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by Tarnas, Richard

Celebrated milestones in the history of science coincided with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle with extraordinary consistency. For example, the opposition alignment that immediately preceded the conjunction just cited coincided with the famous moment of triumph for Einstein’s general theory of relativity in November 1919, when the Royal Society in London heard Arthur Eddington and Frank Dyson’s stunning report of the eclipse calculations that confirmed Einstein’s prediction of the bending of light in a gravitational field. The high drama of that event is worth recalling here in this context, not only because it so well exemplifies the archetypal dynamic at work during these alignments, but also for the people who were there and the poignant presence of Newton’s image in the background, symbolizing the transfer of sovereignty from a long-established world view to a radically new one.

  It was not until the afternoon of Thursday, November 6, 1919, that the Fellows of the Royal and the Royal Astronomical Societies met in Burlington House to hear the official results of the two eclipse expeditions…. The aim of the operation had been to test Einstein’s theory, and unofficial news of the results had been rumbling round the scientific world for weeks. Here, if nowhere else, men were aware that an age was ending, and the main hall of the Society was crowded. J. J. Thomson, now President of the Royal Society, James Jeans, and Lindemann were present. So were Sir Oliver Lodge and the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. All were agitated by the same question. Were the ideas upon which they had relied for so long to be found wanting? “The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of the Greek drama,” wrote Whitehead later. “We were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very staging—the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalizations was now, after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification. Nor was the personal interest wanting: a great adventure in thought had at length come safe to shore.”

  Thomson rose to address the meeting, speaking of Einstein’s theory as “one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought,” and then pushing home the full measure of what relativity meant. “It is not the discovery of an outlying island but of a whole continent of new scientific ideas…. It is the greatest discovery in connection with gravitation since Newton enunciated his principles.”

  Here we see not only the successful (Jupiter) scientific breakthrough (Uranus) but also the grand cultural honoring (Jupiter) of an unexpected revolutionary change in human thought (Uranus), both themes precisely reflective of the archetypal principles associated with the two planets in alignment. We also see a third archetypally appropriate theme, one that is frequent with this alignment, that of the sudden and unexpected expansion of intellectual and cosmological horizons to radically new dimensions.

  In the succeeding months under this alignment, through 1920 and into 1921, Einstein’s achievement and the theory of relativity were celebrated with what was for a scientific theory unprecedented media attention and public excitement. Einstein was declared the greatest genius who ever lived, and the theory of relativity was for the first time widely acclaimed by the scientific community and disseminated to the larger public. Einstein himself was born when Jupiter and Uranus were in close opposition alignment exactly three cycles earlier, and in certain respects his life and work can be seen as a paradigmatic embodiment of the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex—the supremely successful intellectual breakthrough, the astonishing leap of the scientific imagination beyond the established structures of time and space, the scarcely conceivable sudden shift in the nature of reality, the celebrated and honored rebel genius—Prometheus crowned king, as it were, in all these respects.

  The Jupiter-Uranus complex appears to be associated with the experience of breakthroughs of all kinds, joyful Promethean moments of discovery, sudden ascents, unexpected insights that expand one’s world, the “Aha!” experience. The history of technological breakthroughs is closely associated with Jupiter-Uranus axial alignments: the discovery of electromagnetic induction (1831), the invention of the telegraph (1844), the invention of the electric lightbulb (1879), the first radio broadcast (1920), the first sound motion picture (1927), the first television transmission (1927), the first Internet transmission (1969). During the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs constructed their first personal computer.

  Especially notable is the history of aviation and space flight, in which the characteristic Jupiter-Uranus impulse to defy limits, to transcend gravity, to move upward and outward into freedom and expansive space, is particularly clearly embodied. Thus Jupiter and Uranus were in alignment at the time of the first recorded human flight of any kind, the balloon launching by the Montgolfier brothers in France in the late eighteenth century. The Montgolfiers invented the hot-air balloon in November 1782. After months of experiments they launched the first balloon with a human passenger in Paris on October 15, 1783, the first recorded instance in which a human being physically left the earth. Both of these events—the invention and the launching—occurred during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1782–83, the alignment halfway between 1776 and 1789 that coincided with the Treaty of Paris ratifying the independence of the American colonies, which was signed in the same city one month before the successful launching.

  Benjamin Franklin, who was himself born during the first Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of the eighteenth century, in 1706, was in Paris during just this period representing the new nation. In a letter of July 1783 to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, the seventy-seven-year-old Franklin wrote of the future of science, technology, and human progress with that tone of expansive optimism and joy in discovery that is so characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus combination:

  I am pleas’d with the late astronomical discoveries made by our Society. Furnish’d as all Europe now is with Academies of Science, with nice instruments and the spirit of Experiment, the progress of human knowledge will be rapid, and discoveries made of which we have at present no conception. I begin to be almost sorry I was born so soon, since I cannot have the happiness of knowing what will be known a hundred years hence.

  I wish continued success to the labours of the Royal Society, and that you may long adorn their chair, being with the highest esteem,

  Dear Sir, your most obedient and most humble servant,

  B. Franklin

  [P.S.] Dr Blagden will acquaint you with the experiment of a vast Globe sent up into the air, much talk’d of here at present, and which if prosecuted may furnish means of new knowledge.

  Similarly, the first aviation experiments by the Wright brothers took place in October 1900 during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of that year, with their first flight in a glider at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (this was the same conjunction that coincided with the beginnings of quantum physics and psychoanalysis). Jupiter and Uranus were again in conjunction in May 1927 when Charles Lindbergh made the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic from Long Island to Paris in The Spirit of St. Louis (the same conjunction as that of the Bohr-Heisenberg and Solvay congress milestones in quantum physics).

  And Jupiter and Uranus were yet again in alignment at the beginning of the history of space flight. The first space flights by Yury Gagarin and Alan Shepard coincided with the opposition of 1961–62.5 It was during this same alignment, on May 25, 1961, that President John F. Kennedy made his epoch-making call for the United States to achieve a manned Moon landing within the decade.

  I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.6

  To summarize: The Uranus-Pluto conjunction spanned the entire period of the 1960s’ space program
. Its beginning coincided with the moment when Jupiter first moved into opposition alignment with this Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Its climax, the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, coincided with the moment Jupiter moved into triple conjunction with Uranus and Pluto. The “giant leap for mankind” is a paradigmatic instance of the theme of quantum leaps and peak experiences, which here took place on an enormous collective global level. The scientific, technological, and human feat of flying to the distant Moon, landing, then returning safely to the Earth—unprecedented, spectacular, and before that decade scarcely conceivable—constituted both a quantum leap in human evolution and a peak experience engendered in the six hundred million people who witnessed the event worldwide.7

  Three weeks later occurred the Woodstock music festival, which was attended by nearly half a million people and was in many ways both the emotional and artistic climax of the Sixties’ countercultural ethos. The two events so close in time, the Moon landing and Woodstock, represent the same powerful archetypal complex though with very different inflections: the Jupiterian principle of elevation and expansion, largeness, success, grandeur, and joy combined with the Promethean impulse of innovation, creativity, rebellion, breakthrough, and defiance of constraints; with both of these titanically empowered and intensified by the Plutonic principle, which is also associated with events that have a mass, epochal, and evolutionary character.

  It is most striking that both of these paradigmatic events took place in the summer of 1969 precisely during the only triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto in the twentieth century. The three planets at that time were in fact at their closest, most exact alignment since the birth of René Descartes in 1596. Remarkably, Descartes was born with the Sun in a quadruple conjunction with Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto. This is perhaps as vivid a cosmic portrait as one can imagine for the declarer of the birth of the modern self in all its radiant solar glory, powerfully centered identity, and emancipatory confidence. “Everything must be thoroughly overthrown for once in my life,” Descartes’s declaration in the first of his Meditations, could well have been said by the better part of a generation in 1968–69.

  From Copernicus to Darwin

  Because of the specific character of the two principles associated with Jupiter and Uranus, their archetypal interaction seemed to have an expansively synergistic quality that translated itself into waves of creative brilliance and successful experiments that were remarkably apparent as soon as one examined the relevant periods and cultural data. The distinctive character of their historical correlations made the underlying patterns seem in the course of research to leap out at one, as if in a burst of awakening. The effect was very different from that of examining the sequence of the Saturn-Pluto cycle, as in the last section, where the unfolding patterns of grave historical crises and contractions sometimes seemed to present themselves with a dark and heavy inevitability, as if the workings of fate and destiny were executing their implacable judgments before one’s eyes. Each archetypal complex seemed to rule its own universe: Not only did it inform the events and eras coincident with the corresponding planetary alignment, it also permeated the experience of researching and recognizing its characteristic manifestations and even the language and rhetorical modes used for its description and analysis. Like celestial bodies whose presence structure the very geometry of their surrounding space, these archetypal principles governed and pervaded their domains.

  The Scientific Revolution

  Let us return to Michelet’s comment that “the Revolution of 1789 had begun with the Discourse on Method.” Amazingly, Jupiter and Uranus were in conjunction not only in 1789 but also in 1637, the year Descartes’s Discourse on Method was published with its epoch-making cogito.8 This was the third Jupiter-Uranus conjunction following the one that coincided with Descartes’s birth. The sequence of correlations for these four successive conjunctions is typical of the systematic sequential patterning of cultural breakthroughs that coincided with this planetary cycle.

  The conjunction of 1595–96, when Descartes was born, also coincided with the crucial turning point in the life and work of Kepler. It was in July 1595 that Kepler experienced the sudden illumination of the geometrical harmonies of the planetary orbits that set in motion his long and arduous research that at last led triumphantly to his discovery of the laws of planetary motion. During this same conjunction he wrote his first major work, Mysterium Cosmographicum, the first work since the De Revolutionibus to develop and extend the mathematical arguments in favor of the Copernican theory, and the first work of modern science to demand physical explanations for celestial phenomena.

  The next Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, fourteen years later, was the one of 1609–10 cited at the start of this section that coincided with the publication of both Kepler’s Astronomia Nova, which made public his revolutionary laws of planetary motion, and Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, which announced his epoch-making telescopic discoveries. The following conjunction in 1623–24 continued the sequence, coinciding with the publication of Galileo’s celebrated Assayer (October 1623), which contained his influential exposition of the new scientific method and view of physical reality that formed the foundation of modern science. It was in this book that Galileo made his famous statement that “the Book of Nature is written in mathematical characters,” first distinguished between primary (measurable) and secondary qualities of matter, and asserted the superiority of investigation to authority. Moreover, it was during this same conjunction that Galileo began his great Copernican treatise, On the Two Chief World Systems, the book that precipitated the conflict with the Catholic Church.

  During the immediately following conjunction of 1637–38, Descartes published not only his Discourse on Method, the foundational work of modern philosophy, but also his Geometry, the founding work of modern analytic geometry that first introduced the Cartesian coordinates and the use of algebra to solve geometrical problems. Moreover, during this same conjunction Galileo published his last and greatest work, summing up his life’s research in experimental science, the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences, which was smuggled out of Italy and published in Holland.

  During the following opposition of 1644, Descartes published his most comprehensive work, the Principia Philosophiae, and during the following conjunction in 1651, Thomas Hobbes published his magnum opus, Leviathan. Finally, fourteen years later, Jupiter and Uranus were again conjunct, from January 1665 to February 1666. This was the crucial moment when Isaac Newton at age twenty-two, during his personal Uranus-square-Uranus transit, left Cambridge University for his home in Lincolnshire and began the spectacular eighteen-month period of intellectual creativity that laid the foundations for his later discoveries in mathematics and physical science: he discovered the general binomial theorem, invented differential and integral calculus, made his first astronomical discoveries, and performed the most advanced experimental research of his age in the science of optics. It was during this period that the incident of the falling apple occurred according to Newton’s later account. Not unlike the comment made about 1927, one would not be far off in saying that in 1665 the pace of discovery in theoretical physics was possibly as great as any other year in the history of science.

  The eventual fruition of those breakthroughs—Newton’s formulation of the concept of universal gravitation and his writing of the Principia—took place in close coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1685–86. This Jupiter-Uranus alignment in the sky, a world transit, coincided with Newton’s once-ina-lifetime personal transit of Uranus opposite Uranus, discussed earlier: Jupiter and Uranus both crossing his natal Uranus at the same time. This was in fact the same extraordinary convergence of personal and world transits that happened with both Galileo and Descartes and indeed also with Einstein, when in each case the Jupiter-Uranus world transit precisely coincided with the individual’s Uranus-opposite-Uranus personal transit.

  Remarkably, if we look back a century earlier to the very beginning of the Scientific Revo
lution, we find that Jupiter and Uranus were also in conjunction in 1540–41 at the time that Copernicus finally decided after many years of hesitation to publish his De Revolutionibus. He was persuaded to do so by his closest student, Rheticus, who at this time brought forth the first published account of the Copernican heliocentric theory, the Narratio Prima (“First Report”), in two editions, at Gdansk in 1540 and at Basel in 1541. Simultaneously, during the fourteen months of this 1540–41 conjunction, Vesalius wrote the bulk of his De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which marked the beginning of the modern scientific revolution in biology and medicine.

  This particular alignment at the Copernican birth was an example of a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction coinciding with the longer Uranus-Pluto cycle (this was also the period of the Radical Reformation). Thus a form of the rare triple-planet axial configuration we saw with the Apollo Moon landing in 1969—which was, in a sense, the epochal climax of the Scientific Revolution—also happened to take place at the very beginning of the Scientific Revolution. In this case, rather than a triple conjunction, as in 1968–69, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction was here aligned in opposition to Pluto—this being the same configuration that occurred in 1789 at the start of the French Revolution.

  The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

  The Jupiter-Uranus cycle was in fact the most reliable correlative factor for the timing of major intellectual events that occurred between Descartes’s Discourse and the Revolution of 1789. For example, if we examine the history of European thought in the Enlightenment, focusing especially on those works that prepared the ground for the democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, we look to the contributions of the French philosophes—Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau. Along with the Encyclopédie (whose serial publication was spread out over the entire period of the Uranus-Pluto square of the midcentury and after), the most crucial works of the philosophes were the Philosophical Letters by Voltaire, The Spirit of Laws by Montesquieu, and The Social Contract and Émile by Rousseau. Remarkably, all four of these books were published in precise coincidence with consecutive Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions at fourteen-year intervals: the Philosophical Letters in 1734, The Spirit of Laws in 1748, and The Social Contract and Émile both in 1762. These years coincided precisely with the three successive Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions of the mid-eighteenth century.

 

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