In philosophy, we see again the characteristic Uranus-Neptune themes: This was the age of Hegel at the peak of his vision and prominence with his immensely influential articulation of absolute Idealism and his conception of history as a vast evolutionary movement that ultimately integrates all opposites—spirit and nature, human and divine—in a higher synthesis. This was also the crucial formative period for American Transcendentalism, when Emerson imbibed the central ideas of Romanticism, Platonism, German Idealism, and Asian mystical traditions to bring forth a new expression of the second Great Awakening then taking place in America. This period brought the cultural emergence of a new and influential appreciation and understanding of the Renaissance, the Middle Ages, and classical Greek antiquity that has endured to our day. This same period also brought a decisive renewal of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought (as in Hegel, Shelley, and Emerson), widespread new interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and religion, a revival of Western esoteric traditions (as in the revival of astrology in England from 1816), the founding of Egyptology and Champollion’s breakthrough in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone (1822), and the rise of scholarly studies of ancient mythology, folklore, legend, and fairy tale (as in the seminal work of the Grimm brothers in these years).
Often in Romanticism these different Uranus-Neptune motifs would be combined, as with Shelley’s invoking of esoteric alchemical imagery to describe the transformative power of the poetic imagination in his Defence of Poetry:
It transmutes all it touches and every form moving within the radiance of its presence is changed by wondrous sympathy to an incarnation of the spirit which it breathes; its secret alchemy turns to potable gold the poisonous waters which flow from death through life.
In the category of new art forms and technical media that subsequently expressed and influenced the cultural imagination, it was during this conjunction that photography was invented, beginning in 1826, by Niepce and Daguerre. (This development was diachronically related to the rapid development of motion pictures during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition at the beginning of the twentieth century.) The overlapping themes of unexpected revelation and technological innovation suddenly bringing new images and new perceptions of reality, new ways of relating to memory, new modes of artistic expression, and the radical change of traditional art forms (as in photography’s effect on painting as visual representation) were all evident in the emergence of photography during this conjunction.
John Keats’s On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, his first great poem and the one that initiated him into his poetic calling, was composed and published in 1816–17 in that especially seminal moment in the Romantic awakening when Jupiter joined Uranus and Neptune to form a rare triple conjunction.3 With its sublime portrayal of the poet’s awakening to the mythic dimension of reality, the poem both describes and embodies in itself several of the most prominent themes of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex:
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
In this elegant précis of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex, we can recognize many of its most characteristic themes: sudden revelation, the unexpected opening to the archetypal realm of being, the evocation of ancient numinosity, the liberation of the creative imagination, the astonishment of discovering new horizons both inner and outer—the sudden sighting of a new cosmic reality, of the Homeric domain of mythos, of an undreamt oceanic expanse—all multivalently comprehended in a unified poetic epiphany.
Keats’s comparison of his mythic awakening to an astronomical revelation experienced by “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” alludes to the momentous discovery of Uranus by William Herschel, who was himself born with a nearly exact Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1738, that of the first Great Awakening. The correlation of the Uranus-Neptune cycle with the births of individuals who experienced and brought into the wider culture epoch-making astronomical discoveries was especially consistent. Copernicus was born during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in 1473, Galileo and Kepler were both born during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1564 and 1572, respectively, and Isaac Newton was born during the very next Uranus-Neptune conjunction after that, on Christmas Day of 1642.4
Each of these individuals experienced an extraordinary cosmological awakening, a sudden revelation that radically shifted their cosmic and metaphysical foundations. Each experienced that awakening as imbued with numinous significance, as a sudden gift from the divine that opened the human mind to the sacred mysteries of the universe. Each mediated that cosmological awakening to the larger culture in a diachronic sequence of progressively ever more encompassing and developed disclosures: Copernicus led to Kepler and Galileo, then all three led to Newton. Remarkably, from the birth of Copernicus to that of Newton there took place one complete 360° unfolding of the Uranus-Neptune cycle, from conjunction to conjunction, and the births of Galileo and Kepler occurred halfway between, at the 180° opposition.
Moreover, there were two especially key transitional moments of cultural awakening to the new cosmos that took place in the course of this 360° cycle between the birth of Copernicus and that of Newton. The first was the spectacular sudden appearance in 1572 of a supernova, an exploding star whose brightness increases exponentially in a very brief time. Brighter than Venus, the new star remained visible to the naked eye for two years before fading. The appearance of the new star directly contradicted the ancient doctrine of the unchangeability of the heavens, dramatically challenging astronomers’ long-established assumptions and preparing the way for the Copernican-Newtonian cosmological revolution. The year the supernova appeared, 1572, was the same year as Kepler’s birth; both events thus coincided with the Uranus-Neptune opposition that took place halfway in the cycle that unfolded between the conjunctions of Copernicus’s birth and Newton’s. Tycho Brahe, the preeminent astronomical observer of his age, was taking an evening walk on November 11 of that year when he suddenly saw something he did not think possible. His description of that moment well conveys the quality of revelatory impact characteristic of Uranus-Neptune phenomena:
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fixed intently upon it and noticing that same star placed close to the stars which antiquity attributed to Cassiopeia. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
The other pivotal moment in the cosmological revolution that unfolded between the births of Copernicus and Newton took place in 1609–10 with the remarkable convergence, within nine months, of Kepler’s publication of Astronomia Nova, which contained his brilliant solution to the ancient problem of the planets, and Galileo’s telescopic discoveries and his publication of Sidereus Nuncius. These events coincided precisely not only with the fourteen-month period of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1609–10, as discussed earlier, but also with the longer Uranus-Neptune square alignment that began in 1607 and lasted for a decade. This Uranus-Neptune alignment, which also coincided with the invention of the telescope itself, took place exactly halfway between the births of Galileo and Kepler and the supernova’s appearance, all at the opposition, and the birth of Newton at the following conjunction.
In this sequence of correlations, we see
a distinctive synthesis of Uranus-Neptune themes: the sudden awakening to a new cosmological vision that is comprised of, on the one hand, scientific breakthrough, innovative genius, technological invention, and unexpected new astronomical data, all associated with Uranus; and on the other hand, a creative renewal of the Platonic-Pythagorean philosophical vision, the influence and invocation of Hermetic esotericism, a mystical sense of the dissolving of the boundary between the divine mind and the human, and a radically transformative experience of spiritual epiphany and numinous visionary understanding, all associated with Neptune. Thus Kepler’s ecstatic declaration: “I yield freely to the sacred frenzy; I dare frankly to confess that I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build a tabernacle for my God far from the bounds of Egypt.”
Kepler saw astronomers as “priests of the most high God with respect to the book of nature.” In the great cosmological revolution of his time, he regarded himself as having been allotted the sacred “honor of guarding, with my discovery, the door of God’s temple in which Copernicus serves before the high altar.” Similarly, Newton was as fully absorbed in the esoteric, magical, and theological aspects of his research as in what the modern mind would subsequently consider to be science. Between the sudden surge of scientific breakthroughs of his youth (during his Uranus square Uranus transit) and the publication of the Principia in his forties (during his Uranus opposite Uranus transit), Newton devoted himself so assiduously day and night to the study of alchemy and biblical prophecy as to far exceed in time and effort the labors in those areas of any other individual of his time or since. As John Maynard Keynes observed in a paper written for the Royal Society celebrations of the Newton Tercentenary, Newton should perhaps be more accurately regarded not as the “first of the age of reason” but as the “last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians”:
He looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood. He believed these clues were to be found partly in the evidence of the heavens and in the constitution of elements…but also partly in certain papers and traditions handed down by the brethren in an unbroken chain back to the original cryptic revelation in Babylonia….
He did read the riddle of the heavens. And he believed that by the same powers of his introspective imagination he would read the riddle of the Godhead, the riddle of past and future events divinely foreordained, the riddle of the elements and their constitution from an original undifferentiated first matter, the riddle of health and immortality. All would be revealed to him if only he could persevere to the end….
As in science, so also in art: The correlation of the Uranus-Neptune cycle with the several distinct but archetypally coherent themes we have seen so often above—cosmological epiphany, the astonishing disclosure often of an esoteric or spiritual nature, the revelation of a mythic dimension of reality, extraordinary poetic inspiration and imaginative genius—can also be observed in the life and work of William Shakespeare. Here again we can recognize a larger synchronic and diachronic patterning at work, at once aesthetic and mathematical, as Galileo and Shakespeare were in fact born within a few weeks of each other in 1564, when Uranus and Neptune were in nearly exact opposition. Whereas Galileo’s revelations took place within an astronomical and scientific context, Shakespeare’s were expressed in poetic and dramatic form, but with an archetypally similar quality of unexpected awakening to a radically new reality, often with deep metaphysical and spiritual implications. Such epiphanies, sometimes having a stunning, life-changing power, occurred repeatedly in Shakespeare’s plays—whether tragic, comic, or romantic—each instance evoking in a different way the basic Shakespearean recognition that more realities exist in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by our current sciences and philosophies.
As the Uranus-Neptune world transit cycle, moving from the opposition of Shakespeare’s and Galileo’s births, reached the next square alignment in the 1608–12 period, the theme of sudden revelatory surprises and spiritual awakenings became distinctly more pronounced in Shakespeare’s plays until such epiphanies reached a climax in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, the great romance tragicomedies that Shakespeare produced in 1609–11. This was the exact period of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries and the dissemination of his Sidereus Nuncius (“The Starry Messenger”) that brought those discoveries to the attention of the larger culture. (These were also the years in which the luminous King James translation of the Bible was published.) Compared with Shakespeare’s earlier tragedies, comedies, and histories, which were written during the Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto transits discussed earlier, these late plays written during the Uranus-Neptune square explore a more symbolic, fantastic, and experimental mode of drama in which the tragic and problematic dimensions of existence are ultimately embraced within spiritually redemptive narratives that have definite esoteric and mystical overtones. As Ted Hughes wrote in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being:
Shakespeare’s own attitude to his task as dramatist seems to have changed in this final group of plays. From being a prophetic visionary swept along in the dam-burst of historical forces, nakedly exposed to the glories and terrors of creation and human events [visible in his plays during the Uranus-Pluto and Saturn-Pluto alignments discussed earlier]…he seems to become more like a kind of Noah among the rising waters, the magus of a Gnostic, Hermetic ritual.
Especially characteristic of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex was Shakespeare’s intuition of life as a kind of divine play or artistic pageant, much like the Indian view of maya and lila, and his disclosure of this reality as a dramatic epiphany within his own plays. Appearing in subtle and implicit ways throughout his works, this theme is made most explicit in The Tempest, which contains his self-portrait as a magus and was written near the end of Shakespeare’s creative trajectory just as the Uranus-Neptune alignment became exact. Here we see the Shakespearean revelation of a mysterious spiritual-imaginative ground (or, in a sense, groundlessness) underlying all reality, dissolving and melting into thin air the literal appearance of all things to reveal the divine dream of life, the spiritual theater of the human condition:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(The Tempest, 4.4.148–58)
It is characteristic of Uranus-Neptune eras, and of major cultural figures born during these periods, that a certain numinosity often attaches to their legacy in the evolving cultural tradition. This occurs not only with explicitly religious epochs, such as at the birth of Christianity in the time of Jesus and the apostles, but also in philosophical awakenings, like the birth of Platonism in the time of Socrates and Plato, and great epochs of artistic revelation, like the Italian Renaissance of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. So too with revered figures of the creative imagination in the history of literature. The status of the Shakespearean canon as virtually a sacred scriptural disclosure for the modern spirit has often been acknowledged, with every ambiguous word and variant meticulously analyzed and debated as if it were an ancient biblical text, and with its complex layers of meaning revealing themselves in new ways to new generations. Melville, just before he began work on Moby Dick at the age of twenty-nine, wrote his editor while he was in the midst of his own exultant revelation upon first reading the plays of Shakespe
are:
…the divine William. Ah, he’s full of sermons-on-the-mount, and gentle, aye, almost as Jesus. I take such men to be inspired. I fancy that this moment Shakspeare in heaven ranks with Gabriel Raphael and Michael. And if another Messiah ever comes twill be in Shakspeare’s person….
Dante’s The Divine Comedy—there were Uranus-Neptune alignments at both the birth of the poet and the writing of the poem—possesses a comparable numinosity and spiritual status in the Western cultural legacy. In a sequence remarkably parallel to that just cited for Shakespeare, Dante was born in 1265 when Uranus and Neptune were in close square alignment, and he composed The Divine Comedy, beginning in 1304–06, when the Uranus-Neptune cycle had moved exactly 90° further to reach the conjunction. At the time Dante commenced work on the great poem, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in the sky was precisely transiting his natal Uranus-Neptune square in an exact T-square configuration, a rare convergence of world and personal transits on a natal aspect in which all six alignments—natal aspect, world transit, and personal transits—involved both Uranus and Neptune.5 One could say that the very title and essence of La Divina Commedia contains in synthesis the two principles associated with Uranus and Neptune: the divinity and sublime visionary quality of Neptune combined with Uranus’s trickster awakening, the unexpected opening and resolution beyond the tragic. The same principles are equally relevant to Shakespeare’s final divine comedies, the tragicomic romances of The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.
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