The Broken Bridge and the Dream
Dali, America and the Venus-Saturn-Neptune conjunction
Two weeks ago, a container ship outside Baltimore Harbor, named after the Spanish Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, crashed into a bridge named after the American poet Francis Scott Key, famous for penning the lyrics to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ causing it to collapse into the water. It’s safe to say that things are getting Neptunian of late.
The peculiar symbolism of this event speaks to the triple conjunction of Venus, Saturn, and Neptune that was in the sky at the moment of the collapse. This short-lived elegy from the goddess of art and music (Venus) seems to have inaugurated the long-anticipated outer planet conjunction of Saturn and Neptune that will preside over the next three years (if we grant the wider orb of 15° for conjunctions suggested by Richard Tarnas).
This meeting of Saturn and Neptune points to the emergence of a new archetypal zeitgeist that will bring together the Saturnian reality principle of concreteness and limitation with the more transcendent and otherworldly Neptune archetype. These three-year periods typically coincide with a more somber and reflective mood taking root in the collective psyche and a heightened concern with how we might best realize our highest ideals.
Saturn, as it were, compels us to concretize our dreams and ideals, to ground them in material reality; it can also make us painfully aware of all the ways in which our reality (Saturn) falls short of our dreams (Neptune), as well as imparting a darker tone to our imagination. By the same token, the Neptune archetype acts to dissolve prior certainties and to undermine the seemingly fixed nature of things. Neptune weakens and dissipates the hard edges and boundaries that keep things separate; this boundary dissolving influence can render us more sensitive to the suffering of the world and induce a thirst for spiritual transcendence of some kind.
The collapse of the Key Bridge into the icy waters below and the accompanying loss of life reflects Saturn’s entrance into Neptune's oceanic realm, which entails both the literal ocean and everything that the ocean evokes in the mythopoetic imagination: states of mystical absorption and cosmic unity, the secret wellspring of symbolism and dream imagery, the inspiration to Surrealist artists past and present.
The Key Bridge seemed to melt into the sea like a figure in one of Dali's paintings, its once-solid structure appearing to ripple and contort in a way that reflects the liquid motifs of the Neptune archetype. Dali, who was born during a sesqui-quadrate of these planets, expresses the Saturn-Neptune complex in his depiction of melting clocks, with their suggestion that Saturn’s fixed chronological regime is less stable and concrete than is normally assumed; Dali’s clocks are liquid, illusory, dreamlike—qualities that correlate with the Neptune archetype.
The conspicuously symbolic resonances of this event, with its invocation of both Dali, the great 20th-century Surrealist, and Key, the lyricist behind the ‘Star-Spangled Banner,’ further emphasize the Neptune archetype’s connection to symbolism more generally. As the archetype that governs the unseen and the ineffable, Neptune speaks to us through such indirect means as myth, metaphor and allusion. Through its invocation of these famous names, the collapse of the Key Bridge invites us to interpret its meaning in the context of American decline and a now pervasive disillusionment with the ideals that Key once championed.
No longer the “land of the free and the home of the brave”, the United States is an increasingly divided nation, riven by gun violence, economic disparity and mass incarceration. Moreover, faith in this once vaunted democracy has been critically undermined by the growing concentration of wealth and power into the hands of an increasingly narrow segment of society, made up of billionaires and corporations who wield an outsize influence on policy-making.
More recently, any claim to moral authority on the world stage has disintegrated in the face of ongoing US support for Israel in its devastating occupation and assault of Gaza, where more than 30,000 people, mostly women and children, have been killed and the population pushed into famine. The continued supply of US arms to Israel, alongside its refusal to condemn such atrocities as the use of hunger as a weapon of war, have exposed the emptiness of its moral stance on other fronts, such as the Russia-Ukraine war.
There is now a glaring credibility gap between the image that America projects to the world—with its stated commitments to democracy, human rights and a rules-based international order—and the ugly realities of militarism, war profiteering and callous geostrategic interest that undergird its relationship to Israel. The growing awareness of this credibility gap—which was deftly skewered by Jon Stewart (who has a natal Saturn-Neptune square) in a recent Daily Show segment—reflects an emerging undercurrent of disillusionment and skepticism that is typical of Saturn-Neptune alignments. During these periods, the Neptunian tendencies towards escapism, myth-making and spin tend to be sternly challenged by the Saturn archetype, with its preference for realism and clear-eyed critique.
So, it is in this context of widespread disenchantment and cynicism that the Key Bridge has crumbled. The timing of the outward event seeming to mirror the inner shift that has occurred with respect to the ideals that the bridge represented and the general mood of the nation.
Are we to interpret this event as a final death knell for the American dream, or might we see this event as an invitation to make good on the original promise of the American nation? It was this second possibility that inspired Martin Luther King when he spoke the immortal words “I have a dream…” during the Saturn-Neptune square alignment of 1963, as part of a speech decrying the gap between America’s proclaimed ideals of freedom and equality and the realities of racism and injustice. This gap was no less apparent in Key’s own time, as evidenced by the fact that he was a slave owner who patently failed to live up to his own ideals.
The presence of Venus in this alignment suggests that the goddess of love and beauty—the archetypal musician and songstress—is implicated in this symbolic death process, in the death of dreams and ideals that is signified by the Saturn-Neptune conjunction. The Venus archetype, as it were, subjected to the diminishment and decline that Saturn tends to impart with its passing transits. The Key Bridge collapsed at a moment when the anthem it represents seems to have lost its luster for many people.
The symbolic nature of the bridge speaks to the convergence of all three planetary archetypes—Venus, Saturn and Neptune—in a rich synthesis of qualities that reflects this archetypal trio: beauty, structure and symbolism; music, history and the sea. Amazingly, it appears that the bridge was first opened to the public in March 1977 during a grand trine of the same three planets (further sustained by a Venus retrograde), emphasizing the diachronic, cyclical nature of these archetypal patterns.
In addition, consider that Venus was also in a sextile aspect to Jupiter on the day of the collapse, reflecting the prestigious quality that is associated with Key’s legacy as the author of America’s national anthem. Indeed, the very notion of a national anthem—a musical expression of pride and patriotism—is itself reflective of the Venus-Jupiter pairing.
In the aftermath of World War I, Surrealists infused the European art scene with illogical and dreamlike imagery that arose from their deliberate attempts to liberate the unconscious and to collapse the distinction between the states of waking and dreaming; insofar as Surrealism represents an archetypal union of the Artist and the Dreamer, it can be situated within the Venus-Neptune complex. This reading of Surrealism finds some confirmation in the fact that the Surrealist Manifesto was first published during a Venus-Neptune conjunction in October 1924, and that Dali, the ostensible figurehead of the movement, was born during an exact sextile of these planets.
That Dali should continue to haunt the present via his synchronistic connection to this event, during a Venus-Saturn-Neptune conjunction, is an indication that the Surrealist tendency to perceive reality through a dream-like web of association has some validity to it. Moreover, the image of the collapsed Key Bridge invites comparisons to a piece that Dali painted during the Saturn-Neptune square of 1945 titled The Broken Bridge and the Dream. In the piece, a broken bridge doubles up as a staircase upon which elegant and ethereal figures ascend before seeming to pass out of the physical plane, presumably to enter a more subtle realm in the beyond.
The image of this stairway to heaven1 connotes a deep longing to transcend this earthly realm of brokenness and imperfection that is very typical of the Saturn-Neptune cycle. The bridge, by virtue of its absence, becomes a portal into the unseen world. The suggestion here is that tragedy and loss provide opportunities for spiritual redemption and remembrance. The direction of travel seems to be away from the manifested world and towards the immaterial realm of formless perfection, but perhaps the bridge can be traversed in both directions, perhaps Saturn-Neptune alignments are doorways through which the transcendent can more fully enter this world.
To my mind, this strangely evocative event outside Baltimore harbor suggests that death is not as final or absolute as we tend to believe. The uncanny connection to Dali and this painting makes it seem as if Dali himself had a hand in the event, and that the legendary Surrealist lives on in some sense, his compositions no longer bound by the limits of a canvas.
The Led Zeppelin song by this name was released in 1971 during an axial alignment of Venus, Saturn and Neptune.
Another absolutely brilliant piece of analysis :)