This remarkable sequence continued with the immediately following Uranus-Neptune conjunction, from 1814 to 1829, which coincided with the founding of yet another major new religious movement, Mormonism, by Joseph Smith. It coincided as well with the birth of two founders of new religions, Bahaullah, the leader of the Baha’i faith, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. This era was also the height of the Second Great Awakening, which was marked by the rapid spread of revivalist Evangelicalism carried throughout the new American nation by traveling Baptist and Methodist preachers and emotionally charged camp revivals. This religious movement brought a new emphasis on the private stirrings of the heart, the individual emotional relationship to the divine, and reliance on Jesus as personal savior and moral exemplar. Such evangelical activism, growing from the time of the revolutionary 1790s and the Uranus-Pluto opposition, strengthened popular impulses towards religious liberty and a dynamic grassroots democratization of spirituality.
The empowerment of diverse local religious groups and charismatic preachers during the Second Great Awakening produced a centrifugal movement of religious authority away from the established churches and their more conservative theological doctrines and eventually led to a liberalizing movement in all Protestant churches in the United States in the 1810s and 1820s. Here again can be seen the characteristic signs of a synthesis of the two archetypal principles associated with Neptune and Uranus, the one spiritual, the other emancipatory. The sterner doctrines of Calvinism—predestination, innate depravity, salvation dependent on a stern God’s arbitrary will—were increasingly displaced by a new belief in the universal possibility of salvation and regeneration through inner faith, devotional service, and the moral exercise of free will. This shift also reflected the liberalizing influences of the Enlightenment with its affirmation of human freedom and more benign conceptions of both nature and Deity. Equally encouraging of such tendencies was the mobile open society and optimistic individualism of the new American nation, which helped shape a new religious consciousness that focused on a combination of personal salvation and social reform. As the Second Great Awakening reached its full maturity in the late 1820s and after, a more intellectually developed and universalist form of the movement emerged in New England with Emerson and the Transcendentalists.
Finally, the following Uranus-Neptune opposition at the beginning of the twentieth century, from 1899 to 1918, which we examined above in terms of the birth of modernism and the many radical artistic, scientific, and philosophical shifts of that time, coincided not only with the spiritual and religious cultural phenomena evident in those years in the work of James, Jung, Buber, Gandhi, and Aurobindo but also with the spiritual awakenings of other figures who played a transformative role in twentieth-century religious life such as Yogananda, Meher Baba, and Krishnamurti. It was at the start of this alignment, in late 1899, that Rudolf Steiner underwent his pivotal mystical opening that culminated in his “standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge,” after which his life as an esoteric teacher began. This same alignment also coincided with the birth of yet another new religion, Pentecostalism, in 1906—with Islam and Mormonism, one of the fastest growing religions in the world today. The original Pentecostal event, it will be recalled, coincided with another Uranus-Neptune alignment nineteen hundred years earlier, at the birth of Christianity.
The description of the Pentecost in the Acts of the Apostles in the New Testament contains many of the most distinctive characteristics and themes of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex: the sudden collective spiritual awakening, the visions and prophesies, the faith healings and other surprising charismatic phenomena, the descent of the Holy Spirit’s Promethean fire. Remarkably similar events seem to have been repeatedly constellated in close coincidence with the unfolding sequence of Uranus-Neptune cyclical alignments in subsequent centuries.
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance….
…[T]his is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel: And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy: And I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath…. (Acts 2:1–4, 16–19)
Utopian Social Visions
Throughout these same centuries I noticed a parallel pattern of historical and cultural phenomena, similarly coincident with the alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle, involving the emergence of utopian social visions and movements. Again, the underlying archetypal gestalt in this category can be recognized as a distinct synthesis of the two relevant principles: Uranus’s Promethean impulse towards creative experiment and innovation, freedom, rebellion against the status quo, and a vector towards the future all complexly interacting with Neptune’s idealism and hope, spiritual inspiration, intuitive vision, the dissolving of conventional boundaries and structures, and the imagination of a perfect harmony and unity to be realized in the human community.
For example, the earliest influential statement of a utopian social vision in the Western tradition was Plato’s ideal communitarian republic that was to be overseen by philosopher rulers guided by the eternal Ideas. Outlined in The Republic, this vision emerged from Plato’s philosophical awakening during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction at the turn of the fourth century BCE. Similarly, the first utopian work of the early modern period was Thomas More’s Utopia with its Renaissance Humanist vision of a more ideal social order. More’s work was the first to use the word “utopia,” which, with typically Neptunian ambiguity and paradox, draws on Greek roots to mean both “good place” (eu-topos) and “no place” (ou-topos), a world at once ideal and imaginary—two distinct sides of Neptune’s archetypal principle compressed into a single bivalent term. The sequence of axial alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle was closely correlated with the births of individuals who brought forth influential utopian works and visions, as with Thomas More’s birth in 1478 with a nearly exact Uranus-Neptune conjunction. This was the conjunction that took place from 1472 to 1486—the period of the Florentine Platonic Academy and the revival of Platonism, of Ficino, Pico, Botticelli, and Leonardo, which also coincided with the birth of radical visionary reformers such as Luther and Copernicus.
Continuing this pattern, the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition of 1556–74 coincided with the birth of Francis Bacon, whose explicitly utopian The New Atlantis, along with his other major works like The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum, set forth an immensely influential vision of a luminous future society in which science, technology, and the progress of knowledge would help humankind regain the paradise that had been lost in the Fall. In essence, Bacon integrated the buoyantly progressive spirit of the emerging Scientific Revolution with a Christian millennialist hope newly charged by the Protestant Reformation. On this basis he prophesied a scientific civilization whose radical improvement of humanity’s material conditions would coincide with the attainment of the Christian millennium. Here, with considerable historical effect, were combined the religious, redemptive, idealistic, and visionary (Neptune) with the scientific, technological, inventive, and emancipatory (Uranus).
In the centuries following Bacon, I found that these several utopian themes, which variously brought together visionary idealism and spiritual inspiration with social-political emancipation and philosophical-scientific advance, arose repeatedly in close coincidence with the continuing Uranus-Neptune cycle. Such a patte
rn was clearly visible in the wave of utopian works and movements that emerged in the immediately following conjunction period of 1643–58 during the English Great Rebellion, or Puritan Revolution, and continued thereafter with the writings and the births of the leading utopian thinkers in the Western tradition—Condorcet, Fourier, Owen, Saint-Simon, Marx, Engels, Thoreau, and Tolstoy—in the sequence of alignments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The most recent Uranus-Neptune opposition of the early twentieth century coincided with both H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist utopian Herland, and also with the birth, in 1904, of the behaviorist B. F. Skinner, the author of the most recent widely read utopian work, Walden Two, which again combined science and technology with utopian idealism and fantasy.
Many of the major utopian visions and experiments were inspired by explicitly religious ideals and sources. The influence of Judaic and Christian sources in particular on the utopian imagination was a complex one: While in some respects the Judaeo-Christian legacy worked against utopianism, because of the biblical stress on the necessity of God’s intervention and the weakness of humanity’s capacity for self-improvement, in other important respects it strongly supported the utopian impulse with concrete images of universal harmony and an underlying belief in the divinely willed movement of human history towards a future age of blessedness. One especially enduring source of inspiration was the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament on the Kingdom of Heaven and the description in the Acts of the Apostles of the state of communal unity and self-transcending love that suddenly emerged among the first Christians in the immediate aftermath of the Pentecost:
And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers…. And all that believed were together, and had all things common. And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all, as every person had need. And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved. (Acts 2:42, 44–47)
Yet it is remarkable to witness the extent to which a quality of visionary hope and idealism of a virtually mystical luminosity can infuse the philosophical writings and awareness of an individual born during a Uranus-Neptune alignment who is entirely committed to a robust secularism defiantly free of all religious constraints. This visionary idealism of a future utopian fulfillment can thrive even in the face of great personal suffering and the most contradictory concrete evidence of human corruption and historical trauma. In this respect, the utopian faith of a thoroughly unbelieving Enlightenment philosophe can resemble the redemptive conviction of an ancient Christian martyr under Roman persecution.
Eloquent testimony to this capacity, which transcends not just religious affiliation but religion altogether, at least as conventionally understood, is offered by the Marquis de Condorcet, born in 1743 during the Uranus-Neptune opposition coincident with the Great Awakening. At the age of fifty, Condorcet wrote the most encompassing and exalted statement of the Enlightenment’s progressive philosophy of history, the Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (“Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit”), the “philosophical testament of the eighteenth century” bequeathed to the nineteenth century. In 1793, while hiding from the Jacobins’ Committee of Public Safety, which had issued a warrant for his arrest, with only a few months before he would die in prison, Cordorcet wrote his great work. This was during the Terror and the darkest moments of the French Revolution of which he was so idealistic and articulate a supporter. In the Esquisse, Condorcet described the long journey of humanity as it progressed through many stages, gradually breaking free from the dark oppression and superstition of the past, moving ever forward through the power of the natural human reason, aided by technological advance, and leading finally to the perfection of human life in a glorious future of freedom, knowledge, gentleness, harmony, and happiness.
In the final passage of the Esquisse, after he described this future paradise, Condorcet wrote the following moving peroration. Drawing on what we have now absorbed from our studies of the several planetary cycles, we can recognize in its rich fusion of imagery, thought, and feeling the simultaneous influences of the Uranus-Pluto archetypal complex (constellated throughout the 1790s and the French Revolution), the Saturn-Pluto complex (of the 1793–94 period during the Terror), and the Uranus-Neptune complex (the conjunction of Condorcet’s birth in 1743)—all three fused inextricably into a single impassioned statement.
How this portrait of mankind, free of all these chains, no longer under the rule of chance, or the enemies of progress, and walking with a sure and certain step on the path of truth, of virtue and happiness, presents to the philosopher a sight which consoles him for the errors, the crimes, the injustices which still sully the earth, and of which he is often the victim! In the contemplation of this portrait he receives the reward for his efforts towards the progress of reason and the defence of liberty. He then dares to bind these efforts to the chain of human destiny: there he finds virtue’s true reward, the pleasure of having created an enduring good, which fate will no longer destroy with a deadly compensation, by bringing back prejudice and slavery. This contemplation is a refuge for him, where the memory of his persecutions cannot follow; where, living in thought with a humanity re-established in the rights and dignity of its nature, he forgets the one which is corrupted and tormented by greed, fear, or envy; it is there that he exists in reality with those like him, in an Elysium which his reason knows how to create, and which his love for humanity has embellished with the purest enjoyments.
From the Uranus-Pluto archetypal complex of the French Revolutionary decade we see the intense political revolutionary and emancipatory fervor, the overwhelming drive towards radical change, the vivid sense that human progress and freedom are ceaselessly impelled by powerful, unstoppable evolutionary forces that are now breaking forth in a liberating surge. From the Saturn-Pluto complex of the 1793–94 period we recognize not only the immediate background of the Terror with Condorcet as its victim, and the harsh reality of his suffering and impending imprisonment and death, but also the vision of an immense human struggle against vast eras of oppression and corruption, slavery and chains, prejudice and fear, greed and envy, the “deadly compensation” of fate. We can see here too that other side of the Saturn-Pluto gestalt: the noble binding of one’s strenuous effort to the chain of human destiny, which creates an enduring good and forges a deep and permanent moral development in human evolution. Finally, suffusing the entirety of the historical vision is the characteristic spirit of the Uranus-Neptune complex: hope and faith in an ideal future that will liberate humankind, the Elysium of the philosopher’s imagination that is more real than the corrupt present, the boundless trust in humanity’s infinite perfectibility, the creation of a new paradise through the free exercise of human will and reason, and the spiritual transformation of the human condition made possible through the advance of science and technology.2
Karl Marx was born in 1818 during the next Uranus-Neptune conjunction following the opposition of Condorcet’s birth, with all three of these planetary combinations (Uranus-Pluto, Saturn-Pluto, and Uranus-Neptune all in hard aspect with each other) in a single natal configuration. It is not difficult to discern in the Marxist vision, rhetoric, and historical influence precisely the same motifs that were expressed by Condorcet during the alignments of the French Revolutionary Terror, and again inspired by utopian impulses and expectations intensely independent of religious sources.
As we have seen throughout this book, the archetypal complexes—quite apart from the conscious intentions of the actors involved—appear to express themselves synchronically and diachronically in different forms and inflections that can even be antithetical to each other, as in these diverse secular and relig
ious expressions of the utopian impulse, yet are ultimately rooted in the same underlying archetypal principles. Such a pattern of multivalence and antagonism within an underlying unity was visible, for example, in our discussion of terrorism and governmental retribution in the Saturn-Pluto cycle. It was similarly evident in the mutually demonizing armored conservative reactions on opposing sides during the Cold War. In the present context, whether in the work and vision of Plato or the Apostles, Thomas More or Francis Bacon, Marx or Skinner, the utopian impulse, however variously expressed, bears a consistent correlation with the same planetary cycle, Uranus-Neptune, and displays the distinctive symptoms of the same underlying archetypal complex.
Romanticism, Imaginative Genius, and Cosmic Epiphany
Few cultural movements more vividly embodied the full range of characteristic archetypal themes of the Uranus-Neptune cycle than Romanticism. In the most recent Uranus-Neptune conjunction before our own, that of 1814–29, Romanticism was at its height. This was the age of Keats, Byron, and the Shelleys, of the poetic and mythic epiphanies of Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, A Defence of Poetry, Prometheus Unbound, and the philosophical summation of Romanticism, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. This was the age that brought the inspired final masterpieces of Beethoven, Blake, and Goethe—the Ninth Symphony with its invocation to universal love and the “Ode to Joy,” the Missa solemnis, the late quartets, The Everlasting Gospel, the Illustrations to the Book of Job, the completion of Faust. It was an age that declared the liberation and awakening of the world-creating imagination, the high spiritual calling of the artist, the emancipating power of love and art. It affirmed the Romantic-Platonic ultimate unity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. It brought forth Keats’s vision of the world as the “vale of Soul-making.” It was an era that especially aspired to realize the transcendent and numinous, the exalted ideal. This was the age of Schubert, Pushkin, Scott, Stendhal, and Lamartine and the formative period for Hugo, Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt.
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