Returning to the 1845–56 conjunction, now in physics rather than biology, it was during this same period just cited for Darwin that Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the principle of conservation of energy, in 1847. Helmholtz’s analysis proved that mechanical work, heat, and electricity were all different forms of the same physical substrate, a conclusion considered by many scientists to be the most important physical discovery of the nineteenth century. During this same conjunction, William Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius in 1850–51 formulated the second law of thermodynamics, and in 1854 Clausius formulated the concept of entropy, from which he famously extrapolated to the conclusion that the universe is heading toward thermal annihilation. Also during this same period, James Clerk Maxwell began the work on electromagnetic fields that transformed modern physics. This was marked by the first in his series of papers on the subject, “On Faraday’s Lines of Force” (1855), the seed for which was Michael Faraday’s paper “Thoughts on Ray Vibrations” (1846), published at the beginning of the same alignment.
The period of the next such Uranus-Pluto alignment at the turn of the twentieth century, 1896–1907, brought both of the major revolutions of modern physics: quantum mechanics, initiated by the work of Max Planck (1900), and relativity theory, initiated by Albert Einstein (1905). It was during this same period that Freud commenced a comparable revolution in psychology with the founding of psychoanalysis and the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899–1900). This extraordinary period, which saw the emergence of the many radical and emancipatory political movements and upheavals cited earlier, as well as the invention of the airplane and many other technological advances, also brought the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson, the discovery of radioactivity by Becquerel and the Curies, and the founding of the science of genetics by William Bateson and others, among many other significant scientific advances at that time.
Finally, the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1960–72 coincided with another remarkable wave of revolutionary scientific developments: the plate tectonics revolution in geology initiated by Harry Hess’s seminal paper on sea-floor spreading (1962); Benoit Mandelbrot’s invention of fractal images (1962); Edward Lorenz’s seminal first paper on chaos theory (1963); the ascendancy of big bang cosmology by the discovery of background cosmic radiation by Penzias and Wilson, the first definitive evidence for the expansion of the universe from a hotter and denser primordial state (1964–65); the discovery of quarks by Gell-Mann and Zweig (1964); the formulation of Bell’s theorem of nonlocality (1964); the emergence of systems theory, epitomized in von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory (1968); and the formulation of the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock(1968) and the endosymbiotic theory by Lynn Margulis (1969). During this same period emerged what has been called “a second Darwinian revolution” in evolutionary biology, the joining of geneticists and naturalists in the forging of an evolutionary synthesis, combined with Stephen Jay Gould’s and Niles Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibria (1972). This period also brought the rapid development of ecological thought that began with Rachel Carson’s epoch-making Silent Spring of 1962, followed by the work of Gregory Bateson, Arne Naess, and many others. In addition, in the philosophy of science, the very concept of “scientific revolution” was given a radically new formulation and influential analysis in this period with Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 masterwork The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which in itself commenced a paradigm-shifting revolution in twentieth-century thought.
Again, there would seem to be no apparent necessary relationship between social-political revolution and scientific-technological revolution and thus no reason why the two should regularly coincide with each other so consistently during the exact same historical periods.7 Yet from an archetypal perspective, a definite underlying coherence connects the two categories of phenomena—a coherence of meaning, of formal causality rather than of efficient causality. Of course, what is most intellectually challenging within the context of current cosmological assumptions is the possibility that this synchronistic archetypal coherence in historical phenomena also bears a systematic correspondence with planetary movements.
Certainly, considered one by one, none of the many correlations we have so far examined represents a significant challenge. It is rather their cumulative character, as well as their archetypal precision, that is difficult to disregard. I found that virtually identical diachronic and synchronic patterns in close coincidence with the sequence of Uranus-Pluto alignment periods were also readily discernible for several other important categories of historical and cultural phenomena. Historians and specialists in the relevant disciplines will recognize striking correlations between the specific periods of these alignments and eras marked by such archetypally appropriate developments as unusually rapid modernization and secularization of society; epochal shifts in the rise and fall of imperial powers and dynasties and turning points in world history that mark tectonic shifts in the global balance of power; periods bringing the rise of nationalism simultaneously in various countries and continents; eras of mass immigrations and demographic shifts; and periods bringing major historical developments in mass communication, sudden increases in the power of the press, and the struggle to establish freedom of the press—all of these correlations consistently suggestive of cyclical patternings comparable to those we have been exploring.8
Other archetypally relevant eras that coincided with cyclical alignments of Uranus and Pluto include historical periods that brought the sudden rise and empowerment of countercultures and youth cultures; eras marked by the emergence and flourishing of historically significant bohemian and countercultural districts, communities, and demimondes (the Left Bank, Bloomsbury, Soho, Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, Berkeley, Harvard Square); eras that had a decisive formative effect on contemporary youths who later brought forth further developments of the specific impulses associated with that period (e.g., the influence of Schiller’s writings and the French Revolutionary ideals on the young Beethoven in Austria in the 1790s, or the same era’s impact on the young Wordsworth and Coleridge in England,9 and also on the young Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin in Germany, all with enduring consequences for later developments in modern culture); periods that brought the rapid emergence and proliferation of ecological, environmental, and nature-oriented movements of various kinds; and eras marked by cultural trends and movements advocating sexual revolution and erotic emancipation in society and the arts.
Awakenings of the Dionysian
In these last-cited phenomena, we begin to recognize an essential characteristic of the archetypal correlations that we have not yet identified. With each planetary correlation, whether involving a natal aspect, a personal transit, or a world transit, I found that an alignment between two or more planets consistently indicated a mutual activation of the corresponding archetypes, each one acting upon the other in its characteristic way. In the survey above, I have mainly been discussing the eras of Uranus-Pluto alignments in terms that can perhaps most simply be understood as the Plutonic-Dionysian archetype, associated with the planet Pluto, intensifying and empowering on a massive scale the Prometheus archetype of rebellion and freedom, creativity, innovation, and sudden radical change, all associated with the planet Uranus. This way of approaching the phenomena essentially focuses on one vector of archetypal activity—Pluto acting upon Uranus, so to speak: Pluto?Uranus.
However, these same periods can also be understood and further illuminated if we consider as well the converse archetypal dynamic operating in the various historical events and cultural phenomena coincident with these same alignments: that is, if we not only consider the Pluto archetype as intensely compelling and empowering the Promethean impulse in these eras but also consider the Prometheus archetype as suddenly and unexpectedly liberating the elemental forces of the Plutonic-Dionysian impulse: Uranus?Pluto. For in any given archetypal complex that is constituted by two or more planetary principles, each principle seems simultaneously to act and be ac
ted upon in the relevant phenomena, each one doing so in accordance with its own specific archetypal character. The Promethean principle associated with the planet Uranus appears to act by suddenly liberating or awakening that which it touches, with unexpected, innovative, disruptive, and emancipatory consequences, while the Plutonic-Dionysian principle appears to act by compelling, empowering, and intensifying what it touches, with profoundly transformative and sometimes overwhelming, destructive consequences.
With these considerations in mind, I found that many of the most distinctive cultural and historical phenomena during the periods of Uranus-Pluto alignments could be recognized in terms of this second vector of archetypal dynamism, from the Promethean, acting upon, towards, and through the Dionysian-Plutonic: Uranus?Pluto. This vector was immediately visible, for example, in the extraordinarily consistent sudden awakenings and emancipation of the erotic dimension of life in the Uranus-Pluto periods we have been examining, as expressed in the social mores, arts, and leading philosophical and psychological ideas that emerged in those eras.
Thus we recall of course the 1960s and early 1970s, with the tremendous sudden upsurge and liberation (Uranus) of the erotic (Pluto) during that decade and its immediate aftermath, the “sexual revolution” in all its forms—the radical loosening of sexual restraints in social mores, the reclamation of the body and the celebration of sensuous experience, the personal striving for erotic liberation, the “free love” of the hippies and flower children, the countless Dionysian festivals of music and dance, the mass “happenings” and Acid Tests, the exuberant sexual unconstraint of the burgeoning alternative press and underground comics, the emancipation of women’s sexuality impelled by the feminist revolution and the new availability of reliable contraception, the beginning of gay liberation, the publication of widely read advice books from Sex and the Single Girl in 1962 to The Joy of Sex in 1972. In this same era there arose intensified interest in the psychological perspectives derived from Freud advocating greater sexual freedom, with new widespread attention to the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, D. H. Lawrence, and William Blake, and the rise of theorists and proponents of erotic liberation such as Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Germaine Greer, Monique Wittig, and Mary Daly.
The entire period was marked as well by a new sexual explicitness in drama, literature, music, dance, film. One thinks, for example, of the gradual crescendo of eroticism from Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita of 1960 to his Satyricon of 1969, or the great popularity of the erotically charged music and powerful Dionysian theater of Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, Jim Morrison and the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Cream, The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Velvet Underground, and many similar performers and groups. One recalls the era’s prevailing spirit of passionate energy and wild abandon, the polymorphously orgiastic quality of the decade. All these specific qualities strongly suggest the presence of an archetypal complex constituted by the Promethean and Dionysian principles in synthesis—especially if we can divest these transcultural archetypal principles of their gendered Hellenic inflection, holding in our minds, for example, the clear association of Dionysus-Pluto with the great Indian mythic figures of Kali and Shakti, goddesses of erotic power and elemental transformation, death and rebirth, destruction and creation.
The unmistakable cultural ambiance which pervaded the decade of the Sixties, a zeitgeist whose prevailing quality combined a mass awakening of emancipatory and creative impulses with a titanic eruption of elemental and libidinal forces, was talked about, celebrated, criticized, feared. Attempts were made to suppress it, attempts were made to sustain it indefinitely. It dominated people’s experience at the time, just as it now dominates retrospective views of that era. In a sense, the 1960s seemed to unleash the force of a great collective Oedipal impulse, catalyzing a vast wave of erotically motivated rebellion against the repressive structures of established authority. The driving force of so much of the decade’s most characteristic activities and sentiments appeared to be the attempt to overthrow any limitations to libidinal satisfaction, whether social or political, artistic, intellectual, psychological, or somatic. Again, if we move beyond the masculine inflection of these resonant Hellenic symbols to understand them at their most general, transgendered level, the Oedipus impulse and complex can be recognized as essentially a manifestation of two distinct archetypes—the rebellious Promethean and the erotic Dionysian—acting in close conjunction and mutual activation.
Nor was the liberation of the Dionysian in the 1960s limited to that archetype’s erotic or libidinal side, for the same decade was characterized by an equally powerful eruption of the volcanic, violent, and destructive elemental energies associated with the Dionysian-Plutonic-Kali principle. Moreover, the expression of these energies was consistently and directly linked throughout this period to the Promethean cause of revolutionary change and political liberation. Here was the tremendous mass violence unleashed by the Cultural Revolution in China, the repeated eruption of violence and fiery destruction in African-American communities in the inner cities of the United States, the wave of assassinations, the unprecedentedly intensive decade-long destruction of Vietnam, the self-immolating protesters in Prague and Saigon, the unprecedented increase of violence in the cinema—Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange—the extreme turmoil and violence portrayed daily in the television news, the persistent impulse towards violent fury on both sides in the antiwar demonstrations, the pervasive “heat” of the period.
I found that viewing the 1960s as a collective manifestation of an archetypal synthesis of Prometheus and Dionysus seemed to afford a perspective that was not only historically accurate and precise but also aptly multivalent and comprehensive. It provided a wealth of insight, both through assimilating the manifold meanings of the two archetypes and through recognizing the dynamic mutuality of their interaction. In the complex interplay of those two archetypal principles the historical character and pervading spirit of the 1960s seemed to be expressed with a kind of concise and profound clarity.
So too I found a similar deepening of understanding of the 1787–98 French Revolutionary period. We have so far discussed this era mainly as the Prometheus archetype of liberation and radical change being intensely compelled and empowered by the Pluto-Dionysus principle. But if we reorganize our vision to take account of the converse side of this archetypal dynamic—that is, the Prometheus principle’s suddenly awakening and liberating the elemental energies of the Plutonic-Dionysian—an entirely different yet equally fundamental dimension of the French Revolutionary period becomes intelligible: its spectacular synthesis of emancipatory innovation and mass violence. Here again, as in the 1960–72 period, we see the specifically destructive element of the Dionysus archetype, yet we see it always inextricably linked with Promethean themes of freedom and rebellion—the many mass insurrections that convulsed Paris and much of France throughout the decade, the repeated massacres, the regicide, the thousands of executions at the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, the bloodshed and fury, the unbounded irrational rage of the radicals attempting to remake the world, the decapitated heads carried about on pikes in front of cheering mobs, the overwhelming social chaos and political turmoil.
As in the 1960s, here too was the experience of sudden and sustained cataclysmic upheaval, an awakening of volcanic forces that precipitated the collapse of the established order. Here again erupted a sudden collective wave of disinhibition, a return of the repressed, that unleashed primordial destructive forces in close association with liberatory and rebellious impulses. The apocalyptic orgy of killing in the September Massacres of 1792 and the Reign of Terror of 1793–94 had their counterparts in the 1960s with the countless atrocities of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the vast destruction of Tibet, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, the My Lai massacre, the Manson murders, Altamont, Hell’s Angels. The various extremist groups in revolutionary France such as the Jacobins, the Indulgents, and the Enragés had their counterparts in many similar radical factio
ns of the Sixties, such as the Red Guards, the Black Panthers, and the SDS Weathermen, with their own Days of Rage.
Both of these Uranus-Pluto decades brought forth repeated outbursts of mass emotion of great intensity. Whether violent or libidinous, the dominant archetypal complex in each of these periods seemed to constellate sudden sustained outbursts of nonspecific emotional intensity and elemental power that informed and compelled human activity and experience on a mass scale. Nor was this upsurge of intensified mass emotion in the French Revolutionary epoch limited to the violent and aggressive, for visible here as well was an elemental upwelling of fraternité, the third of the French Revolution’s sovereign trinity of values. The powerful wave of feeling that overcame the Legislative Assembly in July 1792 at the height of the democratic period of the Revolution, when the deputies suddenly surrendered their antagonisms and commenced embracing and kissing each other in tears of deep emotion, and that swept through Paris generally in 1792 had its counterparts in such events as the San Francisco Summer of Love in 1967 or the Woodstock music festival in 1969.
B000OVLIPQ EBOK Page 24
