THE PUER-SENEX STRUGGLE
A Note.
Samten de Wet
Albrecht Durer, Portrait of a boy with a long beard
To understand the archetypal struggles embedded in the myths and their astrological equivalents, we have to place these fables in context. For example, the conflict between senex and puer - between the power of age and the power of youth, is well represented in our society.
We have, for example, the cultural or academic mafias, who hold onto power and do not allow any young energy to penetrate their vast ivory towers. We have seen Professors hanging onto their respective Chairs for decades and making it difficult to move on.
Gerontocratic governments with their flocks of politicians, as well as religious structures, have clung to power over hundreds of years. They still are entrenched, as we see with the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the rigidity of the literal interpretation of the text, e.g. stoning a woman to death for giving birth outside of wedlock. These are doctrinal calcifications, typical of Saturn.
Likewise, there exists an inversion, which capitalism has recognized as a value in its marketing strategies, where youth dominates, and does not answer to anything outside of its immediate concerns. This leads to a sort of mass infantilism - the tantrums of spoilt children.
So, we have the power of the youth market, which denies or is denied, the wisdom and experience of age; and we have the aged, clinging to power for all it is worth. And it is worth very little, in the sense of Treasures in Heaven. A case in point is the present Trump Regime in America. Guns and Motorcars, the toys of little boys, the dominator culture of testosterone. As we are to believe that the present astrological dispensation is The Age of Aquarius, we should consider the symbolic implications of this sign of the Zodiac.
Aquarius is extremely polarized by the energies of stasis and revolution. The Silver Key and Golden Key images, give us our thematic senex - puer polarity, in the Hermetic, Wise, Old Man of the Tarot, and the Water Bearer, or Pourer, sometimes associated with Ganymede, of the astrological symbol. So somehow, in the Age of Aquarius, the Senex and the Puer, have to, and will cohabit in their action patterns, for the benefit of the larger society, and from there to humanity.
How could this paradigm be put into action? Well, simply put, the lead must be tempered with a bit of quicksilver, mercurial energy, and the mercurial must be balanced with a touch of lead. Gravity and levity have their place.
In other words, there must be a balance between Saturn and Mercury. At the moment we have the Saturn materialism of Militarization, the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO, while on the other side we have the Mercurial-Hermetic World Wide Web, the Global Brain, the Gaia - Ecology-Green Movements, and various empowered communities along the lines of gender, ethnicity, resurgent spiritualities and so forth, all very based in communication.
It is not the Youth of the Planet who planned the bombing of Vietnam, Baghdad &c. But they are the ones who died. Think of the millions who died in the 1st World War.
Unfortunately, the Mass Media, with the emphasis on mass - as in massive, titanic, totalitarian, seems to control the show. But likewise, the Mercurial Web, is also wiring over 60 million people to the Internet - and if open resistance is not evident, internal sharing of information is moving ahead at an ever-accelerating speed. Saturn can only maintain power by withholding, distorting or inverting information. Mercury cannot be controlled because of its propensity to fragment into Mercurial spheres and reform at the slightest nudge into a unitive, holistic sphere. The Senex-Saturnine is selfish - the Puer-Mercurial shares. But, as mentioned before, we also have the sharing Wisdom of the Senex, versus the selfishness of Youth!
“… the Roman god Janus with his two faces – the young beardless man looking forward and the old bearded man looking back.”
In this sense, we could speculate that the Past is the Senex & the Future is the Puer.
Edgar Wind in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) amplifies the Durer image:
8. For the combination of puer and senex in one hieroglyph, uniting Infancy and Old Age, Calcagnini used the expression paedogeron ([1]). He first employed the term, with the explanation id est puer senex; in his translation of Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride ([2]), which Panofsky mistakenly describes as 'never published and apparently lost' ([3]).”
“As the term was believed to be Plutarch's, it is more than likely that H. Tietze and E. Tietze-Conrat were right in suggesting ([4]) that Durer's Bearded Child in the Louvre is a paedogeron, or puer senex conceived as a hieroglyphic image. Like the triple-headed monsters in which Youth and Old Age counterbalance each other, this hoary infant would again signify Good Counsel or Prudence, that is, practical wisdom.”
Paedagogus ? paedo- (United States pedo-) combining form of a child; relating to children: ORIGIN from Greek pais, paid- 'child, boy'.
Samten de Wet, Cape Town, February 2018, based on earlier versions.
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