One could say that the epic significance of the Galilean drama in the history of Western civilization lay in its fundamental role in shaping the very nature of reality for the modern world. It also shaped the nature of human knowledge of that reality, and the determination of which cultural authority would have the power to configure that reality for the coming age. The overarching historical and cultural momentousness of this struggle seems to correspond with considerable accuracy, both in its specific meaning and its transpersonal potency, to the dynamic tension constellated by the great principles associated with the three outermost planets of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. More specifically, it was Galileo’s thinking and writing (Mercury), his essential commitment to the empowered intellect (Mercury-Pluto), the penetrating character of his mind, his intensely polemical words and personality, his extraordinarily dynamic and sometimes destructive sense of sovereign selfhood (Sun-Pluto)—and indeed, his powerful elevation of the Sun to centrality in the universe—that became the historical focal point upon which this vast cultural struggle and titanic transformation centered, as if it were enacting a Shakespearean drama of its own on the stage of world history. But whereas Shakespeare’s high altar was consecrated to the goddess of beauty, art, and love, Galileo’s high altar was dedicated to the self-empowered mind.
Whether the epiphany took the form of Galileo’s telescopic discoveries or Shakespeare’s dramatic revelations, Dante’s Beatific Vision in The Divine Comedy or Petrarch’s epiphany at the summit of Mont Ventoux, Plato’s philosophical awakening to the transcendent Ideas in the wake of Socrates’s death or the apostles’ Pentecostal awakening of the Spirit in the wake of Jesus’s death, the archetypal theme of epiphanic disclosure revealed itself with luminous consistency in close coincidence with the alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle.
We can recognize a continuing diachronic development of the several interrelated themes of epiphanic disclosure, imaginative genius, and the sacred role of the creative individual in mediating such disclosures when we follow the Uranus-Neptune cycle after the era of Keats and the Shelleys, Coleridge and Emerson, Beethoven and Goethe, Idealism and Romanticism. It was during the Romantic epoch of this Uranus-Neptune conjunction that the twin concepts of the creative imagination and the sacred role of the artist in envisioning and birthing new realities were first fully enunciated and made conscious. These same ideas and aspirations were then actualized in new ways in the lives and works of the major creative figures who were born at that time: Wagner and Dickens at its beginning cusp, then the Brontës, Melville, Whitman, George Eliot, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Tolstoy, Dickinson. This developing impulse then received a decisively new formulation in modernism—at once continuous with and breaking from the Romantic position—during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition of the 1899–1918 period: beginning with the work of Cézanne, Mahler, and Henry James, then Rilke and Yeats, Picasso and Matisse, Joyce and Proust, Pound and Eliot, Stravinsky, Schönberg, Diaghilev, Duncan, Nijinsky, Kandinsky, Mann, Lawrence, Stein, Frost, Stevens.8
In the realm of science, no more dramatic cosmic epiphany can be imagined than that brought forth in this same epoch by Einstein in the special and general theories of relativity and the sudden opening of a radically new cosmos to the modern imagination. Essential to this epiphany, and to the simultaneous emergence of quantum physics, was the characteristic theme of a sudden dissolution of previously established structures and boundaries—between matter and energy, time and space, subject and object, wave and particle, being and nonbeing.
Indeed, the word epiphany itself received a new definition and significance through James Joyce’s writings of that time, first appearing about 1907 in his early unpublished novel Stephen Hero, in which the word was invoked to signify the sudden revelation of the essential nature or meaning of a thing, a person, or a situation—that moment when “the soul of the commonest object…seems to us radiant.” The word epiphany precisely contains the combination and interplay of the Promethean impulse associated with Uranus—the sudden, unexpected, illuminating, revelatory, awakening, liberating—with the Neptunian element of the aesthetic and spiritual imagination, the poetic and numinous, the inner meaning, the deeper reality, the radiant soul of things.
In turn, many crucial figures who subsequently mediated the spiritual, philosophical, and imaginative awakenings of the twentieth century were born in the years of this Uranus-Neptune opposition in the early twentieth century, each representing a different category of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex: seminal poets such as Pablo Neruda and Dylan Thomas; influential mystics and religious innovators such as Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Karl Rahner, and Bede Griffiths; major scholars of mythology and religion such as Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Erich Neumann, Henry Corbin, Paul Ricoeur, Jean Gebser, and Marie-Louise von Franz; great innovators in mathematical philosophy such as Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann who served at once the Platonic-Pythagorean realm of ideal mathematical forms and the development of set theory, game theory, information theory, and the design of computers; pioneers in the awakening to a more unitive and holistic world view that reflected the intricate interdependence and subtle interconnectedness of nature and reality, such as Gregory Bateson, David Bohm, Rachel Carson, Arne Naess, and Thomas Berry; and leading figures in the emergence of the spiritual counterculture, such as Alan Watts, Albert Hofmann, Abraham Maslow, and J. D. Salinger.
Perhaps one of the most widely appreciated epiphanies in modern American literature is the one with which Salinger graced his readers in Franny and Zooey, written and first published in exact coincidence with the most recent Uranus-Neptune square that took place in the 1950s, spanning almost precisely the entire decade. This alignment occurred halfway between the opposition of the early twentieth century and the conjunction of our own time, and coincided with a wave of cultural and spiritual impulses that entered the otherwise conservative postwar collective psyche at that time. This wave was notably visible in the rapid rise of interest in the West in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other forms of Asian mysticism, D. T. Suzuki’s influential lectures in New York on Zen to Erich Fromm and others, Joseph Campbell’s journey to Asia and his beginning his multivolume encyclopedic work of world mythology The Masks of God, Alan Watts’s publication of The Way of Zen, the seminal teaching of Watts, Haridas Chaudhuri, and Frederic Spiegelberg at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, and the emergence of the Beat movement (from “beatific”) with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady—“angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection” (Howl).
Recalling that the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hofmann, was born during the preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition, we can also recognize the characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune complex during this period in the introduction of psychedelic experimentation as a path of psychological change and spiritual epiphany, as reflected in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception of 1954, Humphrey Osmond’s coining the word psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”) in a letter to Huxley in 1956, Gordon Wasson’s meeting the Mexican curandera María Sabina and publishing his influential Life magazine article on the sacred psilocybin mushroom in 1957, and the beginning of Stanislav Grof’s research on LSD in Prague in the same years through which he developed an approach to psychotherapy that integrated psychoanalysis with an openness to transformative mystical experience. Reflecting several themes combining the Promethean and Neptunian principles, Huxley at this time began writing his utopian novel Island, which depicted a society of social compassion and individual freedom whose religious foundation was shaped by the communal ritual ingestion of a psychedelic medicine. Like Huxley and Grof, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, and Ken Kesey all began their psychedelic experiments during this Uranus-Neptune alignment in the 1950s. These pioneering explorations became major influences that contributed to the wider countercultural movement of social rebellion and emancipation during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s.
This
Uranus-Neptune alignment of the 1950s also coincided with Martin Luther King’s crucial religious opening, the “kitchen experience” in January 1956, in the early months of the civil rights protest movement in Montgomery, Alabama (when Saturn was also square Pluto). Late one night after having received a series of threatening phone calls, when he had reached a dark nadir of fear and discouragement, he suddenly experienced God as no longer merely a “metaphysical category” but rather a powerful divine presence that gave him the moral and spiritual courage to risk his life in leading the new movement and serving “the birth of the ideal of freedom in America” and the “birth of a New Age” (Uranus archetypally associated with birth, freedom, awakening, and the new; Neptune with ideals, spiritual inspiration, and experience of the numinous): “I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” Soon after, influenced by Bayard Rustin, King adopted the Gandhian strategy of nonviolent resistance as both a moral principle and an effective force for change. (Gandhi was born during the preceding Uranus-Neptune square; Thoreau and Tolstoy were born during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction just before that.) During this same alignment occurred the widespread Protestant revival and enormous New Evangelical crusades led by the charismatic preacher Billy Graham, epitomized in the summer-long crusade in 1957 at Madison Square Garden in New York—where Graham invited the young King, as a leader of “a great social revolution,” to lead the multitude in prayer.
We can further fill in the picture of the Uranus-Neptune quadrature cycle by recalling the wave of other works that emerged during this most recent square alignment of the 1950s and deeply influenced the spiritual development of the second half of the twentieth century: Teilhard de Chardin’s The Human Phenomenon (1955) and The Divine Milieu (1957), with their dissolving of the boundary between science and religion in an integral mystical vision of evolution; Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), with their passionate Christian engagement with the philosophical and existential tensions of a secular age; Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957), with its influential development of ideas on the evolution of consciousness first advanced by Rudolf Steiner during the preceding opposition; and Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion (1958), which introduced Gnosticism to modern readers. In philosophy, one can mention here the publication in 1953 of two foundation texts of what would become the postmodern philosophical vision, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, which was followed by several more works, published in the 1950s, that represented Heidegger’s later poetic philosophy focused on the mystery of Being.9
This Uranus-Neptune alignment coincided as well with the extraordinary outpouring of Jung’s last works in the course of this decade: Synchronicity, Answer to Job, Aion, Mysterium Coniunctionis, The Undiscovered Self, and Memories, Dreams, Reflections. These works collectively reflect that radical shift in religious psychology, epistemology, and philosophy of history that has become Jung’s most provocative and perhaps seminal contribution to the thought and culture of the later twentieth century. Pervaded by the characteristic themes and spirit of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex, they can be seen as both an unexpected creative advance in Jung’s late thought and the final fruits of the development that was set in motion in Jung’s pivotal period of intellectual and psychospiritual transformation during the preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition in the 1913–18 period, exactly 90° earlier in the cycle.
To all these cultural phenomena that suggest the activated Uranus-Neptune complex of this era we should add the sudden wave of spiritually revelatory films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini—The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria—that appeared in the 1950s, drew international attention, and started, along with the French New Wave, the British Free Cinema, Akira Kurosawa in Japan, and Satyajit Ray in India, a creative revolution in film that went on to permeate the cultural experience of the 1960s and after.
Simultaneously, the evolution of jazz during the Uranus-Neptune square of the 1950s was influenced in a characteristically mystical way by John Coltrane’s famous spiritual epiphany of 1957. Attempting to describe the aura of sacredness and divinity that permeated Coltrane’s subsequent concerts, his wife, Alice Coltrane, stated:
Call it Universal Consciousness, Supreme Being, Nature, God. Call this force by any name you like, but it was there, and its presence was so powerfully felt by most people that it was almost palpable.
Finally, it was Salinger’s memorable contribution to this larger spiritual influx of the 1950s to bring forth the revelation that formed the brilliant climax of Franny and Zooey, first published in The New Yorker as two extended stories in 1955 and 1957 during the heart of the Uranus-Neptune alignment.10 The celebrated passage narrates a phone call from Zooey Glass to his younger sister, Franny, who is in the next room in the Glass family’s apartment in Manhattan. Franny, in the dark throes of a spiritual crisis, refusing to eat and desperately repeating in silence the Jesus prayer of the Russian mystics, is suffering from a state of acute alienation from the spiritless world of shallow egotism that surrounds her in her life as a college student and amateur actress. After several unsuccessful attempts to provide his sister with a way back to her life, Zooey recalls the enigmatic advice their deceased older brother Seymour gave them as children before they went on the air for their weekly radio program, It’s a Wise Child.
“I remember about the fifth time I ever came on ‘Wise Child.’ I subbed for Walt a few times when he was in a cast—remember when he was in a cast? Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Walker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense.”
Franny was standing. She had taken her hand away from her face to hold the phone with two hands. “He told me, too,” she said into the phone. “He told me to be funny for the Fat Lady, once.” She released one hand from the phone and placed it, very briefly, on the crown of her head, then went back to holding the phone with both hands. “I didn’t ever picture her on a porch, but with very—you know—very thick legs, very veiny. I had her in an awful wicker chair. She had cancer, too, though, and she had the radio going full-blast all day! Mine did, too!”
“Yes. Yes. Yes. All right. Let me tell you something now, buddy…. Are you listening?”
Franny, looking extremely tense, nodded.
“I don’t care where an actor acts. It can be in summer stock, it can be over a radio, it can be over television, it can be in a goddam Broadway theatre, complete with the most fashionable, most well-fed, most sunburned-looking audience you can imagine. But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. That includes your Professor Tupper, buddy. And all his goddam cousins by the dozens. There isn’t anyone anywhere that isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady. Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is?…Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Chri
st Himself, buddy.”
For joy, apparently, it was all Franny could do to hold the phone, even with both hands.
We can readily recognize here the most characteristic features of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex: the sudden resolution to the spiritual crisis in which Franny was entrapped, the unexpected creative synthesis of irreverent wit and the sacred, of the trickster (Uranus) and the mystic (Neptune); the surprising dissolution of boundaries between imaginative literature and religious disclosure; the revelation of the numinous in an entirely unanticipated form and manner; and the sudden shift of both reality and personal identity produced by the epiphany of a universal human divinity. Above all, the passage evokes an unexpected liberation from the seemingly irresolvable human condition of egoic imprisonment, like a window suddenly opening to a new, holy, infinitely spacious world.
As we have seen so often before in the other planetary cycles we have examined, the activation of a particular archetypal complex tends to take the form not only of a new expression of the relevant archetypal themes and qualities, but also of a new interest in and sense of kinship with previous articulations of these themes that coincided with earlier alignments of the same planetary cycle. Each new alignment of a cycle appears to correlate with a highly specific sense of resonance with earlier eras, historical phenomena, and cultural figures informed by the same archetypal gestalt. With this resonance emerges a fresh recognition of the significance and contemporary relevance of various events, works of art, and prominent figures from those earlier periods. The religious awakenings of one Uranus-Neptune age draw on those from earlier alignments, as in the cyclical renewals of Christian spirituality and Pentecostal enthusiasm. Buber rediscovers the Hasidism of Ba‘al Shem Tov and brings forth his I-Thou philosophy. Keats adapts both the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet forms to bring forth his own poetic masterpieces of the Romantic era. Petrarch rediscovers the writings of Cicero from the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the first century BCE and calls for a cultural renaissance based on the glories of classical antiquity. Ficino recovers Plato, Melville discovers Shakespeare, Neruda reads Whitman.
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