The New Human 1
Earth’s Twilight — Chapter 02.1
The Era of Saturn
Let’s face once again the ambiguous profile of our time.
What is its secret essence? That of the end or that of a new beginning?
Are we old, waiting for everything to finish, or are we young, waiting for everything to start again?
The time of our history, the human time, situated within the biological time, billions years old, in turn a fraction of the geological time, inaugurated by the big bang between 10 and 20 billion years ago, is the finish line of an evolutionary path about to end, or is it the irreversible trend of an evolution that has finally found the sense of itself? The spark that lights this road of ours, randomly deployed at the periphery of one of the many existing galaxies, is a benevolent spark or a cruel one? Is it a god that loves its own children, or is it a god that generates them and then devours them, as Saturn in the old mythologies?
Those are questions as ancient as mankind, to which no definitive answer is given, if we attain to the reality under our eyes. This ambivalent signs of the present are mutating the once-mainstream positivistic optimism into a feeling of incertitude about the human existence that is mining, for a growing number of individuals, the same possibility of living a meaningful life.
Right around the turn of the first millennium, would circulate in the Arab neoplatonic milieu a collection of texts that later enjoyed, under the title of Picatrix, a widespread diffusion between the humanists of the 15th century. One of those texts was a prayer directed to Saturn (the Kronos of the Greeks, he who would devour his children, and that by an escaped son, Zeus, was confined to the underworld: divinity of the heavens and of the Hades) where we find a chilling example of that ambiguity of life we’re talking about:
“O Master of sublime name and great power, supreme Master; O Master Saturn: Thou, the Cold, the Sterile, the Mournful, the Pernicious; Thou, whose life is sincere and whose word sure; Thou, the Sage and Solitary, the Impenetrable; Thou, whose promises are kept; Thou who art weak and weary; Thou who hast cares greater than any other, who knowest neither pleasure nor joy; Thou, the old and cunning, master of all artifice, deceitful, wise, and judicious; Thou who bringest prosperity or ruin, and makest men to be happy or unhappy!
I conjure thee, O Supreme Father, by Thy great benevolence and Thy generous bounty, to do for me what I ask”.
A thousand years later, after the collapse of the reassuring ideologies of progress, we find ourselves once again under the rule of this double-faced god that brings with him “prosperity or ruin” and makes humanity “happy or unhappy”. Even the scientists, since they have led mankind beyond the frontiers of the physical and genetic atom, appear to be at the mercy of Saturn, at the same time benign and merciless, wise and deceitful, agents of illimitate progress and incumbent catastrophe. By focusing on the analysis of the present — this is what we learn from the perplexities of those involved in the effort of predicting the future of humanity — reason appears to be incapable of solving the enigma. The deciphering key lies within human nature. But wasn’t it double-faced as well?
Homo duplex
According to an illustrated archetype from Jungian psychology, mankind is both senex, old, and puer, young. We are ruled, in the depths of ourselves, by this dual polarity.
That of the senex is apathetic, abstract, calculus-oriented, constantly reducing the quality assessment to quantitative measurements; it signifies the loathing of novelty, of any creative flair; it requires the principle of self-identity, of A=A; it’s the rejection of the different, of any reason that can’t be explained by an orderly geometrical approach.
In a word, the empire of the senex is the empire of order. The cultures change but the order stays. Saturn advances under the guise of many different masks, outside and inside ourselves, us that even at the dinner table passively indulge with the hierarchy of desires subliminally programmed for us by the television ads.
Are there, between us, any poets still able to awake the young boy asleep within ourselves? Are there left, in the cities of today, devoted spaces for the bards to lead us with their music along the magical paths of our hidden memories, of our forbidden dreams? Towards different landscapes from the ones insistently suggested by the corporations? If it were true that history is over, if the dialectical dynamics of reality had definitively come to an end since the disappearance of the last standing antithesis, then we would be really living in the time of Saturn, the pernicious senex, the cunning executioner of hope.
But the kingdom of Saturn is always uncertain (after all, isn’t he duplex, inhabiting simultaneously hell and heaven?) because there is within us the other polarity, that of the puer: the excitement for the beginnings, the pleasure from surprises, the love of contradiction, the divine folly that exceeds any set boundary. The senex raises walls and the puer tears them down, the senex, as the rulers in Plato’s city, would like to regulate even the mating between man and woman, the puer weaves extravagant plots (isn’t Cupid, with its bow and arrows, a young boy?) so that free love can overcome any pre-conceived ruling. The secret impulse of the senex is that of thanatos, death, he is necrophiliac, since he lives by the other pole of life, that were life fades away. He generates his children to consume them later. It’s because of him if we are instilled with the existential doubt by which life could be evil in itself, since it implies a rupture with the pristine coherence every being is initially supposed to have with itself, life seen as a disease whose only cure is death, as stated by Socrates right after drinking the hemlock. This mal de vivre is more than the mere effect of some misfortune; it is a primeval feeling that secretly accompanies even those who apparently enjoy the everyday seductions.
The greatness and misery of humanity lies therefore in the inseparable link between senex and puer.
The challenge and nobility of life lie in our effort to conciliate order and love, conservation and creativity, respect of the traditions and wish of starting all over again.
If the link breaks down and the compensating feedback effect of a pole on the other weakens,
both the individual and society enter a crisis that can resolve either with a tightening of the given order or with novel spaces being allowed to the creative forces.
In that singular historical phase that characterized the 13th Century in Italy, the puer Francesco d’Assisi (novellus pazzus in mundo, as he would call himself) had to confront himself with the senex Innocenzo III and, more generally, with the Ordo of the secular theocracy. A dangerous wave of crazy youngsters appeared suddenly throughout Europe, but the Ordo managed to diplomatically reabsorb the alarming Franciscan spring, thanks to the newly instituted Roman Inquisition body.
This is the tragic side of our history: Necessity (the moira, the ananche of the Greeks) is on the side of the senex;
to the puer is left the task of interrupting for a moment the chain of necessity, so to reactivate, along with hope, the possibility of new horizons not marked on the current maps of power.
The task of the puer is not to revolt against the status quo; Rebellion means its death, as happened to the protesters in Tien An Men square, guilty of chanting puerile messages at the shadows of the Great Elder.
The fate of the future cannot commit itself to the clash between the two polarities, but instead, as we’ll try to describe, to a modification at the roots of their dialectic;
especially today that everything, even procreation, appears to be under the control of the senex, already programming eugenic combinations apt to produce human specimen of great intelligence and building in that perspective a spermatic bank counting in its files many Nobel laureates. If Erodes had ordered the massacre of every child under the 2 years of age to try and prevent the birth of the puer par excellence, today, in the years of genetic engineering, the senex is confident of achieving the same result covertly, without the need for a bloodshed.