemistically referred to as "sanctions". Innocents
have been dying there, as innocents died in New York. Our president, who
only recently took his first trip abroad, is a national symbol of our collective
ignorance, and our country's various delinquencies with the UN represent
an ongoing refusal to take responsibility at the international level.
This is
a stance that the Saturn opposition is rendering untenable.
Saturn
and Responsibility
The antidote
to ignorance is to ask questions. Not, "Which side started it?" This is
schoolboy sputtering, which we have absolutely no time left to indulge.
Let us ask questions not about "them"; but about us. We do not even know
who "they" are (do we ever?), but we most assuredly have a responsibility
to know who WE are.
For example,
who supplies Israel and Saudi Arabia and Egypt et al with all that fancy
ammo? (When there is a shooting in a suburban school, is not the first
question the newsman asks, "Where did he get the gun?"?) And why have they
been armed to the teeth like that?
Pluto
as Underground Wealth
Students
of mythology will remember that Pluto (Hades to the Greeks) was the ruler
of all riches found beneath the earth's crust: among them, oil.
Much has
been written about the role of fossil fuels in U.S. foreign policy. We
are at the point now where Big Oil has moved from being merely influential
in government to being personified by it.
In his
original proclamation of holy war, when Osama bin Laden demanded that the
U.S. remove our troops from lands sacred to Islam, he centered his denunciation
of the West around our much-touted secularity. But America does have a
religion: the acquisition and consumption of wealth.
In the
modern age, it is no longer spice, nor gold, but oil that has become talismanic
in the American consciousness. A perverse symmetry exists between the American
point of view and bin Laden's, both fixated upon control of these ancient
lands: the oil fields are our holy sites, too. The conflict in the Middle
East has more in common with the Crusades of centuries ago than our misspeaking
president realized.
If "Oil"
is the answer, what might the questions be? Ask enough of them and the
good guy/bad guy scenario starts to exhaust its viability, leading us beyond
the compulsion of blame.
The
Sins of the Fathers
The transit
we are under is about venturing beyond blame. The Law of Karma does not
trifle with right and wrong, good and bad. It is simply a matter of What
goes around, comes around. One of the more obvious examples of this principle
is illustrated by the fact that George Bush Senior's CIA trained the Taliban
when they were the foe of our foe; and Bush Junior is at the helm now that
the Taliban has become the foe.
Karma
works in some very intricate ways, but in the main it is a very simple
concept, and morally neutral.
Us
vs. Them
Saturn
is prompting an extreme of national identification right now. This is the
planet of edges and perimeters; thus it governs the concept of cutting
up landmasses into discrete political entities.
But what
does Pluto care about such distinctions? Pluto does not honor national
boundaries. From the point of view of the god of death and rebirth, to
mourn one group's deaths over another's is myopic at best, blasphemous
at worst.
A
Subtler Expression of Saturn
Saturn
seeks to limit Pluto, as Pluto seeks to deepen Saturn. We are more familiar
with the polarizing exclusionism of Saturn, of which patriotism and bigotry
are two current expressions, than we are with the more profound and spiritually
mature level of its function. It is to this deeper level that the transit
is trying to take us: the level where we recognize that human suffering
is one of the Dark Mysteries, and must be audienced with a humble and universal
perspective.
A
New Era of Accountability
The Saturn-Pluto
opposition heralds the beginning of new era of human adulthood. We are
being trained to be able to face the darkness within us, and in the world.
Imagine a war criminal humbly asking pardon for his crimes; imagine countries
solemnly paying reparations for their sins against humanity. Imagine each
one of us daring to confess to our neuroses, our shames; accepting accountability
for all our demons and thereby laying the groundwork for their exorcism.
Imagine
the freedom that could come of Not Denying Anything any more.
Those
of us who would wave flags, let us wave the flag of New York, the flag
of Chechnya, the Balkans, the flags of Chiapas and East Timor, the flags
for all of the African states whose people have been suffering so relentlessly
that we can barely imagine how they endure. Those of us who would light
candles, let us light one for all the precious dead, and for every man,
woman and child alive. Let us pray to whomever we pray to, that we meet
the years ahead with a dedication to clean the blood off our hands and
put not one more drop upon them.
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