Yet in philosophical terms, how can a principle be at once so multivalent and still maintain its underlying identity in all its expressions? This question directs us to the very heart of the archetypal perspective, with its roots in the Platonic Forms of classical philosophy and in the gods of the ancient mythic imagination. In particular, it compels us to engage what the philosopher J. N. Findlay has called the archetypal Forms’ intrinsic capacity for “elastic and variable identity,” “iridescent variation of aspect,” and “differentiation without difference.” Their very essence lies in this multiform potentiality, from which is elicited the unique particular that is creatively actualized within the unfolding stream of life. In this perspective, every individual being is a locus of many interpenetrating archetypal forms and forces, each of which permeates and influences the whole in such a way that each archetypal presence affects all the rest in its characteristic manner. Each individual, moved by countless interacting factors, draws out and creatively enacts a unique inflection and embodiment of the many archetypal principles that inform his or her being. Nor is the situation static, for a particular archetypal field can be more strongly constellated at certain periods in a person’s life in coincidence with transits to the corresponding natal aspects. It can also be affected by the presence of other important archetypal factors that are concurrently activated. As a method for discriminating and clarifying these many complexities, the astrological perspective was, I found, able to provide a uniquely precise insight into which archetypes were most likely to be dominant in a person’s life, in what larger archetypal combinations, and during which times of life.
Assessing Patterns of Correlation
The challenge inherent in any attempt to examine and assess evidence for planetary correlations arises from the inescapable reality that no single correlation between an individual’s personality and birth chart, nor any single correlation between a specific biographical event and a specific personal transit, could in itself ever constitute decisive evidence for the astrological hypothesis. Nor even could any group of such correlations, though certainly the larger the group and the more vivid the correspondences, the more suggestive the evidence. Ultimately, however, I found that it was the enormously vast and ever-increasing body of observed correlations involving all the planets—each with its specific corresponding archetypal complex of meaning, with the planetary alignments coinciding again and again with strikingly appropriate events, personality characteristics, and precise timing—that taken in its entirety constituted a highly coherent and compelling body of data.
Yet the narrative exposition of such evidence presents considerable difficulty. The larger body of correlations must be approached simultaneously as a whole yet also as comprising many interconnected particulars, each requiring nuanced attention. One can assess any particular natal aspect or transit only in the context of a much larger set of data—all the major transits in a particular individual’s life, for example, or all the major aspects in the natal chart, with these compared and contrasted with the same transits and same natal aspects for many other individuals. Yet while it is ultimately the larger whole of data that is required to evaluate the significance of any single correlation, in practice one can examine or set forth only one correlation at a time, gradually building up a larger foundation and context for assessing each new particular. It is a challenge not unlike that facing Darwin in The Origin of Species: He had to set out one by one the examples of evidence for natural selection that he had observed over the preceding three decades, no one of which considered on its own would be probative—a task made all the more formidable because the implications of his evidence seemed to contradict the most well-established assumptions of his age.
In our situation, before we can recognize or assess a correlation we must have a working knowledge of the planetary archetypes that form our interpretive lens. For this, not only do we require a basic understanding of each planetary archetype’s specific complex of meanings on its own terms; we also need to be able to recognize the way those meanings are combined and mutually inflected when two such archetypes are linked, corresponding to an alignment between two planets. The nature of the data—cultural, historical, biographical, existential, aesthetic—is such that it cannot be assessed by simple quantitative methods of analysis, inserted into a statistical protocol, and mechanically quantified. The data’s significance must be judged both individually and as an entirety, with all of our cultural and psychological sensibilities brought into the equation.
What is especially required is an ability to recognize multivalent archetypal patterns and underlying coherencies in a wide range of very different personalities and biographies, historical events, and cultural epochs. The ability for such discernment is a developed human skill, a cultivated mode of vision and understanding that cannot be reduced to a computer algorithm and impersonally deployed in a double-blind study with controls. As Hillman has emphasized, even a purely clinical psychological approach is inadequate: “An archetypal eye…is difficult to acquire through focus upon persons and cases. This eye needs training through profound appreciation of history and biography, of the arts, of ideas and culture.” The method used in this research is essentially both a science and an art—both mathematical and interpretive, rational and aesthetic—in an intricate synthesis.23
Over many years of research, I examined in detail the biographies of a considerable range of culturally significant individuals—Nietzsche and Jung, Virginia Woolf and Mary Shelley, Beethoven and Wagner, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Einstein, Picasso, Churchill, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Byron, Goethe, and hundreds of others. Only with such a substantial data base could an inquiry of this kind be effectively pursued. Working with such iconic cultural figures provided two further important advantages: First, their biographies and personal characters were well known and well documented. Equally important, individuals who have made major cultural contributions or whose historical influence has been significant are, in certain respects, paradigmatic. The shape and force of their lives and characters, the sharp contours and decisive vector of their biographies, render more discernible their essential qualities. Such individuals are more conspicuous embodiments of archetypal tendencies that are present in varying degrees in everyone, and thus potential correlations can more readily be judged.
To a great extent the analysis of individual biographies pertains to the first two forms of astrological correspondence I listed above in the chapter on forms of correspondence: natal charts and personal transits. However, as we begin to explore planetary correlations with the patterns of human experience in the following chapters, it will be helpful for several reasons to examine in some depth a category of evidence associated more widely with collective experience and the world at large: namely, world transits. Historically, world transits represented the earliest form of astrological observation. Whereas modern astrology, reflecting the humanistic individualism of the modern era, has been principally concerned with the analysis of individual natal charts and personal transits, the most ancient forms of astrology were based rather on the study of astronomical correspondences with events of collective significance. To my considerable surprise, I found that with this category of correlations—cyclical alignments of the outer planets with each other that coincided with major historical events and widespread cultural phenomena—it was possible to assess the presence and relative significance of correlations just as readily as with natal and personal transit analysis of famous individuals, but with specific added advantages.
With the study of individual natal charts, one can always ask how, despite the impressive agreement between the planetary positions and the individual’s life and personality, did this same natal aspect or personal transit correlate with the lives of countless others who were also born with it? Ten, twenty, even a thousand compelling examples would only be a drop in the ocean of the larger class of individuals born with that aspect or undergoing that transit. But
when we look also at world transits, we can examine the chronology of the human community, its collective biography, as it were. In such a study, one can focus on entire cultural epochs and the collective experience of many individuals at once, comprising a wider distribution of phenomena at a particular time for evaluating correlations with the concurrent planetary alignments. The specific years and decades at issue involve many events and many lives coalescing within a certain general zeitgeist, which can more easily lend itself to critical assessments and historical comparisons. By contrast with the details of individual biographies, the character and cultural significance of major historical eras tend to be more widely known, better documented, and more open to straightforward evaluation. They either obviously fit the postulated archetypal meanings of the current planetary alignments, or they do not.
In the following four sections, therefore, I have set forth an initial survey of four different cycles of world transits involving specific combinations of the outer planets, each with its own distinctive archetypal character and each with its specific length and frequency. In terms of the major alignments formed by the planets in these cycles, I have further restricted this initial survey to an examination of only the major dynamic aspects: first the conjunctions and oppositions (the two axial alignments), and later the squares midway between them. By focusing on just the major dynamic aspects of four world transit cycles of the outer planets as measured against the chronology of history, I believe we may enter more quickly and deeply into the nature of the archetypal astrological perspective and assess more readily its validity.
In the following chapters I have focused principally on the history and figures of the Western cultural tradition, as it is this history that I know well enough to make historical judgments with some degree of confidence. It also happens to be an unusually vast, diverse, and complex cultural tradition for which precise historical data is especially extensive and accessible. Where possible and relevant, however, I have cited significant events in the histories of non-Western cultures, especially in more recent periods, and I look forward to future collaboration with scholars in these traditions to pursue more detailed analyses on that broader canvas.
Although most people first encounter serious astrology through readings given by others of their own natal chart and personal transits, many factors in such analyses have actually served to sustain the estrangement of the modern mind from the astrological perspective. The elaborately complicated principles of interpretation and often arcane terminology employed in most conventional astrological analyses, compounded by the subjectivity and suggestibility involved in receiving such analyses, especially in the early stages of inquiry, have contributed to a situation in which many thousands of individuals privately believe that astrology may indeed “work,” but they do not know how to assess that possibility for themselves. They cannot see how to bring such a perspective into coherence with the dominant modern scientific world view nor how to communicate their insights in any way that others might find plausible.
Throughout the modern era, an opaque veil over the archetypal cosmos has been effectively maintained by a potent combination of diverse factors, including the disenchanted cosmology of the modern age, the dubious pronouncements of the daily newspaper horoscope columns, the armored resistance of skeptics who do not deeply examine what they zealously reject, the baroque jargon of much astrological discourse, the naïvely uncritical perspectives and frequently harmful predictive practices of many contemporary astrologers, and a vague uneasiness about the seemingly deterministic and fatalistic implications of an astrologically governed universe. I have come to believe, however, that because of the important theoretical and technological advances in the field that have emerged in our time, a careful examination of historical correlations with the cycles of the outer planets can allow the modern mind to explore and assess the astrological perspective with a rigor and depth that has not previously been possible.
That said, I nevertheless believe that an individual who wishes to make a genuinely rigorous assessment of the possible validity and value of astrology must in the end have sufficient knowledge to be able to recognize the most significant structures of meaning in a natal chart, and be able to calculate and interpret personal transits. These are not difficult skills to master, and there is no adequate substitute for a direct encounter with the depth and consistency of these archetypal patternings, based above all on a sustained examination of natal and transit correlations in the context of one’s own biographical history and ongoing life experience. In preparation for such a study, I believe that a survey of major planetary cycles within the context of history and culture can provide a uniquely helpful beginning to the reader’s journey of exploration into this remarkable realm.
IV
Epochs of Revolution
And life itself told me this secret: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must overcome itself again and again.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
From the French Revolution to the 1960s
I was encouraged to examine the possible existence of historical correlations with planetary cycles when I encountered a number of highly suggestive patterns in which certain cyclical alignments between the outer planets coincided with major historical events and cultural trends of a distinctive character, as if the specific archetypes associated with those planets were emerging on the collective level in periodic cycles. In astronomical terms, these world transits consist of major extended alignments between two or more of the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto). Rather than personal transits of a planet in the sky to a planetary position in an individual natal chart, as with the examples cited earlier, world transits are configurations between two or more planets concurrently aligned with each other in the sky—alignments relevant to the entire world, so to speak, rather than to a specific individual. These alignments, such as conjunction or opposition, can last a year or more, and in cases involving any of the three outermost planets with each other (Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto), even a decade or longer.
However, compared with ancient astrology, which appears to have been strongly divinatory in character and based on a considerably smaller body of astronomical observations, the situation that has now emerged provides a radically different as well as greatly expanded basis for research in the area of collective historical correspondences. The discovery of the three outermost planets by telescope in the modern period, combined with the gradual but eventually universal consensus in the astrological community on the empirical correlation of those planets with specific archetypal principles, has dramatically opened up new horizons for research and understanding. Scarcely less significant is the development of computer technology and programming, as well as continued improvements in historical scholarship, which have brought an extraordinary increase in the accuracy and extent of both astronomical and historical data for many centuries into the past. All these factors have produced a very different context for such research. Correlations that in earlier eras were entirely impossible to examine or even imagine are now suddenly visible and open to critical assessment.
The archetypal meanings of the three outermost planets seem to have been derived principally from correlations observed in the study of individual natal charts and personal transits, and of synchronistic historical phenomena in the specific eras in which those planets were discovered. When I applied those meanings to this entirely different category of phenomena—analyzing periods of history when the outer planets were in major alignment in the sky and thus, theoretically, when the corresponding archetypes were most activated in the collective psyche—I was deeply impressed by the empirical correlations. These extended alignments of the outer planets consistently seemed to coincide with sustained periods during which a particular archetypal complex was conspicuously dominant in the collective psyche, defining the zeitgeist, as it were, of that cultural moment. The dominant archetypal complex was alwa
ys discernibly composed of the specific archetypal principles associated with the relevant aligned planets, as if those archetypes were interacting, merging, and mutually inflecting each other in highly visible ways.
One of the first such instances was the decade of the 1960s. By all accounts the Sixties were an extraordinary era. Intense, problematic, and seminal, the entire decade seems to have been animated by a peculiarly vivid and compelling spirit—something “in the air”—an elemental force apparent to all at the time, that was not present in such a tangible manner during the immediately preceding or subsequent decades, and that in retrospect still sets the era apart as a phenomenon unique in recent memory. Early in the course of my research I noticed that during the entire period of this decade, specifically from 1960 to 1972, there took place a conjunction of two outer planets, Uranus and Pluto, that occurs relatively rarely. Indeed, this was the only conjunction of these planets in the entire twentieth century.
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