One can follow the ongoing sequence through subsequent Jupiter-Uranus alignments after the Sixties. For example, the opposition of 1975–76 coincided precisely with the emergence of both punk rock (Patti Smith, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones) and new wave (Talking Heads, the Cars), as well as the founding of U2, the preeminent rock band of the following decades. During the following conjunction in 1983 the leading jam-rock band of these decades, Phish, was founded, and during the following opposition of 1989–90 Nirvana recorded its debut album, marking yet another new generational impulse in the history of rock music.
If, on the other hand, we look back again at the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction just before the Sixties, that of 1954–55, in terms of the themes of rebellion, creativity, and countercultural turning points so characteristic of this archetypal complex, hardly less remarkable than the synchronistic convergence of works that marked the birth of rock music at that time is the coincidence of this same conjunction with significant milestones in several other areas as well. The fourteen months from the summer of 1954 through the summer of 1955 brought the making or release of all three of James Dean’s films—East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant (Dean died one month after the conjunction ended)—as well as Marlon Brando’s On the Waterfront. These same months also coincided with the literary turning point of the Beat movement. Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl, the poetic manifesto of the Beats, in the summer of 1955. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was first published in an excerpt in New World Writing in April 1955 under the title “Jazz of the Beat Generation” (in the same issue was “Catch 18” by Joseph Heller, the first sign of what became Catch-22). In San Francisco, Lawrence Ferlinghetti began the City Lights bookstore poetry series, the first to publish works by the Beat poets, with the publication in July 1955 of his first volume of poems, Pictures of the Gone World. In Tangiers during these same months, William Burroughs began writing Naked Lunch, the work that with Howl and On the Road formed the classic triumvirate of Beat literature.
In these and many other correlations can be seen a tendency in both popular culture and high culture for the events and figures that played roles during Jupiter-Uranus alignments to possess a certain mythologized, legendary aura, as they were again and again celebrated and invoked to the point that they became iconic in the cultural imagination: Galileo’s first turning his telescope to the heavens, Newton’s apple-falling epiphany of the universal law of gravity, the “shot heard round the world” at Lexington, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech, Paul Revere’s ride to warn the countryside of the British approach, the fall of the Bastille, the mutiny on the Bounty, Beethoven’s composing the Eroica, Byron’s fighting for Greek independence, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion in Virginia, Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, Emerson’s American Scholar address (called by Oliver Wendell Holmes an “intellectual declaration of independence”), Samuel Morse’s first electric telegraph transmission (“What hath God wrought?”), Thoreau’s building his cabin at Walden Pond, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Darwin’s and Wallace’s joint announcement of the theory of evolution, Thomas Edison’s demonstration of the electric carbon-filament light (“the birthday of modern technological research,” October 21, 1879), Pancho Villa’s uprising in Mexico, Gandhi’s first fast as a means of political demonstration against British rule in India, the dramatic confirmation of Einstein’s relativity theory, Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic, Neil Armstrong’s stepping onto the Moon, the Woodstock music festival, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution, and so on.
To these could be added comparable moments from the history of sports, such as Babe Ruth’s hitting sixty home runs in one season during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1927, or fourteen years later during the immediately following conjunction in 1941, Joe DiMaggio’s setting his equally famous and still-standing record of getting a hit in fifty-six consecutive games. Or more recently, Tiger Woods’s historic performance in winning the Masters golf tournament with a record-breaking score during the most recent Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1997.
A related category of cultural phenomena that show a far more than random correlation with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle comprises celebrated first meetings of major cultural figures that marked the beginnings of culturally significant personal associations that have become iconic in the collective imagination. Thus the first meeting of Freud and Jung at Freud’s house in Vienna on March 3, 1907, when the two men spoke animatedly with each other for thirteen hours straight, took place during a Jupiter-Uranus opposition—the one immediately following the conjunction of 1900 and The Interpretation of Dreams. Other culturally influential associations that began in coincidence with Jupiter-Uranus alignments include those of Goethe and Schiller (1788), Wordsworth and Coleridge (1797), Keats and Shelley (1817), Chopin and Liszt (1831), Pushkin and Gogol (1831), Emerson and Thoreau (1837), Marx and Engels (1844), Verlaine and Rimbaud(1871), Van Gogh and Gauguin (1886), T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1914), and Einstein and Bohr (1920), to name only a few.
Significant romantic associations were more likely to occur in coincidence with personal transits of the outer planets crossing the natal Venus, Moon, or Ascendant (and also, in the case of marriages and long-term committed relationships, with the personal Saturn transit cycle). Yet here too the Jupiter-Uranus world transit cycle was often relevant: Goethe scholars, for example, will recognize the periods of the two conjunctions that coincided with the beginnings of the American and French Revolutions (1775–76 and 1788–89) as also exactly coinciding with the beginnings of Goethe’s two most important romantic relationships: the first with Charlotte von Stein, the second with Christiane Vulpius. Similarly, the famous first meeting of Petrarch with Laura in Avignon, on April 6, 1327, took place when Jupiter and Uranus were in opposition, transiting across his natal Sun. This proved to be the turning point in Petrarch’s creative journey, with Laura serving as the queen of his poetic inspiration for the rest of his life.
A common theme in many of these correlations was that of the sudden and unexpected expansion of personal or cultural horizons. This expansion could be quite literal as well as intellectual, as when Galileo discovered a new and immensely expanded universe by turning his telescope to the heavens during the conjunction of 1610. So also during the conjunction of 1513, when the Spanish explorer Balboa became the first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and, from the heights of the Darién mountain range, saw the magnificent vista of the Pacific Ocean. This moment was later commemorated by Keats in his first great sonnet, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, which was itself published during yet another Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, that of 1816–17:17
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
In such instances we see that form of the Uranus?Jupiter vector in which the Uranus principle suddenly and unexpectedly opens up the Jupiterian experience of wider horizons, expanded experience, elevation and magnitude, a larger world. Captain James Cook’s first voyage to Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1768–69 is another example. The sudden expansion of horizons can be achieved by vertical as well as horizontal movement—the first balloon ascents, the first space flights, the first Moon landing. In the biographies of many cultural figures, the sudden expansion of horizons often took the form of major turning points in which the individual moved to a new environment where his or her creative work and personal life unfolded on a profoundly new level. Sometimes this was a journey or an extended stay at another place that in some way exerted a significant influence on the person’s intellectual or artistic development. So it was with Darwin’s long voyage to South America and the Galápagos Islands, begun during the conjunction of 1831, or Tocqueville’s famous nine-month visit to the United States during that same conjunction in 1831 that became the basis for his prescient and still insightful Democracy in America. Here t
oo could be cited Thoreau’s building of his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845 during the immediately following conjunction. So also Voltaire’s life-changing stay in England during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1726–27, which profoundly affected his intellectual outlook and inspired him to bring the liberating aspirations of the Enlightenment he saw successfully embodied there to the Continent. His influential Lettres Philosophiques that contained these ideas was then published during the immediately following conjunction of 1734.
Often the suddenly expanded horizons took the form of a transformative encounter abroad with a specific individual or institution, as in Freud’s pivotal stay in Paris during the conjunction of 1885–86 when he studied at the Salpêtrière with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who inspired Freud to change his life’s work to the study of psychopathology and the unconscious. So too Joseph Campbell’s transformative journey during the conjunction of 1927–28 to study in Paris and Munich, where he first encountered the work of Freud, Jung, Joyce, Mann, and Picasso, and conceived his understanding of the mythic foundations of human experience. Moreover, Campbell’s similarly transformative year-long pilgrimage to India, Southeast Asia, and Japan took place precisely within the fourteen-month period of another Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, in 1954–55. James Hillman’s major turning point occurred during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in April 1969 in London at the Warburg Institute, where his revelatory encounter with a tradition of classical polytheistic images and the larger Western cultural imagination helped inspire the birth of archetypal psychology.
Sometimes the sudden opening of new horizons took place through a book accidentally discovered, as when Nietzsche came upon Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea in a Leipzig bookstore during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1865, which proved to be a crucial turning point in his intellectual life. At other times, a shift of geographic location and expansion of horizons was both literal and intellectual, as when Nietzsche, during the immediately following opposition of 1879 fourteen years later, left his university teaching career and began his great creative decade of wandering and writing in Switzerland, France, and Italy.18
I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber…. I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as fate and experience—a wandering and a mountain-climbing will be in it: in the final analysis one experiences only oneself.
In other instances, the shift of location to a new and more creatively stimulating setting was specific and long-term, as in Goethe’s life-changing move to Weimar during the conjunction of 1775–76, or T. S. Eliot’s equally consequential move, during the conjunction of 1914, to England, where his poetic gifts were catalyzed and his literary career unfolded.
As in the case of Eliot’s joining Pound and other early modernists in London, an individual artist’s move during a Jupiter-Uranus alignment often resulted in a developmentally decisive encounter with a larger milieu of creative artists, as in Chopin’s move to Paris during the conjunction of 1831, where he met Liszt, Berlioz, Bellini, and Mendelssohn. Equally decisive was Van Gogh’s move to Paris during the conjunction of 1885–86, where he met Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, and Seurat. So also was Picasso’s move to Paris fourteen years later during the next conjunction of 1900—where, during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1906–07, he painted the first cubist masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in many ways the pivotal work of twentieth-century art.
The High Renaissance
In general, I found well-defined correlative patterns in the history of Western thought and culture, the tradition with which I am most familiar, in every century for which we have historical records sufficiently precise and extensive to research a planetary cycle of such brevity. As one moves back into earlier eras, the density of cultural data gradually thins out, and is drastically attenuated once one moves into the centuries and millennia preceding the year 1500. It is thus of special interest to study the first conjunction after 1500, centered on the year 1513 (the planets actually first came within 15° orb in June 1512, moved in and out of orb through the rest of 1512–13, and finally left it in February 1514, an unusually long span for a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction). This period coincided with an extraordinary wave of events that in many ways seemed to mark a climax of the Italian High Renaissance.
In October-November 1512 Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting was completed and unveiled. In early 1513 he began to carve the Moses for the tomb of Pope Julius II. During the same period Raphael completed the great cycle of paintings for the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura and Stanza di Eliodoro that included The School of Athens, Mount Parnassus, and The Triumph of the Church. This was in fact the culminating period of the papacy of Julius II, the greatest art patron of the Renaissance, who was himself born during a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction five cycles earlier and who oversaw Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s achievements in the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican apartments. (Julius’s other great legacy, the building of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was then in progress, began under Bramante during the immediately previous Jupiter-Uranus opposition seven years earlier, its foundation stone having been laid in April 1506.) In Venice during this conjunction, Titian, who was just starting his long career, painted his famous Neoplatonic allegory, Sacred and Profane Love. In Germany at this same time Albrecht Dürer engraved his greatest works, the set of three masterpieces, Saint Jerome in His Study; Knight, Death, and the Devil; and Melancholia I, all in 1513–14.
Nor was this creative wave limited to the visual arts. Between the spring and autumn of 1513 Machiavelli began work on both of his masterpieces, The Prince and the Discorsi, the foundation works of modern political theory. Castiglione in the same year commenced his quintessential Renaissance work The Book of the Courtier, which after expanding and polishing it for fourteen years he finally sent to the publisher in early 1527 during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.
The conjunction of 1513 proved to be consequential as well for theology and religion. Martin Luther in Wittenberg during these same months began his famous series of lectures on the Psalms and Paul’s Letter to the Romans that set forth his new understanding of salvation through faith alone in God’s grace, thereby establishing the theological basis for the Reformation.
Moreover, historians of science believe that this period coincided with the writing and private distribution of Copernicus’s Commentariolus, the short manuscript that contained the earliest description of his heliocentric theory, which he circulated to friends and colleagues. The first record we have of its existence is its having been listed in early 1514 in a scholar’s library inventory, just three months after the conjunction reached the final 15° point. Copernicus scholars regard it as having most probably been written in 1512–13.
It is as if, five hundred years ago, some archetypal force pushed the modern self into being all at once—in art, religion, science, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution—and this brief period represented a kind of accelerated threshold of the larger phenomenon. Even in global exploration, it was in these same extraordinary months, in September 1513, that Balboa first sighted the Pacific Ocean, a literal, geographical form of unexpected awakening and the expansion to new horizons. Moreover, amidst all the synchronic events and cultural phenomena we have been noting, the diachronic patterning in global exploration is visible as well: It was during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus opposition, in October and November 1520, that Ferdinand Magellan first traversed the strait at the southernmost tip of South America that links the Atlantic and the Pacific (bestowing the name Pacifica on the latter as he did so) in that expedition’s historic first circumnavigation of the globe. And if we look in the other direction, it was exactly two cycles earlier, during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1492, that Christopher Columbus set sail from Spain on the voyage that first took him to the New World.
Great Heights and Shadows
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nbsp; In these diverse correlations so closely patterned in sequential coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, we can recognize Jupiter’s archetypal principle in its broadening and elevating cultural dimension—the expansion of intellectual and artistic horizons, with an inclination towards higher aspirations, high culture, the arts and sciences, philosophy, higher learning, broader understanding, breadth of cultural and intellectual vision, opening to other cultures and an expanded range of perspectives. We can also see Jupiter’s association with an impulse for global expansions, heights, and glories of a more literal kind, as in the vast explorations of the transoceanic navigators. In turn, the Promethean archetypal principle associated with Uranus seems to catalyze and liberate this Jupiter impulse in unexpected, innovative ways, in many forms of human experience and endeavor, while simultaneously being successfully elevated and expanded (Jupiter) in its own emancipatory and creative tendency (Uranus). Thus we begin to see something of the richly complex archetypal dialectic that takes place between the two principles: both Jupiter?Uranus and Uranus?Jupiter. The two mutually activate, interpenetrate, and inflect each other, each in its characteristic way.
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