Musings on Saturn-Pluto

The arc of Pluto, as I have discussed many times before now, is always toward unknowing. Like anything shut away from air and light for too long, it might turn, and become a blight that slowly poisons the host from deep within. For this reason, the darkness of Pluto’s domain must be broached to allow the world in; this breath of fresh air can transform the fetid darkness and allow the lightness of the world to leaven the oppressed demesne of Hades. But such acts of trust and faith are against instinct and rarely risked. Better to leave it unknown, we argue to the ghosts of our long night hours, that they might better slumber. But they grow restless all the same, precisely because we leave them in our soul’s oubliette, terrified at what ravaged visage we might be forced to behold in the moment of their emancipation. And that is Pluto’s great trick, because fear of the dark is far more mortifying than anything the light might descry. Ah Pluto! Cheerless captain of the occult dominions. Lord of Ruin. Sombre gaoler of our heart’s desire…

Some brave few, although in truth, more often than brave they are desperate, turn into the darkness and feel their unsteady way into the night, for it is time to face the dread unknowing. An impossibility of choices. “The dark or death!” they might cry, for that is the dilemma, and once decided, they rush forward, to have it done with the sooner, and thus the great journey begins. Time passes inexorably while the battle rages deep below, out of sight of summer meadows, unheard by children playing in the evening sun, unknown to the busy bees. Time passes and then, eventually, for it is always done with no matter how interminable it seems from within the thick of the battle, the warrior emerges victorious. Victorious for having fought, and whether or not the battle goes ill, no matter its atrocities and horrors, the warrior cannot be defeated. To fight is to win.

The arc of Saturn is to concretise, to diminish into form and matter. To formalise. The arc of Saturn tends to the solid state, the least kinetic of energies, such that movement and momentum are repressed, composite elements slow and congeal, and outer forms become set and averse to change. This sorcery operates on outer and inner forms alike idealising structure and familiarity. Over time, as even form becomes formalised, these Saturnine expressions gravitate toward conventional manifestations of form, and become orthodoxy. Orthodoxy prunes away outliers as aberrations and becomes a mere shell of itself, abhorring all difference and spontaneity. The beloved architectures of Saturn starved of all creative sustenance dry out and crumble away. The dust of once great civilisations is carried away on the wind. Such is the arc of Saturn, for to seek safety is to deny creation, is to seek death.

And when these dread Lords combine, a complexity of fears and forms and oppressions are made that are beyond simple calculation. When approached from the perspective of dull matter, it is a dread, ponderous automaton that is born, slavishly adhering to the most conventional of dogmas. The offspring of Chronos and Hades craves safety in materiality above all else. Whether it be named for Crassus or Caesar matters little, dominion over the earth can be equally bought with gladius or gold. Once enthroned, indentured sycophants are garnered as jewels in the peasant emperor’s heavenly crown. The admiring gaze of a few benighted uninitiates is mistook for divine refulgence and all progress ceases, until only the wind-worn bones of small men are left to be forgotten in the nameless dirt of long-demolished blackened brick empires.

Saturn – Pluto, progenitor of petty dominions and miserable doctrines, how pitiful you are. Goading men to aspire to the lesser dreams of countless failed forbears, your promise is a shabby, unhappy half-truth, a gospel of the already damned. Your legacy is bitterness and dust. It is the communion of fear and death that sustains only mediocrity and you offer it jealously and only to enslave, never to emancipate, to undermine rather than uplift.

This is the impetus of Saturn – Pluto, for it nurtures the seed of its own demise. It concretises death. The encroaching immobility of energy confounds the very heartbeat of creation. Lust for life becomes lust for lucre and the epicure becomes the oligarch. Then at the last, in a rheumatic effort against oblivion, desiccate dynasties are raised up to become reviled regimes. But even men who would be immortals cannot cheat oblivion, and to dust they return.

In the eternal peregrinations of the old gods, these meetings of time and oblivion are few, but they inevitably challenge even the most profound and embedded of structures, whether within or without. For those unhappy few born under the stern auspices of Saturn and Pluto, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Pluto’s phoenix might only be conjured with Saturn’s work and more work. Else it is the tired old way. But let us not dwell there today. For the world, this conjoining of fate and karma is doubly foreboding, because as is Hades’ implacable purview, he seeks what is true. He examines to discard what is false. And these tests are applied to the most established and traditional of structures. All that society, and the world holds dear is crash tested. Whatever survives is true.

Hades’ base masteries are to mask, molest and magnify. Saturn’s authority, in the outer world, is thus made secret, malign, and potent in equal measure. Before your oppressors enslave you, they first befriend you. Safe in your rights and freedoms, you clamour for their curtailment, then their annulment, and all agree, that it is just plain sense. The dark unease within becomes the enemy without and another dog-eared dominion is founded in the black dust of the underworld. The oubliette in your own soul commands you, swallowing joy and vomiting pride because to fight is to win and you chose to turn your back and let the shame lie.

So, here is a reminder for you to heed and to lend. It is a moment’s work to take up arms, for to fight is to win.

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