In Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, repeated references are made throughout to major figures associated with previous Uranus-Neptune historical epochs who reflect the Uranus-Neptune archetypal gestalt—spiritual teachers and mystics such as Socrates, Jesus, and Francis of Assisi, and spiritually illuminated writers such as Pascal, Dickinson, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Quotations from many of these figures were meticulously inscribed on a large white board nailed to the door of the bedroom of the two eldest Glass brothers, Seymour and Buddy, and several were silently read by Zooey as he contemplated his coming conversation with Franny. One of them, from the Discourses of the Stoic philosopher and former slave Epictetus—written during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 104–117 CE that immediately followed the opposition at the birth of Christianity—can serve as a characteristic example of the archetypal resonance to which I am referring, with its sober step-by-step philosophical analysis that suddenly breaks forth into an unexpected revelation of an intimate and pervasive divine reality.
Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the Godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those that cry:—
I move not without Thy knowledge!
Revelations of the Numinous
As we have seen, the period of the most recent Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1899–1918 played an especially catalyzing role in the spiritual history of the twentieth century. As in other such alignment periods, the larger intellectual situation of the age seems to have encouraged new and creative responses to the characteristic Uranus-Neptune archetypal impulses in evidence at that time, responses that were specific to the cultural context. Because of the dominance of modern science in shaping the contemporary sensibility, many spiritually informed thinkers in these years felt compelled to approach the phenomenon of religious experience in a manner that answered the demands of empirical rigor and critical analysis. Many figures discussed earlier engaged in this task—William James, Jung, Steiner, Buber, Bergson, Bucke, and Royce—each bringing different starting points and tools to the effort. To these can be added other important theorists of religion whose work emerged at this time such as Max Weber and Rudolf Otto.
In the context of psychology, it was especially James and Jung who in these years laid the foundation for integrating the religious dimension of the human psyche with the world view of the emerging century. Both transpersonal and archetypal psychology, two of the most vital currents to emerge from the wellspring of depth psychology in the past several decades, originated in the ideas and concerns that these men addressed in the period of this Uranus-Neptune alignment, the most recent opposition before the conjunction of our own time. Both in the study of the numinous and the analysis of mystical reports and psychedelic experiments, this period was extraordinarily seminal for the philosophical and psychological engagement with the spiritual dimension of human experience. As James declared in 1909 at the end of A Pluralistic Universe:
Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with ir-religion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin.
In the twentieth century, both depth psychologists and scholars of religion came to employ the term “numinous” to signify experiences pervaded by a sense of the holy, the sacred, mystery, divine presence, and religious awe. The concept was developed by Rudolf Otto in a series of works beginning in 1904 and culminating in The Idea of the Holy of 1917, all written during the Uranus-Neptune opposition of 1899–1918. Otto’s views were influenced by James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, with its empirical survey and sensitive analysis of a multitude of reports of religious and spiritual phenomena. The Varieties was originally delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1901–02 at the beginning of the same Uranus-Neptune opposition. In turn, both Otto’s ideas and James’s studies influenced the work of Jung, who integrated the concept of the numinous as a critical element in his own psychology and philosophy of religious experience, which emerged during this same alignment.
We can discern not only this synchronic but also a distinct diachronic pattern of correlations between the Uranus-Neptune cycle and significant milestones in this area. Otto regarded Friedrich Schleiermacher as his most important precursor and the key figure in the philosophical rediscovery of the sense of the holy in the post-Enlightenment era. The founder of modern Protestant theology, Schleiermacher published his masterwork The Christian Faith, the most influential work of nineteenth-century Protestantism, in 1821–22, in exact coincidence with the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction that took place at the peak of Romanticism and German Idealism.
In observing the concept of the numinous and the study of numinous phenomena that developed through the work of these scholars—Schleiermacher, Otto, James, Jung—we can recognize what was in essence a liberation of the idea of the sacred into modern discourse, an awakening to a previously hidden or suppressed reality in rebellion against the established secularism of the modern mind. This characteristic expression of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex, the liberation of the sacred, can be seen as both closely analogous to and in contrast with the liberation of the instinctual, the awakening to the Dionysian and the id, that occurred for the modern mind in coincidence with the successive Uranus-Pluto alignments in the same hundred-year span through the work of Schopenhauer, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Moreover, not only its cultural and intellectual effect as a spiritually liberating idea but the very nature of the numinous as it was formulated and discussed by both Otto and Jung precisely embodies the distinctive qualities of the two archetypal principles that constitute the Uranus-Neptune complex. In Otto’s perspective, the numinous is defined not only by such terms as sacredness, divinity, inspiration, mystery, and religious awe (all qualities associated with Neptune) but also as something that suddenly confronts human awareness with an unexpected dimension of reality, something that is experienced as “Wholly Other” than the mundane sphere, that utterly transcends and subverts the everyday world of conventional experience, and that disrupts the very ground of one’s being as it was previously construed (all these themes reflect qualities associated with Uranus interpenetrated by Neptune). This same archetypal synthesis is evident in Otto’s focus on the experience of divine grace’s sudden entering of the soul as an unexpected influx of sanctification that catalyzes a radical inner change.
Similarly, Jung repeatedly described the appearance of the numinous as the abrupt intrusion of another reality into the ordinary conscious state, as something that suddenly crosses one’s path, that stops one up short, that is imbued with an uncanny, challenging, often destabilizing quality. It overwhelms one with its alterity. It is autonomous, tricksterlike, beyond anticipation or control.
Such an understanding and experience can be seen as underlying Jung’s entire psychology with its distinctive emphasis on the unpredictable, autonomous, and ultimately spiritual nature of the unconscious in its interaction with the conscious ego. Through this lens Jung saw the nature and function of dreams, psychological symptoms, slips and errors, synchronicities, suddenly intrusive events whether inner or outer, “fate”—the entire modus operandi of the archetypal dimension as it unpredictably impressed itself upon human experience.11 The very phenomenon of synchronicity can be recognized as a vivid expression of precisely these two archetypal principles in close interplay: the metaphysical trickster, the unexpected correspondence of inner and outer events that reveals a deeper coherence of meaning in life than had been assumed possible, the inexplicable coincidence that carries a numinous charge, the sudden revelation of a spiritual
purpose that works within and subverts the apparent randomness of existence. Here we can recall that Jung’s seminal paper on synchronicity—itself something of a cultural awakening to a transcendent dimension, disruptive of established assumptions and conventional logic, and not without its own confusing ambiguities—was published during the Uranus-Neptune square of the 1950s.
Jung’s enduring testament to this conception of the numinous that informed his psychology and his life experience, one so consistently expressive of the Uranus-Neptune complex and the tricksterlike unpredictable spontaneity of the divine, was the ancient Latin motto he inscribed above the door of his house on the shore of Lake Zürich, where it can still be read today: Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit (“Called or not called, [the] God will come”).
In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James meticulously examined religious and mystical reports from many sources over the centuries in order to discriminate the specific qualities that seemed most distinctive of this category of human experience. James believed that a mystical stratum existed in human nature, that it was the source of all religions, and that at the core of personal religious experience were mystical states of consciousness. For our present analysis, his survey of these states represents a concise catalogue of characteristic archetypal phenomena and themes associated with the Uranus-Neptune complex. James especially singled out the following qualities as defining the nature of mystical experience, each easily recognizable as embodying a synthesis of these two archetypal principles:
Ineffability: Mystical states are typically experienced as having a character so radically different from ordinary experience and the structures of conventional language that they defy any attempt by the mystic to adequately convey to others their impact or meaning. They are outside the compass of verbal formulation and require direct experience for their meaning to be understood or appreciated.
No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love oneself to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment.
Noetic quality: Such states are experienced not only as states of feeling but as states of knowledge. Those who experience them have the sense of being the recipient of truths that are so profound as to be inaccessible to the ordinary intellect, and that convey a power of conviction of their veridical reality that can endure a lifetime: “They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance…as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.”
Transiency: Mystical states enter and depart with a spontaneous evanescence, generally lasting for only brief periods before fading into the light of common day. Yet in that sudden opening of a window to another reality, as in the fleeting moments of poetic apprehension received in a state of intoxication, such states give evidence of an intrinsic “mystical faculty of human nature, usually crushed to death by the cold facts and dry criticism of the sober hour.”
Passivity: Though often facilitated by preliminary voluntary actions, such as meditation or prayer, fasting, special breathing techniques, or the ingestion of psychoactive plants or compounds, the mystical states themselves are characteristically experienced in a state of passive receptivity, with a surrender of the personal will in favor of a radically receptive embrace of the divine influx: “The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”
Other characteristic Uranus-Neptune qualities that James specified as typical of such states include the sudden influx of a dreamlike sense of mystery and timelessness, indescribable awe, a dissolution of the usual sense of self or personal identity, and an often disorienting recognition that ordinary consciousness discloses only a phantasmal unreality. In his survey, James—much like Salinger in his survey in Franny and Zooey—recounts reports of mystics and poets who with extraordinary frequency were themselves associated with earlier Uranus-Neptune alignments: Meister Eckhart, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Jakob Boehme, Whitman. Each is cited to display a different quality or nuance of the mystical spectrum. The paradox and ineffability of mystical experience is illustrated by Eckhart (who led the early fourteenth-century Rhineland mystical awakening during the same conjunction as Dante’s La Divina Commedia) and Boehme (whose Aurora, a foundation work of Christian theosophy, was published in 1612 during the same square as Galileo’s The Starry Messenger). Saint John of the Cross, whose spiritual awakening occurred during the preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition, is called upon to give witness to that state of high rapture in the “union of love” that escapes the power of verbal description. The soul, John wrote,
finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled…. In this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love.
James then calls upon Teresa of Ávila, “the expert of experts in describing such conditions,” whose mystical autobiography coincided with the same Uranus-Neptune opposition as that of John of the Cross and the birth of Shakespeare. In the passages James quotes, Teresa’s deep intimacy with mystical states is matched only by her transparent spiritual modesty, revealed in each instance in a different manner.
One day, being in orison, it was granted me to perceive in one instant how all things are seen and contained in God…. The view I had of them was of a sovereign clearness, and has remained vividly impressed upon my soul. It is one of the most signal of all the graces which the Lord has granted me…. The view was so subtle and delicate that the understanding cannot grasp it.
God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favor she received, nor doubt of its reality…. But how, you will repeat, can one have such certainty in respect to what one does not see? This question, I am powerless to answer. These are secrets of God’s omnipotence which it does not appertain to me to penetrate. All that I know is that I tell the truth; and I shall never believe that any soul who does not possess this certainty has ever been really united to God.
What empire is comparable to that of a soul who, from this sublime summit to which God has raised her, sees all the things of earth beneath her feet, and is captivated by no one of them? How ashamed she is of her former attachments! How amazed at her blindness! What lively pity she feels for those whom she recognizes still shrouded in the darkness!…She groans at having ever been sensitive to points of honor, at the illusion that made her ever see as honor what the world calls by that name…. She laughs at herself that there should ever have been a time in her life when she made any case of money, when she ever desired it…. Oh! if human beings might only agree together to regard it as so much useless mud, what harmony would reign in the world! With what friendship we would all treat each other if our interest in spurious honor and in money could but disappear from earth! For my own part, I feel as if it would be a remedy for all our ills.
As an example of the “sporadic” type of mystical experience, James cites Whitman’s well-known lines from Leaves of Grass in which he described an embracing spiritual epiphany that suddenly suffused the poet’s sensibility:
I believe in you, my Soul…
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of m
y own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.
Whitman, born in 1819 during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the Romantic epoch, is also called upon for his description of what James believes was “a chronic mystical perception” in the poet’s life:
There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous…. [Of] such soul-sight and root-center for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.
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