In the preceding chapters, we have seen many milestones in the history of freedom that coincided with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, from the shot heard round the world and the fall of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall. This cyclical unfolding of successful expansions and flowerings of the Promethean impulse also regularly took the form of major breakthroughs that advanced human rights, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen that was proclaimed in France during the conjunction in 1789, and the Bill of Rights that was introduced in the U.S. Congress in 1789 during the same conjunction. Similarly, Jupiter and Uranus were in opposition on August 1, 1838, the long-celebrated day on which all slaves in the British Empire were freed, that climaxed the abolitionist movement begun over fifty years earlier by William Clarkson. Jupiter and Uranus were again in opposition in 1865 when slavery was prohibited in the United States by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The same two planets were again in opposition in 1893 when New Zealand became the first country to grant women the vote, and yet again in 1920 when the long drive for women’s suffrage in the United States culminated in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
To these could be added many other similarly paradigmatic events. In England, during the same opposition in 1865 that coincided with the ending of slavery in the United States, John Stuart Mill introduced in Parliament the first bill in English history that supported women’s right to vote, another landmark in the struggle for the emancipation of women. The same opposition in 1920 that coincided with the granting of women’s suffrage in the United States also coincided with the founding of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was ratified by the United Nations during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition in 1948. The Helsinki Accords on Human Rights was signed during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1975–76, “the crowning achievement of the era of détente.” This milestone played a major role in galvanizing dissidents in the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries in the years leading up to the collapse of the Iron Curtain, which in turn occurred exactly one cycle later during the immediately following Jupiter-Uranus opposition in 1989.
Again, such correlations with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle, in politics and human rights as in the arts and sciences, seemed to express in their manifold ways the specific archetypal synthesis of Jupiter and Prometheus: the expansion, growth, and success of the principle of freedom, revolution, and creative innovation. To adopt a Homeric manner of speaking (and if we can divest these mythic personifications of their masculine specificity), in such events Jupiter seemed to elevate and confer success upon Prometheus—the king of the Olympian gods, as it were, granting honor and triumph to the rebel and creative genius. Yet the archetypal interaction during the cyclical alignments of Jupiter and Uranus can be seen not only as one archetypal principle affecting the other, with each a separate entity, but also, perhaps more precisely, as the two principles permeating each other, becoming fully integrated, manifesting themselves as one composite principle—as if the two mythic figures, Prometheus and Jupiter, had joined and become one. We saw a similar phenomenon during Uranus-Pluto alignments, such as that of the 1960s or the French Revolution, when a composite archetypal figure of Prometheus-Dionysus seemed to be collectively constellated. In the case of Jupiter-Uranus alignments, it seems as if in these various creative and revolutionary breakthroughs, Prometheus himself became the Olympian sovereign Jupiter and was crowned king, to use the metaphor that suggested itself for the apotheosis of Einstein. The same image of Prometheus as crowned king might be invoked for the triumph of the Apollo Moon landing. In a sense, every creative breakthrough, every moment of successful rebellion, every unexpected expansion or happy awakening can be seen as an expression of this archetypal synthesis.
While the crowning of Prometheus is expressed in a multitude of ways in the correlations we have examined, at times the metaphor becomes unusually vivid, as in the case of the Statue of Liberty (“Liberty Enlightening the World”), a superb iconic embodiment of the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex in a single integrated form. In one statue, the two distinctive symbols of the two gods—Jupiter’s elevating crown and Prometheus’s liberating fire—are perfectly synthesized. Moreover, the Statue of Liberty embodies not only the Jupiter?Uranus vector, in the monument’s celebrating and elevating to high honor the eternal human aspiration to freedom and enlightenment, but also the Uranus?Jupiter vector, which is expressed in the sheer astounding magnitude of the statue, the wondrous expansion of the Promethean Liberty to gigantic Gulliver-like dimensions: the Goddess of Liberty. In both its integrated dual symbolism and its astonishing size, the Statue of Liberty is perhaps the quintessential Jupiterian monument to the Prometheus archetype.
It would seem to be expressive of a high form of cosmic artistry that this grand gesture of freedom was erected and dedicated in New York Harbor precisely during the fourteen-month period of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1885–86—with France’s gift to the United States commemorating the American and French Revolutions of a century earlier, both of which began in coincidence with their own Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, the consecutive ones of 1775–76 and 1788–89.19
The vivid archetypal contrast between the Statue of Liberty, which was erected during a Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, and the Vietnam Memorial, which was erected during a Saturn-Pluto conjunction, is instructive. In a multitude of ways—their form and appearance, the spirit and character of their aesthetic, their symbolic meanings, and the historical events and eras they commemorate—the two monuments are paradigmatic expressions of their respective planetary cycles and the corresponding archetypal principles.
In view of this comparison and many similar correlations cited in the chapters devoted to these two cycles, one could say that the archetypal combination of Saturn and Pluto suggested a dominant quality of dark weightiness, a vector of downward depth, hard contraction, grim reality, death and loss, the enduring power and weight of the past; while alignments of Jupiter and Uranus seemed rather to coincide with phenomena that have a lighter, upward and expansive vector—the quest for the future, ascending to brilliant heights, sudden freedom, the expansion to new and unexpected worlds in creative joy.
Conversely, while events of the Saturn-Pluto cycle brought enduring structures and foundations, moral gravitas, depth of experience, solemnity and solidity, long-sustained deep tradition, the hard-earned wisdom of maturity, and the empowered senex principle, the Jupiter-Uranus tendency was often naïvely optimistic and unbounded, the puer eternus, the eternal child inflated and untrammeled in Icarus-like limitless ascending flight: Thus one sees associated with Jupiter-Uranus alignments the uncritical celebration of scientific and technological progress, the gleeful breaking of rules and limits, the prodigal lack of restraint of countercultural rebellion, the carnivals of excess, the fleeting euphoria of the newly liberated, the immoderate indulgences and flashy wealth of the nouveau riche, the glitz and dazzle of celebrity, the manic inventor claiming yet another incredible breakthrough.
Every archetypal complex has its shadow, as do the coinciding correlations. In the Jupiter-Uranus complex, it can indeed be easy to make light of the shadow of such happy superabundance. As Mae West, herself born with a Jupiter-Uranus opposition, said so well, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful.” So speaks the irrepressible smiling Trickster in defense of Jupiter’s grand domain of over-the top plenitude, blithely free of inhibiting concerns and deploying the unexpected twist of humor to better celebrate the virtues of excess and unlimited good times. In the universe of the Jupiter-Uranus archetypal complex, shadows cannot be seen. Yet the world is not ruled by any one archetypal complex. The gods, said Schiller, never appear alone.
It sometimes happens that the two very different planetary cycles we have here been comparing, Saturn-Pluto and Jupiter-Uranus, unfold in such a way that they precisely overlap in a particular moment of history. We can then observe the telling ways in which the coinciding phenomena reflect the two
distinct archetypal complexes working together. For example, in 1914 the first Saturn-Pluto conjunction of the twentieth century exactly coincided with the briefer Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of that year. In the summer and fall of 1914, both pairs of planets, Saturn-Pluto and Jupiter-Uranus, were aligned in their respective cyclical conjunctions during those fateful months when virtually all of Europe enthusiastically leapt into war. Excited national leaders and eagerly volunteering young men alike, inspired by boundless optimism and visions of patriotic and personal glory, set in motion the most horrific slaughter the world had ever seen, bringing to a dark end the age of European civilization’s ascendancy. Two generations of unfulfilled creative genius were lost in the ensuing thirty years of global conflict.
Similar dynamics can be recognized in the unfolding of an individual life as well. Napoleon was born during a Jupiter-Uranus opposition (both planets were in close major aspect to Mars, associated with the archetypal principle of assertive action, aggression, and the warrior). After a long series of nearly unbroken brilliant military successes, Napoleon was at the height of his power in 1808–11 as transiting Uranus aligned with this configuration, conjoining his natal Jupiter and opposing natal Uranus (the same transits that Einstein had when his theory of relativity was corroborated and he was acclaimed the greatest genius who ever lived). The genius of war who emerged from the French Revolutionary epoch was not only the Emperor of France, having crowned himself in Notre Dame cathedral, but the most powerful man in Europe. He had risen from Corsican obscurity to the heights of of imperial grandeur. Like an ancient conqueror, he had crossed the Mediterranean to invade and conquer Egypt in the battle of the Pyramids. His empire included the Netherlands, Tuscany, parts of Germany, and the Illyrian Provinces. The kingdoms of Spain, Italy, Westphalia, and Naples were now vassal states ruled by his relatives. He was married to the daughter of the Austrian emperor, and his newborn son was the king of Rome. He considered himself the heir of Alexander and Charlemagne. No obstacles to the further expansion of his dazzling success seemed insuperable.
The next year, Napoleon invaded Russia, and as transiting Saturn moved into exact conjunction with his natal Pluto in the harsh Russian winter of 1812–13, his fortunes turned. In a fateful series of errors in judgment, military overextensions, and imperial overreach, Napoleon’s empire began its fall. In June 1815, precisely when transiting Saturn had moved into square alignment with his natal Jupiter-Uranus alignment, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo—the sudden fall from grace, the collapse of the inflation.
Some personal dramas take place on the public stage of history, witnessed and experienced by multitudes. Others unfold in the solitude of a life and work largely unknown to contemporaries, on an interior battlefield, yet are no less archetypal in intensity and magnitude. Perhaps no figure in Western thought more powerfully articulated the impulse of unbounded Promethean liberation than Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844 with Jupiter and Uranus in close conjunction. This was the same Jupiter-Uranus conjunction that coincided with Wagner’s composition of Tannhäuser, the beginning of Marx’s and Engels’s collaboration and their first major works, Darwin’s first exposition of his evolutionary theory, and Thoreau’s building his cabin and living at Walden Pond. All these events and the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction occurred at the beginning of the longer Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the mid-nineteenth century in a broader version of the rare triple-planet conjunction that took a more exact form in 1968–69.20
Throughout his life, Nietzsche rebelled against, brilliantly critiqued, and broke free from one established cultural belief and philosophical assumption after another. When Jupiter and Uranus moved into opposition in 1879, he left the life of the nineteenth-century university professor for which he was so superbly educated but so painfully unfitted, and entered his ten years of wandering.
For this is the truth: I have left the house of scholars and slammed the door behind me. Too long did my soul sit hungry at their table; I have not been schooled, as they have, to crack knowledge as one cracks nuts. I love freedom and the air over fresh soil; I would sleep on ox-skins rather than on their dignities and respectabilities. I am too hot and scorched by my own thought: it is often about to take my breath away. Then I have to get into the open air and away from all dusty rooms.
In a manner vividly reflective of the Jupiter-Uranus complex, Nietzsche was possessed by compelling metaphors of flight and ascent, ever striving towards radically new horizons and the opening of new worlds. In the climactic passage that ends Daybreak, written near the start of his years of wandering, he gives testimony with soaring eloquence to the aspirations he felt rising within him and within the human soul:
We aeronauts of the spirit!—All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance—it is certain! somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face—and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly! All our great teachers and predecessors have at last come to a stop…it will be the same with you and me! Other birds will fly farther! This insight and faith of ours vies with them in flying up and away; it rises above our heads and above our impotence into the heights and from there surveys the distance and sees before it the flocks of birds which, far stronger than we, still strive whither we have striven, and where everything is sea, sea, sea!—And whither then would we go? Would we cross the sea? Whither does this mighty longing draw us, this longing that is worth more to us than any pleasure? Why just in this direction, thither where all the suns of humanity have hitherto gone down? Will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering westward, hoped to reach an India—but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity? Or, my brothers. Or?—
Nietzsche was born with his Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in exact opposition to an equally close Mars-Mercury conjunction—the archetypal synthesis of the warrior and the thinker, the warrior whose sword is his pen, his words, his ideas. In Nietzsche’s life and character, the Mars-Mercury archetypal complex was expressed in his consistently combative, forceful use of language, his incisive ideas, his sharp directness of statement, his constant close linking of thought and action. With his aphoristic style of writing, he felt like “an officer storming the barricades.” He saw himself as serving the great imperative of his era to “prepare the way for a yet higher age, and assemble the force which that age will one day have need of—that age which will carry heroism into knowledge and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences. To that end many brave pioneers are needed now….”
This synthesis of the Mars warrior and the Mercury thinker and writer was closely intertwined in Nietzsche with the unbounded Promethean impulse associated with Jupiter-Uranus: the impulse towards soaring freedom, the liberation of cultural and philosophical vision, the discovery of new worlds, the delight in uncertainty, the joy of victorious rebellion, the celebration of unfettered creative genius—all expressed in ideas and language (Mercury) at once assertive and forceful (Mars), brilliantly inventive and unexpected (Uranus), and expansively elevating and exalted, as if proclaimed from the top of a mountain (Jupiter).
Every individual is a meeting point of and vessel for many archetypal drives. With Nietzsche as with every other person discussed in this book, I found that the only way I could begin to grasp the rich complexity of the unique human being in archetypal astrological terms was to recognize the extent to which every specific natal aspect was embedded in a larger whole—the full natal chart—that encompassed all the planets, each uniquely and complexly configured with others in such a way that each relevant archetypal complex was shaped and inflected by every other such complex at work in the person’s life and character. While in one sense Nietzsche’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction can be isolated and its distinctive archetypal complex recognized in his biography and ideas, in another sense that com
plex can be understood only if one takes into account the entire natal chart with its multiplicity of intersecting natal aspects. In the present work, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, I have focused the discussion on one planetary combination at a time. But a more adequate analysis must engage the larger complex of archetypal relationships that are always at work in every person’s life, every event, and every cultural epoch.
In Nietzsche’s birth chart as in his biography, it is clear that the central unifying archetypal complex and planetary configuration at work is his exact opposition of the Sun with Pluto—i.e., the 180° Full Moon moment of the Sun-Pluto cycle. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Nietzsche’s embodiment of his Sun-Pluto configuration is a paradigmatic illustration of that aspect, with his unparalleled role as the heroic avatar of Dionysus in the history of Western thought. His lifelong identification with the Dionysian principle (even to the point of signing his last letters “Dionysus”), his commitment to the elemental forces of nature and the instincts (“To the discerning man, all instincts are holy”), his philosophical focus on and identification with the will to power (“Something invulnerable, unburiable is within me, something that rends rocks: it is called my Will”), his titanic power struggle with the entire civilization of which he was both vessel and antagonist, his repeated call for the going down of the courageous human being, like the Sun’s descent into the Plutonic underworld darkness to permit a resurrection of greater life—all these reflect an extraordinarily compelling embodiment of the archetypal principles associated with the Sun and Pluto in dynamic interplay.
We see the same archetypal complex expressed in Nietzsche’s identification with life as a state of ceaseless flux, evolving, transforming, dying and regenerating (“Behold, I am that which must overcome itself again and again”). We see it too in his consciousness of inward chaos and warfare among the instincts as essential to his creative essence:
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