(Not) a Saturn Culture

The immediate trigger for publishing this post is as a response to a comment I saw from a modern astrologer out on Facebook. The person was talking about the planet Uranus, and how Uranian people are the change agents, the rebels against what he called our Saturnian culture. This is a very common cliche of modern astrology.

I maintain that it takes only a moment’s thought to realize this is not true, and our current culture is very close to the exact opposite. In simple terms, Saturn represents age, tradition and that which is established and passed down to us. Uranus in modern astrology represents the new, the youthful, progress and change.

We live in a culture that worships youth, and change and the new, a culture that denigrates, attacks and despises anything old or traditional. We are not a Saturn culture at all.

This essay is extracted and adapted from my recent book, Saturn through the Ages: Between Time and Eternity. It is part of a series of chapters where I am examining various people throughout history and how they interpreted Saturn. In the section on modern astrologers I have a chapter on the influential psychologist James Hillman, who comes out of a Jungian framework and who has had a big influence on what is now called Archetypal Astrology.

Please note that this essay was originally written in late Summer 2019. I think that this essay anticipates and describes many developments in our society since then.

James Hillman and Archetypal Astrology

James Hillman (1926-2011) was a Jungian psychologist who eventually went his own direction and, to quote from the Wikipedia page, moved towards what is now called archetypal psychology. Hillman was not an astrologer himself, but he was very influential, and here he is talking about the meanings of Saturn as a psychological archetype. In this section I want to focus on how Hillman’s approach vividly illustrates many of the assumptions of our modern world. The way he uses the meaning of Saturn here is characteristic of much of modern astrology.

This is from the introduction to the essay by Richard Tarnas p 11, talking about Hillman.

“Hillman …(is) using his insights into Saturn and the senex to reveal and subvert the orthodoxies he perceives as both structuring and constraining our cultural imagination.

Hillman deftly deconstructs not just the field of psychology but the entire religious-philosophical meta-structure of Western civilization.

He was always the fearless dissident, whatever the setting.”

Notice the stance of rebellion. Deconstruct means destroy, tear down. Subvert has a similar connotation. The assumption here is that “the entire religious-philosophical meta-structure of Western civilization” needs to be criticized and destroyed. It is evil because it is constraining, limiting the imagination.

The assumption is that limits are evil, structure is evil. And the “fearless dissident” Hillman is taking on the task of rebelling against it. This is Uranus the rebel outside the ring of Saturn the constraining structure. Historically this stance of the “fearless dissident” is very popular and is a kind of modern norm, and being the fearless dissident has been popular since at least the late 1800’s.

This is actually the language of heresy over against orthodoxy. Heresy is a technical religious term, and only really has meaning in the context of traditional Christianity. The shadow of the Christian church towers over this whole discussion with so much force that it is still being rebelled against over a century after Nietzsche proclaimed that God is dead. Hillman is a modern day brave Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the church door. Archetypal astrology is in the form of a Protestant heresy – and note that the word Protestant just means Protester, and it is a characteristic stance of our culture.

There is a strong streak of modern culture that is in a stance of rebellion, of destroying old structure. In some ways we still live in a post-Christian world, a world in rebellion against that order. We live in a world of protest. The old structure is an evil to be deconstructed, subverted, torn down, destroyed – and Saturn is often used as a symbol for the old structure. The focus is on being over and against a structure to be destroyed. The new is not clearly defined, and I think that is intentional. The future is intentionally conceived as unformed, indefinite, open-ended. It is hinted at, implied, suggested, approached sideways.

This is freedom FROM restriction. This is the open-ended, formless world of the modern outer planets and infinite space past Saturn. It is the stance of Uranus, the planet just past Saturn, and we see that pairing of meanings repeatedly in modern astrology. If you want to talk of archetypes, I think of it as the stance of the rebellious child and teenager over against the elder parent and ancestors.

In this next section Hillman talks of senex and puer archetypes. In plain English, senex means very old person, and puer means child. In my comments I will use the plain equivalents rather than the Latin technical terms to clarify the meanings. The emphasis in this next paragraph is mine.

“the main image of God in our culture: omniscient, omnipotent, seated and bearded, a ruler through abstract principle of justice, morality and order…The high God of our culture is a senex god…”

Hillman is identifying the traditional structure of Western Judeo-Christian civilization, and all of the traditional structure of the traditional Christian God and world view, and summing it up by identifying it with the senex, a senile, old and dying man. Note that this is the first and only reference I have ever seen to Saturn as being omniscient and omnipotent. I think that reference is to the Christian God he is identifying with an old man here, rather than relating that to Saturn.

“Because this archetype expresses all that is old, ordered and established, it has particular bearing upon our culture and its supposedly dead or dying God.”

“The breakdown of structure is the death of this particular structure, who is the Principle of Structure”.

Now Saturn is identified with the breakdown of all structure, of the Principle of Structure itself. Structure is one of the core meanings of Saturn.

“If the central fixation of our religious consciousness has aged into remote transcendence, there to wither and die, then the image in which we have been cast, reflecting this main god, is also passing away… The ‘de-struction’ of culture and the breakdowns in individual lives result from the transition of the senex dominant…”

“What the Greeks called Kronos, and the Romans Saturn, our tradition has worshiped as ‘Our Father which art in Heaven.’ But gone from Heaven, and Heaven gone too, the senex now can be best encountered indirectly, through psychological phenomenology.”

Traditional astrologers do not equate Saturn with the Christian father God image. I think he is saying that the structure of Western civilization is breaking down and dying, or may already be withered and dead. The Principle of Structure itself is collapsing. There are no fixed truths anymore, and all is change and flux.

Metaphorically Hillman is making an important point – we’ve smashed the house of the Father. The static order, the cathedral of the heavens, is gone, and the winds of chaos and change are blowing in from the outside. We are living in the ruins of a post-Christian world. I think he catches something very important about our modern world here.

I want to talk about the change in worldview that Hillman is so vividly and clearly illustrating here.

The metaphoric stance of our culture has changed. The spire of the Gothic cathedral soaring up into the heavens has morphed into the Skyscraper, with a sort of magnificent stripped down rectangular plainness. The Gothic church aspires to God, the skyscraper is humanity ascending to the heavens, acknowledging nothing higher than itself, more like a tower of Babel.

The word “destruction” is written as “de-struction” partly to illustrate it means to break down structure, and also because it defuses some of the concrete meaning and emotional charge of the word. It looks more abstract and less threatening than just using the word itself – something like, I didn’t mean destruction, I meant de-struction. To Deconstruct a building sounds a lot less threatening than to destroy it.

De-struct, subvert, deconstruct – all of those are evocative and deliberately vague buzzwords in popular culture.

If the Principle of Structure is withered and dead then what remains is open-ended lack of order, a potential for the new. If we really look at the evocative technical terms he uses, he seems to be saying that it is time for traditional western civilization to be destroyed, to collapse. De-structed, deconstructed, means torn down, ripped to pieces.

God is no longer in Heaven, and Heaven itself is gone. The Principle of Structure is gone. What we are left with, is images in the mind – archetypes. And, these are images in the mind with no external referent or judging standard. It is open ended, it has potential, there is no fixed structure. Now that external Principle of Structure in the Universe has collapsed – or, in other words, now that God is dead – the only place to look for meaning, the only place where “the gods” still live, is within our minds. As with modern materialistic science, the external universe of matter is value-free, and has no inherent meaning other than what our minds impose on it.

There is a problem here with this model in explaining how astrology can be valid. If the gods exist only in our minds, then there is really no reason why there should be any correlation between the movement of physical bodies in the heavens around us, and anything at all of meaning in our lives. It cuts the ground out from under any meaning to astrology other than as personal projection. It also makes it very difficult to make sense of mundane or world astrology having any significance at all.

Hillman speaks of the high god of our culture as being a “senex god”. Given that senex means old man or woman, if we live in a senex culture then it should be a culture in which senex values are highly honored and respected. This would mean that old age is honored and respected, and that the tradition of previous generations is respected and passed down.

I maintain that our current culture is the exact opposite of a senex culture. Our culture worships youth and not age, the new rather than the old. Far from being in brave rebellion against our current culture, I think Hillman is very typical of it.

We are in a culture that worships youth, that worships the new, that dismisses and denigrates the old, and that believes in perpetual progress. Much of our current culture is in a general stance of youthful rebellion over against a tradition that is perceived as outmoded, repressive, structured, withering and dying. The general stance of our culture values freedom, and it is freedom FROM all restriction, a movement towards limitless expansion. It is a breakdown of all restriction to expand metaphorically into limitless outer space, or limitless inner psychological space.

I originally wrote this essay in September 2019. Then as now, there are a couple of very prominent examples in the news of children and young adults being spokespeople, or authorities, or bearers of important messages. There are some examples of youth gathering as groups in demonstrations and rallies, and there are a few young people being given prominent front page news coverage to have their say on current issues. The unspoken assumption is that we are supposed to listen to them precisely because they are young. They are the future, they are the new authorities, so their voice weighs far heavier than that of old people, whose time is past and should now step aside and let the young take over.

We do not live in a senex culture; quite the opposite. We live in a culture that worships the young and the new, and devalues the old and outmoded and old fashioned. The brave young rebels are the new normal, and the heretics and protesters are the new orthodoxy.

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The quotes from James Hillman are from an essay titled, On Senex Consciousness. This appears in the book, Saturn and the Theoretical Foundations of an Emerging Discipline, edited by Grant Maxwell and Becca Tarnas, Nashville, Persistent Press, 2016. The essay has an introduction by Richard Tarnas which I also quote.