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by Tarnas, Richard

  VIII

  Towards a New Heaven and a New Earth

  A mood of universal destruction and renewal…has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos—the right moment—for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious human within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science…. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of the modern human.

  —C. G. Jung

  The Undiscovered Self

  Planetary democracy does not yet exist, but our global civilization is already preparing a place for it: It is the very Earth we inhabit, linked with Heaven above us. Only in this setting can the mutuality and the commonality of the human race be newly created, with reverence and gratitude for that which transcends each of us singly, and all of us together. The authority of a world democratic order simply cannot be built on anything else but the revitalized authority of the universe.

  —Václav Havel

  The Spiritual Roots of Democracy

  Understanding the Past, Creating the Future

  To approach the issue of future planetary alignments in the light of the evidence we have examined so far, we must first clearly grasp the limitations of the present study. For the sake of simplicity and clarity in this initial survey of archetypal correlations with planetary movements, I have restricted the focus of this book almost entirely to a few major cycles of the outer planets. The larger astrological picture, however, is far more rich and complex, with many more interpenetrating variables. Of the three principal forms of correspondence described in this book—natal charts, personal transits, and world transits—I have focused mainly on the latter. In that category I limited the above survey to only four planetary combinations, and in those cycles to only the quadrature alignments: the conjunctions, oppositions, and squares. Cyclical alignments having a different character, such as the trine and sextile, were not included. I mentioned only briefly such significant planetary cycles as the Neptune-Pluto and Saturn-Uranus cycles, while still others, such as Saturn-Neptune, I have not yet discussed at all.

  These limitations have resulted in my focusing on certain dominant themes and qualities of the periods examined while ignoring or bracketing other significant motifs that in another context I would have highlighted. Similarly, these constraints have resulted in my considering at length certain historical periods while scarcely mentioning others. The later part of the 1970s, for example, was not explored, nor were the mid-1920s, though many important cultural phenomena are associated with those periods, and the relevant planetary alignments are as noteworthy and illuminating as those we have examined. Every era has its own significance, its own nobility, its own complex drama, each with its unique pattern of unfolding planetary alignments and corresponding archetypal dynamics.

  To give just one illustration of a category of correlations that we have so far not considered: An especially notable planetary alignment in Western cultural history, one that involved the trine aspect, was the rare “grand trine” configuration of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto that took place approximately between 1765 and 1777, when the three outermost planets moved into an equilateral triangle, each being positioned in an angular relationship of 120° with the other two. Grand trines between any three planets characteristically coincide with a particularly pronounced harmonious mutual activation and interpenetration of the three archetypal principles involved. Such a grand trine of the three outermost planets occurred only once in the modern era. The period of that alignment coincided with the very height of the Enlightenment, when there took place many of that era’s most distinctive milestones, such as the completion of the Encyclopédie, the eighteenth century’s great intellectual bible of intellectual emancipation, by Diderot and the other leading philosophes. The grand trine coincided also with the beginning of the American Revolution led by Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Franklin, and others as a self-conscious expression of Enlightenment ideals and principles. Here too we can recognize the archetypal background of the distinctive numinosity, the sense of providential blessing and divinely ordained destiny, that has historically been attached to those founding events and figures. This numinosity and spiritual idealism (Neptune) was in turn radically interwoven with the impulse towards liberty and revolution (Uranus-Pluto), a complex of themes powerfully articulated later by Lincoln and, often more problematically and exploitatively, by others.

  This same period of the grand trine of the later 1760s and 1770s also coincided with the great birth of Romanticism in Germany that introduced that seminal and profound cultural impulse into the European mind. From the work of Herder and Goethe in these years emerged a new conception of nature, spirit, and history—and of language and art, intellect and feeling, interiority and imagination, sensuality and spirituality, humanity and divinity—that would dramatically bear fruit, as we have seen, during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune axial alignments from the 1790s through the 1820s (and indeed beyond those periods to the most recent such alignments of the 1960s and 1990s). In addition, virtually the entire central generation of Romantics was born during the decade of this grand trine: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schelling, de Staël, the Schlegel brothers, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin, Novalis.

  The powerful confluence of brilliant creativity and the urge for freedom and change (Uranus), of imagination, spiritual aspiration, and charismatic idealism (Neptune), and of nature, evolution, instinct, and eros (Pluto) that began to enter into the world at this time and was then given artistic and philosophical form by the generation born during this period corresponds exactly to the character of a grand trine involving these planets and archetypal principles. Remarkably, during the period when the three planets were in especially close alignment, in 1769–70, three world-historic individuals were born whose lives and influence especially embodied this archetypal confluence: Napoleon, who was born with Mars on the grand trine; Beethoven, who was born with Venus on the grand trine; and Hegel, who was born with Mercury on the grand trine.

  To a far greater extent than can be explored within the limits of this book, an enormous range of comparable evidence has now emerged concerning the natal charts and personal transits of historically significant individuals. The comprehensive set of data comprising all three forms of correspondence expands the evidence of synchronistic patterning to include all the archetypal combinations associated with the planets and luminaries in all their possible pairings: Sun-Pluto, Moon-Pluto, Mercury-Pluto, Venus-Pluto, Mars-Pluto, Jupiter-Pluto, etc.; Sun-Neptune, Moon-Neptune, Mercury-Neptune, Venus-Neptune, and so forth. The correlations presented in the preceding chapters involving just four cycles of world transits are thus only a highly restricted sample and illustration of this much larger body of evidence. They provide us with a limited, though still potentially valuable, foundation for looking at future planetary alignments.

  Before turning our attention to the future, it will be helpful to consider briefly the way I went about assessing the evidence surveyed in the preceding chapters, and how this journey of inquiry led to a gradual transformation in my research assumptions and, more generally, my approach to knowledge.

  In any sustained rigorous inquiry, many apparent anomalies will arise in the course of systematic research. Something as infinitely complicated and mysterious as human history, or even a single human life, can never be neatly comprehended by any theoretical structure, no matter how complex, supple, and encompassing that structure may be. Over the years, I would often examine biographical and historical phenomena for which I could not immediately recognize any planetary correlations that made sense in terms of the coherent patterns consistently visible in mos
t other cases. Yet in the course of time, with more data, or with a deeper grasp of the astrological principles at work, a new horizon of understanding would often open up. I would then realize that I had been attempting to compress the data too rigidly into an inadequate theoretical structure or, conversely, attempting to apply a viable structure to inadequate or insufficiently understood data. These are problems familiar to researchers in every discipline as they work within a particular paradigm. As Kuhn and other historians of science have observed, confronting anomalies constitutes an essential aspect of the growth of knowledge and the process of paradigm change.1

  To respond to such challenges, the researcher must engage in a constant negotiation between theory and data, reconsidering each in the light of the other in a continuous process of recursive feedback—tentatively modifying the theoretical structure, probing the evidence more deeply, patiently observing. In my case, the evidence was of two kinds, astronomical and historical-biographical, both of which had to be carefully examined and precisely compared to determine whether significant correspondences were present. The task therefore required a disciplined alertness to subtle clues of genuine patterning yet also to the hazards of distorting projection and insufficient knowledge. Like Scylla and Charybdis for Odysseus, the dangers lay in both directions: on the one side, being skeptically armored to the point of impenetrability against the possible reality of correlations that would challenge the conventional modern world view, and on the other, being uncritically overcommitted to a mass of inherited astrological theories that could promiscuously find patterns everywhere.

  In the end, making proper assessments of correlations seemed to involve the continuous interplay of “multiple intelligences,” to use Howard Gardner’s helpful term. To maintain the double-edged alertness to both potential patterns and potential projections, the exercise of critical reason of the usual sort was crucial. But so also was something more like psychological self-awareness, with a cultivated willingness to challenge one’s own structurings of reality and limiting assumptions of all kinds. The task seemed to require not only an intellectual but an emotional capacity to tolerate a state of unknowing, to withhold oneself from premature conclusions—either skeptical or affirmative—that merely bolstered one’s sense of existential security at the expense of encountering the unknown.

  Equally crucial was the role of aesthetic and imaginative discernment, without which the archetypal forms and patternings at the heart of the phenomenon would have been entirely invisible—or inaudible, as if the archetypal forms were a language the cosmos spoke, for those who had ears to hear. No less important was a capacity for empathic insight into the underlying character of different historical eras and diverse cultural figures. This in turn needed to be combined with a sound historical sense for what events and individuals were significant in a particular field, in what ways, and with what interconnections and lines of influence. Always, what had to be honored was the evidence—life itself, in all its complexity, particularity, and sovereign autonomy. What I sought to explore and understand seemed to demand the engagement of my whole being for it to open up its deeper patterns and meanings, its intelligibility. The long journey of research was in itself not unlike a spiritual path.

  Looking back over the past three decades, I can now recognize that after a certain critical threshold was reached in both the quantity and the quality of correlations, my starting posture underwent an essential transformation of perspective similar to the one described in the Two Suitors chapter: Instead of assuming a general cosmic randomness, as one usually would, then checking skeptically for highly unlikely inexplicable coincidences that might contradict the conventional view, I now began to assume, flexibly but with some degree of confidence, an underlying order. When I encountered an event or cultural phenomenon for which convincing planetary correlations were not immediately apparent, I continued to pursue the inquiry, staying open to the possibility that a significant correlative pattern might well emerge over time as I learned more. Far more often than not, this is just what occurred. In retrospect, attending closely to anomalies resistant to understanding proved to be an important part of the research. Such an approach in the end often produced valuable conceptual breakthroughs, sometimes many years after I first encountered the challenging problem.

  Yet without the starting posture of methodological openness, neither impenetrably armored nor naïvely overcommitted, the deeper and more compelling patterns would most likely not have become visible, because the starting structure of my assumptions would have impatiently precluded their eventual appearance. I found that the conventional modern assumption that the cosmos and its processes are intrinsically random and meaningless constituted an extraordinarily effective barrier to further knowledge. So also did the uncritical acceptance of many conventional astrological doctrines. Finding the middle path between these two obstacles turned out to be essential to opening a path of discovery that would not otherwise have presented itself.

  As I continued the research in this manner and in this spirit, year after year, the intelligibility of the historical record began to unfold. In the preceding chapters, the reader will perhaps have observed a similar process. For both researcher and reader, the success of such an unfolding seems to require a flexible combination of critical questioning, freedom from a predisposition of closed skepticism, and patience.

  Any discussion of future alignments, whether for world transits or personal transits, presents extraordinary challenges and responsibilities to the astrological researcher. Because we have seen how similar planetary configurations in the past have coincided with specific archetypal phenomena with considerable consistency, and because we can mathematically determine the upcoming alignments with great precision, one might say that, in a sense, we know something about the future. But in another sense, we do not know. I believe that the extent to which we have embraced this epistemological humility is a decisive measure of the potential value or harmfulness of our analysis. The difference between concrete prediction and archetypal prediction is something like the difference between fate and free will. Stated more precisely: It is the difference between an inevitably constraining and likely misconceived assertion of a pregiven future and the potential empowerment of a co-creative self consciously participating in an archetypally structured unfolding of life in an open universe. It could well be said that the entire modern and postmodern development of human autonomy and critical self-awareness has prepared us to be better able to walk the tightrope presented to us by the contemporary archetypal astrological perspective and evidence—in particular, by the knowledge of the outer planets’ existence and their corresponding archetypal principles, by the retrospective knowledge of the historical correlations, and by the foreknowledge of future planetary alignments.

  I began my systematic astrological research in the mid-1970s. In the course of the next several years the basic framework of understanding that underlies the present book emerged fairly rapidly. At that time, therefore, a number of the more recent planetary alignments I have discussed in the preceding chapters were still in the future. When I saw, for example, that a Saturn-Pluto conjunction was going to occur in the 1981–84 period, or that a much longer Uranus-Neptune conjunction would take place from the mid-1980s through the rest of the century, I tentatively anticipated that humanity’s collective experience during those eras would bear something like the distinctive archetypal character I had observed in so many earlier instances of the same configurations. On occasion, I would have a specific intuition—essentially an educated guess, based on the evidence available to me—as to what kinds of concrete events might take place during a particular alignment. From the perspective of the late 1970s one could easily surmise that the upcoming Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84 might very well coincide with a period of widespread conservative empowerment, an acute increase in Cold War tensions, and a crisis in the Middle East, given the occurrence of just such phenomena during every previous quadrature alignment
of the Saturn-Pluto cycle since the preceding conjunction in 1946–48 when the Cold War began and the state of Israel was born. Similarly, during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the later 1980s and 1990s into the new millennium, the likelihood of a sustained era of widespread spiritual awakening, heightened religious belief, and new interest in esoteric, mystical, and holistic perspectives seemed to me a fairly straightforward prospect, given the historical record.

  While these anticipations of the future proved well-founded, there occurred many specific events and trends in those periods that I did not anticipate. Before it happened I did not foresee that anything like the Internet revolution and the globalizing impact of the World Wide Web would happen during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1990s, and the same is true of countless other cultural phenomena of that era discussed in the preceding chapter that I now can easily recognize as reflecting the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex. Conversely, other possibilities that I feared might occur during these periods did not in fact take place. In the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the 1981–84 period, when so many geopolitical circumstances clearly resembled those of the 1914–16 Saturn-Pluto conjunction two cycles earlier that had coincided with the sudden catalyzing of a global war among all the European powers and alliances, I was not entirely certain during the first Reagan administration that the world would manage to get through that conjunction without a direct and perhaps catastrophic conflict between the mutually demonizing and nuclear-overarmed Cold War superpowers—something many foreign policy experts feared at the time as well, often making explicit references to the European situation of 1914. Such an outcome seemed especially plausible given the extent to which the world situation in 1981–84 appeared to be moving towards a climax of the Cold War whose beginning had coincided with the 1946–48 conjunction exactly one Saturn-Pluto cycle earlier. A cyclical pattern seemed clear; the principal question was how it would turn out. Instead of a catastrophic conflict, however, what happened was an intensification of these global tensions and dangers, as well as many local wars, to a point that catalyzed both widespread public criticism and severe economic stresses, and eventually produced a very different outcome: the mutual effort in the second half of the 1980s by both superpowers during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction for nuclear arms control and increased diplomatic understanding, which finally led to the end of the Cold War itself in 1989–90, when Jupiter reached this alignment.