The Underworld and its Archetypes

Science began, many say, with the Copernican Revolution, 1543, when a Polish astronomer put forth that the earth revolves around the sun, rather than the Earth at the center.  And so began the broader Scientific Revolution, whereupon the foundations were set, and modern science flourished as an autonomous discipline.    

But science can be argued to have begun with Aristotle circa 350 BCE, or the heliocentric theories of Philolaus in 5th Century BCE, or even Thales of Miletus, born 626 BCE, one of the seven sages, who broke from mythology to explain the world through deductive reasoning.  Science is based upon facts, and the Western Intellectual tradition is rational.  

But all cultures have gazed up at the heavens, and tried to decipher meaning.  The scientific astronomers – in the West – used Greek mythological figures to christen the constellations of stars, and so mythology towers overhead, still to this day.  Stop and consider: science at best is 2,400 years old, while celestial divination is millenia older, common to all cultures, on all continents.  We are wise to consider the archetypes in the sky above us, and what we can learn from them.  

Pluto, the planet furthest from the sun, was discovered in 1930 and named for the God of the Underworld, of the dead, also known as the Great Destroyer, Transformer and Redeemer.  

Pluto, the planet, was present above the United States on July 4, 1776 “When in the course of human events…” fifty-six founding fathers on that date set pen to paper, to sign and to state that, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  So our sovereign nation was declared.

Pluto has a very long arc – specifically 247 years to circumnavigate the sun – and it has now completed one full return, precisely exact on February 2022 through 2024.  The Great Destroyer, Transformer and Redeemer is at high noon, dead overhead again, and who among us cannot say that the United States of America is being wrestled to its core, over “truths held self evident”?

What I say here is not scientific fact, but may be an archetypal truth and the question before us, what we the people must decide, is who we are, and who shall we be going forward?  Scientific fact does little to help us here.  The archetypes seem predominate, and we are wise to pay heed, to seek answers not in the political but at our deeper, more expansive realms.  

Fear not.  As Pluto is the God of the dead, so too he is the God of wealth and agriculture; the Destroyer, he is also the Redeemer.  Persephone, his mistress, would bring back from the underworld new seeds to be planted each spring, to spawn a harvest come fall. 

And so as we move through this dark season, may we also see at hand the seeds of an abundant future.  Rather than fighting to the bottom, we the people can sow seeds of unity in diversity, we can move past an “either/or” mindset, to a “both/and” embracing and accepting a greater wholeness.

The choice, and its consequences, are ours.