As Havel matured, his life’s contribution turned away from theater and more toward the political realm. Although never far from critiquing the politics of his day, as tensions in the Eastern Bloc rose, Havel became more overtly political. Like his plays which shed light on the absurdity of the Soviet system, Havel would assess critically the oppressive nature of the regime of his day, although in more direct terms. Although his plays dealt with the absurdity and meaninglessness of the system, Havel’s political writings were more concerned with two major themes: the development of political conscience and the need for values of transcendence. In his major essay, “Politics and Conscience,” Havel writes: “As a boy, I lived for some time in the country and I clearly remember an experience from those days: I used to walk to school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of some hurriedly built factory, in all likelihood in the service of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens.”³

This theme of “humans soiling the heavens” is the predominant motif of the essay; in the tome,  Havel chastises a lack of political awareness and inspires the need toward political idealism. Through his writing, we observe a primary theme of the Saturn-Neptune gestalt: the clash of one’s subjective experience of how the world should be (Neptune) with the world as it is (Saturn). In this example, Havel’s poetic and imaginal rendering of the world creates a sense of loss and tragedy, on the one hand, but also the driving impetus to correct and improve the conditions of the real world so that it better conforms to the world of one’s ideals.

Under the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of the late 1980’s, a dramatic series of events thrust Havel from the position of outsider and dissident to leader of Czechoslovakia. The bourgeois poet became king. Havel instantly became a symbol of the promise of the Velvet Revolution and  political freedom. In perhaps his most famous address as president, “The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World,” the Saturn-Neptune expression can once again be witnessed. In words more fitting of an archetypal psychologist than a political statesmen, Havel suggests, “The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world.” ⁴ Havel’s appeal to a need for transcendence and a need for orientation is perhaps the great message of the Saturn-Neptune gestalt. Like his eye for the existential meaninglessness of the totalitarian state, Havel also possesses a keen discernment for the detriment of the modern, scientific condition, namely, the extreme sense of alienation and disenchantment stemming from the loss of soul and the disavowal of subjective experience. Thus, within the Saturn-Neptune gestalt, we see the utter and driven seriousness (qualities of Saturn) of Havel’s quest to redeem the rightful place of the transcendent, the imaginal, and the need for participation within a larger, cosmic whole (qualities of Neptune).