The English Revolution and Radical Reformation
If we take another step back into history and look at the Uranus-Pluto cycle during the centuries preceding the French Revolution, we find a clear continuation of the same pattern. The Uranus-Pluto opposition immediately prior to that of the French Revolution took place from 1643 to 1654, in close coincidence with the great wave of revolutions and rebellions that swept Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, and in particular with virtually the entire period of England’s major revolutionary watershed: the English or Puritan Revolution (referred to in its own century as “The Great Rebellion”). This was yet again an era of extraordinarily intense, widespread, and sustained social upheaval, political radicalism, and countercultural vitality, essentially the English equivalent of the French Revolution, which it influenced and anticipated.
As in the four alignment periods just discussed, here too the same themes appear with remarkable consistency: the successive waves of rebellion against the established order, year after year of political and social chaos, the proliferation of radical movements and ideas that deeply affected the subsequent course of Western history. Here again was the collective empowerment of a many-sided impulse to make over the world in radically new ways, with the sudden emergence of innumerable revolutionary groups and dissenting factions—radical Puritans, Independents, Roundheads, Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, Ranters, Fifth Monarchy Men, Adamists, among many such radical sects that flourished during just those years—resulting in, as the title of Christopher Hill’s well-known history described it, “the world turned upside down.” Here again was the call for an overthrow of royal tyranny and the forced abdication and execution of the king—Charles I during this Uranus-Pluto alignment of the 1640s thus meeting the same fate that would befall Louis XVI during the following opposition of the 1790s (and, less the execution, Louis-Philippe during the following conjunction of the 1840s).
It was in the years of this alignment, 1643–54, that there emerged the seminal appeal to such characteristically emancipatory ideas as the sovereignty of the people, representative government, natural rights, a written constitution, equality of representation, freedom of the press, religious toleration, and the superiority of rational debate over theological dogma and historical tradition for political decision-making—all this producing, in Hill’s words, “so great an intellectual revolution that it is difficult for us to conceive how men thought before it was made.” It was of course these ideas that directly anticipated the revolutionary ideals that would later be instituted during the following Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1787–98, one cycle later, in the U.S. Constitution (1787–88) and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). These same principles would in turn inform the ideals and movements that emerged with new force and in new contexts precisely during the three subsequent Uranus-Pluto alignments: the revolutionary 1845–56 period, the turn of the twentieth century, and the 1960s.
Moreover, as historians have often remarked, with much the same wonder and puzzlement with which they contemplated these later periods of widespread simultaneous revolutions that erupted independently in many nations (constantly appearing in these restrained and sober historical analyses are such phrases as “astonishing,” “virtually incredible,” “utterly baffling”), what happened in England in the 1643–54 era curiously coincided with a wave of rebellions and upheavals that swept the rest of Europe and Asia during just those same years.6 In France once again there occurred another sustained period of revolt and political turmoil—the five-year series of Fronde uprisings by the parlements and the nobility which took place from 1648 to 1653—the most significant rebellion against royal sovereignty in France until Uranus and Pluto were again in opposition during the French Revolution. Here again, barricades were thrown up in Paris, amid mass riots and street fighting, as part of a larger cyclical pattern—in exact coincidence with Uranus-Pluto alignments—of comparable mass street insurrections in Paris in July 1789, Paris in February 1848, and Paris in May 1968.
In Russia during the same years as the Fronde revolts, there occurred a five-year mass uprising by the serfs (1648–53), while also during this alignment the Cossacks revolted to gain Ukrainian independence from Poland, the Irish rebelled against England, Portugal revolted against Spain, and the long and influential struggle of the Netherlands for political liberty was finally achieved and ratified in the Treaty of Münster (1648). Throughout the continent of Europe, “rebellion was everywhere in the air.” Nor were these upheavals limited to Europe; in Asia during this same period, sustained and massive rebellions in China brought about the collapse of the Ming dynasty (1644), after three centuries’ rule, and the rise of the Manchu dynasty. The latter would begin its own fall two centuries later with the Taiping Rebellion during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1845–56 period.
Again, as one moves yet further back in history, one finds fully comparable periods of extraordinary social upheaval, rebellion, and political transformation coincident with the Uranus-Pluto cycle. For example, the opposition preceding that just cited took place during the years 1533 to 1545, the most tumultuous and radical period of the Reformation as it swept through Europe: armed insurrections, the anarchistic revolt in Münster by the Anabaptists and their militant establishment of a “communist state” under John of Leiden, Henry VIII’s epochal schism of England from Rome and the Catholic Church, and the adoption of the Reformation in Geneva, Württemberg, Brandenburg, Saxony, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland.
To mention here just two examples from classical antiquity, the period of Spartacus’s massive rebellion of slaves and the dispossessed against the Roman state in 73–71 BCE, the largest and most sustained such insurrection in ancient history, took place during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 74–65, the same era in which Julius Caesar began his rise to power. And still earlier, the conjunction of 328–318 BCE coincided with the period of profound cultural and political upheaval that transformed the ancient world, from Greece and Egypt to Persia and India, in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests and the beginning of the Hellenistic era.
Scientific and Technological Revolutions
One of the most interesting and challenging characteristics of the historical correlations with the Uranus-Pluto cycle is the occurrence of distinctive cyclical developments exactly like those cited above in altogether separate, seemingly independent—but in archetypal terms clearly related—areas of human endeavor during precisely the same periods and with the same degree of cyclical definition. For example, the entire sequence of Uranus-Pluto alignment periods in the modern era that we have been examining in terms of revolutionary social and political phenomena happened to be eras marked by equally significant scientific and technological revolutions and advances—thus involving breakthroughs, revolutions, radical social changes, and emancipatory impulses of an entirely different category. Again, it appeared as if during these specific historical periods, a multivalently comprehensive archetypal complex—a Promethean principle at once emancipatory and innovative, scientific-technological and social-political—were being activated and empowered in many areas of human activity simultaneously. This coincidence of scientific-technological and social-political phenomena, repeated so precisely during each alignment period, is difficult to explain in conventional sociological terms, though it makes perfect sense from an archetypal point of view: in this light, the various phenomena reflected a collective empowerment (Pluto) of the Promethean impulse (Uranus), a dynamic evolutionary drive pressing both individuals and societies towards radical change, freedom, and innovation on many levels simultaneously.
In the area of technological advance, the period of the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction, 1960–72, brought an especially dramatic technological breakthrough and achievement, the American and Russian space programs that climaxed in the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969. The entire arc of this momentous series of space flights, from the first expeditions by Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepar
d in 1961 through the last of the Moon landings in 1972, took place precisely within the 15° time-span of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction. Here was the titanic empowerment of Promethean technological genius, the restless quest for new horizons, the defiance of gravity, the epochal breakthrough beyond ancient limits, the penetration into celestial space, “stealing fire from the heavens.”
This correlation with epochal breakthroughs in the technology of human flight was in fact part of a larger pattern, for it was exactly during the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907 that the initial development of the airplane took place, when the Wright brothers achieved their first successful powered flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. Coincidentally, several other experiments in powered aviation took place independently during this same opposition, almost simultaneously in several parts of the world, including the invention of the first rigid airship, the Zeppelin, in 1900. Of these, it was Wilbur and Orville Wright who succeeded in accomplishing, in the careful terms of historians of aviation, “the first power-driven heavier-than-air machine in which humans made free, controlled and sustained flight.”
Nor were these diachronic achievements in aviation and space flight isolated technological advances in their times, for both these periods, 1960–72 and 1896–1907, were pervasively marked by an extraordinary acceleration of technological developments, breakthroughs, and their proliferation in many areas simultaneously. The turn of the twentieth century saw such dramatic advances not only in the development of the airplane but also of the automobile, radio, motion picture technology, chromatography, the cathode ray tube, and the photoelectric cell, among many other technological advances; and the 1960s brought a comparable multitude of advances in computer technology, microelectronics, biochemistry, agriculture, industrial and medical technology, jet aviation, and space satellite technology, all with deeply transforming consequences for twentieth-century life.
Again, these too were part of much longer cyclical patterns in which Uranus-Pluto alignments in earlier centuries precisely coincided with periods of sustained major technological advance and transformation. Thus we see the rapid development and global proliferation of the telegraph, railroads, and steamships during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1845–56 period, when the collective self-awareness of that era’s unprecedented technological progress was displayed at the famous Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace in London in 1851 and at the Paris International Exposition of 1854.
The two immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto alignments presented a similar pattern of historically consequential technological advances and milestones. In the 1787–98 French Revolutionary period, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin in 1793, his pioneering of mass production techniques, the automation of grain milling, and the widespread mechanization of the textile industry caused a radical transformation of the American and British economies and accelerated the spread of the Industrial Revolution. The actual beginnings of the Industrial Revolution can be precisely traced to the immediately preceding conjunction of 1705–16, when the combination of Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the first practical steam engine in 1705–11 and Abraham Darby’s discovery in 1709 of the utility of coal for iron-smelting furnaces began the age of steam, coal, and iron.
Finally, going back to the first Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the modern period, that of 1450–61, we find that it was just these years that brought Gutenberg’s epoch-making development of the movable-type printing press—the necessary precondition for the Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. This was the same conjunction that coincided with the fall of Constantinople(1453) and the resulting mass emigration of scholars to the West from the collapsing Byzantine Empire that played such a crucial role in precipitating the Renaissance.
The history of scientific revolution and advance displayed the same remarkable pattern of close correlation with the Uranus-Pluto cycle. Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, the epochal starting point of the Scientific Revolution, was published in 1543 during the same Uranus-Pluto opposition that coincided with the radical Reformation (1533–45). (This was the alignment immediately following that of Gutenberg’s press invention just cited.) Here we see as well the synchronic nature of these correlations, not only in the social-political realm but within the realm of science itself: Historians of science have often noted the coincidence that Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, which founded modern anatomy and began a revolution in biology and medicine just as Copernicus began one in astronomy, was published in the same year, 1543, as De Revolutionibus.
Here too we see the diachronic patterning in clear evidence: Historians of science have also often noted that virtually no significant advances were made in the Copernican revolution for almost half a century after 1543, not until Kepler and Galileo embraced the heliocentric hypothesis—which took place in exact coincidence with the next Uranus-Pluto conjunction after the publication of De Revolutionibus, that of 1592–1602. During this period the entire Scientific Revolution was decisively propelled forward as Galileo began his revolutionary studies in the laws of motion (from 1592). Kepler experienced his initial sudden illumination concerning the geometrical harmonies of the planetary orbits (1595) that led to the writing of his first work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1595–96), the first fully committed Copernican treatise since De Revolutionibus that expanded the mathematical arguments for the heliocentric theory. Kepler then moved to Prague and began his seminal work with Tycho de Brahe’s unprecedentedly accurate astronomical observations, which provided the essential empirical basis for the heliocentric theory (1600). William Gilbert published his revolutionary De Magnete (1600), which in turn influenced Kepler’s theories on the physical dynamics of the solar system. And finally, Francis Bacon began his long series of influential writings that declared the need for a radically new philosophy for a new age—empirical, pragmatic, scientific, no longer constrained by fruitless veneration for past authorities—beginning with Temporis partus masculus (“Child of the Time,” 1602–03) and followed by The Advancement of Learning (1605).
Significant advances in scientific thought, of course, did not take place exclusively during such periods; the patterns were far more complex and nuanced than that, and here, as with the other phenomena we have been discussing, the Uranus-Pluto cycle was not the only relevant one. (As we will see later, the much shorter and more frequent Jupiter-Uranus cycle, for example, coincided with extraordinary consistency with an ongoing cyclical pattern of scientific and other intellectual and cultural breakthroughs that unfolded in between as well as in coincidence with the Uranus-Pluto alignments.) Yet keeping this caveat in mind, there was nevertheless an unmistakable tendency for these long and relatively rare Uranus-Pluto alignments to coincide with sustained widespread advances in science that had an especially epochal and revolutionary character.
For example, after the two alignments just cited, the immediately following opposition of 1643–54 that coincided with the English Revolution also coincided closely with the Cartesian mechanistic revolution that radically transformed the scientific understanding in the mid-seventeenth century. This was marked by the publication of Descartes’s Principles of Philosophy in 1644–47 and the work of Hobbes, Boyle, Pascal, and others beginning at this time, which definitively overthrew the Aristotelian framework and established the necessary foundation for the Newtonian synthesis.
Similarly, the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition one full cycle later, which coincided with the French Revolution, also precisely coincided with the revolution in modern chemistry that was marked by the publication of Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry in 1789 and the revolution in modern geology that was marked by the publication of James Hutton’s A Theory of the Earth in 1795, both during this same alignment.
The next such alignment, the conjunction of 1845–56 that coincided with the wave of revolutions and upheavals throughout Europe and Asia discussed earlier, also coincided with the period in which Charles Darwin, after y
ears of work on the theory, began at last in 1855 to write his book on natural selection that described his theory of evolution. As we shall examine later, he did not make his theory public until 1858 (just as Jupiter conjoined Uranus in the sky), when he received the famous letter from Alfred Russel Wallace containing the latter’s independent formulation of the same theory, which he had developed during his years of research in South America and Borneo from 1848 onwards.
Remarkably, it was during the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the 1790s that Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin in England (1794), Goethe in Germany (1794–95), and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France (1795) all independently developed evolutionary theories on the origin of species that constituted the immediate precedents to Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory. This coincidence was noted by Darwin himself in The Origin of Species: “It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which similar views arise at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwin in England, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in France, came to the same conclusion on the origin of species in the years 1794–95.” Moreover, also in France, Lamarck began developing his evolutionary theory some time between 1794 and 1802. Finally it was also during the 1790s alignment that Malthus wrote and published, in 1798, his Essay on the Principle of Population with its theory of the necessary relation of human population growth to food supply, which when Darwin read it several decades later provided him with the crucial idea he required for solving the problem of the mechanism of natural selection.
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