The Twilight Zone as the 7th House in Astrology

I didn’t get at the truth of The Twilight Zone in my last attempt but i gave it the ol’ college try. Writing about The Twilight Zone is hard for a couple of reasons; 1) It’s harder to write critically about great shows, than awful ones; 2) So many people have already written about The Twilight Zone that it’s hard to have an original thought on it. I tied it into the Kennedy dream of “winning the peace,” and do think the show operates on this level. The Twilight Zone was part and parcel of Playhouse 90 and a kind of heavy-handed sentiment pervasive in film and TV. The plot twist gave the show a quirkiness that belied the heavy-handedness in Serling and his contemporaries, as worthy as their moralistic art was. The conceit of The Twilight Zone blew the doors open and one of the unintended consequences was that there were a lot of episodes about people losing their identity or having no idea who they were or where they lived. I missed this in my first review.

I’ve had the good fortune to catch Rod, White, and Blue this 4th of July weekend and immersed in the mood of the show like a piece of music to get me through the holiday. I had an astrological take on it that I never had before, and I’d argue few if any have had. It was the first original insight, I had on this show that had changed my life, and I was starting to get disturbed that I didn’t have an original thought on something so significant to me. Just too weird. It was as if I was a machine and could only spew out what everyone else thought of it. And The Twilight Zone has been so lionized and mythologized in the culture that it’s become an adjective. I had nothing original to say about it or why it spoke to Kennedy, but it came through to me the other night. It mostly had to do with psychology and how psychoanalysis was at a height in the Kennedy years. The goal was to dig deep enough into the mind to dislodge a memory so stuck that it was blocking the native’s growth.

This is a bit of a jump, but most modern western astrology is based on psychology. In astrology, the 7th house is “The Twilight Zone,” part of the chart. It represents the setting sun part of the sky on the western horizon. In Serling’s narration, The Twilight Zone becomes a place on the show, and he gives it a geography - meaning The Twilight Zone is a place both on the map and in the mind, just like it is in astrology. It is said that for one to be psychologically whole they have to embrace their seventh house identity, which is unfamiliar to a native. The first house is how we see ourselves and the 7th house is how we don’t. It’s very much like one lost in The Twilight Zone - “between light and shadow, science and superstition, between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” The 7th house is the place of that indescribable time of day called twilight where we meet our shadow. (“The Dummy” just ended where a ventriloquist is taken over by his dummy, who he hides in a box. And “Ring A-Ding Girl” just started about a Hollywood starlet who goes to her smalltown home to merge with her past.)

The stated theme of The Twilight Zone was to win the peace as an essential moral obligation like Bobby Kennedy talked about, the spiritual twin to his brother. The only way to do this was to come face to face with one’s demons, and this was the deepest point of the show. I’m not sure this was a goal of Serling’s when he signed onto the series, or that he knew it was going to go here, but The Twilight Zone became bigger than him like all zeitgeists do. If Serling didn’t have the magical touch of The Twilight Zone, he would’ve made man’s demons come in a bottle, or a woman’s touch. They wouldn’t have had the same punch that they did and been plot contrivances.

Did Serling know this was what he was getting at with the title The Twilight Zone? My scholarship is fading in the years, and it’s getting to the point where I see episodes that I don’t remember, which scares me. If there was one thing certain in the world it was that I had counted off my Twilight Zone episodes in the Marc Scott Zicree tome and knew exactly what I hadn’t seen. Now I see episodes that I barely remember. That said, I don’t think Rod Serling knew that The Twilight Zone was analogous to the 7th house in astrology and where we met the enemy within, whose topical meaning is the marriage partner. It’s only by conquering the enemy within that we can learn not to hate because all prejudice and bigotry could be seen as a fundamental inability to do this. I’d further argue that being blind to the nature of one’s 7th house was akin to the bigot who can’t see another’s point of view.

Rod Serling was an incredibly lucky and brilliant man to do The Twilight Zone, though he may have seen it as a ball and chain. I’ve seen some of his other stuff and it’s good, but it would also be forgotten in the trash heap of art as being chained by its time, but The Twilight Zone freed him. He might’ve been embittered by it and thought it was a show for teenagers, but the constriction on his penchant for heavy handed drama was put into check. Not to mention, I doubt his characters would’ve had the craziest ways of losing their identity through the supernatural and would’ve been relegated to the kind of drama having a man looking in the mirror and asking himself, “Who am I?” The Twilight Zone did this but given the supernatural conceit someone could literally confront their dark side and lose themself so much that they had no choice but to go looking for their identity. It became the theme of the show and winning the peace was more like the plot.

There is one episode that does this to a T about World War II with Dean Stockwell who was in Psych Out and lots of Corman L.S.D. movies. He trades places with a Japanese solder in World War II, and they become the enemy. I’d say this is also the meaning of the 7th house in astrology that is located in the twilight part of the sky. Maybe this is a coincidence but it’s one of those that feels ordained. I now see The Twilight Zone much more clearly, as will most students of astrology - or maybe it will explain it to them. Traditionally, the 7th house is the marriage partner, but really, it’s the search for the other side of our self.