Yet in all of these periods and in many of the clearly Promethean phenomena just cited, the Dionysian element was regularly implicated. In each of the Uranus-Pluto eras, we see a volatile synthesis in which rebellion against religious authority and dogma is closely linked to a suddenly awakened collective impulse for erotic emancipation. Such a synthesis of the two motifs, erotic and religious, was notably visible in the French Revolution’s Festival of Reason after the ceremonies in the cathedral of Notre Dame, as the excited populace danced wildly in the cathedral sanctuary, women bared their breasts and men disrobed, and couples engaged freely in sexual intercourse in the sacristy. The entire parade through the streets, with its carnivale atmosphere and the playfully transgressive crowds cheering on the magnificent carriage that brought the Goddess to the cathedral, is strikingly redolent of the ancient ceremonial procession of the Dionysian chariot.
At the same moment as these extraordinary events in France, Blake in England was proclaiming a remarkably similar combination of religious rebellion and erotic freedom. The opening declaration of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written in this same year of 1793, announces that synthesis with Blake’s characteristically apodictic assurance:
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:
That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul.
That Energy, call’d Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call’d Good, is alone from the Soul.
That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is aportion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
Energy is Eternal Delight.
Blake continues the argument with aphorisms pungent in their defiance of conventional religion and morality yet imbued with a biblical resonance:
Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion….
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.
And then a prophecy:
The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell. For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at the tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed and appear infinite and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged.
Similar patterns of liberation and the awakening of the Dionysian principle in human affairs were evident for Uranus-Pluto alignments from earlier centuries before the French Revolution, such as the period of tumultuous upheaval and widespread revolutionary developments that dominated the 1643–54 period at the time of the English Revolution, exactly one full cycle before the period of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and the French Revolution. Amidst the multitude of radical political parties that emerged at this time, there was a simultaneous upwelling of emancipatory social movements in which the erotic dimension was decisively prominent, visible in the religious “enthusiasts” who celebrated the divinity of nature and the natural human instincts, communal love, equality of the sexes in relationships as well as in religion and politics, the sacredness of sexuality, and, like Blake, the affirmation of nudity and the naked human body as reflecting the original divine glory of the human being.
In a different spirit but with a comparable emancipatory influence on subsequent social developments and erotic expression, it was during this same Uranus-Pluto alignment that John Milton argued for both the religious importance and the legal necessity of divorce to free deeply incompatible partners from the lifelong prison of an unhappy marriage in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce of 1644. This issue arose with increasing force during subsequent Uranus-Pluto alignments and came to its most emphatic and widespread expression in the radical social changes that began during the conjunction of the 1960s.
And moving back one more cycle, similar cultural phenomena reflecting these same motifs were yet again evident during the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the Radical Reformation, in 1533–45, in phenomena that included the hedonistic orgies and polygamy of the Münster Anabaptists, with their antinomian anarchism and communization of property, and Henry VIII’s divorce-driven schism from the Roman Catholic Church that brought the Reformation to England and a vast shift towards the secularization of society.
The combined drive for religious and sexual freedom was often expressed in Uranus-Pluto eras not only through radical rejection but also through sustained efforts for liberal reform. For example, the synthesis of religious and erotic emancipation in the 1960s was evident in the growing movement in the Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council towards the acceptance of contraception. This fundamental change in traditional Church policy was ultimately rejected by the Roman hierarchy but was overwhelmingly embraced in practice by much of the Church laity from that decade onwards, thus creating a significant fissure between the hierarchy and the people—between the “head” of the Church and its “body”—with rippling effects in other areas of religious doctrine and increasing tendencies towards nonconformity by both laity and clergy.
More generally during these same years of the 1960s and after, in virtually all the major religions worldwide, countless multitudes of individuals left or largely ignored their inherited faith. While many factors impelled this exodus, a central one for many was an explicit or implicit rebellion against the sexually repressive moral codes of the established religious traditions that, in the highly secular and psychologically transformed zeitgeist of the 1960s, seemed pathologically constricting and contrary to the free and wholesome expression of nature’s healthy instincts.
Here we begin to see the remarkably rich and complex interplay of the mutually activated archetypal forces during such eras, in which different manifestations of the same multivalent principles, Promethean and Dionysian, set in motion other manifestations of the same principles in an intensifying spiral of causes and effects. To unpack just one example: In the 1960s, the technological breakthrough that brought forth the contraceptive pill and led to its widespread use also empowered, and in certain respects made possible, the sexual revolution, freeing both women and men from constraints, fears, and enduring responsibilities that previously inhibited sexual activity. In turn, the use of contraceptive methods gave women a new freedom of choice between the pursuit of career and marriage, encouraged postponement of marriage for both men and women—since they were no longer required to marry to fulfill their sexual longings—and dramatically increased the frequency of both premarital and extramarital sexual relations with a resulting increase in the number of divorces as well.
All these developments in turn supported and strengthened personal autonomy in social behavior and morality. They also engendered major changes and disruptions in the social fabric, evident in widespread defiance by youths of traditional parental and community authority and the emergence of an intensely polarized “generation gap” that simultaneously arose in the political sphere. Especially notable was the heightening of sexual expression that increasingly pervaded and impelled the rock music of the era, the art form that was both most emblematic and most formative of the emerging countercultural zeitgeist. Rock music’s synthesis of Promethean and Dionysian impulses—unprecedentedly empowered on a mass scale by technological advances, both through electronic amplification and through its virtually global dissemination by radio and recordings—was in turn expressed in a wave of mass concerts and festivals of music and dance in
enormous rituals of art, eros, and transformation.
As mentioned above in the Catholic context, unfettered expression of sexual impulses also encouraged a new disregard of long-established religious prohibitions, which in turn reinforced the larger movement of the era towards religious experiment and the rejection of orthodox belief. The new individualism and new freedom from religious constraint augmented a broader tendency towards intellectual and moral independence of all kinds and accelerated the dismantling of a wide range of internal and external structures of social restraint, with many unforeseen consequences that unfolded in the subsequent decades.
This delineation of a cascading sequence of causes and effects certainly simplifies the reality. The Promethean technological breakthrough that made possible the contraceptive pill did not by itself cause the libidinal disinhibition in the culture, signs of which were already evident from the beginning of the decade in many cultural phenomena, such as popular films, music, and literature, before the widespread adoption of the pill. Rather, I believe that the technological innovation should be seen as a synchronistic and powerfully synergistic factor in a much larger, more complex, multicausal historical process in which the two principles, Promethean and Dionysian, potently interacted and mutually catalyzed each other at many levels, thereby producing an accelerating proliferation of causes and effects.
Filling in the Cyclical Sequence
In all these phenomena involving the synthesis and mutual activation of these two archetypal impulses, we see clear suggestions of the two different forms of patterning in correlation with the Uranus-Pluto cycle: a synchronic pattern, in which a single alignment coincides with a multiplicity of archetypally related events in different locations and different areas of activity that occur independently yet in close temporal proximity; and a diachronic pattern, in which a series of cyclical alignments over the course of several centuries coincides with a distinct sequence of significant events that forms a meaningful progression for a specific movement or in a specific area of activity. As I continued the historical research, I found that these two general types of patterning repeatedly emerged with each of the planetary cycles I examined, in an astonishing variety of forms yet with rigorous archetypal consistency. Both types of patterning were also visible, and were rendered both more comprehensive and more tightly coherent, when I included the intervening square alignments in the unfolding planetary cycle.
For simplicity’s sake, in reviewing the distinctive pattern of correlations for the Uranus-Pluto cycle, I have restricted our attention almost entirely to just the two axial alignments, the conjunction and opposition, the two climaxes of the ongoing 360° cycle. A more detailed analysis would include careful examination of historical and cultural phenomena that coincided with the intervening square alignments and filled in the full quadrature sequence. I mentioned earlier the Uranus-Pluto square that occurred midway between the conjunction at the births of Rousseau and Diderot and the opposition of the French Revolution, which coincided with all of Rousseau’s seminal works and with Diderot’s Encyclopédie, both of which found powerful expression in the events and ideals of the Revolution during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto quadrature alignment and in subsequent alignment periods. A similar pattern can be recognized with the birth of Blake during that same square, followed by the outpouring of his revolutionary works during the 1790s, and then the upsurge of his influence in later Uranus-Pluto periods, especially in the 1960s. Also during this same square alignment were born both Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, two of the most crucial figures in British thought of the French Revolutionary period. So too both Robespierre and Danton, pivotal figures in the French Revolution itself. All five of these individuals were born in the 1756–59 period when the Uranus-Pluto square alignment was closest to exact. Here we can clearly discern an unfolding diachronic sequence of archetypally and historically related events during these three successive quadrature alignments of the eighteenth century that climaxed in the French Revolutionary period.
We can perceive the same pattern in the immediately following sequence of quadrature alignments. The Uranus-Pluto square that occurred halfway between the opposition of the French Revolution and the conjunction of the 1848 revolutions took place between 1816 and 1824. These were the years when the two planets were within 10° of exact alignment, the usual range within which I observed the coincidence of archetypally relevant events with the square aspect (the alignment reached exactitude in 1820–21). This eight-year period precisely coincided with the great wave of Latin American revolutions that brought independence in rapid succession to Argentina (1816), Chile (1817), Colombia(1819), Mexico, Venezuela, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Santo Domingo (all in 1821, when the alignment was exact), Brazil and Ecuador (1822), and Peru (1824). What appears to be the bell-shaped curve of an archetypal wave pattern of a suddenly empowered Promethean principle expressing itself in collective human activity and historical events, here unmistakably centering on 1820–21, is again readily discernible.
Moreover, in Europe during this same period occurred a wave of revolutions and revolts in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France, intense ferment against the Habsburg Empire throughout central and eastern Europe, and the beginning of the long war for Greek independence from the Turks. Lord Byron, who died during this period in 1824 while supporting the fight for Greek independence, was born in 1788 at the start of the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the French Revolutionary period (with the Sun in alignment with both Uranus and Pluto, and with Venus in nearly exact conjunction with Pluto). Byron’s life and his iconic embodiment of both erotic emancipation and, at its end, the struggle for political freedom vividly suggest the presence of the Promethean and Dionysian impulses in close interaction. His charismatic embodiment of this archetypal combination exerted an enduring cultural influence, asserting itself repeatedly during subsequent Uranus-Pluto alignments in a wide range of forms, from leaders of the 1840s–50s nationalist struggles like Mazzini and Mickiewicz to cultural figures such as Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, and on finally to the 1960s and Mick Jagger.16
So also with Percy Bysshe Shelley, all of whose mature work was produced in the years of the Uranus-Pluto square between 1816 and 1822, when he drowned in a storm off the coast of Italy a month before he turned thirty. Like Byron, Shelley was born during the French Revolutionary opposition, in 1792 (with the Sun and Venus in close alignment with both Uranus and Pluto), his birth occurring in the same summer that brought the wave of fraternal ecstasy which suddenly overtook the French legislature and the population of Paris. The constellation of commitments that inspired Shelley throughout his life—to social justice and political revolution, to individual liberty, to the creative freedom and power of the poet, to rebellion against confining religious orthodoxy, and to romantic freedom and erotic emancipation—all reflect the characteristic themes of the Promethean-Dionysian complex. Many of these themes were particularly embodied in his poetic masterwork, Prometheus Unbound, written in 1820 when the Uranus-Pluto square alignment was exact.17
In turn, figures who were crucial in subsequent Uranus-Pluto periods were born in this period of the 1816–24 square. Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Susan B. Anthony were all born during this square and brought forth their liberating achievements in coincidence with the immediately following conjunction of 1845–56. An especially paradigmatic example is Karl Marx, born in 1818 during the Uranus-Pluto square, whose life and work were devoted with a kind of elemental intensity to the cause of mass revolution and emancipation that first fully emerged during the conjunction of the 1845–56 period. (“Prometheus is the noblest saint and martyr in the calendar of philosophy,” Marx wrote in his doctoral dissertation.) Again, the Uranus-Pluto square that coincided with the birth of Marx and also of Engels, and that coincided as well with the revolutionary wave in Latin America and Europe, was the intervening quadrature alignment that took place exactly halfway between the Uranus-Pluto oppo
sition of the French Revolution and the conjunction of the 1848 revolutions—the two periods whose dynamic historical and evolutionary connection Marx played such a central role in articulating.
This sequence of the three quadrature alignments from the French Revolution to the mid-nineteenth century was in turn part of the larger ongoing Uranus-Pluto cycle that brought forth subsequent waves of revolutionary, radical socialist, and Marxist movements and events, as we have seen and explored earlier in these chapters: the rise of Lenin and Trotsky, the founding of the Bolshevik and the major socialist parties, and the beginning of the Russian revolutionary epoch during the following opposition of 1896–1907; and the worldwide wave of radical socialist, Marxist, and independence movements during the conjunction of the 1960s. The only Uranus-Pluto square of the twentieth century occurred halfway between these last-cited alignments, through most of the tumultuous decade of the 1930s (within 10° orb from 1928 to 1937). This alignment coincided with the period of heightened tension, violence, and struggle when the upsurge of Marxist and radical socialist movements in both the masses and cultural elites was especially widespread and international.
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