Even in the cultural life of a single country we can recognize the potency of this archetypal patterning. The Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1845–56 coincided precisely with the most intensely creative moment of nineteenth-century American culture, with Emerson at his peak, traveling throughout the country giving over eighty lectures a year, which became the essays of Representative Men and The Conduct of Life, riding far and wide on the proliferating railroads and delivering his emancipatory message that celebrated the creative power and heroic nobility of the self-reliant individual embedded in a universe of deeper meanings. During this period, Thoreau was at Walden, Melville and Hawthorne were writing their masterworks, Whitman brought forth Leaves of Grass, and Margaret Fuller wrote her pathbreaking criticism, called for recognition of women’s equality and rights to self-fulfillment, and joined the struggle for liberty in Italy. In these same years of the 1840s and 1850s, an equally brilliant creative wave and the rise of a new cultural spirit was taking place in Europe, with the emergence of Wagner, Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Brontës, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, many of these individuals also embedded in the surging revolutionary movements and ideas of those same years.
No less vivid an illustration of this pattern is the extraordinary epoch of empowered creativity in the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the 1790s and French Revolution, visible above all in the great Romantic emergence in literature and the arts, philosophy and science at that time: Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Goethe and Schiller, Hölderlin and Novalis, the Kant of the later critiques, Hegel in his crucial formative period, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegels, Mozart and Haydn at their peak, the dramatic arrival of the young Beethoven in Vienna with the unprecedented power and improvisatory freedom of his piano performances—the nineteenth-century equivalent of the electrifyingly powerful performances of the young Hendrix as he arrived in London during the conjunction of the 1960s.
If we then move back in history all the way to classical antiquity to see whether comparable correlations are evident—recalling en route the conjunction of the Elizabethan era and the sudden brilliant emergence of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, Marlowe, and the rest—we find that the Uranus-Pluto conjunction period of the classical Greek era (one cycle before the conjunction that coincided with Alexander the Great’s conquests and the birth of the Hellenistic age) took place in the period from 443 to 430 BCE. These years were precisely the height of the Periclean age in Athens, when Pericles as the uncrowned king from 443 to 429 pressed for radical democratic reform and presided over the most culturally and intellectually creative era of the century, when the Parthenon was built, from 447 to 432, when Socrates emerged at the start of his long career (age twenty-seven to forty in the period of the conjunction), when the Sophists brought to Athens their liberating secularist critical thinking and the birth of humanistic education, the paideia, and when Sophocles, Euripides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, Leucippus, and Hippocrates flourished.
In this extraordinary litany of sequential bursts of cultural creativity and awakening, we can recognize that one of the most strikingly consistent characteristics in all these individuals, eras, and cultural phenomena is a certain unleashed or awakened titanic quality. Whether we are considering paradigmatic individuals born in Uranus-Pluto periods such as Leonardo and Galileo, Blake and Byron, Wollstonecraft and Douglass, Marx and Nietzsche, or distinctive cultural expressions of these eras such as the poetry of Whitman and the songs of Dylan, the music of Wagner and the Rolling Stones, the writings and theories of Rousseau and Schopenhauer, Darwin and Freud, or the eras themselves such as the Periclean age and the Elizabethan, the French Revolutionary epoch and the 1960s, in all these periods, figures, and cultural phenomena we can readily see this distinctive titanic quality—titanic impulse for change, titanic intensity and creativity, titanic struggle and defiance—so appropriate for an archetypal synthesis of the Promethean and Dionysian principles. These eras and figures seem to be the vessels for a sudden upsurge of elemental creative forces from nature’s depths that catalyze and accelerate the evolutionary transformation of human life.
It seems to me remarkable how many of the great works of literature that especially embody this tendency towards creative power, titanic depths, and violent forces—the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry and prophecies of Blake, the novels of Dostoevsky, Melville’s Moby Dick, Jung’s prophetic Answer to Job, to name a few of the most notable—were written by individuals born during Uranus-Pluto periods and were very often created during the next quadrature alignment of the same planets. It is as if such works of the creative imagination reflect the unleashing of an elemental dramatic power much like their eras as a whole. Characters such as Ahab and Lear and the Karamazovs break forth from the page or the stage to compel our visceral attention, as if a kind of volcanic force from the depths of the human spirit is being bodied forth before our eyes.
Interestingly, the births of all five of the just-named authors took place during Uranus-Pluto square alignments, as the square in particular seems to correlate with a certain high tension wrought by the combined archetypal principles, Promethean and Dionysian, that emphasizes the clashing extremity of the dynamic forces that have been activated. Such heightened tension appears to be especially demanding of some kind of dramatic embodiment and articulation. It presses intensely and urgently towards the possibility of a larger resolution. We see this same depth and dynamic tension in the novels and poetry of Mann and Rilke; both were born in the same year as Jung, 1875, during the same Uranus-Pluto square alignment, and in both cases their works, like Jung’s, first emerged in coincidence with the following opposition of 1896–1907. So too Isadora Duncan, born during the same square alignment as Jung, Mann, and Rilke, and bringing forth her revolution during the same opposition at the turn of the century. These same qualities are strongly evident as well in such historically crucial works as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792 and The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass of 1845. Both Wollstonecraft and Douglass were born during Uranus-Pluto square alignments, and their great works were published during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto axial alignments.
As with these many iconic expressions of the individual will and imagination, so too the same power and drama—intellectual, emotional, elemental—are consistently conspicuous in the collective life and historical events of the great sequence of Uranus-Pluto eras we have examined. In our own life and time, even several decades later, whether we are now twenty years old or seventy, the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction period of the 1960s continues to exert its titanic effects—emancipatory, revolutionary, violent, creative, erotic, disruptive, destabilizing, driving ineluctably towards the future, awakening to the new.
Yet as Dostoevsky and Melville, Shakespeare and Jung all explored so penetratingly, this awakened titanic impulse is also dangerous in the intensity and potential destructiveness of its unleashed energies, and in its potential self-destructiveness. Here we encounter one of the deep challenges and ambiguities of this archetypal complex. When we consider many of these titanic Promethean figures and epochs, it is evident that the combination of the Promethean and Dionysian principles often seemed to express itself not only through the intensification, empowerment, and violent eruption of the Promethean but also through the destruction of the Promethean, which burns itself out in the flames of its own intensity, in the exigencies of its own archetypal drama. This potential outcome reflects the deep ambiguity of the Dionysian-Plutonic-Kali principle, which is at once empowering and intensifying, violent and destructive, transformative and regenerative.
Thinking of Byron and Shelley, for example, or many comparable figures of the 1960s, we cannot help noticing that one of the most conspicuous features of Uranus-Pluto eras is the frequency of premature death, often by violence or mishap, of so many young Promethean figures in the crucial moment of their life drama. For the Sixties brought not only the decisive empowerment of many Promethean figures and impulses but also their destructio
n: paradigmatic political figures such as Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and the Kennedys, as well as leading artists of the counterculture such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. A similar pattern is evident in the French Revolutionary epoch: the violent deaths of Marat, Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just—most still in their twenties and thirties, as was also true in the 1960s. Sometimes this archetypal drama took place more internally and psychologically, or in a complex interaction with the outer world, as in the lives of Rousseau, Nietzsche, Wilde, Rimbaud, and Van Gogh, all born during Uranus-Pluto conjunctions.
Given this distinct archetypal pattern, it is remarkable that Aeschylus, the titanic creator of classical tragedy and the author of the prototypical drama of titanic defiance, Prometheus Bound, was born during a Uranus-Pluto alignment, the opposition immediately preceding the conjunction of the Periclean age. As both Aeschylus and Jung knew, in the complex relationship between humankind and the gods, everything is at stake.
For the very drama we see unfold with all these Promethean individuals, we see as well in entire Promethean eras. The eruptive emancipatory intensity and extremity of the French Revolutionary epoch, or the English revolution before it, or later the 1848 revolutions and the 1960s, all in some way brought about a kind of self-immolation of the entire epoch. The unleashed forces of destruction and self-destruction—and the unleashed forces of violent conservative reaction—deeply compromised and complicated the emancipatory and creative impulses of all those eras, even as those impulses continued to live and develop in the ensuing decades. No less problematic and consequential were the unleashed energies of violent power in the already powerful during just these eras: the United States in Vietnam, Athens in the Peloponnesian War, Revolutionary France in its Napoleonic explosion, modern civilization itself in its vast technological potency and destructiveness.
All these observations suggest the immense historical and individual responsibility presented by these powerful forces in the collective psyche and in ourselves. For what has happened in the past is not past, but lives within us.
A Larger View of the Sixties
After many years of closely studying the correlations set forth in the preceding chapters, as well as the evidence for correlation patterns involving the other outer planetary cycles, I gradually gained the distinct impression that in some sense everything that occurs during one alignment is implicitly present and contributing to every subsequent one, as if it were a single continuing and cumulative historical development. This appeared to be true not just in the life of an individual person during successive alignments of the same cycle but also in the collective life of a culture, as if indeed the entire culture were a single individual being. It seemed to me that whatever was achieved, experienced, suffered through, painfully or joyfully brought forth during one cyclical alignment somehow remained present and causally efficacious (in both the Aristotelian and Whiteheadian senses) during the following alignments of the cycle, making possible and informing new developments. Something like this dynamic continuity was clearly evident in the various lines of development that linked, for example, the English revolutionary epoch of the seventeenth century to the French revolutionary epoch of the eighteenth century, on to the revolutions of 1848 and the mid-nineteenth century, to the many revolutionary developments at the turn of the twentieth century, and finally to the 1960s, in all the areas we have examined: feminism and women’s rights, antislavery and civil rights, progressive and radical social thought and political movements, technological and scientific revolutions, erotic emancipation, and the unleashing of the forces of nature, of violence and destruction, and of self-destruction.
Thus each era, each event, each cultural phenomenon, and each individual life that coincided with a specific planetary alignment seemed to me best regarded not in isolation but rather as having been deeply shaped by and carrying forth within it what happened in preceding alignment periods of that cycle—and also, as we will see, by what occurred in preceding alignment periods of other planetary cycles that are associated with very different archetypal principles and complexes. This seemed to be true even if what was achieved or struggled with took place in the seclusion of an isolated individual life or local society or subculture, unbeknownst to the life of the larger world. One feels when looking at these many historical and cultural phenomena that what is worked out and brought forth at each moment is never lost, nor is it truly isolated in its individual or local context. Rather at some deeper level it participates and endures in a much larger collective unfolding.
These ongoing archetypal developments affect all of us, not just those born under those particular alignments—some obviously more dramatically than others, but everyone is in some way carrying the whole within them. We all have those archetypal principles and complexes living within us, in varying forms and combinations with other archetypal impulses—much in the same way that we all have those planets in our birth charts, in endlessly diverse configurations—and these archetypal impulses carry vast streams of historical experience.
From this point of view, it is as if everyone who was born after the 1960s actually in some way lived through the 1960s. They bear within themselves the effects of that era, they know its conflicts and struggles, its truths and revelations. In some sense this knowledge lives subconsciously within them. They then enter new eras with all those impulses and forces existing potently within them, both the epochal resolutions from the earlier era and all that is deeply unresolved. So too do we all, with respect to all the preceding centuries of alignments and human experience.
These reflections are, of course, all anticipated by Jung’s understanding of the collective unconscious, but the evidence set forth in this book introduces a certain specificity, and perhaps a more explicit cosmic ground, to the Jungian perspective.21 It vividly indicates in great detail the ongoing cyclical awakenings and activations of a particular archetypal impulse in human affairs, showing its dynamic continuity and its specific timing over the centuries. It allows a new potential for historical self-awareness and conscious archetypal participation. All this is made possible by the hypothesis, or the understanding, that the planetary movements have significance: that is, they bear an intelligible correspondence to particular archetypal principles, and their unfolding cyclical patterns are closely associated with the unfolding cyclical patterns of human affairs.
Just as everything that happened in the 1960s depended on, and carried within it, what happened in the earlier Uranus-Pluto eras, so also is this true now with the continuing dynamic presence of the “Sixties” in subsequent decades up through the present moment. The great worldwide awakening of feminism and the women’s liberation movement that surged forth in the 1960s, that expanded tremendously in the following years, and continues ever-strengthening and growing today utterly depended on, and bore within it, what had been struggled through and achieved by the militant suffragists of the 1900s, by the women’s rights pioneers of 1848, by Mary Wollestonecraft and the French Revolutionary women of the 1790s. When Dylan sang with his tongue on fire in the 1960s, he drew on all the freedom-crying, times-changing singers and poets that came before him, and the power of his prophetic voice in those years has continued to shape the cultural ethos through each subsequent decade. So also with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, Rachel Carson and the ecology movement, the progressive political movements, the scientific and technological advances, the evolution of literature and the other arts.
And so also with the unleashed titanic forces of nature—of technological power, of instinctual and libidinal freedom, and of radical rebellion whether in the form of revolutionary violence or a sublimated will to power that brings a more profound and integrated transformation of society and self.
Of course much of what I am saying here is already widely accepted, sometimes to the point of truism, but again the evidence we have been examining provides a certain detailed specificity of dynamic connections, both historical and a
rchetypal, and also a detailed specificity of both the timing and the archetypal character of these developments that is available to us in no other manner. I believe that this specificity of detail and cyclical patterning radically enhances our understanding of cultural evolution as a vast historical development that is shaped by dynamic archetypal forces, powers that move within a collective psyche that is in turn rooted in and expressive of a cosmic ground.
During the same Uranus-Pluto alignment in the fifth century BCE that coincided with the birth of the Promethean tragedian Aeschylus, the early Greek philosopher Xenophanes articulated for the first time the idea of an underlying progress in human affairs that was dependent on the human quest for truth and the unfolding of time: “The gods did not reveal, from the beginning, all things to us; but in the course of time, through seeking, human beings find that which is the better….”22
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