A woman waits for me, she contains all, nothing is lacking,
Yet all were lacking if sex were lacking….
Sex contains all, bodies, souls,
Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results…
All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the passions, loves, beauties, delights of the earth….
Give me now libidinous joys only,
Give me the drench of my passions….
The awakening to nature’s pulse and power during this period was expressed as much in the spheres of science and philosophy as it was in poetry. On the one hand, the Darwinian evolutionary developments described earlier possessed a powerfully Promethean character (Pluto?Uranus), as a revolution of thought and a liberation from confining tradition and ignorance. On the other hand, if we shift to the other archetypal vector, we can also recognize the theory’s distinctly Dionysian character, its liberation of the Plutonic (Uranus? Pluto). The reality of nature’s encompassing power in the larger scheme of things, the ceaseless striving of evolutionary forces, the driving libidinal and aggressive urges for sexual reproduction and species preservation, the struggle for survival, nature red in tooth and claw—to all this the modern mind was now awakened, often startlingly so, much as it was again by Freud’s instinctual unconscious during the following Uranus-Pluto opposition.
Yet even here, in the theory of natural selection and in the phenomena it depicted, these Plutonic themes of biological evolution, instinctual drives, and the struggle for survival were always tightly linked with specifically Promethean motifs embedded in the principle of variation itself: the random appearance of sudden mutations in a species, the creative emergence of unpredictable biological innovation—the evolutionary trickster, as it were, the innovative rebel against the species norm, the eccentric chance offspring that, under ever-changing circumstances, unexpectedly survives. Again, the complex synthesis of the two archetypal principles seemed to unfold on many levels simultaneously.
Moreover, during the period of this same conjunction, a closely related epochal shift in the history of European thought took place with the widespread dissemination after 1851 of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the primordial will that drives the forces of nature and shapes all human motivation from the depths. In many ways the closest parallel in philosophy to the scientific theory of Darwin, Schopenhauer’s vision in turn inspired both Nietzsche and Freud, whose formulations of the will to power and the Dionysian principle in the one case and the instinctual unconscious and the id in the other have the Schopenhauerian will as their crucial precedent. Schopenhauer was born at the start of the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the French Revolutionary period.13 Nietzsche was born at the beginning of this Uranus-Pluto conjunction, and Freud was born at its end.14 In turn, moving forward, both Nietzsche’s and Freud’s theories began to come to cultural attention during the immediately following opposition, that of 1896–1907.
Schopenhauer’s philosophy also deeply influenced both Wagner and Mahler by its conception of music and artistic genius as uniquely capable of directly portraying the primal forces of the will in nature. This influence was most explicitly expressed in the music that emerged from the two composers during those two consecutive Uranus-Pluto eras: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Der Ring des Nibelungen in the 1850s and Mahler’s Third Symphony and its successors in the 1896–1907 period.
The entire period of the conjunction was pivotal for both Wagner’s musical development and his cultural influence as his controversial operas first made their way through Europe, his polemical writings were widely debated, and his genius was recognized. During the first half of the conjunction, from 1844 to 1848, Wagner composed Tannhäuser, with its orgiastic bacchanale and sonic depiction of overwhelming instinctual forces, and Lohengrin. After his participation in the political revolutions of 1848–49, he devoted himself for the next several years to a deep rethinking of the entire creative process by which music, myth, and narrative drama could be integrated into one powerful artistic expression, drawing on classical Greek tragedy as the most realized instance of a complete art form. Out of this crucible, he commenced work in the 1850s on the epic Ring cycle, interrupting it in 1857 to compose Tristan, his masterpiece of insatiable erotic passion—works that constituted both a revolution in the history of music and a vivid expression of the Schopenhauerian will.
It was during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907 that Isadora Duncan, invited by Wagner’s widow Cosima, famously performed the bacchanale from Tannhäuser at Bayreuth. Significantly, Duncan often proclaimed that the sources of her artistic inspiration were specifically Wagner, Nietzsche, and Whitman, and ultimately the power and forms of nature itself.
At the beginning of this same Uranus-Pluto alignment, in 1896, Mahler wrote a letter to a friend describing the composition of his Third Symphony with words that well convey his own experience of the compelling intensity of a larger will grounded in the depths of nature driving the force of artistic creativity:
I am working on a large composition. Don’t you know that this demands one’s whole personality, and that one is often so deeply immersed in it, that it is as if one were dead to the outside world? Now, imagine a work of such scope that the whole world actually is reflected in it—one becomes, so to speak, only an instrument upon which the universe plays…My Symphony will be something that the world has never heard before! In this score, all nature speaks and tells such deep secrets…I tell you, at certain places in the score, a quite uncanny feeling takes possession of me, and I feel as if I had not created this myself.
Mahler’s phrases and experience call to mind not only Nietzsche and Schopenhauer but also the influential philosophy of nature that emerged in German thought and culture precisely during the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of the 1790s, one full cycle earlier. From Goethe’s studies and writings on the metamorphosis of plants (from 1791) and Schiller’s writings on the poet’s dynamic relationship to nature (from 1794) to Schelling’s series of works on Naturphilosophie (from 1797), there emerged the immensely influential Romantic conception of nature as dynamic self-activity, ceaselessly striving to realize itself, to bring forth the infinite within the finite, with the human being as its vessel of awakening consciousness. This stream of thought deeply influenced the thought of Hegel during the period of this alignment, the formative years in his philosophical development. This was the same Uranus-Pluto alignment that coincided with the sudden simultaneous emergence of independent evolutionary conceptions of nature, anticipating Darwin, in the work of Goethe, Erasmus Darwin, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Lamarck. And again we see the theme of both scientific revolution and awakening to the dynamic evolution of the Earth in Hutton’s seminal work of 1795 during this same alignment, A Theory of the Earth, the foundation of all modern geology.
In many of these examples, we are revisiting cultural and intellectual developments that we earlier examined in terms of the Prometheus principle of revolutionary awakenings being driven and empowered by the Plutonic (Pluto?Uranus), but which we can now perceive as reflecting the converse archetypal dynamic of the Prometheus principle’s suddenly awakening the collective psyche and scientific mind to new dimensions of the Dionysian-Plutonic forces of nature, evolutionary processes, and instinctual drives (Uranus?Pluto). This sequential pattern of artistic and intellectual awakenings to the elemental forces of nature and chthonic evolutionary processes is again clearly evident on many fronts during the most recent Uranus-Pluto conjunction, that of the 1960–72 period.
In addition to the sudden eruption and pervasive presence of the Dionysian impulse in the music, dance, film, theater, and literature of the Sixties, we find a distinctive complex of Promethean-Dionysian themes expressed in a different form in the sciences during these years. It was visible in the rapid theoretical developments and intensified focus concerning the evolutionary roots of human behavior and anatomy evident in such widely discussed works of that decade as Konrad Lorenz’
s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, and in the development of sociobiology in those years by Edward O. Wilson and others. We see it as well in the emergence of the evolutionary synthesis forged by geneticists and naturalists, the “second Darwinian revolution” in evolutionary biology, and again in Gould’s and Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibria. The motif of chthonic awakening is similarly evident in the Earth sciences during these same years, with the plate-tectonics revolution that built on Wegener’s concept of continental drift from the beginning of the century. Catalyzed in 1960 by Hess’s theory of sea-floor spreading, the plate-tectonics revolution gradually unfolded during this alignment, as crucial confirming experiments were formulated by Vine and Matthews in 1963 (“equal in importance to any formulated in the geological sciences in this century”) and successfully carried out in the immediately following years. The latter developments in turn appeared to be part of a larger intellectual awakening in this period to the Earth as a living, dynamic, self-transforming system. Many other scientific and philosophical developments of these years, such as those related to chaos theory, complexity theory, and systems theory, reflect similar themes suggestive of this same archetypal complex. Again, a paradigmatic expression of these themes was Lovelock’s proposal in 1968 of what became known as the Gaia hypothesis, which conceived of the entire Earth as a living, self-regulating planetary ecosystem.
Indeed, throughout the 1960–72 period of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, we see evidence of a widespread awakening to the claims of nature and a liberation of nature’s voice, beginning with the rapid emergence of ecological awareness initiated by Rachel Carson near the start of the conjunction in 1962. In the summer of 1969, in the midst of the most intense period of antiwar activism, teach-ins, and student rebellion, planning began for Earth Day, a national grassroots protest on behalf of the environment. Both a symbol and a collective expression of the rising ecological awareness, Earth Day took place in 1970, with over twenty million demonstrators and the participation of thousands of schools and local communities. In the same year Greenpeace was founded. Finally, near the end of the conjunction period, in 1972, a further stage was marked by the emergence of deep ecology as formulated by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Naess’s philosophy of biocentrism set forth a new ethic, embracing plants and animals as well as human beings, that he believed was necessary for human societies to live in harmony with the natural world on which they depend for survival and well-being. Once again we see a diachronic pattern with the preceding Uranus-Pluto conjunction period one cycle earlier, 1845–56, which brought forth Thoreau’s writing and publication of Walden, or Life in the Woods. Here Thoreau’s articulation of other characteristic Uranus-Pluto themes, such as radical individualism and social rebellion, was embedded in perhaps the most seminal of all works calling for humanity’s reawakening to the voice of nature, epitomized in his dictum, “In Wildness is the preservation of the world.”
Unleashing the Forces of Nature
In the category of historical and cultural phenomena we have been exploring, we see cyclically patterned archetypal variations, with seemingly endless creativity, on the theme of liberating or awakening to the forces of nature—the creative powers of nature and life, erotic libido and sexuality, the Freudian instinctual unconscious and the id, the Nietzschean will to power and the Schopenhauerian universal will, the Darwinian biological forces of evolution and the chthonic geological forces of the Earth. We have seen other forms as well, as in that sudden liberation of creative forces in the peoples of previously repressive societies that has so often accompanied revolutionary emancipations, as in the 1640s in England, in the 1790s throughout Europe, and in the 1960s throughout the world. Even going back as far as the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1450s and the development of the Gutenberg press, we see another version of this theme: the unprecedented unleashing of both historical forces and the creative forces of the human spirit that took place in the wake of the printing press, which proved to be a crucial precondition for many of the most important cultural and technological developments of the modern era. And we have seen the more problematic expression of this archetypal motif in the unleashing of mass political violence and mob behavior during all of these alignments.
If we now review the entire category of technological revolutions we earlier surveyed, we can recognize this same archetypal theme as having been played out in yet another form: namely, a more literal Promethean unleashing of the forces of nature, with immense consequences that are still unfolding. Thus the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1705–16 coincided with the invention of the steam engine and the discovery of the use of coal for iron-smelting furnaces that began the Industrial Revolution and the age of steam, coal, and iron. The following conjunction of 1845–56 coincided with the discovery of petroleum oil as a fuel, a discovery that began the petroleum age whose cultural, ecological, and geopolitical consequences are still unfolding. And the following opposition of 1896–1907 coincided with the birth of the nuclear age with the discovery of radioactivity in uranium, the isolation of radium and polonium, and Einstein’s E = mc2 formulation.
Each of these inventions and discoveries in turn played a role in major technological and industrial developments that coincided with subsequent Uranus-Pluto periods, suggesting the same kind of diachronic cyclical patterning we have observed in other areas. Restricting ourselves here to the axial alignments: as discussed earlier, the steam-driven and coal-driven Industrial Revolution rapidly accelerated first in the 1790s and then more potently and globally in the 1845–56 period with the proliferation of railroads and steamships and the widespread mechanization of industry. In turn, the opposition of 1896–1907 coincided precisely with the oil-fueled proliferation of automobiles (from twenty-five produced in the United States in 1896 to twenty-five thousand in 1905) and of motor-buses, motorcycles, trucks, electricity plants, and the first airplanes. The same period brought both the discovery of vast oil deposits in Texas and the beginning of oil exploration in the Middle East (both in 1901). Finally, the period of the most recent conjunction of the 1960s brought the rapid proliferation of nuclear power plants throughout the world, the rise of global jet aviation, and the deployment of the titanic energy and power required for space travel, all made possible by the technological discoveries of the preceding Uranus-Pluto alignments.15
Here again we are taking the same developments we earlier analyzed in terms of epochal scientific and technological revolutions, understood as the Plutonic empowerment of the Promethean principle of intellectual breakthrough and radical change (Pluto?Uranus). And we are shifting our perception to recognize the converse archetypal dynamic in which Promethean technological innovation and human ingenuity unleash the Plutonic forces of nature (Uranus? Pluto).
All these phenomena represent the concrete embodiment of Bacon’s dictum that “Knowledge is power,” another form of Prometheus unbound and empowered. Bacon himself, we will recall, began his philosophical writings that were inspired by the knowledge/power imperative under the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1592–1602. During this same conjunction occurred the birth of Descartes, the other major philosophical progenitor of the modern scientific-technological will to power.
Religious Rebellion and Erotic Emancipation
Historically, both radical religious reform and rebellion against religious authority and tradition have been consistently in evidence during Uranus-Pluto alignment periods. These took many forms, some as the sudden rise of pressure for change from within, as with the unprecedentedly reformist Second Vatican Council called by Pope John XXIII in 1962 “to open the window” of the Catholic Church to the fresh winds and spirit of the time. Other expressions of the same theme were more radical and antagonistic, as with the French Revolutionary abolition of the worship of God in 1793, when the churches of Paris were closed and public reading of the Bible was forbidden. The Bishop of Paris publicly abjured the Catholic religion and declared th
at only Liberty and Equality should henceforth be worshipped in France.
On November 10, 1793, a Festival of Reason was declared, and the cathedral of Notre Dame was plundered and then ritually dedicated to the cult of Reason. Before an immense and joyful crowd, an actress from the Paris opera was selected to represent the Goddess of Reason. After being embraced by the president, she was paraded in glory through the thronged streets to the cathedral, where she was enthroned on the high altar, crowned as Deity, and worshipped by all present. Stirred by the demonstrations, the Convention two weeks later outlawed the Bible and any expression of the Christian religion under penalty of death. Parish churches were reopened as Temples of Truth and Reason, and Christianity was replaced by “natural religion.” In this period marriage was no longer under the Church’s authority, and divorce was legalized. The Revolution’s systematic attempt to dechristianize French society and establish a new religion of Reason and Humanity continued for over three years until religious freedom was instituted in 1797, but with the Roman papacy still regarded as an enemy of the Revolution. In 1798, near the end of the opposition, the French military expelled Pope Pius VI from Rome and put him in prison, where he died. Thus during the span of this alignment period, the Revolution’s early anticlericalism moved through increasing degrees of secularism to a stringent atheism, and finally to a legalization of religious freedom combined with an attack on the Roman papacy, all in the service of a new religion of liberty, reason, and nature.
We see this same motif of rebellion against religious orthodoxy again during the following conjunction of the mid-nineteenth century at the philosophical level of high culture. Amidst the social and political revolutions of the period (including another Pope Pius, IX, being compelled by revolutionary forces to leave Rome, in 1848), a powerful emancipatory impulse in the religious context expressed itself with the wave of religious skepticism that swept the European intellectual world in the 1840s and 1850s in the wake of the ideas of Schopenhauer, Marx, and Engels, as well as David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and George Eliot, among others. This shift in the culture’s philosophical vision in turn influenced Darwin and later Nietzsche. Similarly, another comparable wave of religious doubt, philosophical innovation, and intensified secularist impulses in Western culture emerged during the following Uranus-Pluto axial alignment of 1896–1907 in association with the enormous social and political, technological, scientific, and artistic shifts that marked those years at the turn of the twentieth century. Related movements, pressures, and disruptions were evident in China, Japan, India, Russia, and the Middle East during both of these periods and again in the 1960s in a clear diachronic sequence.
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