Saturn's Remedy

I woke up this morning with a good dose of self-doubt, but also knowing it would appear a lot better once I was up and about! Partly it’s just a vitality thing, once you’re up you have more energy to deal with stuff. But also at night your guards are down, the underworld and its demons reveal themselves, which I’m sure is a good thing, providing we can see it as that.

It’s a fragile thing, our consciousness, it has to keep switching itself off to re-group. It’s like a bubble on the surface of a pond. At night we merge into the pond. At death we merge into the pond.

And then my thoughts drifted to the Soul of the World. The split in our culture between inner and outer. Inner is where the soul is, it’s the place of feeling and interiority and psychotherapy. Outer has become the place of science, the blind, mechanical, meaningless universe that (at worst) it envisages.

James Hillman has pointed out that Soul needs to be restored to the world, to bring us back to how the ancients felt. Otherwise psychotherapy is of no use to the world, it does not change it. I have heard or read 2 people in the last day talking about Teilhard de Chardin (who I have not read) in this respect. As a balance, in one instance, to Jung, who tended to locate the Soul within. And that de Chardin locates it without, seeing the whole universe as one big ensouled evolutionary process (albeit from a Catholic perspective.) (See The Archetypal Cosmos by Kieron Le Grice.) 

de Chardin had Sun in Taurus conjunct Neptune  - the Soul (Neptune) in Nature (Taurus). Jung had Sun in Leo square to Neptune - the Soul (Neptune) in the individual (Leo).

And all this connects with the planet I want to say something about, Saturn. I did a vlog on him, and the picture quality was crap and I haven’t got time to sort it, so here goes.

Saturn is the planet that helps us ground our lives, to give it shape, to take our spirit if you like and make it take form in matter. He is the planet who says “Don’t tell me about your visions unless they grow corn.”

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He is the planet of responsibility, hard work, patience, discipline and on a deeper level, setting our goals, even our vocation, in the world – he is the natural ruler of the 10^th house. But those qualities of responsibility etc don’t necessarily come easily when we are young, which is why the Saturn Return, aged 29 or 30, can be tough. By the time of our second Saturn Return, however, aged about 58, we know those Saturnian qualities, they are second nature, so Saturn becomes a planet of abundance instead of restriction.

He was classically one of the bad guys (along with Mars), but nowadays we say it’s about learning to work him, learning his qualities. Venus-Saturn has a particularly bad press, but I don’t think it need be like that.

Venus of all planets needs Saturn. Venus is romance, Saturn is common sense. They are in that sense opposites. Saturn on his own can marry someone just for the money or social position, Venus on her own can marry someone just because they look like a god or buy her flowers. Put them together, give them 20 or 30 years, and you can get some sound judgement around relationships. And relationships that work.

So Saturn at large makes our lives real, actual. Because of the split in our culture between spirit and matter, because of the denial of spirit by Saturnian science and by our ‘work ethic’ (with its promise of salvation), people on some sort of mission for a wider meaning often have a hard time with Saturn. Creating a life that works, that does not look down on and reject society (as banal or run by ‘evil’ capitalists or governments or whatever), yet keeps the sense of vision.

The imbalance is also the other way: we have become so good at creating wealth and inventing new technologies, that pursuing that is all that can seem to matter. This is negative Saturn: you are only what can be measured, the ‘inner’ does not exist.

This is often the problem where you see the Sun in hard aspect to Saturn. These people are very good at working hard, at achieving, but it is never enough, they are not ease with themselves, they cannot stop. The Sun is in square to Saturn in the US Chart, and you see it there, the great ability to achieve, to send men to the Moon and to become the world richest and most powerful nation; but tremendous judgement around it, dividing people into winners and losers, only feeling OK if you’re working hard. That’s another bit of Saturn – the snobbery, the creation of hierarchies of wealth and social position and the invidious looking down on others and the (secret) worship of those ‘above’ you.

So Saturn can scoop you out, in the sense that only that which can be measured has value. BUT, he can also be a protector of the inner world. He creates boundaries, and negatively this can mean loneliness and isolation (as in Venus-Saturn, until we have learnt his lessons). But positively it can mean solitude, the monk's cell, the alchemical crucible, the conditions for inner work.

So this is the point I want to make about Saturn. He is not just the worldly taskmaster telling you to get on your bike. He has an inner quality which in our world we tend to undervalue and forget. He can help us listen to ourselves, to what we are feeling, he protects us from all those voices – many of them internalised – telling us what we ‘should’ be doing, or that we’re not good enough. Saturn has a discerning quality, he can show us what to listen to within, and what to acknowledge but not to heed.

Above all, because he judges and measures, he can help us place value on the inner world, on feeling, and help us shut out the voices that say otherwise, that say being busy and working is all that matters. I have a picture of a bottle of medicine in my head, it’s called Saturn’s Remedy, and it’s a dark liquid and we need to take it once, maybe twice a day and it has a picture of a benevolent looking Saturn on the label and the medicine has a kind of magical quality that takes us inwards to another world.

Nature's Little Joke

I'm in Vancouver on an astro-tour. Off to Washington State tomorrow. Below is a piece I wrote just before I went away, and before that is a piece I put on Facebook yesterday:

Had breakfast at a place that claims to be Vancouver's most famous breakfast cafe. It's good, and one of a kind. Big helpings, as much coffee as you want. The guy running it is small, about 70, bald and with a big mouth in both senses. Says 'fuck' a lot, teases the customers way beyond what most people could get away with, and has a sign up warning parents about his language. Also has a sign saying don't ask us to get your coffee refill, get it yourself. As I was eating, he told the people at the next table that if they had finished could they please move their asses. They got up straight away, no offence taken, laughing.

I was watching a guy called Brian Swimme on youtube today – he’s one of the archetypal bunch from California along with Richard Tarnas. And he was talking about Science and he’s obviously really awed by the observable evolutionary tendency of the material universe, as well as within life itself. (They are not separate.)

Archetypally, I attribute that evolutionary tendency to Pluto, the sheer power within the universe that is always wanting to move on to the next stage; and the endless creativity of Uranus, which means that next stage is something completely new, not just a re-arrangement of what came before, something we could never have thought of. And of course Neptune, the image of a universe that appears before us and which seems so real. What was the Big Bang if not Pluto, Neptune and Uranus acting in concert?

Brian Cox (on the right)

And then someone asked an awkward question: what does he think is the eventual fate of the universe? The conventional answer of course is ‘Heat Death’, about which the boyish Brian Cox waxes so enthusiastically, and for which the ladies forgive him because he’s so charming, though not exactly hot.

The Heat Death prognosis says that eventually the universe will expand into a chilly meaningless nothingness where there is nothing of anything.

Brian Swimme gave the interesting answer that he doesn’t think the universe has yet made up its mind what its eventual fate will be. I liked that. Douglas Adams couldn't have said it better.

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Swimme was further saying that we are living in an age where the old story of the universe has gone, and the new has yet to be born, and it needs to include the discoveries of science. I agree, up to a point.

But I also want an opt-out clause, or science becomes more than a story, it goes over to the dark side and becomes a 'fact' - the 4th kind of lie (along with Mark Twain's lies, damned lies and statistics.) And we need more than one story, ideally one that contradicts the science story!

A Canadian Indian friend in his 60s had a much older Indian friend in his 90s who wanted to know what this big deal science thing was about, so my friend did his best to explain, and the old Indian’s response was “So the horse shits”. Meaning that science explains the mechanics of the material world and that’s all, it’s low-level stuff.

Is that the case? Is science separate from philosophy, from anything that gives significance to human life? Certainly when it comes out with theories like Heat Death, then it seems to me positively anti-life, it is a demonised view of the universe, it makes me angry that it should be given credence just because some people can make the numbers add up on paper. And if I’d been Swimme, I would have said so, but then I would have lost academic credibility, because science has to be refuted scientifically rather than on human and philosophical grounds. 

It’s got it all sewn up, hasn’t it, a bit like Christians and the Bible 500 years ago? You can’t reject Heat Death just because it is an inhuman demonization of the destiny of the cosmos, you have to do it mathematically, and how would I ever do that? The modern mythopoeic elite has surrounded itself with a wall of numbers and none of the rest of us – the 99% - can contribute to that story.

For me, the deeper nature of the universe reveals itself not directly through science, but ironically when its method breaks down, which to me it seems to at extremes. Science is just a model, based on the idea of ‘Let’s pretend the universe is an object external to ourselves that is governed by purely material laws and whose nature we can discover through rational investigation.’ I have no problem with that, don’t think I’m anti-science, I’m not, I love it. But it is a model of the universe, not the universe itself, which is clearly unknowable in its deeper nature. 

And when you push a model to extremes, it breaks down, and that in my opinion is what happens when you push the scientific method to investigate reality at ever smaller and ever bigger levels – it breaks down, and you end up with the counter-intuitive quantum reality at one end, and nonsensical results like the universe is 96% undetectable dark matter/energy at the galactic end.

Now Dark Matter, that’s a good one. And if we think about Dark Matter as a story, mythologically, psychologically even, it is saying that our ignorance far outweighs the little bit we know. The unconscious can show its wisdom through jokes, and I think Dark Matter is one of those jokes. It’s maybe saying that we are getting MORE ignorant through science, through that approach to reality, because it has become THE way, we need to dance with it more lightly. 

The more we push science at the quantum and galactic extremes, the more reality recedes, leaving a paper trail of little jokes. I think Douglas Adams would understand that. Certainly Patrick Harpur would, the man from whom I learned to think Mythologically (along with my Canadian Indian friend): I recommend his book, The Philosopher's Secret Fire.

I think the big shift could come through brain research, which is starting to receive megabucks of funding. There are major projects in Europe and the USA to map the brain. And however philosophically naïve you are, when you research the brain you are faced with the created nature of the reality around us, its story-like nature, and you know exactly which bit of the brain creates what, deep structural stuff like time and space, you even know which bit of the brain creates the illusion of an object called the brain! So it’s deep, it’s paradoxical, it’s profound. I don’t hold much with collective human awakening, not for very long at any rate, and not to any great degree. But I think if anything can turn humanity into a metaphysical creature on a collective level, brain research can.

Sun-Pluto and the Gospel of St Thomas

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." 

That is Saying No 70 from the Gospel of St Thomas. 

It sounds to me like Sun in hard aspect to Pluto. With Sun and Pluto, you have 2 very different principles at work. The Sun is reaching upwards towards the light, towards individual unfoldment. It is conscious, ‘civilised’. Pluto represents a call from the primordial collective consciousness, from the raw, undifferentiated power of nature. It is the Sun that needs to learn to understand and honour Pluto, and this can take many years.

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The Sun pushes forward into the light, and Pluto keeps pulling it back, saying you are incomplete. You have this nagging feeling of disempowerment that keeps you awake at night that you cannot shake off. In some ways you have the power of Pluto, you have a strong confident presence. But there is this hidden tormented side to you that contains your true power, and you maybe project it onto lovers or parents or bosses or teachers and see them as having power over you, but eventually you have to go within and claim it or it will keep eating at you.

You may even experience it as a curse, an affliction that runs through the family that has also got you, but if you are reading this, you are probably the one with the strength to make it conscious and claim the gifts buried deep within it.

So with Sun-Pluto you can’t just jog along and hope to get away with it. You have powers within you that life is pushing you to claim, and Pluto has this horrible way of trampling you down until one day you go no more and at last you stand up.

And in claiming that gift, and your independence with it, self-doubt is your companion. It is a fire you have to go through, and keep going through, because you are putting your deepest self, your soul if you like, into the world. 

And others recognise that, they respond to that. People long for that authenticity that Pluto gives. And people who want to live by the rules – well, they might admire you from a distance, they might even dip their toes in your waters now and then, but you are not safe, you can’t be predicted, because Pluto rather than Saturn is your master. Your recognition has to come from within.