This striking synchronic pattern can be recognized as part of a longer diachronic pattern of coherently related correlations with this cycle. For example, with respect to the development of the modernist novel, during the immediately preceding Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1900 (coincident with Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Planck’s quantum physics discovery), Henry James wrote The Ambassadors (begun in the summer of 1900, completed the following spring). This and its two successors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, anticipated the formal and thematic innovations of twentieth-century fiction that would soon be fully exploited in the work of Joyce and Proust, and later in the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.
During the conjunction immediately after the two just cited, that of 1927–28 (coincident with the Bohr-Heisenberg quantum physics synthesis and Lemaître’s expanding-universe theory), Virginia Woolf published To the Lighthouse, her greatest novel, while in the same months William Faulkner began his extraordinary succession of major works, writing Sartoris, the first of his long series of Yoknapatawpha County novels, then, still during this conjunction, beginning The Sound and the Fury, the first of his masterworks and perhaps his greatest novel.
The history of the modernist novel thus suggests a diachronic pattern of development that closely correlates with the first three Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions of the twentieth century, which in retrospect can be seen to have coincided with the inception or publication of the most significant and pivotal works in that literary revolution: James’s The Ambassadors as the major precursor, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past and Joyce’s Ulysses (and, in a different strain of modernism, Kafka’s The Trial) as the fully achieved first-generation works, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as the next generation.
Comparable patterns were visible in whatever literary epoch I examined. For example, major milestones in the history of English literature from Spenser to Milton took place in precise coincidence with the major milestones of the Scientific Revolution noted earlier involving Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. During the conjunction of 1595–96, Edmund Spenser published his masterpiece, The Faerie Queen; William Shakespeare’s Sonnets were first published during the immediately following conjunction of 1609–10; the First Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays was published during the next conjunction of 1623–24; during the following one of 1637–38 was published John Milton’s Lycidas, one of the greatest poems in the English language; and during the conjunction of 1665–66, Milton completed his masterpiece, Paradise Lost. Continuing the sequence, Paradise Regained was published during the following opposition of 1671–72, as was Milton’s final masterwork, Samson Agonistes.
So also with the beginnings of the English novel in the eighteenth century: When I checked the publication dates for the pioneering works in this form by Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias Smollett, I found that two had published their greatest novels—Tom Jones by Fielding, Clarissa by Richardson—and Smollett had published his first novel, Roderick Random, all during a single fourteen-month period between January 1748 and February 1749 when Jupiter and Uranus were in conjunction. During the immediately preceding Jupiter-Uranus opposition, centered on the year 1741, both Richardson and Fielding had published their first novels, Pamela by Richardson and Joseph Andrews by Fielding.
Again, it is important to consider the underlying character and spirit of the work in question as much as its status as a cultural icon of innovation or achievement. In Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example, as in many other artistic works and cultural phenomena coincident with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle (e.g., the Eroica, the celebrated revolutionary awakenings of 1775–76 and 1789, the countercultural efflorescence of 1968–69, the euphoric 1989 fall of communism in Eastern Europe), one can readily discern in the hero and narrative of such a work the characteristically prodigal spirit of the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex: robustly adventurous, untrammeled, ebullient, generous, excessive, at once admirably principled and blithely transgressive, constantly opening out to new horizons. Such a spirit reflected an essential dimension of the underlying Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex whose emergence in the collective life of the culture during these alignments seemed to constellate a certain widespread adventurous vitality and enhanced creative inspiration, which in turn brought forth these cyclical waves of innovative works.
The general picture with respect to the history of literature is thus one in which the axial alignments of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle coincided consistently with many concurrent milestones of creative innovation, events that were part of larger continuities that formed serial patterns in coincidence with the preceding and subsequent alignments of the same planets. Striking diachronic patterns coincident with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle are in fact readily apparent in the history of Western literature from the Renaissance to the present. Again, it is not that such events suddenly and exclusively happened during these alignment periods, with no connection to the events and activities of the intervening years. Rather, there seemed to occur a kind of cresting of the wave of ongoing literary activity and cultural creativity in general correlation with those periods. That cresting is visible in the numerous publications or inceptions of significant and revolutionary works that occurred during the alignments, as well as in distinct clusterings in several other similar categories of events such as the beginnings of influential movements, new genres, and creative associations between major literary figures. The entire set of correlations appears to form an intelligible pattern of cyclically related cultural phenomena that bear the precise archetypal qualities associated with Jupiter and Uranus.
Often a particular Jupiter-Uranus conjunction period brought forth a work that marked the beginning of a sustained series of such works by a major author that took their basic character from the one that had appeared in coincidence with the conjunction. One example is that of Faulkner, who started his long sequence of Yoknapatawpha County novels during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1927–28 with Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury, the first in the series of masterpieces that rapidly followed (As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and the rest). Another case is that of Thomas Hardy, who began his long series of Wessex novels with Under the Greenwood Tree during the conjunction of 1871–72 and followed it with Far from the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and his other novels that focused on the people and landscape of southwest England.
During the same conjunction of 1871–72, Émile Zola initiated his twenty-novel experiment in naturalism, the Les Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels that documented life in the French Second Empire, with the publication of La Fortune des Rougon. Likewise, it was during the conjunction of 1900 that Colette published the first of her Claudine series of novels. During the same conjunction, as mentioned above, Henry James commenced his final and most complex phase of work with The Ambassadors, which was followed by The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, the three novels forming a coherent whole both formally and philosophically. The following conjunction of 1913–14 brought the first volume of Proust’s multivolume Remembrance of Things Past (whose final volume was published in 1927 in coincidence with the next conjunction).
During the one Jupiter-Uranus conjunction I left out in the above sequence, yet another memorable series of fictional works was initiated when Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, in March and April of 1886, the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.12 Moreover, in the cycle just before this, Lewis Carroll published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, in exact correlation with the successive Jupiter-Uranus alignments of 1865 and 1872. After decades of writing, Tolkien commenced publication of his Lord of the Rings trilogy during the conjunction of 1954–55, with all three volumes published in those two years. During the same conjunction J. D. Salinger began his final Glass-family phase with The New Yorker’s publication of Franny in January 1955, followed by Zooey; Raise Hig
h the Roof Beam, Carpenters; Seymour: An Introduction; and Hapworth, 16, 1924, which were all published over the next decade and similarly formed a coherent artistic and philosophical whole.13 During the immediately following conjunction of 1968–69, Patrick O’Brian published Master and Commander, the first in his twenty-volume series of Aubrey-Maturin historical novels set in the Napoleonic Era. During the same conjunction, in a different genre, Carlos Castañeda’s series of Don Juan books commenced with The Teachings of Don Juan. Many other comparable examples could be cited. During the most recent Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1997, J. K. Rowling published the first of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
The common denominator in many of these patterns of literary creativity was the precise correlation of the Jupiter-Uranus cycle with new beginnings of many kinds: the first published work of a major author, the first of a major series of closely connected works, the first of a new genre, and so forth. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Melville, for example, all wrote or published their first works or first novels in coincidence with Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions or oppositions, as did Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Thackeray, Gogol, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Henry James, Zola, Colette, Conrad, London, Dreiser, Mann, Kafka, Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, Evelyn Waugh, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and earlier, at the dawn of the novel, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. So also the first works by poets: Blake, Keats, Baudelaire, Auden, García Lorca, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, Allen Ginsberg. It was during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1858 that Emily Dickinson began to collect her poems into bound fascicles—the only form approaching publication of her poetry during her lifetime.
Iconic Moments and Cultural Milestones
Correlations with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle involving other cultural phenomena, such as the histories of film, theater, painting, jazz, rock music, and the counterculture, and of specific fields of study such as anthropology, psychology, and philosophy, presented equally rich and instructive patterns of synchronic and diachronic events and milestones. To give a small indication here of some of these patterns: If asked to single out the three films that had the most significant impact on the evolution of the cinema, most film historians would choose D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which is widely considered the single most influential work in the history of film, one whose many technical and aesthetic innovations established the vocabulary of the new art; The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson, the film with synchronized sound that revolutionized the motion picture industry and marked the birth of the sound era; and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, a landmark in the history of sound film, with its mastery of many technical and artistic innovations that influenced subsequent filmmaking much as The Birth of a Nation did in the silent era. These three films precisely coincided with the three consecutive Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions of the first half of the twentieth century: The Birth of a Nation was made during the conjunction of 1914, premiering in early 1915; The Jazz Singer coincided with the next conjunction, its celebrated premiere taking place in October 1927 (the same month as the Bohr-Heisenberg Solvay physics conference); and Citizen Kane coincided with the following conjunction, premiering in May 1941.
Each of these periods was highly significant for the history of film in many other regards. The sequence of Jupiter-Uranus axial alignments in the twentieth century coincided closely both with specific masterworks that represented climactic milestones of the preceding years’ developments and with the beginnings of new movements and genres that unfolded in succeeding years. The conjunction of 1940–41 that coincided with Citizen Kane, for example, also coincided with the birth of Italian neorealism in the films and published manifestos at that time of Rossellini, de Sica, and Visconti. The very next conjunction of 1954–55 coincided with another extraordinary wave of film milestones with the simultaneous emergence of both Bergman and Fellini as leading directors; the birth of the French Nouvelle Vague with the manifestos and first experiments of Truffaut, Godard, Varda, and Resnais; and the emergence of the British Free Cinema movement led by Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson.
The immediately following conjunction of 1968–69 (the triple conjunction with Pluto) coincided with an explosion of innovative and influential works in virtually every national cinema and genre, both by established directors (Fellini, Bergman, Visconti, Bresson, Buñuel, Godard, Truffaut, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Polanski, Pasolini, Rohmer, Chabrol, Tati, Varda, Wajda, Anderson, Nichols, Kubrick) and by an extraordinary wave of new directors who brought forth their first films (Scorsese, Spielberg, Woody Allen, Rafelson, Mazursky, Fosse, Bogdanovich, Pakula, Newman, Herzog, Fassbinder). Equally notable during this last alignment at the end of the 1960s was the wave of so many films that reflected revolutionary or countercultural themes or that centered on rebel heroes or antiheroes, from The Graduate, Easy Rider, Alice’s Restaurant, Medium Cool, and Midnight Cowboy to The Conformist, Adalen 31, If, and Z.
I will address elsewhere with more precision and thoroughness the remarkable clarity of the patterns in film history revealed by this cycle, as well as their interweaving complexity and many nuances, as these patterns provided a new dimension of understanding for the historical development of film in the twentieth century. The major milestones of twentieth-century comedy, for example, were closely correlated with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, from Charlie Chaplin’s first films and his invention of the Tramp during the conjunction of 1914 to the first Monty Python broadcast during the conjunction of 1969. Identical patterns are evident for the history of jazz, from Louis Armstrong’s epoch-making Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings and Duke Ellington’s five-year engagement that began at the Cotton Club during the conjunction of 1927–28, through the first recordings of Billie Holiday, the emergence of Benny Goodman’s and Count Basie’s big bands, and the sudden rise of swing, all occurring during the opposition centered on 1934, to the beginnings of the bebop revolution, when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie played with Lester Young, Kenny Clarke, Charlie Christian, and Thelonious Monk at Minton’s Playhouse and Monroe’s Uptown House during the conjunction of 1940–41, and then the emergence of cool jazz with Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” recordings during the following Jupiter-Uranus opposition in 1948.
So also the history of rock music, beginning with the following conjunction: Remarkably, all five of the recordings that marked the birth of rock and roll took place during the fourteen months of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1954–55: Elvis Presley’s first record (That’s All Right, July 1954), Bo Diddley’s first record (Bo Diddley, May 1955), Chuck Berry’s first record (Maybelline, July 1955), Buddy Holly’s first recordings (eleven demo songs, released posthumously), and Bill Haley and the Comets’ performance of Rock Around the Clock in the 1955 film Blackboard Jungle.14 It was also in early 1955 that Ray Charles recorded the seminal I’ve Got a Woman, often called the birth of soul music, a synthesis of gospel with rhythm and blues.
The following Jupiter-Uranus opposition, of 1962, coincided with the first recordings of Bob Dylan and the Beatles and the formation of the Rolling Stones, the three dominant creative forces in the musical culture of the Sixties. This synchronisitic creative emergence was part of a wave of cultural milestones that catalyzed many of the key movements of the 1960s and the longer Uranus-Pluto conjunction of that decade.15
The following triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto in 1968–69 coincided with what was in certain respects the climax of the classical era of rock, a twenty-four month period that brought a virtual Niagara Falls of creativity and many of the most celebrated works of this genre: all three of the Beatles’ final albums (the double White Album, Abbey Road, and Let It Be), the Rolling Stones’ Beggar’s Banquet and Let It Bleed (including the songs Sympathy for the Devil, Street Fighting Man, Midnight Rambler, and Gimme Shelter), Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, Hendrix’s Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Lady-land, and the titanic Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock, the Who�
�s rock opera Tommy, Cream’s Wheels of Fire with Eric Clapton’s masterful Crossroads, the Grateful Dead’s Live/Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company’s Cheap Thrills with Janis Joplin, the Band’s Music from Big Pink and The Band, the Incredible String Band’s The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, John Mayall’s The Turning Point, the birth of reggae in Jamaica with the Maytals’ Do the Reggay, and Miles Davis’s landmark jazz-rock fusion recordings In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew.
Equally noteworthy was the appearance in 1968–69 of an extraordinary wave of debut albums (and often the first two albums) by bands and solo artists whose music became central to the larger era and its legacy: Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Santana, the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Creedence Clearwater, Blood Sweat and Tears, Procul Harum, Jethro Tull, Blind Faith, Fairport Convention, King Crimson, Genesis, Spirit, Yes, and many others.16 Reflective of this creative outburst in the counterculture, sixteen mass music festivals, including Woodstock with its many musical triumphs, took place from the summer of 1968 through the summer of 1969, the average attendance at which was over one hundred thousand. No moment in the history of popular music is comparable to this period of the triple Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto conjunction, the only one of the twentieth century.
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