Jessica Murray's writings on astrology and current events - www.mothersky.com
RQ's featured article - September 2005
Pluto, Taboo and Power
by Jessica Murray
September 2005 is Pluto month.
The most distant planet in the solar system, Pluto pivots
in the sky twice a year. Planets are especially potent during the few weeks
around their stations. Like a photographer saying "Hold still", the
cosmos is giving us a chance to look more carefully than usual at the planet's
meaning.
And what a look we're getting.
Hurricane Katrina
- This month's direct station took place on September
2nd at 3:51 am PDT, the day the storm on the Gulf Coast moved in for the
kill. But the real shock to the country's system is Katrina's aftermath,
a cultural scandal now rising from the toxic sludge of a ruined New Orleans.
Collective taboo - Pluto governs collective breakdown: corruption, mass destruction,
toxicity. Its stations function to expose the dirty secrets hidden
beneath the highly sophisticated veneers of a nation's bureaucracies. A
great many Americans are being wrenched into unsavory realizations about
the way their country operates, as they witness hundreds of thousands of
their fellow citizens suffering through conditions that are incessantly
being referred to as happening "only in third-world countries".
Racism and poverty - The abomination of slavery ended in this country only
a century and a half ago, and the mass mind has yet to come to grips with
it. Racism is one of America's great dirty secrets. A national ethic of
disdain towards the poor, which we justify with fanatical adherence to
a capitalism-gone-terribly-wrong (Pluto in the
U.S. 2nd house), is another. Katrina has revealed
both in short order.
The crisis has made glaringly evident the criminal negligence
of the American government, whose first bright idea in damage control was
to scapegoat the victims. Stories are emerging of survivors
who, after waiting on rooftops for five days, watched helplessly as one
after another rescue boat passed them by, manned by rifle-toting National
Guardsmen on the lookout for property theft. One family reported being
finally rescued by several neighborhood men who'd found a broken rowboat,
defied shoot-to-kill orders and single-handedly delivered hundreds to safety
(meanwhile, the media was busy getting photo-ops of looters for the evening
news). One would not be surprised to hear these unsung community heroes
described any day now by our president as terrorist boat-jackers.
The Bush administration's next big project looks to be
a long, drawn-out cover-up of the calamitous institutional failure of their
rescue operations. But it is too late to cover it up. The hurricane crisis
has exposed a moral bankruptcy in the upper echelons of power: the problem
being not a fluke of nature, but a hidden rot at the core of the American
system.
The symbolism of the transit tells us exactly where to
look for the meaning of this event. Pluto's job is to reveal root-deep
decay.
Individual taboo - Individual taboos too are revealed by Pluto transits.
Pluto's house position hints at the origin of those peculiarly intense
personal dramas that seem to occupy a psychological category all their
own. To make sense of what this national drama means to each of us in terms
of our personal karma, we go back to the natal chart, and review the house
in which Pluto was positioned at birth. Here we will find clues as to the
individual teaching that we are to draw from the collective event.
Next we identify what house of our chart Pluto is currently
transiting. This will clarify how the external world has provided just
the right circumstances, as always, to help us confront whatever we must
confront in order to transform our lives; though it feels like death to
do so.
Once we have located where in our life situation Pluto
is most active, we know where to start paying attention -- for the learning
has just begun -- and how to make sense of the great taboos now being exposed.
The readier we are to look, the more palatable the lessons will be. The
best way to approach this time is to use it an opportunity to face the
untenable, express the unmentionable, and accept the unfathomable.
Pluto rulerships - We sensitize ourselves to Pluto's teachings by stepping
back from current events and our feelings about them, and repositioning
ourselves in the big picture. It's always a good idea to begin by reviewing
the list of daunting subject matter assigned to the planet by astrologers
over the centuries: its
mundane associations.
But it is not enough to read "Pluto governs sex and death",
for instance, and let it go at that. To accept such linkages at face value
teaches us nothing; one might as well wonder whether it governed drugs
and rock & roll. No matter where Pluto falls in our chart, we've probably
experienced sex, and most assuredly we will experience death.
The question should be: Whydoes Pluto "govern"
these things? What's the common thread beneath its rulerships?
Taboo - Pop astrology attaches a perverse glamour to Pluto. Its
lore is loaded with superstition but little real understanding. And when
you consider the sorts of things Pluto is said to rule over, you can see
why: dispassionate thinking about these particular topics is rarely done.
Taboos discourage their own exploration.
There are taboos that are almost universal -- cannibalism,
for example -- but ultimately the concept is relative. Taboos vary from
culture to culture, family to family and individual to individual. In American
society, sex, death and the occult are the three big ones.
A good indication of Plutonian rulership is the fact that there are libraries
in existence in this country today that would ban books on these topics.
Arguments for maintaining a taboo, though they vary widely, tend to combine
strong emotions with intellectual chaos. Such rationales come from the
viscera, not the mind.
Let us leave specific taboos to the anthropologists to
enumerate, and turn our attention instead to the very existence of taboo:
its essence; the energy from which it derives. What's going on when a society
tacitly decides to hold a whole realm of inquiry at arm's length? How does
Pluto fit into the act of declaring certain subjects beyond the pale?
The Mechanics of Taboo
All taboos involve the same strange social mechanism:
a culture's religious/moral agencies clamp down on the topic, attach to
it a floridly negative evaluation, and declare it off-limits. This in turn
creates an underground traffic of some kind, whereby the glamour of the
topic is preserved and maintained.
Direct communication about the topic is disallowed except
as curses and insults (e.g. motherfucker, which gets its charge
from the Oedipal taboo); or when reference to it becomes necessary in polite
company, in which case euphemisms are pressed into service. As if to distance
the speaker from the subject matter, euphemisms tend to be either awkwardly
scientific, or coyly juvenile ("I have to visitthe little girls' room").
That which is forbidden - We don't need astrology to tell us that it is human nature
to obsess over that which is forbidden. We know that the most sexually
repressed societies, like Victorian England, are the ones with the most
entrenched sex industries. We can easily imagine that if the powers-that-be
suddenly outlawed chocolate as the work of the devil, its cachet would
skyrocket overnight. Our question as astrologers is to investigate why
this is so.
What are the impulses behind hiding? Tradition
links Pluto with the idea of invisibility: that which is underground, literally
(bunkers, caves, oil) and figuratively (spies, heretical thinkers, terrorists).
In any study of archetypes, if we look at such examples metaphorically
rather than literally we will find our way to the fundamental meaning of
the symbol.
Secrecy - In individuals as well as in groups, the dynamics of secrecy
are orchestrated by Pluto. Among its mundane associations are objects that
are out-of-sight (detective novels, lost-and-found departments, classified
documents, microscopic particles) as well as psychological energies that
are out-of-sight (suppressed memory syndrome; "blindspots"). An act of
hiding may be enforced and deliberate, as when we swear to secrecy; or
it may be inadvertent, as when we repress our desires through shame.
Pluto is at work either way.
The injunction in some families against mentioning a relative's
suicide has the same root as the injunction in Hindu Bali against leaving
the god's mask uncovered overnight.
Sacred secrets - If we look beyond the evaluations that are usually attached
to it, the essential meaning of taboo begins to arise. The term comes from
the Polynesian word for sacred. Stripped of all moral or philosophical
connotations, taboo conveys the idea of dangerous potency.
With fear out of the way, and with notions of "good" and
"evil" out of the way, we start to see the essential impulse behind declaring
something taboo. It is a respectful one, even a practical one: a prohibition
intended to forestall prematurity of action and immaturity of spiritual
intention. Taboos represent the understanding that some things are so powerful
they have to be protected from misunderstanding and casual misuse.
Esoteric law
- This is the thinking behind all esoteric traditions. In
the ancient mystery schools, it was believed that only those truth-seekers
who had cultivated a requisite level of consciousness should be allowed
access to the group's inner sanctum, where the most potent information
was stored. This was the original meaning of the Major Arcana -- or Greater
Secrets -- of the Tarot deck, which is now known as a fortune-telling
device but was probably designed to be a step-by-step initiation into enlightenment. 1
Death - One of the Dark Mysteries that esoteric laws were established
to protect was the death of the physical body. Throughout human history,
funerary rituals have been considered the most sacred of human rites; and
until the current epoch it was thought that only the wisest of the wise
should be entrusted to conduct them.
We can only speculate about how people felt about the
dying process, back when the world was young. But it is probable that pre-historic
humans accepted death very much the same way other denizens of planet Earth
accept it. It seems a natural assumption that in the beginning, animals
and plants, from the single-celled on up to the human variety, lived by
the same planetary laws.
Ancient View of Death
To early humans, the circularity of the life cycle was
a given. Evidence from archeological findings and creation stories the
world over suggests a universal worldview which held that all living things,
human beings included, follow ever-repeating cycles: birth leads to death
leads to rebirth. This, in a nutshell, is the law of Pluto.
Before the sky-god religions (Judaism, Christianity and
Islam) rose to dominance, a movement that began around five thousand years
ago, spirituality was Nature-based. The Earth was seen as a Great Mother,
and all living things were her children. When death came to a member of
the tribe, it was the crone priestess who presided over last rites. It
is said that she cradled the dying in her arms like a newborn child, crooning
the funerary version of a lullaby. The pronouncement of anathema
was the priestess' official statement that the dying person was about to
cross the mortal threshold, and should prepare for the great surrender.
Christian spin - During its long campaign to stamp out the old beliefs,
the Christian church grotesquely misinterpreted ancient rites such as these.
The calling of anathema was construed to mean a curse. Churchmen
told their flock that the ritual was a Satan-powered
act of aggression, whereby an old woman was magically causing someone
to die.
These were not mere theological distortions. They were
the strategic decisions of a new institution trying to consolidate its
power. Through the canny misinterpretation of ancient rites, the church
conducted the world's first mass negative propaganda campaign ever attempted
on this kind of scale. Needless to say, it was quite a success.
Under the new priesthood, it was untenable that female
elders could be charged with the power to announce the Mysteries. All evidence
of feminine religious authority had to be expurgated. Here as with so many
other tenets of ancient cosmology, the church found a way to cast blame
for death onto the feminine principle. During the centuries that followed,
the old priestess' rite mutated into a rationale for the persecution of
"witches".
But the spin churchmen put on the calling of anathema
has an even more profound significance. It points up the way our thinking
about death has changed over the ages. No longer a sacred phase in the
wheel of life, death came to be seen as a non-inevitable calamity of which
humanity was cause as well as victim.
Looking death in the eye - When ancient priestesses looked death in the eye,
they were conducting an instructional sacrament: they were showing their
tribesmen how to face the ineffable with courage and respect. That churchmen
saw this ritual as an act of agency, intended to harm, tells us much about
how modern thinking came to distort the role of the human ego in the death
process.
Any historical analysis of the early church must confront
the question: What inspired church fathers to come up with the truly perverse
new explanations of mortality, sex and childbirth that they came up with?
How much of it was pure political co-option; how much projected collective
neurosis?
However we explain their motivation, their edicts heralded
the way death would be seen by an increasingly dis-ensouled world. Eventually
their explanations came to be accepted as normative, and evolved into a
cosmology whereby modern people imagine themselves to exist outside of
and at odds with Nature, and alone in the Universe.
Death becomes taboo - Many pre-Christian traditions, Buddhism included, teach
that we achieve enlightenment only through a personal acceptance of our
own death. Though teachers abound in these traditions, they are not considered
necessary. The direct and intimate nature of soul-search is thought to
require no intermediary; indeed, ultimately such interference is a cheat.
We must each traverse this ground alone.
But under the Christian system, independent explorations
into the Mysteries were condemned as heresy. Looking death in the eyewas
outlawed; and by prohibiting it, the church suppressed the likelihood of
a person reaching spiritual maturity. Christians were denied the license
to cultivate their own unique spiritual intelligence. Passivity was encouraged.
It became a crime even to ask questions that didn't fit the program.
Thus the church made death taboo in the modern
sense: too dangerous to talk about, think about or confront.
New death stories - For untold millennia before the father-gods appeared,
death had been seen as basically wholesome. Nature was sacralized unconditionally.
Death was Her way of recycling human energy. If modern linguists had access
to their languages, we would likely find that ancient peoples' word for
death
would translate to death/rebirth: the two were seen as flip sides
to the same coin. Like childbirth, death was revered as part of the fabric
of a nurturing universe.
But with the advent of the patriarchal religions, humanity
was presented with a whole new set of death stories: stories of a bellicose
and rejecting deity, of inborn human evil and hideous punishment. The new
myths wrenched humans out of their sense of planetary belonging.
Death became linked with fear.
Fear and Evil
The new cosmology proposed that the human mortal cycle,
both individually (procreation) and collectively (the expulsion from Eden),
originated in sin and folly. Through various tortuous contortions of common
sense, church patriarchs invented explanations of sex and death that managed
to dissociate humans from the rest of the natural order. In a complete
departure from intuitive logic, they introduced the taint of evil and shame.
Indeed, the church passed a papal bull declaring it a heresy to declare
death a natural occurrence.
The changeover from the original view of death to the
Christian view was a revolutionary philosophical crisis. It was the most
critical ontological threshold humanity has ever crossed, marking the chasm
between the primitive mind and the cosmically estranged modern mind.
The new death stories represented a definitive parting
of company with Plutonian law.
The conquering priesthood - Every society has a priesthood: a group given exclusive
license to explain the Mysteries to the people of that culture. For the
past few centuries, Western science has been wresting control of this license.
If we take a broad enough historical view, we begin to
see that notwithstanding the current clashes between Darwinists and creationists,
the truth is that modern science itself evolved out of the victory of the
patriarchal church over the ancient ways.
Back when the great Goddess-to-God shift was taking place,
the contest for the right to explain the Mysteries was between folk ("pagan")
tradition and Christianity, whose crusaders were armed to the teeth and
dispatched to "convert" heathens across the globe. It took several
thousands of years of persecution, pogroms and inquisitions for the new
system to prevail.
It is no wonder that it took so long. One can only imagine
how freakish the idea of original sin must have sounded to the goddess-worshiping
cultures that came under the conquering sword. To ancient peoples,
the idea of demonizing sexuality was not merely bizarre; it was a sacrilege.
And for the church to condemn across-the-board the entire race of women
-- givers of life, like the Goddess Herself -- must have seemed an incomprehensible
blasphemy.
Ultimate power play - But it was the new way of looking at death that ultimately
turned the tide. Fear of death was the primary tool the church used
to bury the Old Religion and enforce loyalty to what were called Christian
laws.
To declare death an aberration was a consummate power
play. Cajoling the populace away from seeing their own death as part of
a larger cycle, as organic as leaves falling from the trees at the approach
of winter, the church presented death as a weird human error that could
be rectified only through institutional intervention. By enforcing the
belief that death came about through human wickedness, death became a problem.The
ultimate problem; and one that no amount of self-knowledge or independent
spiritual search could solve. There was no choice but to submit to the
priests and popes, follow their rules and pay their tithes. Otherwise the
horrors of hell awaited.
It was the biggest scam in human history.
Church teachings go secular - In time, the church's teachings worked their way into
what we think of as the most resolutely secular institutions of society:
politics, education, the environment... indeed, the whole consensual definition
of reality.
The church made it its first order of business to denounce
reincarnation as a pagan travesty. This campaign proved largely successful
in the Western world, where great cosmic truths are now under the auspices
of a scientific establishment that dismisses and ridicules the idea of
past lives. And by declaring it taboo to sacralize Nature, church founders
laid the groundwork for the kind of modern thinking that leads us to treat
the environment as a commodity to exploit and consume.
The new teachings had impact far beyond the theological.
What Christianity did was to formally outlaw the ancient, circular view
of existence, and substitute a linear model. The new model said: We are
born and then we die, and whatever happens after that is forever. This
worldview has become so ingrained that atheists and fundamentalists alike
hold it as an unquestioned assumption (the former consider what happens
after death to be a moot point, while the latter consider it to be the
whole point. But both consider after-death experience to be final and static).
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this
change in the collective worldview. The modern mind considers it axiomatic
that human life -- and Time itself -- operates in a line, not a circle.
Death is seen as the phase farthest away from birth (just phrasing it this
way sounds absurdly self-evident; which tells us how deeply entrenched
the notion has become). By contrast, the ancient mind saw death as the
phase that took a person's life full circle. Thus it was the point closest
of all to the point of birth.
Ideas go underground - But taboo ideas do not disappear; they just go underground.
Liz Greene has suggested that every two and a half centuries, when Pluto
moves through Scorpio, the sign of its rulership, widespread interest in
the phenomenon of death-and-renewal rears its head again, despite all manner
of cultural injunctions against it.
Greene has associated Pluto-in-Scorpio through history
with the reawakening of interest in various doctrines which reclaim humanity's
place in the natural order of ever-repeating cycles -- all heresies in
the eyes of the church. These include reincarnation, astrology, alchemy
and other occult traditions.
The New Physics, which entered the collective vocabulary
in earnest during the late 80s and early 90s when Pluto was last in Scorpio,
is of course not new at all. Its basic tenets are merely the most recent
restatement of the eternal truths: that everything in the universe is connected,
and that energy can never be created or destroyed, but just changes form
-- the key premises of the Old Religion.
Cell-Deep Knowledge
Unlike the historians of ancient Mesoamerica or India,
whose astounding calendars bespeak a vast, macrocyclic perspective, Western
historians have tended to confine their attention to the couple of thousand
years that have transpired since the classical Greeks and Romans:
the definitive benchmark of "civilization". Schoolchildren learn that all
earlier epochs comprise a vague, undistinguished mass called "pre-history",
which was populated by stereotypical "cave men" and where nothing of import
happened.
To the extent that we in the First World are all educated
in this myopic perspective, we overestimate the proportion of human history
that the father-god theologies have been in power, while underestimating
the depth of collective memory that we retain from humanity's earlier tenure
on the planet.
Pockets of resistance - When the whole of human history is taken into consideration,
it starts to seem only natural that pockets of resistance to church law,
like astrology, have survived every effort to wipe them out. Eternal truths
are nothing if not resilient. Pluto's teaching -- that all things die and
come back in another form -- is as basic a law of Nature as there is. It
is written into the hard-wiring of human consciousness just as it is into
that of animals and plants. It isn't something we have to learn;
it's something we have to remember that we know.
It also seems likely that each of us carries within our
cells the memory of those rituals which honored Plutonian law; rituals
that were practiced for thousands upon thousands of years before the relatively
recent sky-god religions which abolished them. Deep species-knowing cannot
be stamped out, even by centuries of oppression and brainwashing.
I believe we also retain deep collective memory of the
gallows and the stake -- for those who were lucky -- and the rack -- for
those who weren't. Nine million women are estimated to have been killed
in the name of the father-god during the European Renaissance, an epoch
glorified for being a high point for (male) education and the arts; but
which, for believers in the Old Ways -- or those mistaken for same -- was
one long Abu Ghraib.
Pluto and death - As we have seen, the church's redefinition of death was
an artificial construct, a brilliant stroke of power-mongering. It
so obscured the fundamental essence of mortality that we cannot make sense
of Pluto's governorship until we move beyond the theological nonsense.
Only then are we in a position to look at the essential Natural Law that
matched Pluto up with death in the first place; and to use Pluto transits
-- like this month's station, which sent Hurricane Katrina as its messenger
-- as an opportunity to look death in the eye.
1 - For an exhaustive work of scholarship on the origins and history of the tarot, see Barbara G. Walker, The Secrets of the Tarot, Harper and Row 1984.
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More of Jessica Murray's writings on astrology and current events can be found at www.mothersky.com
Contact Jessica Murray at jessica@MotherSky.com or (415) 626-7795.
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