The special spiritual stature of the works of Shakespeare and Dante in the Western cultural legacy is shared by the great novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky: War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov. The profundity and revelatory power of their imaginative vision provides a similarly enduring source of spiritual insight and interior deepening. The same could be said of Melville’s Moby Dick. It is striking that all three of these novelists were born during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1814–29 period at the peak of the Romantic age. Indeed, this alignment coincided precisely with that remarkable wave of births of imaginative geniuses who made of the nineteenth-century novel a medium of great revelatory power and spiritual vision—not only Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Melville but Flaubert, Turgenev, the Brontës, and George Eliot—as well as the equally revelatory poets Whitman and Baudelaire. Dickens was born at the beginning cusp of the alignment, Emily Dickinson at its ending.6 All these individuals played a crucial role in the transformation of literature in modern culture as it became a form of spiritual disclosure and a vessel for the religious impulses whose traditional expression had been undermined and devalued by the disenchanting implications of modern science. As Charles Taylor has emphasized, this revelatory and transfiguring impulse at work in the literature of this era is true even of anti-Romantic “realists” such as Flaubert and Baudelaire who sought courageously to reveal the disenchanted and meaningless with their art, creatively transfiguring the banal and the deterministic into liberating, epiphanic artistic experience that possessed its own beauty—sometimes even sublime—beyond the conventional standards of earlier artistic canons.7
It is important to note here that many of these novelists and poets born during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the Romantic era—Dostoevsky, Melville, Flaubert, Baudelaire, George Eliot, Whitman—were born also with the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1816–24 period, as discussed earlier in the Uranus-Pluto section of the book. The combination of these two archetypal complexes, Uranus-Neptune and Uranus-Pluto, seemed to provide an especially dynamic creative drive both for major cultural figures who worked in the period of this three-planet configuration and for the next generation that was born at this time. Among the former we see this specific archetypal synthesis in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound of 1818–19, which depicted a Prometheus who was simultaneously a mythic embodiment of an ideal humanity (Uranus-Neptune) and a titanic force for radical change and emancipation from tyranny (Uranus-Pluto).
At times the combination of these two distinct, even sharply polarized archetypal complexes brought together in a thinker’s work divergent views in an unusually idiosyncratic manner. Schopenhauer, for example, in The World as Will and Idea published in 1818–19, combined the Uranus-Pluto awakening of nature’s chthonic powers, the universal will, and the underworld of human experience in a proto-Darwininan evocation of nature’s ceaseless struggle for existence with several interrelated Uranus-Neptune themes: his philosophical view of the world as “idea,” something that exists only as our experience, a representation; his appropriation of certain mystical doctrines of Hinduism and Buddhism (the unity of life behind appearances, the world as maya or illusion, ascetic-mystical transcendence achieved by negation of the will and worldly attachment); his conception of the Platonic Ideas as universal forms that can be experienced through great works of art; and his exaltation of art and aesthetic experience as providing the possibility of a liberating transcendence from the prison of existence.
In the lives and works of the major cultural figures who were born during this period of the two overlapping cycles (1816–24), the clashing and interpenetration of two such different archetypal complexes seems to have provided an extraordinarily powerful and at times intensely polarized expression of the creative imagination. We have seen something of this profound dialectic and polarization in Marx in his attempted synthesis of titanic struggle and political revolution with utopian and humanitarian idealism. In literature, equally striking is Dostoevsky, who was born in 1821 at the peak moment of the cyclical overlap with an exact Uranus-Neptune conjunction (within 1/2°) and a very close Uranus-Pluto square (within 3°). In each of his great novels Dostoevsky creatively enacted the themes and conflicts of the corresponding archetypal complexes in a memorably compelling manner.
Particularly in his final masterwork, The Brothers Karamazov, we can recognize a striking archetypal pattern in the three Karamazov brothers—Dmitri, Ivan, and Alyosha—each of whom distinctly embodies one of the three archetypal principles associated with the three outer planets. The eldest brother, Dmitri, lustful, volcanic, instinctually driven, is a classic embodiment of the Pluto archetype; Ivan, the brilliant existential rebel, decisively carries the Promethean principle associated with Uranus; the youngest, Alyosha, the religious mystic, is an equally clear incarnation of the Neptune archetype. It appears that Dostoevsky’s intimate lifelong experience of these three principles in direct dynamic relation and tense counterpoint, which corresponds to the nearly exact hard-aspect alignment of the three outer planets at his birth, was translated by his creative imagination into their separate personified embodiments in the three strongly defined brothers. In this dramatic context, the archetypal complexes in Dostoevsky’s being and in the collective psyche were not only differentiated and articulated, made more conscious, but also brought into direct interaction and urgent dialectical development.
Yet beyond this intricate dialectic between the three different archetypal principles, it is also instructive to discriminate a further set of themes and qualities in the works of Dostoevsky in which all three principles—Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—combine to form a single larger archetypal complex. We see this triple combination embodied again and again in the overwhelming potency and unpredictable irruptions of both spiritual and instinctual conditions that so affect and afflict his major characters, almost always with the spiritual and instinctual aspects closely interconnected. We see this larger archetypal gestalt in the highly characteristic Dostoevskian state of extreme mental, emotional, and physical turmoil verging into madness that he called “brain fever.” And it is acutely evident in the profundity and often violent intensity of the sudden transformations of consciousness that his characters so often undergo, which are recognizable to every reader of Dostoevsky’s highly distinctive works—not only the spiritually revelatory seizures but also more generally the states of overwhelming passion, love or hate, despair or hope, reverent devotion, dark descents, luminous resurrections.
If we precisely discriminate the three separate archetypal principles and the specific nuances of their interactions, we can recognize how all of the above qualities, conditions, and themes, so pervasive in Dostoevsky’s novels, perfectly reflect the interplay of the three planetary archetypes in a manner that can be articulated as three different archetypal vectors:
First, we can understand this larger archetypal gestalt as the Pluto archetype of titanic power and chthonic depths tremendously intensifying and compelling the Uranus-Neptune themes of unexpected shifts of consciousness and sudden spiritual awakenings (Pluto?Uranus/Neptune), driving these sudden revelations and shifts of awareness with volcanic elemental potency.
Second, we can recognize the Uranus-Pluto theme of suddenly catalyzed violent intensity being activated by or associated with Neptunian factors such as alcohol, mental and emotional confusion, madness, and mystical apprehension (Neptune?Uranus/Pluto).
Third, we can discern the Promethean principle associated with Uranus as suddenly awakening and catalyzing in unexpected ways, both liberating and disruptive—and also giving brilliant creative expression to—the Neptune-Pluto experience of overwhelmingly intense, even destructive convulsions of consciousness, descents into the underworld, volcanic eruptions from the depths of the archetypal unconscious, hallucinatory visions and projections, and profound, viscerally felt spiritual transformations (Uranus?Neptune/Pluto).
All these themes come together in what is perhaps the central spiri
tual experience of Dostoevsky’s life, one repeated many times, which occurred at the onset of the epileptic seizures to which he was subject for almost his entire adult existence. Dostoevsky described that experience with clinical precision in The Idiot, in the interior reflections of Prince Myshkin:
He was thinking…that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself…when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness, and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments, and with an extraordinary momentum his vital forces were strained to the utmost all at once. His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, all his doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of serene and harmonious joy and hope, full of understanding and the knowledge of the final cause.
Reflecting about that moment afterwards, when he was well again…he arrived at last at the paradoxical conclusion: “What does it matter that it is an abnormal tension, if the result, if the moment of sensation, remembered and analyzed in a state of health, turns out to be harmony and beauty brought to their highest point of perfection, and gives a feeling, undivined and undreamt of till then, of completeness, proportion, reconciliation, and an ecstatic and prayerful fusion in the highest synthesis of life?”…That it really was “beauty and prayer,” that it really was “the highest synthesis of life,” he could not doubt.
As later recounted in memoirs by others who knew him, Dostoevsky described his own epileptically catalyzed revelations in terms that are suggestive of the same overwhelming intensity, noetic power, and spiritual exaltation:
For several brief moments I feel a happiness unthinkable in a normal state and impossible to imagine by anyone else who has not lived through it. I am then in perfect harmony with myself and the entire universe; the sensation is so powerful and so delightful that for a few seconds of such happiness one would give ten years of one’s life, perhaps even one’s entire life.
I had the sentiment that heaven had come down to earth and swallowed me up. I really apprehended God and felt him in every fiber of my being.
Before we leave Dostoevsky, it will be instructive to discuss one other remarkable archetypal pattern in his works that can be precisely illuminated by his natal planetary aspects. In all of Dostoevsky’s major novels, a crucial element in the narrative drama is the role of the principal female character in relation to the male protagonist for whom she is both romantic partner and spiritual mirror, as for example in Crime and Punishment, where each step of Raskolnikov’s moral and spiritual transformation was mediated by his relationship to the saintly young woman Sonya. I found it extraordinary that not only was Dostoevsky born when all three outermost planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, were in a rare nearly exact configuration of dynamic aspects, but on the day of his birth the planet Venus was in exact conjunction with this larger alignment. (Venus was positioned precisely between Uranus and Neptune, which were themselves less than 1/2° from each other, and all three planets were closely square Pluto.) Because of Venus’s archetypal association with romantic love, beauty, and the beloved partner, it seemed to me striking that virtually all of the male protagonists in Dostoevsky’s major novels were romantically involved with women who exactly mirrored and mediated the male figures’ most essential character traits and existential attitudes, the very traits and attitudes that corresponded so precisely to the three outer-planetary archetypes. Similarly, each of these women played crucial roles in either the extreme turmoil (Uranus-Pluto) or the spiritual awakenings (Uranus-Neptune) that marked the lives of the protagonists—as indeed happened in Dostoevsky’s own life, as clearly visible in the sequence of his three most significant relationships with women.
Moreover, such themes as the sudden awakening of romantic love and unexpected perception of beauty, both liberating and disruptive in its effects and often associated with rebellious actions against societal conventions (all Venus-Uranus), the spiritually redemptive power of love and the spiritual beauty of compassionate love (Venus-Neptune), and finally the overwhelming intensity of passionate erotic love with its potential for instinctual and emotional violence (Venus-Pluto) are all prominent in every one of his major novels.
Remarkably, the only other major literary figure who I found was born with this same rare four-planet configuration—Venus closely aligned with Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto all in hard-aspect alignment—is Shakespeare, believed by most Shakespeare scholars to have been born on or within three days of April 23, 1564 (he was baptized on April 26). The exact archetypal themes that we have just seen so explicitly expressed in the life and work of Dostoevsky were evident, with equal intensity and with all their specific nuances and complex interplay, in virtually every one of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. The extremity of passion experienced and acted upon, the potential instinctual and emotional violence of romantic and erotic love, the rebellion of lovers against the confining authority of social or familial structures, the sudden awakening of romantic love, the sudden opening to compassionate forgiving love, the enchantments and self-deceptions of romantic enthrallment, the spiritually transformative and redemptive power of love and beauty, the unexpected power of beauty to move the human soul, the crucial role of young girls, women, and lovers in shaping the unfolding drama of human life through beauty and love and bringing the possibility of spiritual rebirth—all these are expressed in Shakespeare’s work with an articulate specificity that could scarcely be more vivid.
Even in an entirely comedic context, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare precisely conveys this overarching archetypal complex in his telling juxtaposition of love and madness, both of which he recognizes as akin to the poet’s imaginative capacity to body forth a new reality:
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.4–17)
Apart from the presence of the faster-moving Venus in this configuration, the larger outer-planet configuration of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in a T-square at Shakespeare’s birth can be recognized archetypally in the more general quality of experience that is conveyed in virtually his entire oeuvre: the countless diverse states of overwhelming mental and emotional intensity, of visceral depths and spiritual heights, so often associated with love but also with ambition, power, and pride, with envy and jealousy, with hope, despair, revenge, madness, death, old age, rebirth. The T-square alignment of any three planets generally coincides with a challenging archetypal dynamic informed by the relevant planetary principles in tense relation, but a T-square alignment of the three outermost planets—a configuration that has happened only once in the modern era—appears to be correlated with an especially profound archetypal interaction bringing forth an extraordinary range of human experience and deep internal and external conflicts that often have a transpersonal quality. A certain high tension is wrought by the clashing extremity of the dynamic forces activated—Promethean, Dionysian, Neptunian—that demands dramatic embodiment and presses towards an enlargement of human possibility. In many ways one can recognize that, as Harold Bloom and other critics have observed, in the almost anonymous brilliance of his plays’ many-charactered articulations, Shakespeare himself
bodied forth the self-reflective modern character and sensibility in all their unprecedented complexity—spiritual, instinctual, emancipatory, rebellious, inspired, passionate—at the very moment of its titanic emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Recalling that Galileo, too, was born in 1564 with this same T-square, except that he had Mercury and the Sun in alignment with the outer three planets rather than Venus as Shakespeare did, we can observe the parallels in these two paradigmatic individuals’ roles in mediating the birth of the modern sensibility. In Galileo, the Plutonic factor (he was born with Sun and Mercury in triple conjunction with Pluto, all in a T-square with Uranus and Neptune) seems to have expressed itself as a titanic power struggle of self and intellect (Sun-Mercury-Pluto) in the context of a radical shift of cultural world view (Uranus-Neptune) in which the opposing forces were science and religion. In this opposition of cultural forces, one side was emancipatory and disruptive in its influence (Uranus) while the other affirmed a transcendent sacred dimension of existence (Neptune). This religious impulse, however, was fatefully conflated with the authoritarian structures and dogmatic beliefs of a fearful, armored and punitive Church hierarchy, as described earlier in the sequence of Vatican prohibitions and Inquisitional trials precisely aligned with the Saturn-Pluto cycle. Yet the emerging scientific vision had its own cosmic numinosity (Uranus-Neptune), whose power inspired the Copernican revolutionaries with a certain spiritual conviction as well.
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