Does The Discovery Of The Outer Planets Invalidate The Astrology Of The Ancients?PLUTO

Since Pluto was first sighted on

January 21,1930, the world has witnessed

the horrors of Hiroshima, Hitler, and

Dachau—end the rise of modern-day

terrorism. We need not rewrite the

history of World War H in these pages

to give evidence that Pluto is indeed

a planet whose movements at tunes coincide

 with mass destruction and death.

By Daniel Heydon
 Death has always been with us, but it is only since the unleashing of the de­structive power of the atom at Hiroshima in 1945 that humanity has contemplated the possible extinction of the planet Earth itself—a horrifying thought indeed. 
 
With Pluto in Scorpio in 1500, Heironymus Bosch painted "The Last Judgment" (a triptych) and people then feared the end was near. In that painting, the sky was slashed apart and fire dropped from the air on burning cities—perhaps an early un­conscious rendition by an artist of the mushroom cloud that later rained fiery destruction on Hiroshima. In 1500, the world did not literally come to an end. Pluto's transit then signaled the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of an age of exploration. This year marked the beginning of the transition from a Christian to a secular civilization.1
 
With Pluto’s entrance into Scorpio in 1984, our thoughts again returned to apocalypse. Many wondered if George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, would prove prophetic in its description of the dehumanization of man in a mechanistic and totalitarian so­ciety. Or did Pluto in Scorpio signal the end of civilization as we know it and the beginning of planetization, as thinkers such as astrologer Dane Rudhyar and culture-historian William Irwin Thompson hope­fully foresaw?
 
As Thompson writes, "Teilhard de Chardin first observed the planetization of na­tions in the 1940's, in his essay on the atom bomb. He noted that the more the nations built armaments to separate themselves and maintain their sovereign independence, the more the very armaments forced them to come together in a new international system. And so the planetization of nations is the emergence of a new world order. The opposite of planetization is simply thermo­nuclear war."2

 

 

Pluto often operates through paradox. Associated with the sign Scorpio—saint and sinner, black and white—Pluto con­fronts us with extremes. For example, the atom bomb is the symbol of both our power and powerlessness and is central to any discussion of Pluto, as the following astro­logical facts will confirm.
 
Pluto was first seen on January 21, 1930, at 18° Cancer 18'. When Saturn by transit reached this degree—to be precise, 18° Cancer 14'—on August 6,1945, at 8:15 A.M. J.T., the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. When transiting Uranus by di­rect motion arrived at 18° Cancer 19' on October 3,1952, Britain's first atomic bomb tests were made in Australia,; when Uranus by retrograde motion returned to 18° Can­cer 28' on November 6, 1952, the United States exploded its first hydrogen bomb. (Also in the same year, President Harry Truman laid the keel of the first atomic submarine, Nautilus.)

 

The eighteenth degree of the cardinal signs is often involved with nuclear developments. The birth of the Atomic Age began with the splitting of the atom at 3:25 P.M., December 2, 1942, at the University of Chicago. The degree of the midheaven of that chart is 18° Capricorn 09. Signifi­cantly, physicist Enrico Fermi, who split the atom, also had a Midheaven of 18° Cap­ricorn 43'. The destruction at Hiroshima was a fulfillment of potentialities inherent in the chart for the splitting of the atom.
 
The dangers of radioactive fallout was reinforced in the public's consciousness by the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island on March 28,1979, with Pluto at 18° Libra 09' and then again with Ground Zero week, which began on April 18,1982, with Saturn at 18° Libra 13'. As of April 11, 1982, forty books on nuclear issues were scheduled for publication during 1982, the most cele­brated of these being Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth.
 
Clamor over nuclear disarma­ment occurred with Saturn's station at 19° Libra during 1982: then, it squared Pluto's posi­tion at the time of discovery and Saturn's position in the chart for Hiroshima. Sym­bolically apt are Rudhyar's key words for 19° Libra, "Group Protest." 3
 
ORTEGA AND THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES
 
We have to ask ourselves, "How did the liberal dream of progress through scientific development lead to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?" In the same year as Pluto's discovery, Spanish philos­opher Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses notes the divorce between science and culture, science and morality
 
Whereas an Einstein had to study Kant before he could arrive at his own theories, the average scientist is knowledgeable in his own field but, more often than not, ig­norant of matters that lie outside his spe­cialty. The increase in specialization in science has led to an emphasis on tech­nique and an ignorance of cultural values.
 
Ortega goes so far as to say "that the actual scientific man is the prototype of the mass-man. Not by chance, not through the individual failings of each particular man of science, but because science itself—the root of our civilization—automatically con­verts him into mass-man, makes of him a primitive, a modern barbarian." 4
 
In most areas of life, the average scientist shares the same materialistic standard of the mass-man, which is a desire for the products of science, such as automobiles, without an appreciation for the philosophic principles that lay behind civilization. Ortega is not criticizing the creative scien­tist, but rather the technicians of a science wed to industry.
 
The marriage of science and capitalism has helped create the mass-man, who is spoiled in Ortega's eyes, for he is born in a world, which caters to his taste for material ease. The average or mass-man is content to utilize the products of scientific, civiliza­tion without feeling the need to develop his own creative potentials.
 
Also contributing to the phenomenon of the mass-man is the accelerated growth of population that occurred during the 19th century. Ortega notes that from 1200 to 1800 AD., the population of Europe was fairly constant, numbering around one hundred eighty million, but tripled in the next century. The sheer number of people who seemed to come from nowhere were suddenly everywhere. This sudden growth of the masses resulted in the glorification of collective values over individual ones.
 
Since the discovery of Pluto, we have witnessed the rise of the mass-man to a dominant position in our civilization, whose economy depends on satisfying his needs. Scientific technology wed to capitalist goals has helped create a rebirth of barbarism in the emergence of the mass-man.

 


 FASCISM

 

Ortega's book was published shortly after the onset of the Great Depression which followed the stock-market crash of 1929. The decade that followed the discov­ery of Pluto witnessed the consolidation of power by Fascist leaders in Italy, Spain, and Germany. These totalitarian governments were supported by the masses and had a philos­ophy of government that glorified the state and assigned to it control over every aspect of national life. The emphasis on "the will" and a doctrine of the survival of the fittest place Plutonian values to the forefront, yet we should note how the arrival of Fascism was a natural outgrowth of a world caught in the throes of a Neptunian crisis, exem­plified by confusion and hopelessness.
 
As psychologist Rollo May says in The Meaning of Anxiety: "Fascism was a com­plex socioeconomic phenomenon, but cer­tainly on its psychological side it could not be understood without reference to anx­iety. Of particular importance are these phases of anxiety—namely, the feelings of isolation, insignificance, and powerlessness of the individual."(5) May also notes that anxiety [Neptune] creates hostility" (6) [Pluto] and that fascism "is born and gains its power in periods of widespread anxiety [Neptune]. (7)
 
The com­bined influence of the disillusionment felt in the wake of World  War I and the poverty that accompanied the Depression of 1929 left a void in which totalitarianism took hold. Note also how Franklin Roosevelt came to power in the United States and inaugurated his New Deal, created govern­ment jobs for the masses, and was quite a popular president with them because of the hope his leadership offered.
 
SEX: THE LINK BETWEEN WILHELM REICH AND D. H. LAWRENCE
We get a confirmation of Ortega's view that the emergence of the masses brought about a rebirth of primitivism and barbarism in the writings of  psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, whose The Mass Psychol­ogy of Fascism was published in Germany in 1933. He says, "It is generally clear today that 'fascism' is not the act of a Hitler or a Mussolini, but that it is the expression of the irrational structure of mass man."(8) To Reich, all individuals have some elements of Fascist feelings in their makeup and these feelings stem from repressed primary biological needs, which have been sup­pressed for thousands of years by Church and State.

 

In Reich, the need for sadistic power be­comes linked with repressed sexuality. At the core of his beliefs is the feeling that the orgasm is a link between man and the cos­mos, in that natural sexual release also re­leases a primal energy, which he called the orgone. This same energy, which he be­lieved permeated the universe, is at the core of artistic accomplishments.
 
Reich later developed the orgone box, a device he claimed would restore energy. Even though the Food and Drug Adminis­tration declared his orgone box fraudulent in the 1950's, Reich's theory bears a strange sympatico to ideas voiced by the contro­versial English writer D. H. Lawrence.
 
It is no accident that D. H. Lawrence died on March 2, 1930, eleven days before the discovery of Pluto was officially announced to the world on March 13, 1930, for the Plutonic themes of sex, death, and rebirth are the subject matter of his collected works. Interestingly enough, his natal Pluto is at 3° Gemini 16' and he died at age forty-five when transiting Pluto made a semi-square to his natal Pluto. It is almost as if Lawrence had to hang on to life until the discovery of the planet which would insure him that the mass of humanity would un­derstand his message, even if they weren't acquainted with his writings.
 
The false selves that we acquire through living in a mechanized and impersonal civilization can be stripped away in an honest sexual relationship. Through sex one could become alive to the individuality of self and others, as well as be in tune with the cosmos. For Lawrence, sex provided the individual with a way to be simul­taneously unique and universal, yet sepa­rate from the common herd as represented by the mass-man.
 
This is one of the core meanings of Pluto. Yet, as described by Lawrence himself in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he fell short of capturing in words what is essentially a primal experience. His readers got caught up in the graphics of his descriptions as keys to a better sexual technique than as a doorway to the experience of self, others, and the cosmos.

 


 THE BLUE ANGEL, ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, AND ORGANIZED CRIME  

 Despite the sexual revolution of recent decades, in the seventy-seven years since Pluto's discovery, man is still wrestling with problems of sex and violence. Reich's feeling that there is a bit of the sadist in all of us, which is linked to sexual repression, seems to make sense when we look at the gangster-moll films of the 1930's.

Woman as femme fatale made her ap­pearance in Josef von Sternberg's classic film, "The Blue Angel" (1930) starring Marlene Dietrich. The Plutonic phoenix, which rises from the ashes, makes a strange appearance as Rath's dead canary and the feathers on Lola's post-card portrait.

The power of obsessive love to destroy is depicted in this story of a schoolteacher who becomes infatuated with a cabaret dancer. He gives up his career for her and ends up as a destroyed man, while she con­tinues life with her latest lover. As Lola, Dietrich sings, "Men cluster to me like moths around the flame, and if their wings burn, I know I'm not to blame."

The first serious depiction of crime as it actually was in America appeared in 1930 with Edward G. Robinson in Little Cae­sar. The same year, Arthur Conan Doyle died and Dashiell Hammett became heir apparent to Doyle with The Maltese Falcon. Hammett invented a new genre of detective story, featuring a hard-nosed private eye, Sam Spade—a far cry from the deductive reasoning and gentility of Sherlock Holmes.

In real life, Pluto, Lord of Hades, be­comes the real God of the Underworld, for the 1930's saw the beginnings of organized crime with the partnership of Lucky Lu­ciano (an alleged mafioso) and Louis Buchaler, who created an interstate crim­inal organization known as the Syndicate. Prior to the Syndicate, gangs fought among themselves in the prohibition days. Again, we see a connection between Neptune and Pluto. Prohibition (Neptune) gave rise to organized crime (Pluto).

The Syndicate was an invisible govern­ment which apportioned territories and profits. To make sure its rules were fol­lowed, it hired a band of professional kill­ers who performed over one hundred mur­ders in a ten-year period (1930-1940). The band was known as Murder Inc.; it was formed in 1930, the same year that Alfred Hitchcock's film Murder was released. Also in that year, the Lindbergh baby was born; the boy was kidnapped and murdered two years later. This resulted in legislation against kidnapping, though it did not pre­vent its recurrence.

DEATH, REBIRTH, AND FAULKNER'S LIGHT IN AUGUST

 
Though the discovery of Pluto signaled the return of the daimonic to con­sciousness, the first examples of its work­ings on the human stage was of an unregenerate humanity. With the Lord of Hades in the guise of Pluto, the new ruler of the planetary hierarchy, it would seem that hu­manity was once more in need of a redemptor to take on the sins of the world, which seemed more numerous than ever some nineteen hundred plus years after the death of Christ.
 
It is in literature where we see our first workings of Pluto as the planet of Death and Resurrection. The phoenix which rises from the ashes and is reborn has its Chris­tian corollary in the example of Christ, who was crucified, descended into hell, and on the third day rose into heaven. Both Auden and Graham Greene published their first works in 1930; in subsequent years, they wrote about death and resurrection.
 
We have to take a special look, though, at the early works of William Faulkner. His masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury, was published in 1929, the year before Pluto's discovery. The action in this book takes place on an Easter weekend, begin­ning with Good Friday and ending with Easter Sunday. However, the reader quite familiar with religious themes may become lost in this tale of darkness where there are only flickers of light.
 
Faulkner's Christ figure is a thirty-three-year-old idiot, Benjy, who babbles incoherently. One truly has to ask what is going on here, for the violence, sexuality, and isolation of the characters echo that of real-life man around the same time of Plu­to's discovery. Again, in Light in August (1932) Faulkner confronts us with another Christ figure in the character of Joe Christ­mas, who is also thirty-three, the same age as when Christ died. Like the idiot in The Sound and the Fury, Joe Christmas experi­ences castration.
 
A birth, a death, and a resurrection are depicted in this book, but these events do not happen to a single character but are divided among three separate characters. Joe Christmas, the Christ figure, dies; a woman he never meets gives birth to a child; and a third character, Hightower, tries to help Joe Christmas out but fails. However, he does help the woman who gives birth to a child. It is he who experi­ences rebirth and ends his isolation from his fellowman.
 
What is implied here is that death/rebirth is a process in which more than one person is involved. It is achieved through a sense of community, a quality which Hightower develops and uses for his resur­rection. But resurrected to what? To a common humanity, to qualities most ordi­nary humans in life, who are not damaged, have as their birthright?
 
Faulkner's message perhaps does not be­come clear, but a look at his writings for an insight into the meaning of Pluto does succeed. We are all the Christ—or, at least, we have been put in that position with the discovery of the outer planets. The people asked in Faulkner's works to undergo the Christ-trip have the same consciousness as those mass-men, whose qualities were enumerated by Reich and Ortega. Their mission in life is to find themselves—and perhaps in the perilous route to rediscover the roots of their humanity, they will stum­ble on their divinity.

1.  For a more detailed discussion of the relevance of Bosch to now, see William

Irwin Thompson's Darkness and  Scat­tered Light, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978, p

74.

 

2  ibid., p. 82

 

3  Dane Rudhyar, An Astrological Mandala,Vintage Books, New York, 1974, p. 185

 

4  Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of theMasses, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York,

 

 1932, p. 109

 

5 Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety, Pocket Books, 1979, New York, p. 172

 

6 ibid., p. 172

 

7 ibid., p. 11

 

8.  Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Farrar, Straus & Goroux, New York, 1970, p. xx