And it came to pass…when I was forty-two years and seven months old, that the heavens were opened and a blinding light of exceptional brilliance flowed through my entire brain. And so it kindled my whole heart and breast like a flame, not burning but warming…and suddenly I understood of the meaning of expositions of the books….
It was during this same Uranus-Neptune conjunction, in 1136, that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the dominant figure of his age in European Christendom, began his Sermons on the Song of Songs, which set out the ideal of Christian aspiration in the mystical union with God in a state of infinite divine love. As with the other planetary cycles, I observed that these alignments also regularly coincided with the births of significant figures whose lives and cultural influence strongly reflected the characteristic archetypal themes. For example, during this same conjunction, in 1135 in the great metropolitan city of Córdoba in Moorish Spain, was born Moses Maimonides, whose philosophical synthesis of the Jewish religion and Greek rationalism provided a model for Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis in a Christian context in the following century.
The immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition of 1214–30 coincided with the widespread evangelical awakening led by Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Dominic and the rapid dissemination throughout Europe of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. Here the characteristic archetypal themes of the Uranus-Neptune cycle were visible not only in the decisive spiritual quickening of the era but also in the Franciscans’ and Dominicans’ innovative dissolving of the boundaries between the lay world and the religious, bringing the dynamism of the Christian faith out of the cloister and into the world; in the more democratic forms of government within these religious orders that affirmed greater individual autonomy; in Francis’s sense of universal compassion that extended to a mystical participation in nature as an expression of divinity, subverting traditional Christian tendencies towards a dualism of spirit and nature; and in Dominic’s influential call for an awakening of scholarship and education that would better serve the dissemination of the Christian gospel and liberate both the intellect and the spirit by their interplay.
Appropriately, this same Uranus-Neptune alignment coincided with the birth of Thomas Aquinas (1225), who represented the climax of this spiritual-intellectual awakening of the High Middle Ages, and whose creative synthesis of the Christian gospel and Greek philosophy, of faith and reason—initially condemned by the Church for its innovations but eventually enshrined as canonical—was crucial for the subsequent evolution of Western thought. We can recognize the themes of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex here on several levels: again, the unexpected creative integration of realms previously kept rigidly separate by orthodox authority (religion and rationality, pagan thought and Christian belief, spirit and nature); again, the philosophical breakthrough of an idealist, metaphysical, spiritually informed character, but in a new, liberating form that affirmed the value of the natural world and the present life; again, the renewal and creative reformulation of the Platonic tradition, enriched by an encounter with Aristotle; and again, the rebellion against conservative or reactionary religious authority in the service of a new spiritual autonomy. Even Aquinas’s mode of philosophical argumentation showed a liberating new self-reliance and independence from the previously heavy authority of the past: “Authority is the weakest source of proof,” he wrote in Summa Theologica, anticipating the spirit of the Enlightenment.
The Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex is especially visible in Aquinas’s philosophical affirmation of human autonomy (Uranus) within a universe ordered and pervaded by divinity and spirit (Neptune). This synthesis was achieved through Aquinas’s articulation of what was in essence the mystical principle of participation, in which the human striving for freedom, autonomous intellectual development, and existential self-realization was seen not as a threat to the sovereignty of an aloofly separate God, but as an affirmation and expression of the divine will itself, with the finite human being participating in the infinite divine being from which humanity received its extraordinary capacities and essence. Whereas the dissolving of categorical boundaries and the mystical quality of this vision reflect the Neptune archetype, the elements of creative philosophical innovation, the striving for human freedom, and the openness to novelty in the universal order all reflect the presence of the Promethean principle associated with Uranus. It was this theological revolution, brought forth by Aquinas in the High Middle Ages, that established the necessary historical foundation for the emergence of the modern mind and the modern self—the birth of the modern from the medieval womb, achieved through an intellectual and spiritual reformation and synthesis of the Greek and Christian sources of the Western legacy.
The immediately following Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1301–14 precisely coincided with the great wave of mystical fervor that swept through the Rhineland and central Europe in the early fourteenth century, and that was above all reflected in and influenced by the teachings of Meister Eckhart at that time. Eckhart’s mystical understanding of the divine immanence in human experience was epitomized in his famous statement: “The eye by which I see God is the same eye by which God sees me: my eye and God’s eye are one and the same—one in seeing, one in knowing, and one in loving.” Many such statements, and his repeated assertion that the birth of Christ takes place in the present within the individual soul, as it did in history and as it does in eternity, strongly convey a synthesis of the mystical impulse associated with Neptune and the liberating subversiveness against orthodox structures associated with Uranus.
Where is he who is born King of the Jews? Now concerning this birth, mark where it befalls. I say again, as I have often said before, that this birth befalls in the soul exactly as it does in eternity, neither more nor less, for it is the same birth: this birth befalls in the ground and essence of the soul…. God is in all things as being, as activity, as power.
In Italy this same alignment period coincided with Dante’s composition of La Divina Commedia, the preeminent literary work of the medieval spiritual and artistic imagination, which Dante began in 1304–06 and continued writing through the entirety of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction and after until his death in 1321. In a vast synthesis of Christian faith, Thomist theology, Neoplatonic philosophy, medieval astronomy and astrology, classical epic, and the courtly troubador tradition of romantic poetry, all infused with his own mystical gnosis, Dante composed the one hundred cantos that climax in the Paradiso with the Beatific Vision of the Absolute. Here we can again observe the characteristic Uranus-Neptune correlation: Direct religious experience and illumination are combined with a rebellion against orthodox Church structures (as in Dante’s encountering seven popes in the course of his journey through hell). Here too can be seen the theme of the Platonic-Pythagorean music of the celestial spheres (which we will see again in Kepler), whose cosmic motions are the expression of the divine creativity and beauty. Here also can be recognized the Uranus-Neptune complex’s close association of divine creativity with the freedom of the human will:
The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creation, and the most conformable to His goodness, and that which He prizes the most, was the freedom of the will, with which the creatures with intelligence, they all and they alone, were and are endowed.
Another indication of the presence of this archetypal complex is Dante’s creative synthesis of Christian mysticism with the courtly exaltation of romantic love and the divine feminine, with Beatrice as both his guide to paradise and the symbol of liberating spiritual revelation:
Overcoming me with the light of a smile, she said to me: “Turn and listen, for not only in my eyes is Paradise.”
Especially characteristic of the Uranus-Neptune gestalt is Dante’s climactic mystical epiphany of the divine light and its universal omnipresence:
O abounding grace, by which I dared to fix my look on the Eternal Light so long that I spent all my sight upon it! In its depths I saw that it contained, bound by love in one volume,
that which is scattered in leaves through the universe, substances and accidents and their relations as it were fused together in such a way that what I tell of is a simple light. I think I saw the universal form of this complex, because in telling of it I feel my joy expand. Thus my mind, all rapt, was gazing, fixed, still and intent, and ever enkindled with gazing. At that light one becomes such that it is impossible for him ever to consent that he should turn from it to another sight; for the good which is the object of the will is all gathered in it.
Finally, we can observe in this epiphany one other frequent Uranus-Neptune motif, the experience of being suddenly illuminated in such a manner that the very heart of one’s being is united with the cosmos and the divine in a sublime harmony:
Now my desire and will, like a wheel that spins with even motion, were revolved by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.
The seminal years when Dante is believed to have begun the great epic were between 1304 and 1308, with 1306 singled out as when work on the poem became especially intensive. Dante underwent his Uranus-opposite-Uranus personal transit in 1304–07. In the pivotal year of 1306, there occurred a rare world transit triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, a configuration that did not occur again until 1486 when Pico’s similarly epoch-making Oration on the Dignity of Man was written.
Moreover, the period of this same Uranus-Neptune conjunction in 1301–14 coincided not only with the wave of Rhineland mysticism and the teachings of Meister Eckhart in Germany, and with Dante’s composition of the Divine Comedy in Italy, but also, in Spain, with the first publication of the Zohar, the foundation text of the Kabbalah.
Finally, as regards the birth of significant individuals whose cultural role especially embodied the archetypal impulses associated with the Uranus-Neptune cycle, during this same alignment, in 1304, occurred the birth of Petrarch, the forerunner and prophet of the Italian Renaissance whose expression of spiritually informed poetic epiphany and cultural awakening was so influential. In Petrarch we can recognize several highly characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune complex. We see it in his restlessness with traditional definitions of the religious life and his urge to experience the spiritual and the sacred in new ways. It is expressed in his creative renewal of culture through a recognition of the classical ideals and achievements of the ancient past, and in his new appreciation and recovery of the Platonic tradition. And this archetypal combination is also evident in Petrarch’s invention of new literary forms, his lifelong cultivation of the creative imagination, his spiritual idealization of romantic love, and his heralding of a new cultural epoch defined by new imaginative and spiritual values.
As we continue to follow the sequence of Uranus-Neptune axial alignments, we can again recognize diachronic developments in these several areas—religious awakening and rebellion, cultural renaissance, artistic and literary creativity involving spiritual and religious elements—in the events and births that coincided with the next opposition, that of 1385–1402. The preaching of the Bohemian religious reformer Jan Hus, a crucial precursor to the Reformation, began at this time, while in England the first English-language Bible was published, in 1388, which began that movement towards lay religiosity and vernacular translations of the Bible that had such a democratizing influence on European spirituality in the succeeding centuries. Geoffrey Chaucer, as was true of Dante and the Divine Comedy during the preceding conjunction, spent virtually the entire period of this alignment in the composition of The Canterbury Tales. In addition, the birth of many of the key early figures of the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance took place in coincidence with this alignment: Donatello, Masaccio, Alberti, Nicholas of Cusa, Cosimo de Medici.
The next Uranus-Neptune conjunction was that of 1472–86 at the heart of the Italian Renaissance which we have already cited. Again, we see the theme of religious rebellion and awakening during the same alignment in the birth of Martin Luther, as well as of Zwingli, who led the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland. In the arts, this period brought the births of both Raphael and Michelangelo, who were distinguished not only for their artistic creativity and revelatory power but also for their heightened spiritual luminosity and Neoplatonic inspiration. The esoteric theme is visible in the coincidence of this conjunction with the works of Ficino and Pico that recovered and renewed ancient esoteric traditions and ideas, and also with the birth of Agrippa von Nettesheim, the author of the treatise De Occulta Philosophia, which exercised wide influence on Renaissance esoteric thought.
Uranus and Neptune were next in opposition from 1556 to 1574, the extraordinary period in the history of Spanish mysticism when both Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross experienced their transformative epiphanies. Teresa wrote and published a detailed report of her mystical experiences in her autobiography (1562–65), founded the Discalced Carmelite spiritual order for nuns (1562), and began her association with John of the Cross, who started the same reformed order for friars (1568). In the same period John Knox, inspired by his experience of the Reformed theocracy in Geneva—“the maist perfyt schoole of Chryst that ever was in the erth since the dayis of the Apostillis”—initiated the Presbyterian religious movement in Scotland. In Jewish esotericism, this same alignment coincided with the years of Isaac ben Solomon Luria’s revolutionary teaching of the Kabbalah in Jerusalem, which thereafter served as the foundation for Kabbalistic studies. At this same time the Elizabethan magus and scientist John Dee wrote his principal esoteric work, Monas Hieroglyphica, which set out the Kabbalistic and Hermetic philosophy of nature as a divinely inscribed Book whose language and deep mysteries can be comprehended by the initiated scholar.
Moving forward to the next axial alignment, the immediately following Uranus-Neptune conjunction in the mid-seventeenth century, from 1643 to 1658, coincided with Blaise Pascal’s influential religious conversion experience as well as with the founding of the Quakers (the Religious Society of Friends) that emerged from George Fox’s spiritual epiphany at this time. During these same years there occurred in England an especially widespread and energetic wave of other mystical, “enthusiastic,” and millenarian religious movements. We may recall that this was also the period of the Uranus-Pluto opposition (1643–54) we examined earlier that coincided with the period of great social turmoil, violent rebellion, and political radicalism variously called the English or Puritan Revolution, the Civil Wars, and the Great Rebellion (“the world turned upside down”). The combination of the two distinct themes associated with these two planetary cycles—the spiritual awakening, religious enthusiasm, and esoteric-mystical-utopian tendencies of the Uranus-Neptune cycle and the violent political revolution, philosophical radicalism, and social turmoil of the Uranus-Pluto cycle—was clearly evident in the dramatic historical events and trends of that time. The many new or newly empowered groups that arose in this period—radical Puritans, Levellers, Quakers, Shakers, Diggers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men, Adamists, and others—were notable precisely for their combining radical political convictions with emancipatory religious beliefs in an unusually potent manner. They flourished exactly in the years of these overlapping cycles.
The next Uranus-Neptune opposition, from 1728 to 1746, coincided with the birth of Methodism in England under John Wesley and the simultaneous Great Awakening that swept through the American colonies, which began with the revival sparked by Jonathan Edwards in 1734 and expanded enormously with George Whitefield’s evangelistic tour in 1740–42. (These two most concentrated bursts of religious revival exactly coincided with the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and opposition of 1734 and 1740–41.) The title of Edwards’s work of 1736—A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God—in which he defended the spiritual authenticity of the spontaneous religious conversions and the accompanying startling behavior that occurred in the 1734 revival, well conveys the two archetypal principles associated with Uranus and Neptune as they work in synthesis: the unexpected combined with the divine, the trickster combined wi
th the sacred. Here too we can contrast the character of this longer Uranus-Neptune alignment of spiritual awakening at this time, 1728–46, with the shorter Saturn-Pluto square that took place within this long period in exact coincidence with Edwards’s famous sermon of 1741, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”
Many other themes relevant to the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex were evident in the interconnected social, psychological, and religious impulses active in the American colonies during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s: the widespread loosening of ties between church and civil government, the new individual freedom to choose and intermingle with other denominations, the religious affirmation of psychological independence from parental authority and tradition. Especially consequential was the Great Awakening’s generation of a widespread sense of spiritual optimism and cohesiveness in the American colonies, associated with a conviction that the young culture possessed a special spiritual status and glory as a new Israel that would lead the world towards a millennial transformation whose early arrival was eagerly expected.
Simultaneously in Europe, this same period of 1728–46 brought the birth of Hasidism and the teachings of Ba‘al Shem Tov, its founder, which brought a new religious impulse into European Judaism. A diachronic Uranus-Neptune cyclical pattern is evident here, since Hasidism essentially brought the mystical Kabbalistic vision articulated during earlier alignments into widespread, socially embodied form. This in turn subsequently received a new creative expression in the work of Buber in coincidence with the Uranus-Neptune opposition of the early twentieth century one cycle later. Moreover, this same eighteenth-century alignment that coincided with the Great Awakening in America, the birth of Methodism in England, and the birth of Hasidism in Poland also coincided with Emanuel Swedenborg’s major spiritual epiphany in Sweden that became the basis for his theosophical writings that would influence many in subsequent generations.1
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