Thus the arising in us of an archetypal complex can serve as a window to a universe, indeed a door and a pathway, but it can also serve as an enclosing wall, an impermeable boundary and barrier that effectively creates a limit to our universe of possibilities. Only a critical awareness of that potential boundary, and an act of the imagination to transcend it, can open the horizon of our universe. I have found that such an awareness is mediated most effectively by a recognition of the dominant archetypal complexes and dynamics of a given time, whether for an individual or an entire civilization, and that this recognition is extraordinarily enhanced by a knowledge of what planets are in alignment at what time and for how long, an informed understanding of which can provide a crucial, irreplaceable perspective on the shifting archetypal dynamics of life.
In this sense, even when the correlations observed involve the gravest and darkest matters, the archetypal astrological perspective points to the possibility of an unexpected liberation from certain otherwise implacably confining conditions. This emancipatory potential has three different interrelated elements:
First, by providing nuanced, clarifying insight into which archetypal complexes are likely to be constellated in an individual or a society, as well as when, such a perspective can open up a new potential for critical reflection and self-awareness—a new possibility of transcending one’s unconscious immersion in the moment, and thus a crucial degree of autonomy in relation to the powerful forces at work in the individual and collective psyche.
Second, such ongoing insight provides one with an edifying sense of the relativity of every state of being in which one finds oneself, whether a state of mind, a stage of life, or an historical epoch: “This too shall pass”—both the grievous and the glorious—and however persuasive the current archetypal gestalt appears to be, it is not the whole story.
Finally, apart from the particulars of the planetary and archetypal patterning, the very recognition that such correlations exist at all, and that they continue to exist with such extraordinary consistency and elegant complexity, can nurture a profound awareness of the human condition as one of embeddedness and creative participation in a living cosmos of unfolding meaning and purpose.
Such reflections started to inform my thinking as I came to grips with the expanding body of correlations, both individual and collective, that I encountered as my research progressed. My understanding of historical events and cultural phenomena was especially transformed and unexpectedly opened as I began to explore the planetary cycle we will next examine.
We have so far surveyed two cycles of the outer planets. It remains for me a source of continuing amazement that archetypal patterns of striking clarity and definition, each with its distinct and appropriate character, were evident in historical and cultural phenomena for every one of the ten planetary cycles involving the five outer planets and their combinations. Perhaps the most dazzling of these were the major alignments of the relatively short Jupiter-Uranus cycle, with each conjunction lasting approximately fourteen months.
As with the other planets known to the ancients, the archetypal significance of the planet Jupiter seems to have been established in the earliest origins of the classical astrological tradition. Linked with specific qualities of the corresponding mythic figure—the Greek deity Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, the Babylonian Marduk, the Roman Jupiter—it received as well certain symbolic amplifications that emerged in the various contributing traditions: Platonic, Hermetic, Arabic, medieval and Renaissance. Throughout this historical development, Jupiter has been associated with the principle of expansion and magnitude, providence and plenitude, liberality, elevation and ascendancy, and with the tendency to experience growth and progress, success, honor, good fortune, abundance, aggrandizement, prodigality, excess and inflation. It also has a frequent association with the realm and aspirations of culture, especially high culture: high principle, higher learning, breadth of knowledge, liberal education, cultured erudition, a wide and encompassing vision. In general, it seems to impel a movement towards encompassing greater wholes and enlarging one’s world, embracing higher principles of order, higher orders of magnitude, broader horizons of experience.
When Jupiter and a second planet enter into cyclical alignment, the coinciding events suggest Jupiter’s archetypal influence to be one of magnifying and supporting the second planetary archetype with an expansive, elevating quality—“crowning” it, as it were—granting it success, honoring it, bringing it to fruition, mediating its positive unfolding, its growth, its fulfillment, its enrichment, its cultural ascension, with a definite potential for excess and inflation.
In the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, all these tendencies seemed to interact in an especially vivid manner with the principle we have seen associated with the planet Uranus—the archetypal complex encompassing sudden radical change, creative breakthrough, rebellion against constraints and the status quo, the impulse for freedom and the new, sudden openings and awakenings, a tendency to constellate the unexpected and disruptive, and so forth. The specific nature of these two planetary principles was such that their archetypal interaction seemed to have a mutually stimulating effect that was highly synergistic. An expansively and buoyantly energizing quality characterized such eras, one that often engendered a certain creative brilliance and the excitement of experiencing suddenly expanded horizons.
In world transits, the cyclical alignments of Jupiter and Uranus correlated consistently with condensed waves of celebrated milestones of creative or emancipatory activity across many fields. The conjunction of the two planets occurs approximately every fourteen years. During each of these, as well as during the intervening oppositions, decisive crests of remarkably synchronous breakthroughs and innovations appeared to take place within a brief period of time in many areas of human activity. The evidence suggested that the continuing long-term cultural developments that we saw associated with the longer Uranus-Pluto cycle (and with other longer outer-planet cycles we have yet to examine, such as Uranus-Neptune) consistently burst forth in a more frequent cyclical efflorescence in coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus alignments. These cyclical waves of creative and emancipatory cultural activity occurred either as intervening crests between the longer, less frequent Uranus-Pluto alignments or as climactic moments during or just after the period of the longer alignment.
As with the personal transits of Uranus cited earlier, I found that here too, on the collective level, when I closely investigated the exact dates of specific cultural phenomena of this character, I could track the frequency and quality of significant creative and liberating breakthroughs, achievements, and new beginnings in the culture as a whole against the shifting planetary positions in the months and years on each side of the exact alignment, with a result that closely resembled the shape of a bell curve as the two planets, Jupiter and Uranus, moved towards exactitude and then moved apart. Although events of this kind frequently took place when Jupiter and Uranus were in close alignment in all major aspects, I found as the research progressed that the most vivid synchronistic and sequential patterns were evident in the succession of axial alignments—conjunctions and oppositions—with the relevant events tending to occur in a wavelike continuum during a period when the two planets were within approximately 15° of exact aspect. Not only synchronic patterns of simultaneous expressions of cultural creativity, rebellion, and awakenings but also extraordinarily precise diachronic patterns of closely related events across a series of consecutive alignments were consistently evident in close correlation with this planetary cycle.
Convergences of Scientific Breakthroughs
Early in my research I was alerted to the possibility of a cyclical pattern in history that correlated with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle when I noticed that a number of famous coincidences in the history of science, when two or more scientists virtually simultaneously brought major discoveries into the public arena, also happened to coincide with a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction.
One of the first insta
nces I came upon, one often cited by historians of science, was when Kepler and Galileo independently made public within a few months of each other their separate discoveries that confirmed the Copernican theory of the solar system. In the summer of 1609 Kepler published in Prague his revolutionary work Astronomia Nova, which introduced his first two laws of planetary motion (stating that the planets moved in elliptical orbits with speeds based on equal areas swept out in equal times), thereby resolving the problem of the planets that astronomers had struggled with for two millennia. In that same summer Galileo made the first public demonstration of the telescope (in front of the Venetian Senate); then in Padua, between October 1609 and January 1610, he turned his telescope to the heavens for the first time and discovered the “unbelievably numerous” individual stars of the Milky Way, the craters on the Moon, the spots on the Sun, the four satellites of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and other celestial phenomena that he found supported the Copernican hypothesis. On March 12, 1610, he published Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”), the epoch-making account of his observations (this entire period also coinciding with Galileo’s personal transit of Uranus opposite natal Uranus cited earlier). The combination of the two events—the publication of Kepler’s mathematical findings and Galileo’s telescopic discoveries—provided the scientific world with a dramatic concurrence of evidence that effectively supported the heliocentric theory, brought it to widespread public attention, and laid the foundations for the eventual success of the Copernican revolution. Jupiter and Uranus were in close conjunction (less than 5°) at the time of both publications, having been within 15° of each other in the fourteen-month period from April 1609 to June 1610.
Jupiter and Uranus were again in conjunction in the fourteen-month period from November 1899 through December 1900. It has often been pointed out that this moment at the turn of the twentieth century marked the coincidental beginning of two of the century’s most important intellectual revolutions, psychoanalysis and quantum theory. Psychoanalysis was brought to public notice by the publication in Vienna of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (published November 1899, dated 1900), and it was in two meetings of the German Physical Society in Berlin in the autumn of 1900 that Max Planck introduced his ground-breaking hypothesis that radiant energy is emitted or absorbed in discrete quanta, thereby initiating the twentieth-century revolution of quantum physics.
Appropriate to its own theory, quantum physics has progressed not in continuous fashion but rather in two major quantum leaps, one at its birth in 1900 with Planck, the second, at its coming to maturity, in 1927. Jupiter and Uranus were again conjunct in the extraordinary fourteen-month period from March 1927 to April 1928 when Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues brought the quantum physics revolution begun by Planck to a culmination, both individually and in interaction at the historic October 1927 Solvay congress in Brussels. It has been said that in 1927 the pace of discovery in theoretical physics was perhaps greater than in any other year in the history of science. The resulting synthesis was, in the words of the intellectual leader of the congress, Bohr, the result of “a singularly fruitful cooperation of a whole generation of physicists,” who included Schrödinger, Born, de Broglie, Pauli, Dirac, Planck, and Heisenberg. During the period of this conjunction, from March 1927 through April 1928, both of the two major revolutionary axioms of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy and Bohr’s principle of complementarity, were formulated and made public. Moreover, this same conjunction in 1927 coincided with one of the most significant milestones in modern cosmology, as the Belgian astrophysicist Georges Lemaître proposed at this time the first expanding-universe cosmology and articulated a mathematical superstructure for what became the big bang theory of the origin of the universe. During the same alignment Alfred North Whitehead delivered the Gifford Lectures of 1927–28, which became the basis for Process and Reality and process philosophy, the last major metaphysical system of modern philosophy.
Jupiter and Uranus were also in conjunction at the time of the famous series of events that led to the first public announcement of the theory of evolution by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in July 1858—a different form, though equally momentous and fruitful, of joint scientific breakthrough. Although Darwin had privately formulated the theory of evolution in his notebooks in September 1838 (when transiting Uranus was within 1° of exact trine to his natal Uranus), he did not make his findings public for nearly twenty years; instead he gradually accumulated evidence and developed the theory in relative isolation. Then on June 18, 1858, he unexpectedly received from Wallace, who was in the Malay Archipelago, a letter containing a statement of the theory of evolution which Wallace had conceived independently in virtually identical form. As a result of this letter and the urgings of Darwin’s colleagues, a joint paper by Darwin and Wallace was read before the Linnean Society of London on July 1, 1858, announcing the theory. Immediately afterward during this conjunction, Darwin commenced writing his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, the foundational work of modern biology.
It was these several convergences of scientific discoveries that entered the public awareness during Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions—Kepler and Galileo in 1609–10, Darwin and Wallace in 1858, Freud and Planck in 1900, Bohr, Heisenberg, Lemaître, Whitehead, and the rest in 1927—that first suggested to me the existence of a larger pattern. At this early point in my research, I would probably not have noticed these correlations except for the combination of their being such well-known turning points in the history of science and the striking appropriateness of the events for the archetypal meanings ascribed to Jupiter and Uranus: the successful fruition and cultural elevation (Jupiter) in a sudden, unexpected manner of the impulse for creative breakthrough and radical change (Uranus). In each case, it was as if the Promethean principle in the collective psyche had suddenly received an expansive amplification and fulfillment, and an unexpected cultural affirmation and ascendancy.
This initial impression was considerably heightened when I turned my attention to a different category of Promethean historical phenomena, in the social and political sphere. There I soon discovered that equally visible in coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle were sudden, often brilliantly successful, and later widely celebrated upwellings of a collective impulse for social and political emancipation, innovation, and rebellion.
Social and Political Rebellions and Awakenings
The most consistent pattern I observed was the close coincidence of these Jupiter-Uranus alignment periods with the opening months of a longer-term process, as if the particular archetypal impulse associated with this cycle acted as a sudden initiatory catalyst for such phenomena: Jupiter’s principle of expansion and growth supporting the Promethean impulse of new beginnings. Jupiter and Uranus were in conjunction during the exact fourteen months coincident with the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775–76. On April 19, 1775, precisely one month after the conjunction had first moved within 15° of alignment, the War of Independence started when British soldiers were met by armed American rebels at Lexington with whom they exchanged fire, the “shot heard round the world.” The succession of months during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction closely coincided with the development of the revolution: in March 1775, the first month of the conjunction, Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech at the Virginia convention that advocated militant opposition to the British; in April the battles at Lexington and Concord; in May the first American victory with the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, and the meeting of the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia led by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams; in June the appointment of George Washington as commander in chief of the revolutionary army, followed by the battle of Bunker Hill; in July the Congress’s formal Declaration of Causes of Taking Up Arms; from that summer through the following spring Washington’s organizing and training of the American army; in January 1776 the publication of Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s manifesto against
British royal power in the American colonies that mobilized public opinion behind the revolutionary cause and sold half a million copies in the colonies in a few weeks. In March 1776, Washington’s army forced the main British contingent to evacuate Boston, thus winning the first decisive round in the War of Independence. The conjunction reached the final 15° point in late April 1776, and 20° in late May. As Mars moved into conjunction with Uranus in early June, Jefferson began to compose the Declaration of Independence.
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