America's Crisis of Maturity:
The Saturn/Pluto Factor
by Jessica Murray
October 2002
Published in The Mountain Astrologer, June/July 2003
Poor
old Saturn, the planet of responsibility,
is usually quite narrowly considered. We tend to think of its lessons as
material tasks and calls to filial duty: I must go to work on Monday morning;
I must call Grandma on Tuesday; I must settle down and become a parent
before I'm thirty.
But
Saturn has to do with being grown-up
in all arenas of life. Its recent duet with Pluto has intensified the question
of what it means to mature in all of our human roles, not just the immediate
ones.
The
Pluto-Saturn opposition of 2001-2 (at this writing, it is still in orb)
has brought to light an intense need, both individually and collectively,
to delve more deeply into Saturn's mysteries. Its questions have been fanning
out from the personal into the societal and the moral. What does it mean
to be a mature citizen? What is truly adult behavior, as regards membership
in the world family?
Ours
is a notoriously immature culture. One could even go so far as to say we
pride ourselves on our adolescent ethos, merrily oblivious as we gallop
roughshod over the rest of the world. In the Dane Rudhyar version of the
USA birth chart 1, Sagittarius rising suggests an overgrown and overconfident
teenager 2. Youth is king in this country; juvenility is cool. Puerile
and easy-going, untested by the rigors of life, the good-natured frat boy
currently in the Oval Office matches this ascendant perfectly. The man
was not offended when he was portrayed as a cartoon superhero on the cover
of the satirical German magazine Der Spiegel. He was flattered.
Saturn
forms a harsh square with the sun in the birth chart of the USA, making
it difficult to assimilate those principles Saturn represents: cool-headedness,
patience and caution among them. Indeed, Saturn's particular area of genius,
the hard-won experience that comes of growing older, is seen in our culture
as a shame and a curse. So thoroughly is aging devalued in America that
it is difficult to think of it as simply a natural process, with pros and
cons like any other. Our mass infatuation with physical youthfulness has
grown so entrenched that the very word "mature" has become a euphemism
for "no longer young and beautiful". But it is upon the non-physical aspects
of our beings that our cult of immaturity inflicts the most insidious damage.
As a group, we lack a maturity of mind and soul.
Maturity
is not the same thing as intelligence. Americans suffer no lack of intelligence,
if only in the classical sense of the word: access to education and information
, of which we have a surfeit. Our collective Mars in Gemini attests to
a restless engagement with information of every stripe; by now surely there
are enough television channels to have the quantity issue, if not the quality
issue, covered. If we do not read deeply enough into our newspapers, behind
the puff pieces and beyond the infighting of national politics; and if
we do not listen between the lines of the blaring television lead stories
to see patterns of meaning, that is a problem of maturity.
Saturn's
transit through Gemini has just about run its two-and-a-half-year course.
When the planet of limitation engages the sign of information, one expects
to see all manner of variations on the theme of insufficiency of knowledge.
Many have noted, for example, that since 9/11 Americans have been forced
to consider parts of the world which heretofore we could not even find
on a map. Perhaps even more dismaying is that the transit has exposed gross
failures in applying what information we do have; witness the flak our
several intelligence agencies got for not connecting the dots (a quintessentially
Geminian phrase). Saturn in Gemini is represented by any and all restrictions
upon, and dearth of, information flow. Incredulity is a mild version of
this: when long-ignored anti-American elements lethally reared their heads
two Septembers ago, the first and most abiding reaction was mass shock.
The
transit of Saturn through Gemini has pointed up the limits of our anti-intellectual
pop culture, with its breezy, scattered approach to information. It has
never been more obvious, certainly to pundits in the rest of the world,
that the American mind suffers from a deadening superficiality. Famously
pluralistic, our society entertains a vast and diverse number of beliefs,
as indicated by the Jupiter that conjoins our country's Sun; yet we lack
a thoughtful, in-depth philosophical life as a culture. Our religious institutions
have calcified into bureaucratic dogmatism, as institutions will, and have
lost their ability to engage the numinous imagination. Church theologies
do not help us to form the questions that would lead us deeper into our
soul-lives; instead they offer pat answers to only those questions church
fathers say should be asked. Religious seekers are not encouraged to seek
at all; we are supposed to learn our answers by rote, as children recite
the ABCs.
This
is a dangerous climate upon which to visit the transit of Pluto through
Sagittarius, the sign of religion, which for years has had astrologers
speculating about the likelihood of holy wars. The planes hit the World
Trade Center a matter of hours after Pluto had regained its first Saturn-opposition
placement 3 (conjunct within a degree of exactitude the USA Ascendant):
it was at this moment when the full significance of fundamentalist religion
came crashing into the American consciousness. As the Descendant ("open
enemies") of the birth chart is a mirror of the Ascendant, the transits
of Saturn and Pluto over those angles seem to be telling us that Islamic
fundamentalism is a mirror of our own. Whatever variation it takes, fundamentalism
is theology in its most simplified form; and one can find it everywhere
except in a social context informed by spiritual maturity. The lesson of
Pluto in Sagittarius is to deepen and empower ourselves theologically;
the lesson of Saturn is to take the requisite moral responsibility to do
so.
Were
we encouraged from childhood to develop our spiritual selves, to cultivate
our own unique cosmologies with increasing artistry as we aged, the notion
of a literal, static Paradise would find no takers. Such a reductionistic
picture of the infinite inter-cyclic universe would be seen as a bizarre
attempt by clerics to keep people in arrested development spiritually.
In
our secular culture, it is not religion so much as politics and ideology
that get the press (the recent spate of pedophile priests headlines notwithstanding),
and come up similarly short in terms of the Saturn/Pluto challenge. If
philosophical maturity were valued in this country, a policymaker would
be hired for the subtlety of his or her ideas. An elected official would
be laughed off the podium if he came out with the kind of absurd black-and-white
pronouncements that we have recently been hearing under the auspices of
authoritative decree. For our president to declare that the rest of the
world is "either with us or against us", or that his enemies "hate freedom"
(this, from a government that detains peace activists at airports!), would
be considered insulting to the intelligence of his listeners.
Were
political maturity valued in our civilization, pundits would be judged
on the basis of their critical thinking. Government spokesmen would not
dare to tell journalists to "watch what they say", as if they were naughty
children at a dinner party. Bad-guy/good-guy characterizations would be
confined to kindergarten discussions, just as stick-figure drawings are
appropriate at only the very beginning levels of making art. For a leader
to invoke terms like "evil" is to employ Pluto imagery in its crudest and
least insightful form, clamping down (Saturn) upon the dark in order to
contain it, as churchmen do when they call sexual urges the work of the
devil. Such scare tactics might be used by an irresponsible adult on credulous
children.
By
contrast, Saturn-Pluto in its mature expression might be exemplified by
a national father figure who could role-model considered judgment, the
better to inform and problem-solve. What our foreign policy desperately
lacks is sobriety.
Perhaps
the most obvious example of Saturn-in-Gemini on a cultural level is propaganda,
a system of disinformation currently being pushed to fever pitch. Propaganda
is inimical to intellectual maturity. Were ideological maturity the goal
in our national discourse, sound bites would be relegated to selling chewing
gum, not used to sum up world affairs. Historical complexity would inform
what was written on the Op Ed page. Any talk of Saddam Hussein's current
weapons capabilities would logically be accompanied by at least a fleeting
mention of the fact that the Reagan/Bush administration helped him plan
and execute chemical weapon attacks against Iran in the '80s. As it is,
information-vendors blatantly indulge the public's ludicrously short attention
span, when they could be actually expanding our understanding by providing
intelligent context.
It
is no accident, of course, that TV commentators do nothing to challenge
the public's ignorance. The American telecommunications industry has fundamentally
changed over the past few years. Pluto in the 2nd house
of the USA chart exposes the subtext of moneyed plutocracy which has always
existed beneath American democracy. Now that we are in the information
age, information is the coin of the realm; thus control of the national
resources implies control of the media. A few immensely powerful conglomerates
now control all the major media outlets, and the industry's ties to Washington
have never been tighter. Consumers of the network news who imagine that
this will not skew the information they are receiving have not heard the
one about the fox guarding the hen house.
The
destructive logic of any chart with a second-house Pluto would have one
consume until one burned out. This is as true for countries as for individuals:
with America in the lead, the industrialized nations are poised to shop-till-we-drop
on a planetary scale -- though the Saturn principle could curb this madness,
and render it productive, were we able to integrate Saturn's gift of maturity.
The challenge is heightened by the nature of capitalistic society, where
free-thinkers are a liability. Independent-minded folks are less likely
to follow orders as to what to consume. Fashion, whether in clothes, tech
toys or foreign policy, depends upon suggestibility and conformity; and
both are more likely when the self is insecure or undeveloped. Blue jeans
manufacturers may insist that by buying their particular style of jeans,
purchasers are making a wild and crazy statement of uniqueness; but the
truth remains that self-aware individuals are less likely to throng into
Macy's to acquire the latest self-image prop.
Youth
is by definition a phase of life with a shaky ego-structure, and it is
to youth that most of the advertising in America is directed. When we are
teenagers, our relative identity-lessness and yearning to fit in with our
peers make us a Madison Avenue gold mine. By the time of the Saturn Return,
at roughly age 29, we have theoretically developed the requisite ego cohesion
to be able to say, "That may be a nice pair of jeans, but I do not need
them in order to have an identity". It is the mature buyer who is more
likely to beware.
However,
in a cultural milieu where chronological age does not guarantee true maturity--
indeed, where most forms of maturity are suspect at best and despised at
worst-- it is questionable whether this discernment ever fully develops.
Instead, we are left with Saturn's darker features, fear and insecurity.
So we buy whatever the cleverest advertisement is selling.
As
a world citizen, the USA has shown itself to be stunningly indiscriminate
as a consumer of the planet's wealth. With Pluto in the house of resources,
it is perhaps not surprising that we flirt with ecocide where the physical
reality of our planet is concerned; as exemplified by our dismissiveness
towards international environmental agreements. But with the ingress of
Pluto into Sagittarius a newly fervent quality started to become manifest.
It is becoming impossible to deny that America's acquisition and consumption
of wealth has the blind aspiration of a religion -- a higher good needing
no justification. And in the modern age, it is no longer spice, nor gold,
but oil that has become the central talisman of this religion. Pluto (oil)
is the holy grail (Sagittarius) of America's new crusades.
Sub-rational
and fanatical, Pluto's drives make no sense to the civilized mind (Saturn);
but there is no more powerful planet in the chart. As if hell-bent, the
USA has allowed an unsavory group of world-resource control freaks to slip
into the rulership of our government. As I write these words, the clique
of oilmen who run this country are trying to bully us into war, despite
immense and obvious moral, financial, international and even military counter-indications.
Beginning their big media push the day after September 11th 2002, the president's
viziers made no bones about trying to "sell" the war, blandly admitting
that their timing was "a centerpiece of the strategy"; that is, the strategy
to exploit the fear and grief of the citizenry. Mention was made of the
conventional marketing wisdom to delay the introduction of a new product
until after Labor Day.
Being
targeted, pitched at, and gulled is so much a part of the life of the average
American consumer that we are downright blasé as we listen now to
our businessmen-cum-politicians smugly discussing the details of their
plan to dominate the oil market by selling us a campaign of massive death
and suffering. The movie "Wag the Dog", which presented as laughable just
a few years ago a situation very similar to what is happening now, would
fail as satire today because the scenario has lost its giggle of implausibility.
The darkly ridiculous has become the darkly unremarkable. Many Americans,
their fears stoked daily by a mass media gone hysterical and maudlin by
turns, would wearily go along with the government's plans.
The
mythic face of this government is a kind of Big Boss of the World, a persona
traceable to our natal midheaven Saturn. This is an ignoble use of a noble
placement. If as a culture we do not develop maturity, we have no recourse
but to express the crude side of our elevated Saturn, arrogant in its leadership,
cruel in its rigidity.
Clearly,
if we want to slow and stop the trajectory of this petrochemical bloodlust,
we must not wearily go along. To do so would be to give up our Saturn and
submit to an eternal puerility. It is time to reclaim our adulthood. We
must summon up an emergency dose of intellectual maturity in order to expose
and denounce the appalling onslaught of propaganda polluting the mass media,
and to inform ourselves through alternative means -- for example, through
the international press -- as to what is really going on in the world. We
need emotional maturity, too, an example of which would be to modify our
recent 9/11 mourning rituals to reflect the reality that throughout these
months of American bombing, the Afghani people have suffered as a percentage
of their population more than twice the deaths we suffered that dreadful
day.
Spiritual
maturity would mean refusing to be infantilized by morally bankrupt leaders.
We must try, like big girls and boys, to rein in our fear and reactivity,
and opt instead to follow a planetary vision informed by a genuine curiosity
about what is going on outside our country's borders. Such maturity would
mean rousing ourselves out of denial and credulity, and taking stock of
what our government is doing in our name. It would mean using our thinking
minds independently, grounding ourselves in the facts while centering ourselves
in the heart.
It
is urgently necessary that we grow up now. Every one of our natal charts
has Saturn somewhere, indicating that within every one of us at birth is
a magnificent potential, a maturity designed to be grown into, to be lovingly
cultivated as we age. We must take another look at our particular version
of adulthood, re-interpret it, embrace it and put it into action. If we
do not, we will suffer, and cause suffering, like lost and dangerous children.
1
D. Rudhyar, The Astrology of America's Destiny, Vintage Books 1974 p.69
2
In arguing the case for this chart over the Gemini-rising version, Liz
Greene points out, "Sagittarius is a cowboy at heart, whereas Gemini is
a cultured intellectual". The Outer Planets & Their Cycles" CRCS Publ.
1983, p. 106
3
T. Tarriktar, The Day the World Changed, TMA Dec01/Jan02
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