So also with the upsurge of the erotic and sensuous in both decades. The sexual liberation of the 1960s had its counterparts in the 1790s in the new erotic poetry of Goethe, in Blake’s redemptive embrace of sexual desire and sensual ecstasy linked to divine creative power and imaginative freedom, in the bared breasts and diaphanous gowns of radical aristocratic women in Paris, in Casanova’s memoirs of amorous intrigues and exploits, in the unleashed violent sexuality of the Marquis de Sade’s novels. Nearly identical cultural phenomena were emphatically conspicuous in the 1960s—and often involved the rediscovery, appropriation, and further creative development of the 1790s’ precedents, as with the celebrated and controversial 1960s’ play and film Marat/Sade, in which the impulse of violent revolution (personified by Jean-Paul Marat) and the impulse of violent eroticism (personified by the Marquis de Sade) discharge themselves in tense dramatic dialogue.10
We see the same rediscovery and reappropriation of the 1790s’ cultural mood in the 1960s’ enthusiastic turn to Blake, with his titanic exaltation of “Energy”—erotic, creative, emancipatory—in rebellion against the shackles of church and state, commerce and industry, mechanistic materialism and positivist empiricism. Numerous aphorisms from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell vividly reflect the common ethos of the two Uranus-Pluto periods, the 1790s and the 1960s, at once Promethean and Dionysian, celebrating passion unbound and defying all arbitrary limits to life’s creative exuberance:
Energy is Eternal Delight.
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
When thou seest an Eagle, thou seest a portion of Genius. Lift up thy head!
Joys impregnate. Sorrows bring forth.
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.
He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.
Sooner murder an infant in his cradle than nurse unacted desires.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Damn braces: Bless relaxes.
Exuberance is beauty.
Again, both Uranus-Pluto decades seem to have been characterized by a sustained eruption of the Promethean and Dionysian principles in combination, with all the complexities of those two archetypes in conspicuous mutual interaction. Blake himself was born in 1759 when Uranus and Pluto were in an exact square alignment (with his Sun in conjunction with Pluto), this being the Uranus-Pluto quadrature aspect immediately preceding the opposition of the French Revolutionary period. I repeatedly observed a distinct pattern in which historically significant individuals who played crucial cultural roles in subsequent Uranus-Pluto eras were born during earlier eras when the same two planets were in alignment. Especially of interest in this context is the seminal figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
The Liberation of Nature
Born at the very heart of the preceding Uranus-Pluto conjunction period of the early eighteenth century, in 1712 when the alignment was nearly exact, Rousseau was also born when both the Sun and Moon were aligned in close major aspect to the Uranus-Pluto conjunction. This was the conjunction that coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that immediately preceded the opposition alignment of the French Revolution. The sequence of consecutive Uranus-Pluto alignments precisely paralleled Rousseau’s central role in bringing forth from within himself and then articulating so many of the principal themes that opened the cultural vision and sensibility in the very directions that came to climactic expression in the French Revolution: the emancipatory fervor (“Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”), the intense communal feeling, the liberation of deep emotion, the quest for individual autonomy and self-dependence, the affirmation of a natural religious feeling, the belief in the natural goodness of the human being, the liberation from the oppressive doctrine of Original Sin, the recognition of the corrupting influence of civilization’s web of pretense and vain ambition. The very slogan “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” was Rousseau’s.
All these themes and values transmitted by Rousseau shaped the evolving intellectual and cultural climate that burst forth in the 1790s, affecting not only the France of the revolutionaries but the Germany of Schiller and Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel, and the England of Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. It was this same Rousseauian complex of impulses and aspirations that surged forth again in new inflections and in unprecedentedly widespread form in the countercultural ideals and zeitgeist of the 1960s. The quest for personal freedom, joy in the intimate communion with nature, the elevation of the feelings of the heart over the dictates of mere calculating rationality, the developed conscience recognized as the true voice of nature, the inviolability of personal ideals against the pressures of society and the state, the democraticizing of social mores, the valuing of simplicity and authenticity, the affirmation of ordinary life, the critique of modern society for its stimulation of spurious needs and wasteful consumption, the appreciation of the natural child’s spontaneous intelligence, the call for radical educational reform—all these and more derived from the eloquent pen and troubled heart of Rousseau.
It happened that all the major works in which Rousseau set forth these themes and values, from The Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Amongst Men of 1755 to Émile and The Social Contract of 1762, were written and published during the Uranus-Pluto square that occurred exactly midway between the conjunction of his birth and the opposition of the French Revolution, the same square alignment during which Blake was born. An exactly similar pattern is visible in Rousseau’s friend and contrasting counterpart amongst the French philosophes, Denis Diderot, who embodied and guided the more secular and rationalist side of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s long quest for intellectual and cultural emancipation.
Like Rousseau, Diderot was born during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction at the beginning of the century, in 1713, just one year after Rousseau.11 Then, precisely during the entire period of the square alignment from 1751 onward, he edited and brought forth volume after volume of the Encyclopédie, not only an enormous compendium of treatises that forwarded the modern mind’s growing scientific understanding of nature but also, in Jacques Barzun’s words, “the tremendous storehouse of fact and propaganda that swept Europe and taught it what ‘reason,’ ‘rights,’ ‘authority,’ ‘government,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘equality,’ and related social principles are or should be.” And as with Rousseau, it was precisely when the Uranus-Pluto cycle reached its next axial alignment during the French Revolution in 1787–98 that Diderot’s great didactic enterprise found dramatic fruition in both the social-political and the scientific-technological revolutions of that decade. Rousseau and Diderot essentially represent two poles of the archetypal complex we are examining, each of which is emancipatory and revolutionary but with different emphases and consequences (Marat and de Sade representing two poles of this same complex as well, in darker hues).
Thus the two Uranus-Pluto alignments periods we have been examining, the French Revolutionary epoch and the 1960s, were notable for the conspicuous presence of both Promethean and Dionysian phenomena at the same time, not just one or the other: the call for freedom but also a revelation of nature, intellectual awakening but also an eruption of feeling and instinct, radical change but also heightened eros, creative innovation and experiment but also destruction and upheaval. I found especially suggestive the evidence for the complex mutual interaction of the two archetypes, their inextricable synthesis—self-dependent freedom with the affirmation of nature, liberation with sexuality, rebellion with violence, innovation and change with overwhelming intensity, all on a massive scale. Of course what was especially suggestive and challenging was the further coincidence that these two principles happen
ed to be the specific planetary archetypes associated with the two planets that were in alignment during just those particular eras.
When I considered major events that took place beyond the European context in the French Revolutionary period, I recognized strikingly similar archetypal dynamics at work in other parts of the world as well. Thus, for example, in Tahiti and other islands of the South Pacific, a sudden liberating and awakening of the Dionysian took place for many British sailors and other European travelers during this period of 1787 to 1798, as they experienced for the first time the revelation of Polynesian eroticism and freer sexual mores than those permitted by European custom and long-established patterns of Christian sexual inhibition. (Appropriately it had been Diderot, born during the preceding conjunction, who had notably extolled the Polynesian peoples’ sexual freedom, which he believed made them both physically and spiritually healthier than Europeans subject to their society’s unnatural sexual constraints.) Conversely, during this same period the indigenous peoples of the Pacific islands, from Tahiti to Hawaii, as well as in Australia and New Zealand experienced a tremendous cultural upheaval and the start of the eventual destruction of their societies as a consequence of the sustained penetration of their world by Europeans that began at this time.
If we look at the two intervening Uranus-Pluto axial alignments that occurred between the French Revolutionary epoch and the 1960s, we see remarkably similar archetypal dynamics at work. At the turn of the twentieth century, during the 1896–1907 Uranus-Pluto opposition, we see again the sudden rise of widespread movements for sexual emancipation in many centers in Europe and the United States; the rise of bohemian communities from Montmartre to Greenwich Village; the neopagan nature, free love, and youth movements in Germany and Switzerland; the influx of European bohemians into California and the beginnings of the West Coast counterculture; the women’s emancipation movements that called for the spread of contraceptive methods and sexual freedom; the new artistic celebration of the primitive and the primordial, as in the paintings of Picasso; the new freedom of physical expression, as in the electrifying performances of the young American dancer Isadora Duncan as she gave birth to modern dance. The influence of Duncan at this time was immense, not only in the world of dance, ballet, and the theater but on culture and society generally, her free-spiritedness in life and her originality in art galvanizing European as well as American audiences. In Max Eastman’s words:
All who have escaped in any degree from the rigidity and prissiness of our once national religion of negation owe a debt to Isadora Duncan’s dancing. She rode the wave of revolt against Puritanism; she rode it, and with her fame and Dionysian raptures drove it on. She was—perhaps it is simplest to say—the crest of the wave, an event not only in art but in the history of life.
In the intellectual domain during these same years, we see the first widespread awakening of interest in the writings and Dionysian philosophy of Nietzsche, which in turn influenced the work of many artists at this time, from Isadora Duncan’s dance and the titanic symphonic works of Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler to the philosophical plays of George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman). We see the same archetypal complex at work as well in the rise of philosophies that combined social and political revolution with the necessity of violence, as in the writings during these years of Lenin and Georges Sorel. Simultaneously during this same period occurred sustained and repeated acts of mass violence, in China, India, France, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, revolutionary movements that advocated violent overthrow of existing institutions, and, much as in the 1790s and 1960s, a wave of assassinations by anarchists of national leaders—the president of the United States, the king of Italy, the empress of Austria, the king and queen of Serbia.
An especially paradigmatic expression of the theme of Dionysian awakening in both the intellectual and the psychological domains was Freud’s seminal articulation of the instinctual unconscious in just these years of 1896 to 1907. We have cited this correlation above in the cyclical patterning of major scientific and intellectual revolutions coincident with Uranus-Pluto alignments. Here I wish to focus on the converse archetypal dynamic that was evident in the rapid emergence of psychoanalysis in this period. This period encompassed Freud’s writing of both The Interpretation of Dreams (from 1896 to 1900) and Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality (1905), the initial rise of the psychoanalytic movement when Freud was joined by Abraham, Adler, Jung, Rank, Ferenczi, and the rest of the early pioneers (1900–07), and, not least, the host of Freud’s discoveries at this time: the Oedipus complex, the sexual etiology of neurosis, the erotogenic zones, the existence of infant sexuality, the resistance of the conscious ego to the unconscious instincts, the return of the repressed, and many related concepts and insights.
In all of these, the theme of Promethean liberation of the Dionysian can be discerned on many levels. In terms of intellectual history, Freud’s achievement can be recognized as the rationalist Enlightenment’s entrance into the Plutonic underworld of the instinctual unconscious, the revelation of the “broiling cauldron of the instincts.” It represented an epochal Promethean awakening to—as well as of—the Dionysian id. On the cultural level, the same theme was visible in the enduring social consequences of Freud’s work, both in its liberation of the scientific study of sexuality from the long-established cultural taboos against which he himself had to contend and in its pivotal role in the radical transformation of modern attitudes towards sexuality generally. On the psychodynamic level, the theme was visible in psychoanalysis’s recognition of the principle of catharsis and abreaction, the therapeutic imperative to release repressed instinctually charged memories to free the psyche and body from neurotic fixations, thereby bringing the suppressed unconscious energies to conscious awareness and expression. Freud himself underscored the specifically Promethean-Plutonic mythical character of his work in the powerful epigraph from Virgil with which he chose to begin his magnum opus, The Interpretation of Dreams: “If I cannot bend the Gods above, then I will move the Infernal regions.”
Again, the central role of the Oedipus complex in Freud’s life and work, which he first recognized in 1897, during this opposition, can be understood as a precise synthesis of the two archetypal principles, the Promethean and the Dionysian—the rebellion against tyrannical authority and the impulse for erotic fulfillment—that were at work in so many cultural phenomena at this time. Significantly, Freud was himself born at the end of the preceding Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56, with his Sun positioned directly between Uranus and Pluto.12 In another striking cyclical pattern, it was Freud’s disciple Wilhelm Reich who carried forth with such passion the project of Dionysian liberation to release the orgasmic energies locked within the psychosomatic structures of muscular and character armoring, blockages that he regarded as directly contributing to the authoritarian psychology of fascism and totalitarianism. Reich was born in 1897, the same year in which Freud discovered the Oedipus complex. It was during the next Uranus-Pluto conjunction, that of the 1960s, that Reich’s work became most influential and the Reichian project of sexual liberation was impelled and empowered on a collective scale.
If we then move back to the preceding Uranus-Pluto conjunction, that of 1845–56, when Freud was born, we see again the same striking constellation of cultural phenomena suggesting a widespread collective emergence and awakening of the Dionysian principle. Amidst the violent turmoil and great revolutionary movements of this era—radical socialist, nationalist independence, anarchist, abolitionist, women’s suffrage, civil disobedience—we also find a simultaneous eruption and liberation of the elemental and erotic. This phenomenon was evident during these years in the rise of intentional communities in the United States that combined religious unorthodoxy with sexual experiment. It was similarly apparent in the powerful Dionysian music of Wagner and Liszt, in the eruption of dark eros and the urban underworld in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal then being written, and in Flaubert’s realistic exploration
of adultery and bourgeois marriage in Madame Bovary (both Les Fleurs and Madame Bovary being prosecuted for immorality upon publication in 1857, before the same judge in Paris). We see it in the revelation of Polynesian eroticism and sexual freedom that Herman Melville’s first novel, Typee, brought to startled American and British readers at that time. This was the same period in which the explorer and linguist Richard Burton entered deep into the cultures and sexual underworlds of India and the Middle East, which provided him with the basis for his translations of the Kama Sutra and the Arabian Nights. And we recognize the entire complex of Promethean and Dionysian themes in the poetry of Walt Whitman—the buoyant erotic and democratic emancipation, the open embrace of the future, the liberated individual embodying within himself the variegated mass of all humankind—these several themes interweaving and emboldening each other:
I am large. I contain multitudes.
One’s Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.
O Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.
Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
If anything is sacred the human body is sacred…
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