Characteristic of this tendency were the dramatic developments in Spain during the 1930s, from the election of the Socialist Party and its anti-Church policies to the rise of the Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War. In the United States, a wave of major labor strikes such as the historic Flint auto workers strike of 1936–37 resulted in the empowerment of labor unions throughout the country. On the religious side, the radical reform movement led by Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker flourished during the 1930s, similar in spirit to the liberation theology movement that would emerge in the 1960s during the conjunction. We can also recognize the precise diachronic patterning coincident with the sequence of twentieth-century Uranus-Pluto alignments in the often-noted cyclical awakening of progressivism and social-political reform in the United States, spurred from both below and above, in the 1900s during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, in the 1930s during the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the 1960s during the presidencies of Kennedy and Johnson.
Indeed in many fields during the 1930s we can recognize the characteristic radical changes and paradigm shifts we have seen during earlier Uranus-Pluto alignments. In the intellectual sphere, economic upheavals throughout the world during the 1930s engendered revolutionary economic theories, above all those of John Maynard Keynes, set out in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which transformed economic decision-making for the rest of the twentieth century. In philosophy, the rise of existentialism, with its concerns with human freedom, metaphysical skepticism, and social emancipation, began during the 1930s as well, especially through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, whose long relationship as well as teaching and writing careers commenced during this alignment. In feminism, the period of this Uranus-Pluto square coincided with not only the emergence of Beauvoir in France but also the publication in England of Virginia Woolf’s influential feminist milestone A Room of One’s Own. In the history of protest music, it was during the 1930s that Woodie Guthrie, riding freight trains and traveling on the open road amidst the mass migration of Dust Bowl refugees, began his career as a composer and performer of folk songs protesting social injustice, which in turn inspired Bob Dylan and the protest music of the 1960s.
Many other cultural phenomena of the twentieth century show a similar sequential progression in coincidence with the three Uranus-Pluto dynamic alignments of that century, as in the distinct cyclical awakenings of a Promethean-Dionysian impulse expressed in widespread intensified cultural creativity and libidinal dynamism. In popular culture, for example, during the decade centered on 1900 with its Uranus-Pluto opposition, we see the emergence of jazz in New Orleans from the dynamic interplay of ragtime, blues, folk songs, church music, and marching-band music (this period also bringing the birth of the first generation of jazz giants like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington). In turn, the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1930s coincided with the wave of propulsive energy that surged through popular culture as swing and the big bands swept the country from Harlem to Los Angeles and brought an unexpected eruption of physicality, rhythmic potency, and improvisatory freedom in music and dance, as well as new social pressures for racial integration. And this was succeeded by the Dionysian-Promethean explosion during the conjunction of the 1960s that discharged itself in the jazz, rock, and dance of the popular culture of that epoch. A comparable pattern can be noted in the history of psychoanalysis, with its awakening to the power of the id and the sexual instincts: its initial emergence in the works of Freud and his first followers during the Uranus-Pluto opposition at the turn of the century, its rapid widespread embrace by intellectuals during the square of the 1930s, and its mass dissemination and radicalization during the conjunction of the 1960s.
Also suggestive of this archetypal combination was the unleashing of elemental forces and the violent rise of mass movements and collective actions of many kinds that took place in the 1930s—fascist, communist, socialist, the mass Nuremburg rallies, The Triumph of the Will, the Hitler Youth, the upsurge of Aryan neopaganism, the power of the criminal underworld and gangsterism, the mass strikes and demonstrations, the many forced mass emigrations and cultural disruptions throughout the world at this time. Widely read works such as Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses (both 1930) reflected these concerns and developments. So also did Jung’s famous 1936 essay Wotan, which diagnosed the rise of Hitler and Nazism overtaking Germany as an eruption of an archaic force within the German psyche personified by the ancient Teutonic mythological figure of Wotan, “a god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle…. A god has taken possession of the Germans and their house is filled with a ‘mighty rushing wind.’” In this dangerous state the German nation was like a “raving berserker tearing himself free from his bonds. A hurricane has broken loose in Germany, while we still believe it is fine weather.”
The unleashing of nature’s elemental forces was evident in other ways as well during the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1930s, and in a close diachronic pattern with the preceding opposition of the 1896–1907 period. It was during these years that physicists first split the atom (John Cockroft and E.T.S. Walton, 1932), achieved the first nuclear fission (Enrico Fermi, 1934), proposed creating a chain reaction that would lead to the “liberation of nuclear energy for power production and other purposes through nuclear ‘transmutation’” (Leo Szilard, 1934), and began conducting the research that led to the development of weapons of mass destruction. Prophetically, in 1903, during the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition, the physicist Ernest Rutherford made the “playful suggestion that, could a proper detonator be found, it was just conceivable that a wave of atomic disintegration might be started through matter, which would indeed make this old world vanish in smoke.” Twenty-nine years later, during the Uranus-Pluto square in 1932, using a linear accelerator built in Rutherford’s own Cavendish Laboratory, Cockcroft and Walton split the atom.
The diachronic patterns involving the intervening Uranus-Pluto square alignments sometimes extended back over several centuries. For example, Che Guevara, who fought in revolutionary movements throughout Latin America, was born during the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1928–37 period, exactly one cycle after the great wave of Latin American revolutionary movements of liberation during the Uranus-Pluto square of 1816–24. In the background of that epoch of revolutions against Spain and Portugal, and reflecting a different motif of the same archetypal complex, the initial 1492 “discovery” of America by Christopher Columbus in service to the Spanish crown coincided with the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1490s. Indeed, all four of Columbus’s journeys to the New World, the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas that divided the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal (1494), John Cabot’s reaching North America (1497), Vasco da Gama’s reaching India (1498), and Pedro Cabral’s reaching Brazil (1500) all took place during the long Uranus-Pluto square that extended from 1489 to 1507 (unusually long because of Pluto’s speed during those years in comparison with that of Uranus). This epochal awakening of the European mind to the existence of new worlds, combined with the unprecedented centrifugal thrust of European power beyond its own continent, began the enormous upheaval that, like a centuries-long hurricane, swept through and overwhelmed the indigenous peoples, flora, and fauna of those many lands.
The eruption of a collective will to power during Uranus-Pluto eras can also become concentrated and embodied in a single powerful figure, a world-historic political-military conqueror or tyrant driven as if by a force of nature: One of the most striking diachronic sequences of this cycle is the coincidence of Uranus-Pluto alignments with the emergence of just such figures: Alexander the Great during the conjunction of 328–318 BCE, Julius Caesar during the conjunction of 74–65 BCE, Charlemagne during the opposition of 766–82, Genghis Khan during the conjunction of 1196–1206, Tamerlane during the opposition of 1390– 1400, Peter the Great during the conjunction of 1705–12, Napoleon during the opposition of 1787–9
8, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Mao during the square of the 1930s, with Mao and his cult of personality reaching its apex during the conjunction of the 1960s. Many other such figures of lesser power but with similar impulses and characteristics—dictators, conquistadors, tyrants, strongmen—arose over the centuries during periods of Uranus-Pluto alignments.
The Individual and the Collective
Throughout the evidence, I continually observed the importance of attending both to the full quadrature cycle and to the birth of particularly significant individuals whose lives expressed the characteristic archetypal complex associated with that cycle. For example, considering the just-cited set of milestones in global exploration, I noticed that Columbus himself was born in 1451 during the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto conjunction that began that quadrature cycle—the same conjunction that coincided with Gutenberg’s development of the printing press and the fall of Constantinople that helped catalyze the Renaissance in Italy. With Columbus and his subsequent epoch-making expeditions, so also in numerous other cases, I found that the work or achievement of an individual born during one alignment of a planetary cycle, the archetypal character of which he or she embodied in an especially paradigmatic way, consistently took place and often suddenly found new life in close coincidence with subsequent alignments of the same planets.
Restricting ourselves to individuals we have already been discussing, and to the one cycle of Uranus-Pluto quadrature alignments that extended from the beginning of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, we can recognize a kind of archetypal clockwork in the unfolding sequence of correlations. The four alignments mark a precise succession of historically crucial Promethean figures who were born during one alignment and whose cultural contribution flourished in close coincidence with subsequent ones: Thus Rousseau and Diderot are born during the conjunction and flourish precisely during the period of the following square; Blake, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Robespierre, and Danton are born during that square and flourish during the period of the following opposition, that of the French Revolution, when also the ideas of Rousseau and Diderot become powerfully influential. Byron and Shelley and Schopenhauer are born then, carry forth that energy, and flourish during the following square that in turn coincides with the births of Marx, Engels, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, George Eliot, Whitman, Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, and Melville. That cycle ends with the conjunction of the mid-nineteenth century and the births of Nietzsche and Freud—and an influx of births of other pivotal figures of cultural rebellion, artistic revolution, heroic individualism, and erotic emancipation such as Rimbaud, Oscar Wilde, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, as well as such alternative embodiments of the empowered Prometheus as the paradigmatic inventors and experimenters Edison and Tesla.
Similarly, with respect to still other Promethean themes, the conjunction of 1705–16 that coincided with the births of Rousseau and Diderot also coincided with the births of the equally Promethean eighteenth-century figures David Hume and Benjamin Franklin: Hume, the most radical British philosopher of the century and an avatar of the Enlightenment’s project of intellectual emancipation from orthodox beliefs; Franklin, another iconic figure of the Enlightenment whose lifetime of scientific, technological, and political activity speaks to the sustained presence of an empowered Promethean impulse, as concisely suggested in the famous epigram by Turgot: “He snatched the lightning from the skies and the sceptre from tyrants.”18
This lineage of epochal Prometheans continues as we move back through the cyclical alignments. At the beginning of the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition, which coincided with the English revolutionary era, occurred the birth of Newton, the climactic figure of the Scientific Revolution, in 1643. The immediately previous conjunction is that of 1592–1602, at the heart of which in 1596 occurred the birth of Descartes. What entire epochs of intellectual and cultural revolution did in subsequent centuries—sweeping away great superstructures of established thought and tradition—Descartes commenced in the crucible of his mind and writings. As the historian Jules Michelet famously observed, “The Revolution of 1789 had begun with the Discourse on Method.”
Descartes’s birth occurred in the same conjunction period that brought the wave of scientific breakthroughs of Galileo and Kepler, Tycho and Gilbert, cited earlier. This conjunction of 1592–1602 also precisely coincided with the great period of brilliant cultural creativity of the Elizabethan age that saw the near-simultaneous emergence of Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, Marlowe, and Jonson.19 Focusing here on Shakespeare, we see the familiar Uranus-Pluto themes and qualities in the sudden eruption of creative power and dramatic intensity in this first decade of his career as he brought forth a new play on average every six months, beginning precisely with the start of this conjunction. We are so accustomed to what now seems like the timeless existence of the full Shakespearean canon that it takes an effort to put this astounding creative torrent into perspective: A full-bodied complex Shakespearean play emerged from his pen on average every six months, two a year, four every two years, eight in four years, and so on. This tremendous empowerment of the creative impulse and sustained creative intensity represents the archetypal vector of Pluto?Uranus. Simultaneously, the specific narrative themes and qualities of character in these works display the characteristic motifs of Uranus?Pluto: the liberation and creative expression of the deep forces of eros and instinct; all the dazzling dramas of the human will in violent struggle and unleashed passion from Richard III and the other histories to Julius Caesar and Hamlet; the free-spirited eroticism of The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the great Rabelaisian figure of Falstaff (remarkably, Rabelais himself produced his masterwork Gargantua and Pantagruel in coincidence with the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1533–45). So too Shakespeare’s poems of passion and sensuality, beginning with his immensely popular first published poem Venus and Adonis (published during his Saturn return), which ran through six editions in nine years in exact coincidence with the years of this conjunction.
More generally, with their unprecedented articulation of self-willed and self-reflective personalities who engage the full range of life’s dramatic tensions and crises, we see in Shakespeare’s works a creative emergence of the modern self no less influential and liberating and, in crucial respects, incomparably more complex and whole than the extremely potent form of the modern self mediated by Descartes, who was born at the very time Shakespeare’s career was fully emerging in 1595–96. Shakespeare himself was born during the immediately preceding Uranus-Pluto square alignment in April 1564. Two months earlier during the same square, in February 1564, Galileo was born, he too a titan of the early modern self, a powerful agent of cultural awakening and of defiant struggle against orthodox belief and traditional authority.
Moving back one more cycle to the opposition of the first Uranus-Pluto cycle of the modern age, the alignment of 1533–45 coincided with the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus, the work that commenced the entire Promethean awakening of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. Finally, if we move back to the beginning of this cycle at the dawn of the modern age, the conjunction of 1450–61, besides the epoch-making development of the Gutenberg press, the great cultural shift from Byzantium to Renaissance Italy, and the birth of Columbus, we find that this same conjunction also coincided with the birth of Leonardo da Vinci in 1452. Here again we can recognize so many of the characteristic motifs associated with this planetary cycle—the compelling drive towards creative innovation, the incessant impulse to experiment and explore, to discover the new, to liberate the human being from previously established limits. We see the distinctive signs of this archetypal complex expressed in Leonardo’s extraordinary individualism, his assertion of the autonomous will in such widely diverse fields of action, his voracious appetite for scientific research, his lifelong concern with the forces of nature and with geology, biology, physiology, hydrodynamics, aeronautics, engineering, mechanics. It is visible too i
n his prophetic anticipation of so many technological advances of the future, to be used for good or ill, from airplanes and space travel to weapons of mass destruction. Above all, we recognize this archetypal complex in Leonardo’s epochal embodiment in his own person of the sudden, radical evolutionary advance of the species. A kind of liberation of the titanic occurs in and through Leonardo, one that is evident as much in his technological imagination as in his almost superhuman creative drive.
As we have seen throughout this survey, all these themes evident in Leonardo’s life and work were played out again and again in history, conspicuously and with dramatic intensity, in each era that coincided with Uranus-Pluto alignments. In an individual such as Leonardo, it is as if all the ongoing, subconsciously developing creative powers and evolutionary forces of nature condensed and particularized themselves for a time in one person—as, in a sense, they did in each of the many seminal figures discussed in these chapters—to compel and drive forward the collective transformation of the whole. Such an impulse, again, seems unmistakably reflective of the Promethean and Dionysian principles in a dynamic interpenetrating synthesis.
If we reconsider the long sequence of Uranus-Pluto eras, we can now recognize that besides all the distinctive themes and impulses we have already noted—social and political revolutions, erotic emancipation, scientific and technological revolutions—we can also discern the correlation of this cycle with historical periods of tremendously heightened creativity seemingly affecting every realm of human activity and indeed making possible the many other manifestations and motifs just mentioned. Again, this appears to reflect the dynamic vector of the Plutonic archetype driving and empowering the Promethean: Pluto?Uranus. As with the spectacular burst of creativity and cultural influence sustained between 1962 and 1970 by the Beatles and Dylan and scores of other suddenly creatively empowered musicians, it was as if all the arts and sciences in the 1960s had been given a rocket boost of creative shakti that paralleled the titanic technological, social, and political explosion of the decade—a creative power capable of hurtling human beings around the Earth and into space, within and without. So too the preceding opposition at the turn of the twentieth century with its great surge of creative breakthroughs in the arts and sciences—Einstein and Planck, Freud and Jung, Mahler and Stravinsky, Cézanne and Picasso, Mann and Rilke, William and Henry James, Isadora Duncan, among so many others—again in close concert with the revolutionary changes and emancipatory movements then taking place throughout the world in the social, political, and technological realms, all taking flight, as it were, along with the Wright brothers.20
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