Exactly one full cycle and fourteen years later during the immediately following conjunction the fall of the Bastille took place and the French Revolution began, with Jupiter and Uranus just 2° from exact conjunction on July 14, 1789. As with the start of the American Revolution, the entire period of this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, from August 1788 to October 1789, coincided closely with the major events that commenced the French Revolution: in August 1788 the forced agreement by the French crown to call together the Estates-General, which set into motion the series of events that led to the revolution; in September the popular reaction against the parlement’s decision to have the estates meet separately; in December the crown’s decision to enlarge the Third Estate; in January 1789 the publication of the Abbé Sieyès’s influential pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?”; in the spring of 1789 the gradual erosion of social order in the countryside; in April the rural and urban riots; in May the meeting of the Estates-General; in June the declaration of the National Assembly by the Third Estate and the Oath of the Tennis Court. After the storming of the Bastille prison in July and the Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen in August, the Assembly began in September to plan the new government. Finally, as the conjunction approached the final 15° point in early October 1789, the king and royal family were forced during the mass riots and marches of the October Days to move from Versailles to Paris, where they could be watched; the Assembly then moved to Paris as well, initiating the most radical phase of the revolution as Uranus and Pluto moved into closer opposition. The long revolutionary epoch then unfolded in exact correlation with the longer-term Uranus-Pluto alignment through most of the 1790s, as discussed earlier.
Compared with the more local revolution of the American colonies during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1775–76, the tumultuous era of the French Revolution was virtually worldwide, with the just-cited events of the 1788–89 Jupiter-Uranus conjunction serving as a catalyst for a sustained epoch of revolutionary violence and intensified emancipatory impulses that, as we have observed, regularly coincided with Uranus-Pluto alignments.
Just as both axial alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle—conjunctions and oppositions—consistently coincided with archetypally relevant historical and cultural phenomena, so also with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle. The consecutive axial alignments again revealed clear signs of a coherent sequential patterning in which the events of one conjunction were closely associated both with events of the opposition that followed and with those of the next conjunction, which completed the cycle. Such diachronic patterning was readily visible, for example, in the full Jupiter-Uranus cycle of alignments that unfolded in the 1770s and 1780s. The American Revolution, having begun in coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1775–76, was successfully concluded and the new nation’s independence was formally ratified with the signing of the Treaty of Paris seven years later during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1782–83.1 The fulfillment of the quest for independence, the joy of emancipatory success, the expansive victory achieved by the rebellion all closely fit the characteristic archetypal complex associated with Jupiter and Uranus.
In turn, it was precisely during the fourteen months of the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1788–89 that the new American government commenced operations, the ratified Constitution was put into effect, the first national elections were held, George Washington was inaugurated as first president, and the Bill of Rights was introduced in Congress—all in exact coincidence with the start of the French Revolution and the fall of the Bastille. The close historical connections and reciprocal causal factors that link the American and French Revolutions are further suggestive evidence of the diachronic pattern linking the successive alignments.
The synchronic nature of correlations with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle was as striking as the diachronic. For example, during the same spring of 1789 that the Revolution was first erupting throughout the countryside in France, the famous mutiny on HMS Bounty took place in the South Pacific, on April 28, led by Fletcher Christian against Captain William Bligh on the return voyage from Tahiti. Thus the same Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1789 that coincided with the fall of the Bastille also coincided with the mutiny on the Bounty, the two revolts taking place within a few weeks of each other, though on opposite sides of the globe.
In contemplating the causal factors that might make intelligible this kind of coincidence, I recognized that much, though certainly not all, of the other concurrent revolutionary activity in Europe and elsewhere during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1789 and afterwards—the Belgian revolution, the West Indies slave revolts, the Polish revolution, the Irish rebellion, the wave of radical thought in England and Germany—could plausibly be attributed to the direct influence and inspiration of the events in France. But the Bounty set sail from England for the South Pacific in late 1787, many months before the French Revolution emerged, and there had been no contact with Europe for over a year and a half by the time the mutiny occurred. That the most famous instance of rebellion in maritime history, the mutiny on the Bounty, took place at the same time as the most famous instance of rebellion in political history—the storming of the Bastille that began the French Revolution—yet thousands of miles away with no possible communication between the participants represented the kind of coincidence that supported Jung’s concept that a powerful archetypal gestalt can emerge in the collective psyche and influence human affairs with no conventional causal connection. The further coincidence of these archetypally connected events with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in the sky at that time, the same alignment that coincided consistently with other cultural milestones of a successful Promethean character, suggested that such collective archetypal emergence might well take place in continuous correlation with planetary cycles.
As the Bastille correlation also suggests, on those occasions when these shorter alignments of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle coincided with the longer and less frequent alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle cited above—that is, when all three planets, Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto, moved into alignment, as at the time of the Bastille revolt—the concurrent events tended to be especially dramatic, widespread, and consequential. In little more than fifty days in July and August 1789 in coincidence with this multiple alignment, the long-established and seemingly insuperable ancien régime in France largely collapsed. It was as if the characteristic burst of rebellious buoyancy, expansive cultural innovation, emancipation and awakening that tended to coincide with the short-lasting Jupiter-Uranus alignments served here as a successful activating catalyst for the more sustained, driven, and often violent revolutionary impulse associated with the longer-lasting Uranus-Pluto alignment that began at this time and continued through most of the 1790s.
A remarkably parallel unfolding of events happened as well in the Bounty mutiny. To this day the overpowering emotions and motives that compelled Fletcher Christian and the other seamen to suddenly rebel remain something of a mystery. With the success of that revolt began the long, intense, erotically charged, and murderously violent drama on Pitcairn Island in the course of the 1790s that overtook the mutineers and the Tahitian women and men who accompanied them—all happening on an island that was utterly isolated from the rest of the world, far from Europe and the violent upheaval that was taking place there at precisely the same time during the long Uranus-Pluto alignment. The result was a kind of laboratory case of a continuing synchronous emergence of parallel events totally isolated from each other yet reflecting the same archetypal complexes.2
In the past century, there was one time that Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto were in a triple conjunction: 1968–69. During that entire two-year period, the three planets were closer to each other than at any other time in the twentieth century.3 This was of course the extraordinary moment at the climax of the Sixties that brought the peak and full amplitude of that decade’s characteristic trends and events, in an unprecedented collective outburst of rebellions, demonstrations, a
nd strikes throughout the world. The protest movement was then at its height, and student revolts disrupted scores of colleges and universities, Columbia, Harvard, San Francisco State, among many others. The period encompassed by this triple conjunction brought the seminal Events of May in Paris, the powerful Tet insurgency in Vietnam, the tumultuous protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, the ensuing trial of the Chicago Eight, the Weathermen’s Days of Rage, the People’s Park riots in Berkeley, the black American track champions at the Olympic Games in Mexico City standing on the medal podium with black-gloved fists raised in support of civil rights and black power, the founding of the militant American Indian Movement, and the Stonewall uprising in New York, among many other comparable events. The American-European “counterculture”—the term was invented during those months—entered its most exuberant phase. The Woodstock music festival took place, one of a wave of such mass festivals in these months that were impelled by an extraordinarily rich eruption of creativity in music and the other arts. Radical ideas in many fields were widely discussed and acted upon, as if a boiling point in the decade’s creative turmoil had suddenly been reached.
Indeed, this period of the triple conjunction in 1968–69 coincided with a wave of cultural, technological, and scientific breakthroughs suggestive of a powerful archetypal emergence taking place in many other historically significant respects as well. Especially dramatic, in July 1969, was the successful culmination of the Sixties’ space flight program with the Apollo 11 Moon landing. After a decade in which over fifteen billion man-hours were expended on the project and after three days traveling a quarter of a million miles through space, with a final dangerous passage that almost forced the aborting of the mission as Neil Armstrong had to take manual control of the landing module, the astronauts touched down on the Moon with twenty seconds of fuel remaining—the first time in history that human beings had broken free of the Earth’s gravitational field and landed on another celestial body: “Houston. Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Remarkably, at the time of the landing, the Moon was in a one-day quadruple conjunction with the Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto alignment.
Many other events occurred and new movements and ideas arose during the period of the triple conjunction that still influence contemporary society and thought. The famous public presentation by Douglas Engelhart of Stanford Research Institute in December 1968 (“still the most remarkable computer-technology demonstration of all time”), before an electrified audience in San Francisco of a thousand computer scientists and engineers, demonstrated the first working model for the future of personal computing: instantaneous long-distance sharing of complex digital information, display editing and word processing, the mouse, the cursor, windows, hypertext linking, email, shared-screen teleconferencing, and the underlying philosophy of using computers for radically enhancing individual and collective human intelligence. Nine months later the first successful transmission of the prototype for the Internet took place at UCLA. During this same period of the triple conjunction there occurred the first public presentation of what is now known as the Gaia hypothesis by James Lovelock at a meeting of the American Astronautical Society, the famous “Earthrise” photograph taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts from the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 (“the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”), the founding of the Earth Day project by Gaylord Nelson to catalyze global ecological awareness, and the beginning of radical ecology with the publication of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.
This period also brought the beginning of gay liberation with the Stonewall uprising, and the emergence of radical feminism with the founding of New York Radical Women (who introduced the process of sharing stories that became known as consciousness-raising). During the same period occurred the first national women’s liberation conference in Chicago, the founding of the radical feminist group Redstockings (which introduced the slogans “Sisterhood is powerful” and “The personal is political”), and the founding of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, which produced the landmark feminist work Our Bodies, Ourselves. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying began the revolution in care of the dying and helped establish the hospice movement. Richard Alpert, just returned from India as Ram Dass, began his career as spiritual teacher and gave the public lectures that became the basis for the countercultural classic Be Here Now. Transpersonal psychology was founded by Stanislav Grof and Abraham Maslow in the United States, and archetypal psychology was founded by James Hillman and his circle in Switzerland.
Finally, this same period saw the publication of a wave of books that both reflected and helped catalyze the cultural and countercultural impulses of the time: Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture (which originated the term), Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Norman Mailer’s The Armies of the Night, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice, Carlos Castañeda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt Therapy Verbatim, Jürgen Habermas’s Knowledge and Human Interests, and Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog, among many others. There were few areas of human experience and activity that were not affected by the distinctive archetypal atmosphere and energy of the time, and few individuals who in retrospect do not regard that period as having been a powerful turning point in their lives.
There was another extraordinary occasion in the recent past that involved a rare multi-planet convergence coinciding with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle—in this instance with Neptune rather than Pluto. This was the last Jupiter-Uranus opposition of the twentieth century, which took place precisely during the astonishing fourteen-month period from June 1989 through July 1990 that brought the unexpected wave of demonstrations for freedom by hundreds of thousands of people across Eastern Europe, precipitating the collapse of communism throughout the continent and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Building on decades of courageous dissident acts and underground emancipatory movements, the sudden wave of liberation took place within weeks, beginning in Poland and the Baltic states and rapidly spreading through East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, bringing the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and the election of Václav Havel. These same months also brought the release of Nelson Mandela and the turning of the tide against apartheid in South Africa.
The distinctive and nearly universal emotion of the time—sudden and unexpected euphoric liberation—was highly characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex. It was an emotion and a liberation felt not only by the millions of people in the nations that underwent the surprisingly peaceful and rapid revolutionary change, but also by the billions around the world who sensed the end of the Cold War with its oppressive state of constant global nuclear tension and danger hovering over the human community. This Jupiter-Uranus alignment occurred in the early part of the long Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1985–2001. As we will see later, the presence of a different outermost planet in this multiple configuration—Neptune, rather than Pluto as in 1968–69 or 1788–89—closely corresponded with the notably different archetypal inflection in this most recent instance compared with the other two historic periods of sudden radical change and emancipation.
Quantum Leaps and Peak Experiences
Of all planetary cycles the Jupiter-Uranus cycle presented perhaps the most richly abundant and brilliantly elaborate sequential patterning in the cultural and historical record. The expansive and elevating archetypal impulse associated with Jupiter seemed to interact in an unusually dynamic, mutually enhancing, and readily visible manner with the emancipatory and innovative principle of sudden radical change associated with Uranus. Major alignments of these two planets coincided with a consistent cyclical unfolding of successful creative milestones and liberating events in every field of human endeavor with whose history I was sufficiently
familiar to evaluate significant correlations. The patterns of this archetypal complex were especially evident in the area of high culture—the arts and sciences, philosophy and the humanities, the history of ideas—but by no means exclusively so. It was also a planetary cycle and archetypal combination consistently associated with the timing of widespread private personal breakthroughs involving a sense of sudden happy awakening, new beginnings, unexpected good fortune, extraordinary expansion of consciousness, psychological rebirth, joyful intellectual epiphanies, radically extended horizons, and events often described by those experiencing them as “quantum leaps” and “peak experiences.”
It is typical of the aesthetic precision and metaphoric coherence of these correlations that the original quantum leap—the emission or absorption of black-body radiation in indivisible quanta of energy, Planck’s innovative formulation that began the quantum physics revolution—first came to public attention during a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, that of 1900.4 This was the same conjunction that coincided with the publication of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which initiated the psychoanalytic revolution.
Similarly, the term “peak experiences”—coined by Abraham Maslow to signify especially elevating experiences that bring to the individual a sense of radically heightened understanding, happiness, and aliveness—came out of two personal experiences, one intellectual and the other emotional, that Maslow had during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1927–28. This was coincidentally the same conjunction that occurred at the climax of the quantum physics revolution that was marked by Bohr’s principle of complementarity, Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, and the Solvay congress of October 1927.
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