Saturn
will be conjoining our country's Sun and our president's Sun over the next
several months and will spend two years in the sign of its detriment. Now
is the time to sweep away the cobwebs around Saturn's lore and dispense
with some superstitions.
To work properly, Saturn's function should express the principles of consistency,
practicality and preservation. But the core meanings of a symbol can become
lost in the translation from archetype to societal expression. There has
been a lot of bad press and confused thinking about Saturn's modern face,
and looking at it through the lens of the old planetary laws raises some
interesting questions.
Saturn
has been said to govern risk-averse economics and bean-counters in general.
This is a logical correspondence, because Saturn is the planet of maximized
results through a minimized expenditure of resources. Leaving to Jupiter
the sticky business of ethics and the spirit of the law, Saturn confines
its attentions to the business sector and the letter of the law. One can
see how the politics of pragmatism came to be associated with Saturn.
But policymakers who claim allegiance to pragmatic thinking (because they
know how well it plays in Peoria) often champion policies that are in fact
astoundingly impractical. The question is, how well do we know Saturn?
Would we know true pragmatism if we saw it?
Perhaps the litmus test for Saturn is whether the viewpoint in question
relies on common sense (though this phrase needs to be used with
caution, as it has so many wildly divergent champions as to render its
meaning very slippery). Suffice it to say that Saturn is the most nuts-and-bolts
of the ten planets: it has come to be linked not with visionary geniuses,
but with competent statesmen. Clear-eyed and sober, Saturn inspires good
managers to create efficient systems on a physical planet where relatively
predictable laws are at work. It is supposed to make the trains run on
time.
That said, finding Saturn in the public sphere is not as easy as one might
think. Saturn is the planet of conservation, but it is by no means clear
that Saturn's rulership extends to conservatism in its generally
understood political meaning. Let us apply a little Saturnine rigor to
an examination of the symbolism at hand. If we agree that Saturn's key
features include keeping a cool head in a crisis, minimizing fuss so that
systems work efficiently, and securing the viability of the future, how
conservative are the National Rifle Association and Rush Limbaugh?
When a planetary archetype goes way out of balance, it runs amok. In the
USA right now, we have lost hold of the reins of Saturn; it is everywhere
and nowhere at the same time. Rather than worrying about whether we are
keening too far to the right or left, we need to reclaim Saturn's essential
teachings and put them to use. They are exactly what we need in order to
lend some coherence to the quagmire we are in as a nation and as a world.
Let us begin by taking a look at what is commonly known as the Conservative
Agenda, asking ourselves what is actually being conserved, and how effectively
it is being done. The word conservative is often used, for example, to
characterize the various religious sects which attempt through legal means
to ban birth control and sex education. But in no way do they meet the
criteria of the dry-eyed god of functionality: if a proposition veers off
the trajectory of its own stated goal, Saturn will not endorse it. Programs
to keep teenagers from having sex have a very low rate of empirical success
and thus do not pass muster. Moreover, Saturn in and of itself has no time
for emotion, and no interest in moral posturing one way or the other. Jupiterian
types may thrill to the subject matter of a passionate debate, but Saturn
cares only about results. Family-values crusades, with their penchant for
histrionics and righteous denunciations, do not belong to Saturn.
The same critique could be made of what has been called the War on Some
Drugs1.
Self-professed conservatives tend to endorse it, but how conservative is
it? If we were to measure this campaign against the yardstick of Saturn,
we would first of all have trouble with the jarring inconsistency at its
base: the core advocates of this domestic policy tend to favor a foreign
policy which, ironically, finances regimes worldwide which make their money
selling drugs, via networks so entrenched and so lucrative that our own
government has exploited them, in Latin America and elsewhere, to finance
its covert operations.
If wagers of this war imagine the goal to be stamping out addiction, they
lack the barest shred of evidence upon which to base their optimism. Year
after year, thousands of millions of tax dollars are pumped into eradicating
certain targeted plants at their source, with battle zones ranging from
the jungles of Columbia to the backwoods of Mendocino; but studies continue
to show an overall continual increase in drug use. And if we were really
thinking conservatively, surely Saturnine logic would lead us to conclude
that long prison sentences to punish the use of certain, but not all, drugs
(and not even the most dangerous of drugs) make no economic sense to anyone
but the prison industry. Whatever is motivating this doomed campaign, it
is not Saturn.
Another
group of self-described conservatives who seem to be blind to the law of
conservation are the policymakers who respond to budget crises by lopping
off human service programs. Ethical considerations aside, are these decisions
practical; do they conserve resources; are they driven by future considerations?
A truly Saturnine approach would use demographic facts and figures to project
what would be likely to happen, for example, to desperate public-assistance
recipients when their small scraps of help dry up and disappear. We might
look to the example set by Ronald Reagan, known as a conservative's conservative,
whose public-funding-slashing approach to governance is considered to have
launched the modern reality of thousands of mental patients fending for
themselves on the streets of California cities. Saturn's approach to harm
is not to fight it but to prevent it. Herein lies the genius of true conservatism.
The Reagan paradigm could be called many things, but surely the one thing
it was not was conservative.
In its
healthy expression, Saturn promotes survival into the future by faithfully
preserving that which has proven worthy from the past. This is the planet
that reminds us to conserve berries so there is something to eat in the
winter, and to conserve the rainforest so the ecosystem may continue to
thrive. With Saturn as their muse, scientists, humanists, engineers and
ecologists are continually coming up with new ideas about how to safeguard
the world's resources -- through sustainable agriculture, for example --
which cost little and have been shown to work very well. Conservationists
are also rediscovering methodologies truly deserving of the Saturnine term
traditional, by means of which pre-industrial cultures managed infrastructure
and food production while honoring the natural cycles of vegetation and
wildlife.
Such efforts get at the very heart of what Saturn is about. But it is noteworthy
that they are being pursued in spite of, rather than at the behest of,
the institutions in our society which hold worldly power. For example,
clean-fuel cars could have been built decades ago were it not for the relentless
resistance of the automakers and their government representatives. In the
current era of ecological crisis, the most genuinely conservative ideas
are showing up at the fringes of consensus thinking.
The sign Saturn is now in governs the care, feeding and shelter of a society's
most vulnerable members. The Children's Defense Fund exemplifies the transit
in name and deed. Among this group's most successful projects is the Head
Start program, which is well-known as a lifesaver for children and teenagers
who would otherwise be swallowed up by the downward spiral of poverty.
Its advocates are seeking to increase the program's funding by an amount
of money that could only be called consummately conservative (the sum works
out to be one half of one per cent of the Pentagon budget). When a program
has a track record years in the building and costs very little to create
results, it has passed the Saturn test: Head Start should be a conservative's
dream program.
The Bush administration wants to dismantle Head Start. This is not a Saturn-driven
decision. Elevated in the tenth house and showcased by a square to the
Sun, Saturn is very strong in the USA chart. If all that Saturn energy
isn't going into stabilizing and preserving and shoring up the future,
where is it going?
It seems
to be feeding into what the Jungians would call its shadow side. This is
not the fault of planetary law, but of our lack of understanding. Misunderstood
Saturn results in fear: fear of the new, fear of loss of control. This
in turn excites in the native a punitive impulse, of the sort that often
prickles beneath the surface of crusades to keep God in the pledge of allegiance
and condoms out of the pockets of teenagers.
We must pay more attention to the difference between the higher and the
lower uses of the Saturn archetype -- between true conservatism and its
distortions through fear. The planet Saturn and the sign Cancer are both
associated with security , a concept that has been heating up the
airwaves in this country for two years now. The transit now upon us is
likely to raise the issue to fever pitch.
What is the difference between security driven by common sense and security
driven by fear?
Before we can know this, we need to rescue the concept from the sound bite
makers: security has become a buzzword. The term is being touted with numbing
frequency in public discourse, while being affixed with increasingly counter-intuitive
connotations. Far from clarifying the issue, its endless official invocations
are designed to manipulate and confuse. The only thing that seems certain
is that whatever are called "security measures" by our government do not
and will not stand up to the Saturn test of rendering us more secure.
"Fear is the mind-killer", wrote Frank Herbert in Dune. In one form or
another, fear has been used by leaders throughout the ages to manipulate
their subjects. To maintain control, heads of church and state have traditionally
exaggerated threats to public safety, or put the focus on a scapegoat --
a timeworn ploy which gave rise to the Yellow Peril, the Jewish Problem,
the Red Menace, and the Devil himself. Designated enemies have always been
a surefire means of keeping a populace terrified and compliant.
In postwar America, the fear of invasion by evil outsiders segued smoothly
from the fear of vanquished Axis forces to the fear of the creeping Communist
Threat. When that particular bogeyman was banished with the fall of the
Berlin Wall, ending the Cold War practically overnight, one could sense
in this country an almost palpable collective sigh of relief at the retreat
of the nightmare that had terrorized every baby boomer's childhood. For
the first time in memory, a true feeling of security was evident, as millions
of people began to imagine a world free from the specter of nuclear holocaust.
But the
hiatus was a short one. The campaign of fear we labor under today was launched
as soon as the airplanes hit the towers on September 11th, 2001. Now, a
couple of years later, the Bush administration has announced its intention
to pump billions into building new atom bombs (the munitions makers are
taking pains to qualify these as "midlevel" nuclear devices; presumably
to produce only "half a Hiroshima"2).
Whether a return to nuclear build-up actually makes Americans more secure,
or even subjectively more secure, is a question that has not enjoyed the
widespread debate it would seem to deserve; for the Bush administration
has been basking in an almost total absence of intelligent criticism from
Congress and from most American citizens. People don't think clearly when
they are in a state of continuous anxiety. The object of this anxiety is
anti-American terrorism orchestrated by foreigners, and the agent of this
anxiety is domestic psychological terrorism orchestrated by Washington.
Surely this campaign has succeeded beyond its architects' wildest dreams.
September Eleventh used to be just a date, and is now a larger-than-life
cultural legend. The ascension of the event from factual reality to galvanizing
political tool has happened so rapidly and so completely that there has
been speculation, supported by revelations now dribbling out about ignored
pre-attack CIA warnings, that the World Trade Center tragedy was anticipated
and allowed to happen by the cartel whose interests have profited most
from it.3Whether
this explosive suspicion is ever proven, or even allowed to be pursued,
we cannot know at this writing. What we do know is that with September
Eleventh, the enterprise that used to be called the military-industrial
complex has hit pay dirt.
Washington's fear mongering over the past couple of years has worked as
well as it has by meticulous design.4Bush's
people have kept the public in thrall by means of top-of-the-line PR consultants
(such as John Rendon, who calls himself a "perception manager"), inflammatory
and obfuscating language (e.g." axis of evil") and primary-color-coded
fear charts. Having secured control of a corporate media whose approach
to debate is to shut out actual Middle East experts while showcasing the
in-house opinions of ex-generals, the Bush administration has assembled
an unprecedented sophisticated propaganda machine, its key precepts being
terror and security.
Under the banner of keeping Americans secure from a numberless gaggle of
stateless, nameless, faceless enemies, our government has snowed many otherwise
intelligent people into buying the most blatantly fallacious arguments
for war. To add insult to injury, the public is footing the bill when it
can least afford to do so. Draconian domestic budget cuts are occurring
at the same time as gargantuan increases in military funding. Taxpayers
who are so financially strapped that they are refusing tax increases to
keep public schools open are nonetheless green lighting the Pentagon
budget to bloat into surreal proportions. The Bush administration is now
easing six million dollars per hour out of American taxpayers' pockets
to fund the occupation of Iraq, an amount twice what it was predicted to
cost a few months ago.
As a concept, terrorism has shown itself to be amazingly adaptive. The
word terrorist has been gradually expanding in meaning, a trend
signaled by the president's introduction last year of the qualified phrase
terrorist-type organization during his unsuccessful campaign to
suggest a link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Whereas at first
the term terrorist confined itself primarily to the WTC highjackers, now
it is being pressed into service to refer to anything from anti-dictatorship
guerillas in the jungles of the Philippines to Iraqi teenagers who throw
rocks at G.I.s. Terrorist has become an all-purpose label, intended to
trigger a vague and all-encompassing fear (the most disempowering kind)
among American citizens so that we will look to our government to protect
us by any means necessary.
Under the guise of fighting this mysterious million-headed hydra, Washington
spinmeisters have made similarly ambitious use of the term security.
Fear is stoked, and then security is promised. This maneuver has been deployed
not only in the realm of foreign policy but also in any corner of the domestic
realm where our astoundingly cynical leaders can use it to score an advantage.
Bush's re-election campaign is to be launched in New York City with the
ruined site of the World Trade Center in the background, a setting designed
to reawaken in his audience feelings of vengeance, dread and helplessness.
Flaunting the specter of another attack on American soil, government spokesmen
have all but convinced the public that rounding up, incarcerating and deporting
immigrants of every stripe, in flagrant violation of national law and custom,
is necessary for the personal safety of those of us who do not (as yet)
fit the profile. In a development almost unimaginable just a few years
ago, the proudly democratic people of the United States have been cowed
by the millions into endorsing such police-state tactics as the use of
torture on untried incarcerees; and the use of wide-ranging domestic surveillance
by a new mega-agency whose title appears to have been deliberately modeled
after Nazi nomenclature, "homeland" substituted for "fatherland".
For a people as anti-authority as Americans are supposed to be, it is noteworthy
that although thousands of ordinary commuters and tourists have mistakenly
been flagged by terrorist-tracking "no-fly" lists, there have been relatively
few outraged voices demanding that the system be reined in. People are
so scared they are even obediently taking their shoes off in front of strangers
-- without a whimper of complaint or a snicker of irony --while waiting
in line at the airport. With big signs overhead solemnly proclaiming that
security is no laughing matter, we watch our Adidas glide by on a conveyor
belt staffed by the underpaid security workers who are presumably our last
line of defense.
Cancer governs defense of the home front, so we can be sure that Saturn
in Cancer is going to stir up interest in everything from fortified national
borders to strengthened locks and burglar alarms. The sign Cancer is closely
linked to biological survival, whence it gets its keen awareness of tribal
and blood identity. These instincts, when used consciously, give Cancer
the capacity, unique among the twelve signs, to protect itself and its
loved ones skillfully and appropriately. But an irrational fear of strangers
(non-family, non-familiar) can afflict low-level Cancer in
the personal realm; and an irrational fear of aliens and foreign governments
is the corresponding dark side in the collective realm. Cancer does not
parse intellectually or assess pragmatically when it determines the likelihood
of threat. It is a water sign, and reacts from feeling. This makes it all
the more susceptible to overreaction when Saturn is out of balance.
We are at the point now where the word defense in the national lexicon
has effectively come to mean the capability of destroying the world many
times over. With the White House to generate rationales for it and the
IRS to launder money for it, the Pentagon provides the structure and hardware
for the most lethal war capacity the world has ever known.
A significant
juncture point in the American annals of fear occurred at the moment in
our history when the old Department of War was renamed the Department of
Defense. Though the new moniker matches more closely the symbolism of the
Cancer sun in the USA chart, our current Department of Defense is of course
not defensive at all, but virulently and increasingly aggressive, with
a military expenditure will soon equal that of the next fifteen most powerful
states combined. Over the past 100 years, our country has been responsible
for the deaths of millions of innocent people all over the world. In Viet
Nam we left no less than three million dead; in Afghanistan and Iraq alone
we have killed -- at this writing -- two innocents for every one innocent
killed in New York two Septembers ago.
It is
remarkable that such staggering statistics fail to dislodge the widespread
belief on the part of many Americans that we are merely defending ourselves;
an idea whose credibility has now been strained even further by the claim
of pre-emptive defense. It says something about our collective Cancerian
sensibility that although Bush's warnings about Iraq's military were ill-disguised
pretexts from the beginning, the populace as a whole responded with very
little skepticism. Unconscious Cancerian individuals express the same psychology
when they take very personally presumed threats to their security, genuinely
feeling themselves vulnerable to attack where no objective danger exists.
When expressed without awareness and pushed to the extreme, an astrological
archetype becomes the thing it abhors. Misapplied, Saturn's instinct to
conserve only brings about waste and dissolution. Pursued blindly, Cancer's
insistence upon security renders it less secure in the end. In the weeks
after Bush claimed the right to pre-emptive warfare in Iraq, India announced
it would consider a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan; a development
that was probably not what the security-conscious among Bush's supporters
had in mind. Neither is the apartheid wall (or "security barrier") Israel
is now building in occupied Palestine likely to keep Israelis secure from
the rage of the wretched, humiliated people on its other side.
Just as we must reclaim the true meaning of conservatism, we must redefine
true security. There has never been a better time to do so: individual
and collective safety concerns become more tense and contracted month by
month as Saturn makes its way through Cancer. We do not want to have to
go through the defensive shutdowns in our personal lives that can occur
when Saturn in Cancer is out of balance, and we do not want the transit
skewed by fear when it crosses the U.S. chart.
Saturn's collective shadow guise is fascism, or the willingness of a people
to "scoot over and leave the driving to Daddy"5.
Giving up our Saturn by projecting it outwards onto some ill-chosen father
figure, we lose our chance to develop self-mastery. The challenge we are
facing is perfectly reflected in the transit's symbolism: Cancer, the sign
of the mother, and Saturn, the planet of the father, are forcing us to
confront deeply primal issues of child/parent, helplessness/authority and
dependent/protector. These themes will be played out emotionally and repeatedly
in the public arena over the months to come, and if we do not change the
script we are currently following, the drama will feature the people in
the role of the vulnerable child, and a tyrannical government in the role
of the oppressive guardian.
But another scenario is possible. Were enough individuals to commit to
the necessary self-reflection, we could fulfill the real promise of Saturn
in Cancer, rather than play out its reactive distortion. If the transit
could be said to have an intention, it is that each of us nurture and protect
ourselves and our fellows in ever-more-authentic ways; that is, in ways
that actually work. The potential for individuals and society at large
to benefit from deliberate, engaged self-parenting is stronger than it
has been for thirty years. Once the inner child is nourished, there is
no need to be enslaved by a false parent in the outside world.
This is the key to the transit now upon us, and for those who do not submit
to collective fear, the opportunities will be there in full force to turn
the key in the lock. Only in this way can we know real security. We will
require no strongman-father to promise not to abandon us, for we will be
un-abandonable. We will be impervious to protectionist blackmail, for we
will trust ourselves to know how to make our lives safe. We will be the
wise, careful parent we always wanted to have.
