the sacred. The Last Temptation of Christ, created at the beginning of the most recent Uranus-Neptune conjunction, was a controversial and brilliant reappraisal of the Christ myth.
The film was damned by almost every Christian denomination, was protested, picketed, subject to boycotts and bomb threats, and barred from Blockbuster video.(9) The overt reason for the controversy was said to be over Jesus's sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, however, the deeper reality was that Christianity was threatened of becoming democratized by this film, with the spiritual struggle of Jesus being presented as the courageous turmoil of everyone's soul. The threat was that the film presented an alternative to a singular coming of the messiah and instead laid claim to a more humanized spirituality: Christ Consciousness versus The Christ, redemption versus transgression, and, as to paraphrase one reviewer's reflection, Christ as All God and All man versus Half Man and Half Deity.
Scorsese, whose intensity as a personality and director may stem from his four planets in Scorpio, directed The Last Temptation of Christ while undergoing the generational Pluto square Pluto transit. (see chart; solar only) Known for its seriousness, reflection, and brutally honest self-assessment, the Pluto-square-Pluto transit-the "come to Jesus" transit, in so many ways-led to Scorsese's most personal and meditative film. As reviewer Jaimie N. Christley stated, "The Last Temptation of Christ" is without a doubt Scorsese's least entertaining film - Kundun and The Age of Innocence are unmitigated laugh-fests in comparison."(10) Although lacking in entertainment value, the film makes up for in spiritual depth and will certainly be heralded as one of Scorsese's finest directorial efforts. Transiting Pluto squared musician Peter Gabriel's natal Pluto and Venus during the composition of the film's aptly named, "Passion." (see chart; solar only) Unlike the progressive rock the Aquarian Gabriel had been known for as solo artist and with Genesis, "Passion's" world-fusion was thoroughly exotic, seductive, and subterranean—a brilliant counterpoint to the themes explored in the film.
Christ in this vehicle is paradoxically presented as whole through his fractured being. Unlike the Christian Christ that arrives as almost completely devoid of shadow, wrongdoing, and sexuality, Last Temptation's Christ realizes his divinity through an intense struggle for reconciliation between the opposing forces of his nature. Hence Last Temptation's Christ is more comparable to C.G. Jung's "Job" than the Christ of the exoteric Gospels. It is the internal struggle of Last Temptation's Christ that is a thoroughly Plutonic one, in which evil, baseness, licentiousness, and manipulation exist as a priori dominants of the personality begging for transformation through the living of life.
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