Yet beyond the specific principles outlined above, perhaps the most essential element in the research paradigm was the basic nature of my approach to the evidence and the possibility of discovering significant correlations. This approach emerged only after I had encountered what was in effect a critical mass of such correlations, which produced in my basic intellectual orientation a gestalt switch or paradigm shift, as Kuhn well described such a change: in this case, a fundamental shift from a starting assumption of randomness to the assumption of a potential underlying order. The correlations I came upon in my early research were compelling enough on their own terms to move me tentatively from my initial skeptical dismissal of astrology and to set in motion a fuller investigation. But without the more profound epistemological shift from the assumption of a cosmic process that is fundamentally random and meaningless to the assumption of a potential subtle orderedness, I would never have glimpsed most of the evidence I have set forth in the following chapters. One is unlikely to discover what one is certain cannot possibly exist. The physicist David Bohm recognized just this fatal constraint in the modern scientific paradigm: “Randomness is…assumed to be a fundamental but inexplicable and unanalyzable feature of nature, and indeed ultimately of all existence.” However,
what is randomness in one context may reveal itself as simple orders of necessity in another broader context…. It should therefore be clear how important it is to be open to fundamentally new notions of general order, if science is not to be blind to the very important but complex and subtle orders that escape the coarse mesh of the “net” on current ways of thinking.
Whatever the field of inquiry, attempting to assess a phenomenon with a methodology that is based on the firm underlying assumption that the phenomenon does not exist has proved itself to be a singularly inadequate strategy, at once self-fulfilling and self-limiting. For the the present research, critical rigor was necessary, but so also was a certain openness of mind and spirit, and patience to allow authentic patterns and deeper meanings to emerge with time and further observation.
The other essential factor making possible the present research was a technical one. In the course of the past thirty years, because of rapid advances in computer technology and the development of increasingly sophisticated programs for the calculation of planetary positions over long periods of time, I was gradually able to gain access to precise astronomical data for all the planets extending for many centuries into the past: first the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, then the earlier modern period going back to the Renaissance, then the medieval era, and finally classical antiquity.15 For myself as well as for many other researchers, these technical advances created a gradually opening horizon extending back in time further and further as the years passed and the research progressed. Compared with the situation facing previous generations of researchers, the sudden availability of such extensive accurate planetary data permitted us to investigate many significant cultural figures and historical events that had long been inaccessible to such analysis.
Personal Transit Cycles
In the following chapters, we will examine correlations for all three forms of correspondence: natal charts, personal transits, and world transits. Although natal chart analysis has been the basis for most modern astrological research and practice, and although study of my own and others’ birth charts was certainly crucial in my growing recognition of astrology’s possible validity, it was the analysis of personal transits that first fully compelled my attention. The study of personal transits is particularly illuminating because it involves the precise correlation of life events with two sets of astronomical factors: planetary positions currently in the sky and planetary positions in the individual’s natal chart, the one set aligning with the other, each with their own specific archetypal meanings depending on which planets are involved. If both the timing of a particular life event and its archetypal quality are found to correlate with the appropriate planetary transits across the appropriate natal planetary positions, the possible implications can more readily be assessed.
Awakenings, Rebellions, Breakthroughs: The Uranus Cycle
The transits of the Sun, the Moon, and the inner planets—Mercury, Venus, and Mars—are fast-moving and brief in duration. The five outer planets move more slowly, and their transits can last several months or years. It is these that hold the most significance for biographical research. Surprisingly, considering the longer astrological tradition, the first set of correlations I observed that alerted me to the potential importance of personal transits centered not on one of the planets known to the ancients that had always been part of the astrological tradition, but rather on the planet Uranus, the first one discovered by telescope in the modern age.
With what still now seems to me stunning regularity, I found that transiting Uranus in the sky happened to be in precise geometrical alignment with planets in individuals’ natal charts during the periods in which those individuals underwent major biographical shifts having an underlying character of sudden change, creative awakening, and unexpected disruption of established life structures: psychological turning points and breakthroughs, radical changes in philosophical perspective, periods of intensified innovation and discovery, acts of rebellion against various personal or societal constraints, and the like. Uranus transits last about three years. After the first several cases in which I had noted such a correlation in the lives of persons well known to me, I began a systematic examination of hundreds of such cases. The coinciding events and experiences were not at all literally identical, nor, given their concrete variety of expression, were they susceptible to statistical measurement, yet the underlying common set of qualities could be readily discerned. Equally significant, those qualities closely matched the consensus of the modern astrological tradition concerning the archetypal meaning associated with the planet Uranus.
In many of these cases, transiting Uranus had formed an exact alignment to the individual’s natal Sun, and in these cases the periods of rapid change and creative breakthrough seemed especially linked with an awakening of the individual self that radically changed and sometimes liberated the sense of personal identity. Such a transit can occur at different times of life for different individuals, depending on the specific astronomical situation in each case. One person might undergo the transit of Uranus conjunct Sun, for example, early in life, even in early childhood; another might do so much later, in her fifties, thereby providing a very different biographical context in which the corresponding archetypal complex could emerge. Despite the numerous differences in age and biographical context, however, I found that an archetypal commonality was readily evident, with the occurrence of various events and experiences possessing a distinctly Promethean character.
An especially noteworthy pattern of correlation I observed occurred when transiting Uranus formed a major aspect to the position of Uranus itself in an individual’s natal chart. As we will see, all individuals undergo the sequence of major geometrical alignments of Uranus to its own natal position at approximately the same ages. I found that each such alignment appeared to coincide with periods in which there was evident a greater than usual potential for sudden radical shifts and breakthroughs of various kinds. This pattern of apparent archetypal activation in coincidence with the Uranus transit cycle became particularly clear when I began to examine in detail the biographies of major cultural figures with whose lives and works I was familiar.
For example, I discovered that when Galileo made his first telescopic discoveries between October 1609 and March 1610 and then quickly wrote and published Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”), which heralded the truth of the Copernican theory and caused a sensation in European intellectual circles, he had the identical personal Uranus transit that René Descartes had in 1637 when he published his equally epoch-making Discourse on Method, the manifesto of modern reason and the foundational work of modern philosophy. Moreover, this also happened to be the same transit Isaac Newton had in 1687 when
he published the Principia, the foundational work of modern science.
In all three cases, the transit that coincided with these pivotal periods was Uranus reaching the exact halfway point, 180°, in its full cycle around the birth chart, i.e., the point of opposition to the degree of celestial longitude that Uranus occupied at the individual’s birth. This is referred to as “transiting Uranus opposite natal Uranus” (or simply, “Uranus opposite Uranus”). One can think of it as the “Full Moon” point of the personal Uranus transit cycle. It is the one time in a person’s life that Uranus has reached the midpoint of its eighty-four-year orbit since his or her birth. The duration of this transit is approximately three years,which represents the period during which transiting Uranus is within 5° of exact opposition alignment with its own natal position, the usual range, or orb, within which I observed archetypal correlations in hard-aspect personal transits of the outer planets.16
In carefully examining the historical and biographical data, I found the precision of timing in these various cases consistently remarkable. One could track the development and the crest of significant creative achievement, personal breakthrough, or sudden life-change in each biography against the transiting planetary positions for the several months and years on each side of the exact transit, with a result that closely resembled the shape of a bell curve in a wavelike continuum as the transit moved towards exactitude and afterwards moved apart. Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, for example, all completed their revolutionary works when the transit was at its mathematical peak, within 1° to 2° of exact alignment, something that with this transit occurs altogether for approximately twelve months in the course of an entire lifetime.
I found that this same transit was regularly present at comparable moments of sudden breakthrough, discovery, innovation, rebellion, and radical change in the lives of other major cultural figures. For example, Freud had this same transit in 1895–97, the years that brought the sudden wave of discoveries in his thought that gave birth to psychoanalysis, the beginning of his systematic self-analysis, and the beginning of his writing of The Interpretation of Dreams—the period of which he later wrote, “Insight such as this falls to one’s lot but once in a lifetime.”
A close examination of this period of Freud’s life reveals the rapid intensification of intellectual creativity that took place during the specific years of this transit. Uranus was in the opposition phase of its transiting cycle, within 5° of exact alignment with its position at Freud’s birth, from November 1894 to September 1897, moving into its closest range of exact alignment in the 1895–96 period. In the spring of 1895, Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer published Studies on Hysteria, the final chapter on psychotherapy by Freud being that with which it is customary to date the beginning of psychoanalysis. On July 24, 1895, Freud first fully analyzed one of his dreams, the “dream of Irma’s injection.” Called by Ernest Jones an “historic occasion,” this date was later memorialized by Freud as that on which “the secret of dreams was revealed” to him. In the summer of 1895, Breuer wrote that “Freud’s intellect is soaring at its highest. I gaze after him as a hen at a hawk.”
During this period Freud postulated the latent wish-fulfillment function of dreams, formulated the distinction between primary and secondary mental processes, and developed his views on the sexual etiology of neurosis, the existence of infantile eroticism, and the nature of the conscious ego with its resistance to the instincts. These years also brought the first mention of the fundamental concepts of compromise formation, overdetermination, the return of the repressed, and erotogenic zones. According to Jones, “Freud was in his most revolutionary stage, both intellectually and emotionally.” The Interpretation of Dreams, the foundational work of psychoanalysis on which he labored for the rest of the decade, was according to Freud “finished in all essentials at the beginning of 1896.” The term “psychoanalysis” was first used in a paper completed on February 5, 1896. In the spring of 1897, Freud first began developing his conception of the Oedipus complex. In the summer of 1897, spurred by his own psychological unrest as well as by his emerging understanding of the psyche, Freud commenced his self-analysis, generally considered the critical turning point of his intellectual and psychological evolution.
In the case of Jung, the same transit occurred in coincidence with the famous juncture in 1914–17 that brought the major personal and intellectual turning point of his life as well. These were the years of Jung’s most intensive and systematic self-analysis, which constituted a period of psychological transformation and breakthrough precisely parallel to Freud’s, out of which Jung emerged with his fundamental concepts of the collective unconscious, the Self, the process of individuation, the transcendent function, and the internal objectivity of psychic reality. Near the end of his life, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung spoke of this period as the most crucial in his career, as the source of virtually all his subsequent scientific and psychological insights:
The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life—in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work.
Similar transits involving the major-aspect alignments of the Uranus-Uranus transit cycle took place with Einstein and the theory of relativity, Darwin and the theory of natural selection, Kant and his Copernican revolution in philosophy, and in many other figures of scientific and intellectual innovation for whom we have sufficiently precise historical data.17 But again I must emphasize the larger complexity and multivalent patterning in the data, even beyond the important differences between the individual natal charts involved. Not only were other overlapping transits involving other planets often relevant in throwing light on the character and timing of the events in question, but the Uranus-opposite-Uranus transit on its own terms coincided with a far wider range of significant phenomena than the above examples suggest. Yet within that diversity this transit consistently marked periods in which defining events and experiences took place bearing the same basic archetypal character of experiment and change, creative breakthrough, sudden awakening, disruption of the status quo, defiant rebellion against established structures, and the like.
For example, this same Uranus transit was taking place in the case of Rosa Parks in 1955 when by refusing to leave her seat on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, she set in motion the American civil rights movement. The sudden decisive act of defiance, the disturbance of social conventions, the resulting radical change in life experience from then on—though in this case historic in outcome—all these qualities were characteristic of this particular transit.
This was also the same transit that Betty Friedan had in 1962–63 when, after five years of writing, she published The Feminine Mystique, launching the modern feminist movement:
My answers may disturb the experts and women alike, for they imply social change. But there would be no sense in my writing this book at all if I did not believe that women can affect society, as well as be affected by it; that, in the end, a woman, like a man, has the power to choose, and to make her own heaven or hell.
Again, in all these cases—Rosa Parks, Betty Friedan, Freud, Jung, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the numerous individuals who experienced psychotherapeutic transformations, personal breakthroughs and turning points—the particular biographical events certainly can be seen to have differed in various ways, in character, intensity, and consequences, and are not statistically measurable as identical phenomena, yet a coherent underlying archetypal pattern seems clearly evident.
It is possible that after a cursory review of a few such correlations, one could reasonably conclude that these coincidences merely reflect the fact that the Uranus cycle’s 180° opposition transit takes place during a period in individuals’ lives—at some point, varying from person to person, during the late thirties and early forties—when a kin
d of peak of creative vitality could often be expected anyway. I repeatedly considered that possibility, but a combination of several interconnected factors argued against discounting the correlations as inconsequential coincidences. First, the acute precision of the correlations between the transiting alignment and the relevant events, down to the exact degree and month, was impressive, even uncanny, particularly since the character of the correlated events fit so precisely the astrological meaning of the specific planet involved. Second, different Uranus transits occurring at different times of life coincided with phenomena having the same archetypal character, but the specific phenomena varied according to which aspect or cyclical alignment was involved. They further varied according to which natal planet was being transited (a Uranus transit to natal Venus, for example, tended to coincide with a different category of sudden change, awakening, or disruption from that of a Uranus transit to Mercury or to Mars).
Finally, as I examined the lives of a much larger range of individuals beyond the well-known figures just cited and the cases of psychological breakthrough I initially encountered, I found that the Uranus-opposite-Uranus transit regularly coincided with a period of life in which inner experience and external events presented a distinct quality that, while differing in important respects from these more dramatic turning points, nevertheless strongly suggested the active presence of the same Promethean archetypal principle. The specific three-year span of this transit coincided with striking frequency with that period of life popularly referred to as the midlife crisis, or midlife transition. A certain existential restlessness, a suddenly intensified desire to break free from the existing structures of one’s life—career, daily work, marriage, community, accustomed personal identity and social persona, belief system, and so forth—was typical at this time. So also was a greater than usual boldness in taking risks, an urge to explore new horizons, a readiness to forgo previous commitments and responsibilities. Moreover, equally frequent during this transit were events having an unpredictable, disruptive character, events whose ultimate effect—bringing about sudden shifts in one’s life circumstances and existential structures—was similar to that of the self-initiated kind. The awakenings that coincided with this transit might be expansively uplifting or intensely difficult. Yet the underlying archetypal principle appeared to be the same whether the events were unanticipated or self-initiated, and whether their eventual outcome was destabilizing and problematic or liberating and creative.
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