The year which has passed…has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.
The moment of cultural awakening, no matter how epochal, often occurs very quietly. Few if any besides Kepler realized the full significance of his Astronomia Nova in 1609–10, with its brilliant solution to the ancient problem of the planets and its mathematical confirmation of the Copernican heliocentric theory. Galileo himself, his own ambitions foremost in his consciousness, entirely failed to recognize the importance of Kepler’s work. Kepler was being only partly rhetorical when he declared, “It can wait a century for a reader, as God himself has waited six thousand years for a witness.”
For this reason it is difficult to speak with sufficient historical perspective about correlations with the more recent alignments of Jupiter and Uranus. Scarcely anyone during the conjunction in 1803 knew that Beethoven was composing the Eroica, let alone what it would signify for later generations. Even six years after the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams during the conjunction of 1900, only 351 copies had been sold. The unassuming Jesuit priest Lemaître and his expanding-universe hypothesis were impatiently brushed aside and ignored in 1927 by all the distinguished physicists, including Einstein, at the famous Solvay congress. No one in 1962 recognized that Betty Friedan had just completed a book that would catalyze a social revolution. Few could have predicted that Rachel Carson in the same year had initiated a new epoch in ecological awareness and a movement of such planetary consequence.
Although Jupiter-Uranus alignments regularly coincided with creative and emancipatory beginnings, births of important works and movements and ideas, these beginnings were often, as it were, births in a stable, humble and remote from the centers of world power and attention—in privacy and solitude, in a quiet study, in a small meeting, in a notebook, alone on a mountain path, by a pond, inside an individual mind, the interior castle. They were often unrecognized at the time by the larger public, and sometimes they were unrecognized by anyone, even the creative agents themselves. Only later did the event or its significance become visible—indeed, sometimes much later, under a subsequent Jupiter-Uranus alignment, as with Mendel’s long-ignored genetic discoveries. No one during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition in 1976 knew that two young men in a garage in California had begun the personal computer revolution. No one during the following Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1983 recognized that perestroika was being born when Mikhail Gorbachev, as the Soviet Union’s chief agricultural expert, made his crucial visit to Canada that year, where he encountered the efficiency and productivity of North American farming and the open political style of the West and began his pivotal association with Aleksandr Yakovlev, then the Soviet ambassador to Canada, who became the principal theorist of perestroika and glasnost. Such correlations become visible only over time.
Judging by the evidence for all previous Jupiter-Uranus alignments, it is virtually certain that the majority of the most significant Promethean events coincident with the recent alignments are not yet known—something to keep in mind with the current (as of this writing) Jupiter-Uranus opposition, which began in the fall of 2002 and extends through the summer of 2004. Certainly many characteristic Jupiter-Uranus phenomena during this period are readily visible, such as the wave of breakthroughs in astronomy and space exploration, the worldwide demonstrations against the U.S. invasion of Iraq discussed earlier, the sudden popular enthusiasm for antiestablishment documentaries, and the intensified transformation of the Internet into a medium of progressive activism and dissemination of news and dissident opinion.21 But as with most of the correlations discussed throughout these chapters on the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, from Descartes’s Discourse on Method and the cogito in 1637 to the birth of rock and roll in 1954–55, many, perhaps most, of the major archetypally relevant cultural phenomena of the 2002–04 alignment will become visible and open to historical assessment only in the course of time as we gain sufficient distance from the age in which we live.
Perhaps it is appropriate to end this section on the Jupiter-Uranus cycle by mentioning that Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man, with which we began this book, was itself composed exactly during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1486 at the dawn of the High Renaissance. The coincidence is both marvelous and altogether representative of the cycle. Universally recognized by modern scholars as epoch-making, Pico’s manifesto was scarcely known in the year of its composition, since the meeting of philosophers for which it was written as the opening oration was prohibited by the Vatican from taking place. Yet with its stirring declaration of human freedom and boundless possibility in the cosmic adventure, with its optimism and creativity, and with its ultimate cultural success and legendary historical status, the Oratio vividly illustrates the central themes of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle and its corresponding archetypal complex, Prometheus crowned king:
Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature…. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer.
VII
Awakenings of Spirit and Soul
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
—William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience
Epochal Shifts of Cultural Vision
Let us now examine our fourth and final planetary cycle in this initial survey of world transits and historical correlations with collective cultural phenomena. The Uranus-Neptune cycle is approximately 172 years in length, the longest we have examined so far. Conjunctions and oppositions of Uranus and Neptune last for relatively long periods, remaining within 15° orb for approximately fourteen to nineteen years. In general, I found that the archetypal character of these historical periods was less concrete and tangible than the other cycles we have been examining, yet their ultimate influence on subsequent human history was no less profound or enduring.
In the century and a half since Neptune’s discovery, astrologers have come to regard the archetypal principle associated with the planet as both all-encompassing and vanishingly subtle in nature. It is considered to govern the transcendent dimensions of life, imaginative and spiritual vision, and the realm of the ideal. It rules the invisible and intangible ground of experience, shaping awareness beyond the usual causal mechanisms. Its characteristic influence is one of dissolving boundaries and structures, merging that which was separate. It favors the unitive over the divided, the timeless over the temporal, the immaterial over the material, the infinite over the finite.
The Neptune archetype is also associated with illusion and delusion, deception and self-deception, confusion, ambiguity, projection, maya. It rules both the positive and negative meanings of enchantment—both poetic vision and wishful fantasy, mysticism and madness, higher realities and delusional unreality. It informs all that is paradoxically united. It transcends and confuses attempts to maintain strict boundaries, definitions, and dichotomies. It is the archetypal principle of the multidimensional and the metaempirical, the metaphorical and multivalent.
The Neptune principle has a special relation to the stream of consciousness and the oceanic depths of the unconscious, to all nonordinary states of consciousness, to the realm of dreams and visions, images and reflections. It governs myth and religion, poetry and the arts, inspiration and aspiration, the experience of divinity, the numinous, the ineffable, the sacred and mysterious. Its domain is that of meaning rather than
matter, the symbolic rather than the literal. It is associated with the realm of soul and spirit, the transpersonal domain, the collective unconscious, the anima mundi, the archetypal dimension of life, the realm of the Platonic Ideas. More broadly, Neptune is regarded as that which ultimately governs all modes of consciousness, in the sense of encompassing all the gods and archetypes that inform and shape how one experiences the world, both outer and inner. It is also the archetypal principle that informs the preceding sentences—that makes possible any perspective or experience concerning “gods and archetypes,” “the numinous,” or “the anima mundi.”
In periods of Uranus-Neptune alignments, as with the other cycles involving Uranus we have examined, I observed that the Prometheus archetype again seemed to be clearly constellated in the collective psyche and evident in cultural phenomena. Its familiar qualities of accelerated change, sudden awakening, creative innovation, emancipation, rebellion, and disruption were easily visible, but in this case these qualities were active specifically in relation to the various archetypal themes and domains of experience associated with Neptune. The periods of Uranus-Neptune alignments were characterized not so much by great political or similarly concrete external changes as by pervasive transformations of a culture’s underlying vision: widespread spiritual awakenings, the birth of new religious movements, cultural renaissances, the emergence of new philosophical perspectives, rebirths of idealism, sudden shifts in a culture’s cosmological and metaphysical vision, rapid collective changes in psychological understanding and interior sensibility, certain forms of scientific paradigm shifts, new utopian social visions and movements, and epochal shifts in a culture’s artistic imagination.
More problematical, these alignments also tended to coincide with periods of widespread spiritual and philosophical confusion and disorientation that were associated with the rapid dissolution of previously established structures of belief and certainty, and a greater than usual susceptibility to mass entrancements of various kinds. As with other configurations involving Uranus, there was consistently evident either an exciting, liberatory, awakening quality, accompanied by spontaneous creative innovation, or a disruptive, destabilizing quality produced by sudden unexpected radical change. But in either mode, those qualities were characteristically expressed in and through the domain of the collective imagination and cultural vision—spiritual, artistic, scientific, cosmological, philosophical, social—with a general tendency towards the idealistic, the poetic, the esoteric, and the mystical, often accompanied by a restless impulse for transcendence and spiritual illumination.
Let us begin this survey by citing a few paradigmatic historical examples. Regarding the birth of new philosophical movements, especially those of an idealist metaphysical character, Uranus and Neptune were in conjunction in the period from 412 to 397 BCE, the years of Socrates’s most influential teaching in Athens during the final decade and a half of his life, including the entire period of Plato’s study with him, his death, and the resulting birth of Platonism, indeed of the entire Western philosophical tradition whose source and wellspring are Socrates and Plato. Many characteristic features of subsequent alignments are evident in the philosophical vision that emerges from this period, such as the affirmation of a transcendent spiritual reality, the vision of the archetypal Ideas, the belief that death is a gateway to greater life, and the revelation of a superior realm of existence that informs and imbues human life with meaning and purpose.
In the area of spiritual awakenings and the birth of new religions, Uranus and Neptune were in opposition from 16 to 32 CE, a period historians generally consider to encompass the adult life and ministry of Jesus, his death, and the birth of the Christian religion. As we will see in the course of our survey, many characteristic features of other Uranus-Neptune alignments can be discerned here in a quintessential form: the charismatic influence of a spiritual teacher inspired and informed by a mystical awakening, the revelation of a new spiritual order and the sudden forming of a new relation to the divine, the belief that a greater divine reality has unexpectedly entered into human affairs with liberating consequences, the pentecostal influx of new spiritual powers and the ecstatic communion with divinity.
Where the Uranus-Pluto cycle of the 1960s, the French Revolutionary epoch, and other comparable periods such as that of the enormous Spartacus rebellion in Roman antiquity can be seen as coinciding with collective activations of the titanically empowered Prometheus, the Uranus-Neptune cycle appears to be correlated with the collective activation of a more spiritual Prometheus. The image of Jesus Christ that emerges from this period bears many of the distinctive Promethean motifs, though in an emphatically spiritual context and mode of manifestation—the divine rebel against the old order, the eternal liberator of humanity who brings the fire of divine grace from the heavens to emancipate humankind from its enslavement to death and sin, reopening the gates of paradise. As we will see, many other themes were visible in this era that would be characteristic of subsequent Uranus-Neptune alignment periods: the focus on miraculous and supernatural phenomena, sudden healings of both a physical and spiritual nature, the concern with redemption and spiritual rebirth, the widespread collective belief that a radically different reality would suddenly replace the present world order, the perceived dissolution of long-established limiting structures of reality and conventional laws of causation, the unexpected awakening to immortal life, the evoking of an ethic of universal compassion and the spiritual unity of humankind.
In the area of cultural renaissances, Uranus and Neptune were in conjunction from 1472 to 1486, the heart of the Italian Renaissance that saw the Florentine Academy’s Platonic revival at its height during the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent, when Marsilio Ficino wrote his eighteen-volume magnum opus, the Theologia Platonica, developed his influential conception of Platonic love, disseminated the ideas of the Hermetic and other esoteric and mystical traditions, and published the first complete translation of Plato in the West. This same period saw Leonardo da Vinci begin his artistic career with The Adoration of the Magi and Botticelli paint both Primavera and The Birth of Venus, the quintessential symbol of the Renaissance’s rebirth of archetypal beauty. This was the formative period for Erasmus, the paradigmatic Renaissance Christian Humanist. Especially emblematic of this archetypal complex, as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction entered its last year, Pico della Mirandola composed the Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of Renaissance Humanism.
At the time Pico’s Oration was written, in 1486, there took place a rare triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. We discussed above those elements of the Oration that reflected the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal impulse. In the context of the present cycle we can recognize several characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex: the numinous revelation of a newly autonomous form of human being; the fluid syncretism and interpenetration of many spiritual and philosophical traditions, often of an esoteric character; the renewal of classical antiquity and the ancient imagination; the creative revisioning of ancient myths and biblical texts; and the celebration of an image of the human being that is simultaneously Promethean and spiritual, divinely informed, and specially graced to fulfill its unique cosmic role.
As we saw in other planetary cycles, major outer-planet alignment periods coincided not only with archetypally relevant cultural phenomena but also with the births of individuals whose subsequent life and work embodied and carried forward the archetypal impulses associated with that specific planetary combination. During the Uranus-Neptune alignment of 1472–86 occurred the births of both Raphael and Michelangelo, paradigmatic embodiments of the High Renaissance artistic ideal, both of whom were inspired by a synthesis of Neoplatonic and Christian mysticism. This alignment also coincided with the births of both Copernicus and Luther, the two men who initiated, respectively, the great cosmological and religious paradigm shifts that launched the modern era.
During this alignment at the heart of the Italian Renaissan
ce we can recognize the evidence for synchronic archetypal phenomena that occur across several categories of cultural experience simultaneously and affect the cultural imagination and sensibility in many areas: the arts, philosophy, religion, science. We can also see the characteristic tendency of these periods to dissolve the boundaries between domains, as in Leonardo (art and science), Ficino and Pico (philosophy and religion, scholarship and gnosis), and Botticelli and Raphael (art and philosophy). A vivid example of this synchronic multiplicity and interplay from the more recent past is the most recent Uranus-Neptune opposition, which took place at the beginning of the twentieth century.
In the cultural phenomena and events during the alignment that took place from 1899 to 1918, the characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal combination can be seen in virtually every category. Regarding a major cultural shift in artistic vision, this is the crucial period in painting and the visual arts for Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Mondrian, Duchamp, Kandinsky, and Klee, as well as the influential later work of Cézanne and Rodin. In literature, this is the pivotal period of radical change and experiment for Joyce, Proust, Mann, Rilke, Kafka, Yeats, Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens. So too in music, for Stravinsky, Schönberg, and Scriabin, as well as dance, for Isadora Duncan, Nijinsky, and Diaghilev. The Uranus-Neptune alignment of this period precisely encompassed the many-sided birth of modernism in European and American culture.
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