With Uranus in Spielberg’s natal 12th House, Spielberg acts as a conduit to channel deep, archetypal images and myths that strongly resonate with the collective unconscious of society-at-large. Aliens, UFO’s, artificial intelligence, poltergeists—strangely we are drawn into this world of imaginal possibility through Spielberg’s unparalleled ability to realize these dreams on screen. As Roger Ebert stated in a recent article for Time Magazine, Spielberg’s great strength is “his direct line to our subconscious.”³ Like strange attractors from a dimension that interfaces with our world on a subtle level, Spielberg’s visions of possibility attract us somewhat hypnotically and instinctively.

However, the fantasies of mythical beings from other dimensions represent only half of Spielberg’s repertory. These ethereal, often benign and adorable beings are counterbalanced by primordial creatures designed for death and destruction. The sharks, dinosaurs, and wartime psychopaths found in Spielberg’s films spring from a very different part of Spielberg’s psyche indeed. However, like his fascination with a utopian future filled with peaceful and spiritual beings, the seeds of his interest in the darker, crueler side of reality are evidenced in his childhood. In his youth, Spielberg had an attraction toward war, monsters, and innocent forms of torture. As a childhood friend has said, “Stevie had a surprising kind of morbid streak.”⁴ The specific archetypal combination responsible for his infatuation with atrocity, violence, and the horrific is the Saturn•Pluto conjunction in Leo. With Saturn and Pluto in combination, the primal force of destruction and regeneration is compacted, actualized, and tinged with dread and fright. Thus, the creative and obliterative functions of the universe are concretized in vessels of tremendous potency that strike fear in the hearts of onlookers—T Rexs, great white sharks, S.S. concentration camp guards.

It is this same archetypal combination that has driven Steven with such obsessive power to achieve success in the world of film. As this combination was awakened and stimulated by a transiting conjunction by Uranus at the age of twelve, Steve’s hobby became a vocation. He states, “I’ve been really serious about [filmmaking] as a career since I was twelve years old. I don’t excuse those early years as a hobby, do you know what I’m saying? I really did start then.”⁵ Fueling an intense ambition and allowing for incredible powers of focused, sustained passion, it is the Saturn-Pluto combination which has allowed Spielberg the power to make his dreams a reality.