Besides the extraordinary special effects and ultra-violence of the film, The Matrix’s popularity rests more on its reliance on this timeless dilemma between the real and unreal. The subject of philosophical and religious speculation for ages, the dichotomy between the divinely transcendent and the inferior realm of known reality probably received its greatest articulation in philosophy through Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” In religion, the dilemma received its greatest articulation through Gnosticism. Like many religions, Gnosticism addresses the shortcomings, evils, and suffering of the world. However, Gnosticism gives this ageless problem an interesting treatment. Unlike in Christianity which, in a sense, suggests that humanity is responsible for the suffering and anguish of its own condition, Gnosticism is not nearly as self-condemning. Rather, Gnosticism suggests that an evil entity has rendered the world the mistake that it is. Moreover, salvation and redemption in Gnosticism is particularly an inner, private experience—the truth, as accessed through secret knowledge, will set one free.

The Matrix is thoroughly infused with the ideas of Gnosticism. Like in Gnosticism, the world of The Matrix is the result of malevolent forces. In The Matrix, machines harvest humans for their energy source, keeping them captive for the sake of energy they provide.  Moreover, like the Gnostics of the first millennium after Christ, the heroes of The Matrix are a sort of underground, secret society that have found each other through following their own inner guidance. With their reliance upon inner wisdom and their crusade of acknowledging the truth from illusion, the early Gnostics and the rebels of The Matrix are united around common themes, motifs that are highly reflective of the Saturn-Neptune complex. With Saturn and Neptune alignments, Neptune tends to create a mythic importance surrounding Saturnian themes, giving the mundane and commonplace nature of Saturn a near-religious importance. Thus, for Gnosticism and The Matrix, the “bad” of the world (and the Saturnian complex of our condition)—our imperfection, our inauthenticity,  our immortality, and our pain—is made a mythic structure to overcome and redeem in some fashion.