Because of the great distance of both planets from the Sun and Earth, the Uranus-Pluto cycle is one of the longest of all planetary cycles and, because of Pluto’s eccentric orbit, is variable in duration. Conjunctions and oppositions between Uranus and Pluto, the two axial alignments, occur only once each per century, with each such alignment lasting approximately twelve years, when the two planets are within 15° of exactitude.1 To recapitulate briefly the nature of the archetypal principles associated with these two planets: The planet Uranus appears to be correlated with events and biographical phenomena suggestive of an archetypal principle whose essential character is Promethean: emancipatory, rebellious, progressive and innovative, awakening, disruptive and destabilizing, unpredictable, serving to catalyze new beginnings and sudden unexpected change. The planet Pluto, by contrast, is associated with an archetypal principle whose character is Dionysian: elemental, instinctual, powerfully compelling, extreme in its intensity, arising from the depths, both libidinal and destructive, overwhelming and transformative, ever-evolving. On the collective level, the archetypal principle associated with Pluto is regarded as possessing a prodigious, titanic dimension, empowering, intensifying, and compelling whatever it touches on a massive scale.
When I applied these specific archetypal meanings to an examination of the historical periods that coincided with the sequence of major alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle, it was immediately apparent that not only were these two archetypal principles each conspicuously active in the collective psyche in these particular eras; they were also in some sense combining with each other—acting upon each other, mutually inflecting and synergistically merging. The resulting archetypal complex seemed to express itself quite dramatically during those specific historical eras in which Uranus and Pluto were in axial alignment, as evidenced by such phenomena as widespread radical social and political change and often destructive upheaval, massive empowerment of revolutionary and rebellious impulses, and intensified artistic and intellectual creativity. Other distinctive themes of these historical periods included unusually rapid technological advance, an underlying spirit of restless experiment, drive for innovation, urge for freedom in many realms, revolt against oppression, embrace of radical political philosophies, and intensified collective will to bring forth a new world. These impulses and events were typically mixed with massive demographic shifts and a general ambiance of fervent, often violent intensity combined with the excitement of moving rapidly towards new horizons.
For example, Uranus and Pluto were in alignment not only during the entire decade of the 1960s, when they were in conjunction, but also during the entire decade of the French Revolution when they were in opposition, from 1787 to 1798. This was of course an era whose character was conspicuously similar to that of the 1960s, to which it has often been compared.
Again, had it simply been a matter of the same two planets, Uranus and Pluto, happening to be in such precise major alignment during those particular periods, and not being in such alignment during eras of relative social and cultural equilibrium, the coincidence would have been at best interesting and curious. What so provoked my attention was the fact that the historical character of these coinciding periods corresponded exactly, even profoundly, to the archetypal meanings for those two planets according to the consensus of standard astrological texts, meanings that had been derived from altogether different sources from the phenomena I was now examining. Equally remarkable was the further correlation of alignments of the ongoing Uranus-Pluto cycle with comparable historical periods of epochal revolutionary upheaval, social liberation, and radical cultural change in each century I examined, deep into the past.
Certainly at first glance there would seem to be no two eras more tumultuously alike in such a similarly sustained manner than the decade of the 1960s and the decade of the French Revolution. A pervasive spirit of rebellion against the “Establishment,” the ancien régime, dominated both periods. As in the Sixties, so also in the French Revolutionary era there was the aggressive assertion of new freedoms in every realm. In both decades an entire generation was swept up in the passions of the era, which were not limited to a single country but erupted simultaneously and independently in many different places in both hemispheres, in a seeming tidal wave of revolts and revolutions, marches, demonstrations, strikes, riots, insurrections, street fighting and barricades, protest movements, independence movements, liberation movements, and calls for radical change. The widespread sense of awakening to a new consciousness of freedom, bringing the birth of a new age, was nearly identical in the two eras and was repeatedly articulated in terms that eloquently conveyed the epochal significance of the historic drama taking place during these decades.2
The word “revolution” itself, so often heard in the 1960s and so emblematic of its spirit, first came into wide use in the 1790s in its present meaning of sudden radical change of an overwhelming nature, bringing into being a fundamentally new condition.3 Innumerable allusions, explicit or otherwise, were made in the press and the popular culture of the Sixties that directly connected the spirit and violent revolutionary impulses of that era with those of the French Revolution, as in the lyrics to Street Fighting Man by the Rolling Stones:
Hey! said my name is called disturbance
I’ll shout and scream, I’ll kill the king, I’ll rail at all his servants.4
The massive upsurge of the revolutionary impulse during these two eras was not only or even principally a political phenomenon, for it expressed itself in every aspect of cultural life: in the music heard, the books read, the ideas discussed, the ideals embraced, the images produced, the evolution of language and fashion, the radical changes in social and sexual mores. It was visible in the incessant challenge to established beliefs and widespread embrace of new perspectives, the movements for radical theological and church reform and antireligious revolt, the drive towards innovation and experiment that affected all the arts, the sudden empowerment of the young, the pivotal role of university communities in the rapid cultural shift. And it was evident above all in the prodigious energy and activism of both eras, the general impulse towards extremes and “radicalization” in so many areas, the suddenly intensified will to construct a new world.
Yet of course in the larger historical context the similarity of these two periods was actually not unique, and as I examined the planetary tables further, I soon found that the precise coincidence of this particular planetary cycle with both the 1960s and the French Revolutionary era was in fact part of a much larger pattern. For it turned out that cyclical alignments of Uranus and Pluto—specifically the conjunction and opposition (the two axial alignments, equivalent to the New Moon and Full Moon alignments of the Sun and Moon in the lunar cycle but on a much larger and longer scale)—consistently occurred in close coincidence with periods in past centuries that were marked by equally extraordinary widespread and sustained social upheavals and radical cultural change, in an apparently systematic manner extending back in time for as far as we have adequate historical records.
For example, since the French Revolution, there were only two other periods when Uranus and Pluto were in conjunction or opposition alignments. Both of these eras stand out as clearly defined by historical events and cultural trends bearing this same highly charged character of massive change and revolution, innovation and upheaval. The first of these alignments took place in the mid-nineteenth century, from 1845 to 1856. This was coincident with the wave of revolutionary upheavals that took place in almost every capital of Europe in 1848–49: Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Dresden, Baden, Prague, Rome, Milan. Again one sees the sudden eruption of a collective revolutionary impulse affecting an entire continent with mass insurrections, the emergence of radical political and social movements, revolts for nationalist independence, and the abrupt overthrow of governments throughout Europe. As many historians have said, it was in fact the climax of the revolutionary impulses that were set in motion by the French Revolution. A striking converge
nce of other archetypally relevant events also occurred during the years of this alignment: among many that could be cited, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto, Henry David Thoreau wrote On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman led antislavery efforts in the United States, and the women’s rights movement began with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Throughout Europe during the years of this conjunction, major artists and intellectuals engaged in revolutionary activities and radical ideas. Beginning in 1845 Dostoevsky entered into revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg first with the radical critic Belinski and then through his involvement in 1848 with the anticzarist utopian Petrashevski circle. Mikhail Bakunin participated in the revolutionary agitations of 1848 in succession in Germany, Austria, and France, and developed his theory of revolutionary anarchism. Wagner, influenced by Bakunin, took part in the 1849 revolution in Dresden and then wrote Art and Revolution in exile in Switzerland.
Moreover, this was the same period in which comparable upheavals took place in China (the nearly simultaneous Taiping and Nian rebellions), Japan (the revolutionary dismantling of the long-established Tokugawa social order with the forced opening to the West), India (the intensive British incursions leading to the Sepoy Mutiny), and the Ottoman Empire (catalyzed by the Crimean War): a remarkable clustering of events in less than a decade when sudden “revolts either from above or from below,” in the words of the historian William McNeill, “symbolized the irremediable collapse of the traditional order of each of the major Asian civilizations” and permanently transformed the global ecumene. McNeill sums up “the remarkable coincidences which funneled so great a change in world history into the space of less than ten years”:
Thus in each of the great Asian civilizations, revolt either from above or from below rather suddenly discredited or subverted old ways and values; and, in each instance, disruptive influences were enormously stimulated by contacts and collisions with the industrializing West. Indeed, it seems scarcely an exaggeration to say that within the decade of the 1850’s the fundamental fourfold cultural balance of the ecumene [Europe, the Middle East, China, India], which had endured the buffets of more than two thousand years, finally gave way. Instead of four (or with Japan, five) autonomous though interconnected civilizations, a yeasty, half-formless, but genuinely global cosmopolitanism began to emerge as the dominant reality of the human community.
The second such alignment of Uranus and Pluto since the French Revolution was the opposition that took place during the decade that spanned the turn of the twentieth century, from 1896 to 1907—again, a period characterized by intense political and social ferment, with the widespread emergence of radical movements and a wave of revolutionary upheavals, drastic social changes, and massive demographic shifts throughout the world. A sudden proliferation of progressive and radical labor movements occurred in this period throughout Europe and North America. These included the near-simultaneous founding of each of the major socialist parties in England, the United States, Russia, and France—all taking place between 1900 and 1905—and also the Industrial Workers of the World, the Menshevik Party, and the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky that marked the beginning of modern Communism, all between 1903 and 1905.
This was also the critical period for the emergence of both the militant women’s movement and the black civil rights movement, with the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904, and the Niagara Movement in 1905. In France the entire period of 1896–1907 was dominated by the long upheaval of the Dreyfus Affair, which convulsed the nation in ways markedly similar to the upheavals that occurred in France during the three other Uranus-Pluto alignments cited above (these included the sustained unleashing of violent passions, conflicts over reform, and defiance of established authority, as in Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse” open letter to the president of France) and which resulted in the unification and empowerment of left-wing movements in French politics. And here again an extraordinary number of leaders and advocates in the area of progressive and radical social transformation emerged and flourished during this period, from mainstream progressive reformists like Theodore Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan to more radical figures such as Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw and other Fabians, H. G. Wells, Emmeline Pankhurst, Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, W. E. B. Du Bois, Theodor Herzl, and Georges Sorel, among many others. From civil rights and feminism to journalism and economic reform, the writings and actions of this wave of reformers and radical leaders at this time exerted a decisive influence on the social and political life of the twentieth century.
As with the other axial Uranus-Pluto periods, during this same span of years occurred comparable epoch-making events throughout the world: the Boxer Rebellion in China of 1898–1900 and the rapid rise of revolutionary Chinese nationalist movements; the Potemkin mutiny and Russian revolution of 1905–06, which brought the beginning of the violent upheavals that culminated in the overthrow of the czar twelve years later; a wave of nationalist revolts in India, Turkey, Persia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; the beginning of the long civil disobedience movement of the Indians in South Africa led by Gandhi; and the founding of other seminal nationalist independence movements such as the World Zionist Organization in 1897 and the Sinn Fein party in Ireland in 1902.
It was as if an immense wave of revolutionary energy swept through the world at the turn of the twentieth century, producing in many nations and in many spheres of activity a profusion of movements pressing for freedom, change, and reform. Taken together, these and many other events of a similar character constituted a decisive watershed for the emergence of modern progressivism, radicalism, equal rights, and independence movements with significant consequences for the ensuing century, many of which came to a climax in the 1960s during the next conjunction of Uranus and Pluto.
In the course of examining thousands of historical events and cultural phenomena over the years, I found that archetypally relevant events consistently began to coincide with conjunctions and oppositions of the outer planets when the planets first moved within approximately 20° of exact alignment, gradually increasing in frequency and intensity and then, after exactitude was reached, decreasing in a wavelike continuum. From the time the planets reached 15° of exact alignment, the archetypal complex appeared to be fully active, with the frequency and intensity of observed correlations especially robust. For purposes of simplicity and clarity, in the detailed survey of the evidence presented in these chapters, the years I have specified for each period as coinciding with outer-planet conjunctions and oppositions reflect the smaller 15° orb. Beyond that point, however, was a penumbral range, up through about 20°, during which correlations could regularly be observed that I will cite and specify as such when relevant.
I should also clarify here that the periods coinciding with these alignments did not mark years in which the characteristic historical events and cultural trends suddenly turned on and then off, when the alignment was over, like bivalent light switches. Rather, the periods in question seemed to represent times when continuing, usually long-developing trends came to a boil, as it were; when a certain heightened stimulus or concrete fruition brought specific categories of cultural phenomena to conspicuous expression, causing those tendencies to emerge more explicitly and dramatically into the collective consciousness. From that more decisive point of inception or climax, those cultural tendencies then continued to unfold in diverse ways in subsequent years and decades after the alignment was over.
In general, the observed correlations suggested something more like fluidly interpenetrating quantum wave patterns rather than discrete atomistic Newtonian events. The dynamics appeared to be complex, holistic, and probabilistic rather than simple, linear, and reductively deterministic. The correlations were most intelligible if they were regarded not as me
chanistically causal in character but rather as multidimensionally archetypal and synchronistic.
Synchronic and Diachronic Patterns in History
The relevant archetypal patterns of historical events and cultural activity coincident with these planetary alignments were both synchronic and diachronic in nature, a dual form of patterning that was strikingly consistent throughout the larger body of evidence. The synchronic patterns involved those cases where many events of the same archetypal character took place simultaneously in different cultures and individual lives in coincidence with the same alignment, such as simultaneous revolutions or simultaneous scientific breakthroughs occurring independently in separate countries and continents. The diachronic patterns, by contrast, involved cases where events taking place during one alignment had a close archetypal and often historical association with events occurring during preceding and subsequent alignments of the same planets in such a way as to suggest a distinct unfolding cycle.
The periods of these alignments of Uranus and Pluto were thus related not only in terms of the general archetypal character that they had in common but also by their sequential dynamism. Relevant historical trends and cultural movements seemed to undergo a sharply intensified development during each of these specific periods in what appeared to be a continuously unfolding but cyclically “punctuated” evolution. Such diachronic patterns were clearly evident in correlation with the Uranus-Pluto alignments of the past several centuries in a number of areas of modern cultural history, such as feminism and the women’s movement, the abolitionist and civil rights movements, and philosophies of political revolution and radical social change, among others.
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