Government Under the Moon, with Saturn Descending

On the semiotics of the heavens in predicting our future

My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne, Hath more power than wot any man. Myn is the drenching in the see so wan; Myn is the prison in the derke cote; Myn is the strangling and hanging by the throte…

From Chaucer, The Knight’s Tale

Our age is under a spell that is cast by the Moon. It is an age of madness, of metaphysical breakdown, of a generalised anxiety that knows no exact cause or resolution. It is an age in which the old certainties no longer hold, and the ‘order of the soul’ has been upended - an age in which all bets are off. It is an age in which bizarre and flagrant lies are cast as truth, and in which people behave in hitherto unfathomable and uncomfortable ways; an age of apocalyptic cults and strange prophecies and moral confusion and profanity. It is an age characterised by sudden rashness and yet by overabundance of caution; it is an age of a loss of courage in convictions. It is an age of forgetfulness - and an age of denial. This makes the Moon an apt symbol for our times, because of its long association with madness and ‘lunacy’, with strangeness and discombobulation, with unpredictability and topsy-turviness.

I speak of course in metaphor - I am no astrologist - but I make no apology for doing so. Metaphors are how we understand the world, yielding deeper and more important insights than any purported fact, statistic, or logical proposition. Metaphors are powerful and dangerous, as Milan Kundera once warned us: ‘a single metaphor can give rise to love’. And by providing us with a more complete grasp of the present than any understanding gleaned from the concrete, metaphors can also give us glimpses of the future that awaits us. They can tell us how our age will end - a subject to which I will return towards the end of this post - and what kind of age will follow as the government of the Moon passes.

CS Lewis was a thinker with a keen understanding of the semiotics of the Moon. In Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia (2008), we learn that Lewis’s plan for the Chronicles of Narnia had what in modern parlance we might call an ‘Easter egg’; each of the Chronicles is secretly inspired by the symbolism of one of the seven planets as understood by the medieval scholastics - i.e., Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, the Sun, the Moon, and Saturn.

The second-to-last of these, ‘Luna’, is characterised by its ambiguity and changeability. The Moon is sometimes the brightest object in the night sky but sometimes is not there at all; it travels here and there and never seems to be in the same place twice; it lies in a liminal space between ‘aether’ (or heaven) and ‘air’, or nature, with one side always looking up the former, and one side down to the latter. And because of this quality in particular it sits at the border of a ‘great frontier’. To be above the Moon is to be in the realm of ‘necessity’ as opposed to ‘contingence’; in the realm of the ‘incorruptible’ versus the ‘corruptible’; in the realm of angels rather than of demons. And to be below it is find oneself in a place where the reverse is true. To be below it is to be within the world of the profane where to be above it is to dwell in sacred heaven.

It follows that the Moon is not to be trusted - it is flighty and fluid and one is never sure where one stands with it. And it is therefore a potent symbol of madness and strangeness, of unpredictability and mystery, of discombobulation and confusion. It is the world under whose influence live lunatics - and, in particular, to gaze up at its surface from the world below is precisely to fixate on all that is beneath the ‘great frontier’: all that is contingent, corrupt, and demonic.

The Chronicle that corresponds to the Moon is The Silver Chair (1953), and we see these themes revealed in its central passage. The children Eustace and Jill, together with their marshwiggle comrade, Puddleglum, have descended far below the surface of the world to an underground city from which they are attempting to rescue the lost Narnian prince, Rilian. In the middle of making their escape, they are hypnotised by the villain of the book, a witch who plays enchanting music to them, and who challenges their memories of the surface world and Narnia in particular.

Though the main characters insist to the witch that they wish to return to the surface, to the open air, to the sky and the sun and the stars, she gradually convinces them that none of those things exist - that there is actually only the underworld, and that is all that is real. Their memories of the surface are just ‘fancies’ which they, childlike, are extrapolating from the objects around them. Thus when they remember the sun they are really just imagining something having seen a lamp; when they remember Aslan the lion, they are just imagining a cat. And it those things, the lamp and the cat, rather than the sun or the lion, which are ‘really’ real:

You have seen lamps, and so you imagined a bigger and better lamp and called it the sun. You’ve seen cats, and now you want a bigger and better cat, and it’s to be called a lion. Well, ‘tis a pretty make-believe, though, to say truth, it would suit you all better if you were younger. And look how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.

There are many different meanings to be found in this passage, but at the centre of it is the idea of what might be called rationalistic madness. To the rationalistic mind, the world below the Moon, the ‘sublunar’ world, is all that there is. There is of course a physical universe beyond it. But symbolically there is nothing ‘superlunary’ - nothing heavenly, nothing angelic, and nothing divine. All that there is (and this is also a semiotically Satanic idea) is encapsulated in the temporal realm and what human reason can deduce from it.

This, Lewis indicates, has the appearance of common sense, of logic, of being ‘grown-up’, but in fact it is a kind of hall-of-mirrors in which nothing can be properly understood because it rests only, and precisely, on what is sublunary. A lion, and the sun, cannot be seen for what they are because they can only be conceptualised in reference to their sublunary qualities.

There is in this a thinly-veiled criticism of the materialism of the likes of Feuerbach and Marx, who saw religion as a mere ‘projection’ of humanity or a part of the superstructure erected on society’s economic base. But there is also here a critique of modern, secular reason as such - a recasting of that reason as resting on, as it were, moonshine: lacking any foundation or telos and reducing everything to less than the sum of its parts. A lion is a lion, and the sun the sun, on the basis of their physical qualities alone - there is no lionness, no sunness, that exists independently of the atoms and molecules from which those things are ultimately made. And thus the bigger picture, the richness of metaphor and spirit and symbolism which imbues meaning into existence, is missed. Existence itself takes on a thin, flighty, gossamer-like quality - resting on nothing, and possessing no real substance. And as a consequence our thinking can be blown this way or that, and can be made to take flight to all sorts of weird and wonderful locations, totally untethered from a real understanding of the universe and our place in it.

This is a rich metaphor to describe the oddness of our time. But this is not the only place in Lewis’s work where we find the Moon used in association with the theme of rationalistic madness. In a central passage in That Hideous Strength (1945), we see it appear again in the recounting of a conversation between Filostrato, the crazed Italian eunuch-scientist, and the main character, Mark, as they gaze at the night sky after dinner.

During the meal, Filostrato has pontificated about the disconnection between mind and body, and the final victory of the pure, inorganic intellect over the dirty, petty, savagery of the human form. He has told Mark and others seated around the table that he dreams of a future in which the world will be ‘shaved’ of life - of trees, plants, birds, etc. - like a beard. ‘It is simple hygiene,’ he has declared, since organisms produce only ‘filth…sweat, spittles, excretions’.

And since this is also true of human beings, who are of course organisms like any other, the human form must, he has told his audience, be transcended. Sex must be cast aside as an ‘anachronism’ in order for ‘real civilisation to become possible’, and our minds must be released from our physicality entirely in order that they can fulfil their true potential:

In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould — all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it…Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation.

Having set out his stall in this way at the evening meal, Filostrato then takes Mark to talk in private in his office where they can gaze out at the Moon:

Filostrato turned sharply from him and with a great scraping movement flung back the window curtains. Then he switched off the light. The fog had all gone, the wind had risen. Small clouds were scudding across the stars and the full Moon — Mark had never seen her so bright — stared down upon them. As the clouds passed her she looked like a ball that was rolling through them. Her bloodless light filled the room.

‘There is a world for you,’ Filstrato declares, ‘There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen, not one grain of dust. Not even air.’ And as he gazes up at it admiringly, he describes it - we do not really know if this is reality or fantasy - as being inhabited by a ‘great race’ who have ‘cleaned their world’ and ‘broken free (almost) from the organic’:

They do not need to be born and breed and die; only their common people, their canaglia do that. The Masters live on. They retain their intelligence: they can keep it artificially alive after the organic body has been dispensed with — a miracle of applied biochemistry. They do not need organic food. You understand? They are almost free of Nature, attached to her only by the thinnest, finest cord.

In the name of ‘hygiene’, he goes on, this ‘great race’ have almost completely succeeded in ‘disinfecting’ their world, which once was covered in water and forests, so that its ‘organic stain’ will vanish forever. And this he describes in glowing terms as an example for those beneath the Moon, on our world, to follow: an ‘inspiration’ that gestures towards a future in which we will exist only in our own minds, and organic life will have been expunged from our planet forever.

There are three important themes to tease out of this strange passage. The first of them is Filostrato’s egocentricity - his hyperrationalism. For him, the mind and body are separate, and indeed the latter only serves as a kind of prison or constraint for the former. In his ideal conceptualisation, the mind will eventually be able to leave the body behind entirely, and live in a world of ‘disinfected’, ‘hygienic’, ‘pure’ reason.

The second is his strong hostility to sex or ‘copulation’, which he declares ‘disgusts’ him. What we want, he insists, are not ‘stallions and bulls’ but ‘geldings and oxen’ - a pliant population who have been, as it were, bleached of their passions and warm-bloodedness. Sex should disappear, because sex and reproduction keep mankind tethered too strongly to the impure organic realm - rooted in the body rather than the mind.

And the third is his association of life with death, and, ultimately, his desire to transcend both. For they are, he tells Mark, ‘the same thing’. To live is to die, and the ‘conquest of death’ must therefore accompany ‘the conquest of life’. His dream is ‘to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature’. Nature, he continues, ‘is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.’

Filostrato’s speech has a different emphasis to that of the witch in The Silver Chair, but its essence is the same. Something goes wrong when humanity limits its imagination to what is ‘sublunar’ - what exists below the face of the Moon - and refuses to look beyond it to the ‘superlunary’ heavens. The result in Filostrato’s case is something more profound and disturbing than the witch’s mere pseudo-post-structuralism. It is, rather, a deification of human reason itself: since there is no God, and no meaning in the universe beyond what human beings can read into it, then it follows that human reason is the most important and powerful force that exists. It can transcend physicality, since that is the locus of life and death, and remake Nature itself to conform to its desires and imperatives. And it can transcend reproduction, too, since that is a mere feature of the fact that we live and die - a regrettable necessity that will be sloughed off when reason has won its final triumph.

These sublunary themes - rationalistic madness; egocentrism; the rejection of sex and reproduction, and our organic physicality itself; and ultimately the desire to transcend death - are characteristic of our current, disorienting moment. Our lives have become ruled by scientism, by the mindless pursuit of what ‘studies show’. We are governed by bizarre flights of fancy, given inspiration by the idea that we have obtained perfect understanding of the world through modelling and the gathering of evidence - as though nothing could be more sensible than to attempt to dim the sun through geo-engineering, to wear face-masks to stop viral spread when walking about in a restaurant but to take them off when seated; to close domestic oil refineries in the name of preventing climate change while importing energy generated from carbon; and so on - all in the name of responding to what is modelled rather than what is real. We imagine that our reason can bend reality itself - that we can declare that men can be women, that algorithms can be ‘intelligent’, that wealth can be made from thin air, etc., and that these things will simply be so. We have less and less sex and produce fewer and fewer children, all while retreating into masturbatory digital spaces where we can enjoy ourselves without the messiness of ‘organic’ entanglements. We disconnect our minds from our embodied selves by spending ever-increasing proportions of our daily lives staring at screens big or small. And our public and private lives are increasingly dominated by a small group of extraordinarily wealthy tech entrepreneurs whose chief obsession seems to be cheating death - whether through ‘mind uploading’, transhumanism, biohacking or the ‘quantified self’.

We live, that is, sublunary lives. We gaze upwards and see, metaphorically, only the Moon looking down at us - we do not turn our gaze past it to the celestial sphere. We are trapped in a maze of reason which we imagine can take us to any destination or our choosing, and we fantasise that our choices are unrestricted by anything so petty as nature. We make a habit of believing not just impossible but foolish things, all the while convincing ourselves that we come ever closer to a perfect understanding and mastery of the world around us. And at the same time we know ourselves, increasingly, to be floating on moonshine - to have no clear idea what to do, how to behave, what to think, or what to feel, from moment to moment, hour to hour, second to second. Where is it that we are heading?

Towards the start of this post I hinted that the period of government by the Moon appears to be passing. And it cannot have escaped your attention that we are at the cusp of something altogether different to what I have described above. We appear to be in the early stages of a transition from this age of disorientation and confusion, this age of the Moon, to a different age entirely. Something more serious, more dangerous, more conflictual seems to lie ahead. We look to the future with foreboding. There is war in the air - we can hear the drumbeats from somewhere beyond the horizon - and generalised sadness and despair. We seem, to continue the semiotic riff on Lewis’s astrological ideas, to be about to slip from a lunar age to one that is more properly called saturnine.

Lewis believed his generation, the generation who passed through the First World War as youths, to have been born under the sign of Saturn. This is because, while in the medieval mind the Moon symbolised ambiguity and fluidity, Saturn symbolised all that was ‘old and ugly’ - the passing of years; the coming of melancholy; darkness and coldness; pestilence and death. Known as The Greater Infortune, or Infortuna Major, Saturn heralded bad luck and treachery and the terrible weight of aging. His basic essence was that of sorrow, and this was therefore the enduring motif of Lewis and his contemporaries - a generation who had known true sorrow, and who had therefore prematurely aged.

To be under the sign of Saturn is to be (in Ward’s words) ‘astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory and serious’. It is to be accustomed to violence and fear, to brutal conflict (rather than the heroism of battle in the ‘martial’ sense), to death and disaster. It is to be intimately familiar with the grim and the bleak. Saturn represents nihilism and misery - the passing into decline and ultimate fall.

This was not the end of the story, because Lewis was insistent that literal ‘joviality’, i.e. Jupiter, was at the true centre of the universe. But it is significant that the Chronicle of Narnia which was written to symbolise Saturn - The Last Battle - comes at the very end of the series. And it is surely no accident that it comes sequentially after The Silver Chair, which as we have seen is the book which Lewis wrote in response to the symbolism of the Moon. The suggestion that the madness of a ‘sublunary’ age will be followed by a descent into a saturnine abyss is inescapable when the Chronicles and their astrological motifs are thought of in this light. And it implies something about the spirit of our own moment as we appear to start the transition precisely from the influence of the Moon to Saturn.

To repeat: I am no astrologist. But symbols and metaphor are important, and human affairs are governed more than we realise by signs, themes and associations. The medieval conceptualisation of the planets may not have reflected what we ‘know’ with our sublunary scientific method. But we should entertain at least the notion that it had nested within it deeper, intuited understandings about our place in the universe - understandings that we have lost, but which a man with the proper aptitude and training, as Lewis was, may have regained.

And as we look at the world around us we sense, I think, that things are spiralling downwards - and with fair rapidity. We may not be able to put our fingers exactly on what went wrong, because the decline is so generalised (for all that it is not evenly distributed). But we feel a sense of pessimism about the direction in which events are moving. Whereas the past ten to fifteen years have been characterised by a giddy, surreal ascent into the literally lunatic fantasies and illusions of ‘wokery’, we are now - are we not? - feeling a mood beginning to descend that is altogether other: ‘woke’ has indeed peaked, but it is being replaced by something, to repeat, that is ‘astringent, stern, tough, unmerry, uncomfortable, unconciliatory and serious’.

There are many harbingers of this, of course, in the international sphere and the domestic. The world has grown cold. And we sense in our leaders that something is hardening - as though they too are gazing on the future with foreboding. Though ill-equipped to face that future, they at least seem to understand that it will contain few days of wine and roses. They seem to intuit that a time is coming for steel, rather than smiles. And a seriousness has come over them as a result. The era of Jacinda Ardern, of ‘empathetic leadership’, is finished. The talk now is about coming crisis - about preparation and security rather than compassion and caring. The talk now is fighting talk.

This turn towards grim seriousness is perhaps necessary, and inevitable, in order to slough off sublunary, rationalistic madness. But it heralds the dawning of a new age in which genuine disaster is at stake. Saturn appears to be coming, ‘old and ugly’, as the Moon retreats, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that deep sorrow is afoot in the years ahead. This may not be literally written in the stars. But that an era of saturnine tenor will follow one of lunar character may nonetheless be a truth encoded, obliquely, in the celestial symbols the medieval mind created. It is certainly the case that Lewis, consciously or otherwise, seems to have intuited that disaster follows from madness. And we can feel that sequencing play out in the mood of the times as our own madness gives way to premonitions of something worse.