For a similar epiphany awakened by nature, James uses a passage from the Memoirs of an Idealist of Malwida von Meysenbug, born in 1816 during the same Uranus-Neptune conjunction as Whitman. Social reformer and feminist, a friend of both Wagner and Nietzsche, and a warm-hearted supporter of a generation of young German artists and thinkers, von Meysenbug for many years had found it impossible to pray because of her materialistic philosophical beliefs. In the following account, it is the sea that both symbolizes and catalyzes her mystical opening, and her metaphors are explicitly suggestive of the fluidity, infinity, and reconciling unity of Neptune conjoined with the sudden unexpected liberating impulse of Uranus:
I was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the solitude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appears as if I heard their greeting: “Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.”
Even the anonymous reports James cites bear precise testimony to the specific character of this archetypal complex, as in this example of a “sudden realization of the immediate presence of God” that occurred in an unlikely environment far from the mystic’s monastic cell or inspiring sea.
I know an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him, that it seems as if his feet could barely keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.
Finally, it is James’s recounting of his own now-famous illumination, which occurred during his experiment with the psychoactive drug nitrous oxide, that brings forth his paradigmatic statement concerning the mystery of nonordinary states of consciousness:
One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different…. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.
This classic Jamesian affirmation of an open universe, inner and outer, and an intellectual and spiritual posture of radical openness to its mystery became ever more articulate in James’s writings during the Uranus-Neptune opposition that coincided with the last decade of his life. Beyond that pragmatic affirmation of openness, James sounded one other note in this account of his own experiences in the Varieties. It is a note heard again and again in the mystical philosophies, poetic illuminations, and religious awakenings associated with Uranus-Neptune epochs and individuals—the experience of sudden reconciliation, the unexpected resolution of what had seemed to be irrevocably opposite principles or forces into a larger complex unity: the mysterium coniunctionis. “Looking back on my own experiences,” James concluded,
they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something…. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear.
The Great Awakening of the Axial Age
It is now time to examine the only period in recorded history when all three of the outermost planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, were in a virtually exact triple conjunction. This world transit was part of the larger Uranus-Neptune cycle we have been surveying, but it was the only time in the past several thousand years that a conjunction of Uranus and Neptune was exactly conjoined by Pluto as well. On the basis of the many correlations so far, we would expect this historical period to be of special interest, even serving as a test case for the entire perspective.
As it happens, the long Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triple conjunction occurred in the extraordinary era, historically unprecedented and still unparalleled, that extended from the 590s to the 550s BCE. These decades constituted the very heart of the great Axial Age that brought forth the birth of many of the world’s principal religious and spiritual traditions. While exact dates for the events and figures of this distant epoch are often difficult to ascertain—generally, only the decade is known rather than the year—the historical evidence for the unique significance of this period is overwhelming. This was the age of Buddha, bringing the birth of Buddhism in India; of Mahavira and the birth of Jainism in India; of Lao-Tzu and the birth of Taoism in China, which was followed a decade later by the birth of Confucius, Lao-Tzu’s younger contemporary. This same epoch coincided with that sudden wave of major prophets in ancient Israel—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Second Isaiah—through whom a deep transformation in the Judaic image of the divine and understanding of human history was forged, one that is still evolving. In this same era the Hebrew Scriptures were first compiled and redacted. The traditional dating for the immensely influential Zoroaster and the birth of Zoroastrianism in Persia, though still elusive to historians, has long centered on the sixth century.
In Greece, the period of the triple conjunction exactly coincided with the birth of Greek philosophy itself, as the first Greek philosophers, Thales and Anaximander, flourished during these decades of the 580s through the 560s, and Pythagoras, towering figure in the history of both Western philosophy and science, was born. In Greek religion, Orphism was emerging and the oracle of Delphi was at the height of its influence. During the same period flourished the first great lyric poet of Western culture, Sappho, whose creativity and mastery of the art were so highly revered that classical authors called her the tenth Muse. Born in this same period was Thespis, the father of Greek tragedy whose crucial artistic innnovation, giving individual actors lines of dramatic dialogue previously spoken only by the traditional chorus, is considered to have marked the invention of drama itself.
On yet another front, these same decades brought the statesman-poet Solon’s revolutionary legal and economic reforms in Athens that paved the way for the development of democracy, so characteristic of the Uranus-Pluto cycle’s correlation with periods of radical change, liberal political reform, and an intensified impulse for social and cultural progress. (The Age of Pericles in Athens coincided with the immediately following Uranus-Pluto conjunction a century and a half later in 443–430.) During this period Solon established rules for the public recital of the Homeric epics, which became the enduring basis of Greek education and the classical imagination, reflecting a consistent theme in later Uranus-Neptune alignment periods such as those in Roman antiquity (Cicero, Virgil), the Renaissance, and the Romantic era.
The great figures and events, ideas, movements, awakenings, and transformations of the collective consciousness that were brought forth during this prodigious epoch have
pervaded the subsequent evolution of humankind. I found it most impressive that the era universally acknowledged as the single most significant in the entire religious and spiritual history of the world coincided with the only exact triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, the very planets whose cyclical alignments were associated with archetypal meanings so precisely relevant to such an extraordinary global epoch of spiritual awakening and cultural transformation. Indeed, having spent a lifetime studying these cyclical planetary cycles, I found that the astonishing coincidence of this specific epoch with the triple conjunction of the three outermost planets possessed a certain numinosity of its own.
Astronomically, this was the only era in recorded history in which the Uranus-Neptune cycle, the Uranus-Pluto cycle, and the Neptune-Pluto cycle coincided in such a close triple conjunction. All three planets were within 2° of exact alignment near the middle of this period, in 577–576 BCE. Viewed, as it were, through a wide-angle telescopic lens, the coinciding historical and cultural phenomena seem to have formed an enormous archetypal wave in the half century from 600 to 550, which almost exactly encompassed the period in which Neptune and Pluto were within 30° of conjunction (602–552). As I noted earlier when discussing other triple conjunctions of the outer planets, such as the remarkable Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1968–69, the presence of three planets in such a configuration seemed to coincide with a significant broadening of the orb in which the archetypally relevant events occurred. In the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto conjunction of the first half of the sixth century BCE, the three planetary cycles formed a series of precisely concentric alignments within this longer period, tightly overlapping in such a way that the spans of their conjunctions became increasingly narrow in the 590s and 580s, reached their closest alignment in the years 578–575, then gradually separated through the 560s and 550s.12
Virtually all the characteristic themes of the Uranus-Neptune cycle that we surveyed in the preceding chapters are visible here, but, appropriate to the triple conjunction with Pluto, they seem to have been expressed in a spectacularly seminal manner—massive and profound, deeply evolutionary, transformative on a vast scale both temporally and globally. The basic theme of spiritual awakenings and the birth of new religions during this era and its aftermath is of course the most conspicuous of these Uranus-Neptune motifs: the great religious revolutions of Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, and the rest. From the perspective of Western religious history, we see exemplified in the prophetic disclosures of Judaism during this era the quintessential Uranus-Neptune theme of a radical transformation of the God-image and a revolutionary new understanding of the divine will acting in history—the latter especially appropriate to the presence of Pluto in the configuration with its archetypal association with both evolution and a universal will.
With respect to the characteristic Uranus-Neptune theme of the birth of new philosophies, we discover here the very birth of Western philosophy itself, visible in Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras, who all sought through a newly emergent capacity for critical reason to discover the fundamental archai, the originating unitive causes that underlie the flux and diversity of the world. Another Uranus-Neptune theme, the emergence of philosophies of a specifically idealist metaphysical character, is evident in Pythagoras’s understanding of the transcendent mathematical forms and universal intelligence that govern the cosmos. Remarkably, it was the very next Uranus-Neptune conjunction, exactly one cycle later, that coincided with the birth of Platonism, which was deeply influenced by Pythagoras.
The astronomical motif of the Uranus-Neptune cycle that we saw in the cyclical sequence of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton is evident here in the birth of Western astronomy itself through the work of Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras. This epochal beginning was marked by Thales’s earliest astronomical speculations (including his reputed prediction of an eclipse in 585); Anaximander’s positing of the first scientific cosmology, which had the Earth suspended freely in the center of a spherical universe; and Pythagoras’s positing of a spherical Earth enclosed in the rotating sphere of the fixed stars, with the planets rotating in the opposite direction. (Again, the diachronic pattern is visible here as well: Eudoxus, the first Greek astronomer to propose a detailed cosmology that explained the diverse planetary motions, was born during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune conjunction at the turn of the fourth century.)
Among the many intellectual breakthroughs and new beginnings of the triple-conjunction Axial era, Anaximander produced the first map of the Earth, and postulated the first known theory of evolution, which proposed that life first arose from the sea and that the first humans resembled fish. This is an especially interesting correlation in view of Pluto’s association with biological evolution and the subsequent coincidence of Uranus-Pluto cyclical alignments with the emergence of evolutionary theories (e.g., those of Darwin and Wallace during the 1840s–50s conjunction, those of Erasmus Darwin, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Goethe, and Lamarck during the preceding opposition of the 1790s, and those of the “second Darwinian revolution” during the most recent conjunction of the 1960s). That this particular Uranus-Pluto conjunction included Neptune in the alignment is aptly suggestive of the dominant oceanic motif of Anaximander’s evolutionary theory, and of the extraordinary imaginative and intuitive leap required for such a speculation at that time.
The Uranus-Neptune theme of cosmic epiphany, especially one revealing a spiritual dimension of the universe, is superbly expressed in the Pythagorean revelation of the transcendent harmony of the spheres that unites astronomy and music in a divinely ordered whole. It is expressed as well in Pythagoras’s use of the word kosmos to describe a living universe that is pervaded by spiritual intelligence, beauty, and structural perfection. In Pythagoras we also see that unity of science and religion, the complete absence of categorical boundaries, which represents another frequent Uranus-Neptune motif. As regards the creative emergence of esoteric traditions, which we have so often observed in coincidence with later Uranus-Neptune alignments, we see in the founding of the Pythagorean brotherhood and philosophy a wellspring of those several Western esoteric traditions for which Pythagoras was the ancient origin and revered charismatic authority.
Another characteristic Uranus-Neptune motif in evidence during this epoch was the birth of new forms of artistic expression, visible in the beginning of tragic drama and the actor’s role believed to have been initiated by Thespis (from whose name the word “thespian” is derived). Again, we see the diachronic cyclical pattern here: the first great tragedian, Aeschylus, emerged during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition; in 485 BCE he won the first of his many first prizes in the annual Athenian festival, and he went on to write ninety plays altogether in the course of his long life. Shakespeare, his Renaissance heir, was born during the Uranus-Neptune opposition two millennia later.
The emergence of new artistic forms and creative genius was also beautifully embodied during the period of the triple conjunction in the luminous figure of Sappho, who beginning in the 580s flourished precisely during this period. Not unlike Pythagoras, a spiritual charisma has come to be attached to Sappho as the high priestess of the isle of Lesbos who presided over a feminine cult of love, beauty, and poetry. Even in the few extant fragments, it is evident to us many centuries later that her work represented not only a creative breakthrough of the poetic imagination but also a profound psychological shift in the posture of the artist. Sappho brought forth a newly personal, emotionally intimate form of poetic disclosure. She creatively transformed lyric poetry in both technique and style as she moved from the tradition of poetry written from the perspective of gods and muses to one expressing the personal vantage point of the individual. Writing in the first person, depicting love and loss as these affected her personally, she seems to have mediated through her art a distinct advance in the impulse towards individuation that was then emerging in the Greek psyche.
We can also recognize in Sappho two sig
nificant Uranus-Pluto themes that we saw consistently in correlation with that cycle in later centuries, such as during the 1960s, 1896–1907, 1845–56, and the 1790s: first, the social empowerment of women; and, second, Dionysian awakening and erotic liberation. The distinct presence of the full archetypal complex associated with the three planets in combination can be sensed in the pronounced depth of feeling and intensity of lyrical expression that marks Sappho’s work, a revelation of eros overpowering in its visceral and instinctual potency (Uranus-Pluto) that is inextricably intertwined with the poetic, romantic, and imaginative dimensions of her art (Uranus-Neptune).
That man seems to me on a par with the gods
who sits in your company and listens to you so close to him
speaking sweetly and laughing sexily,
such a thing makes my heart flutter in my breast,
for when I see you even for a moment,
then power to speak another word fails me,
instead my tongue freezes into silence,
and at once a gentle fire has caught throughout my flesh,
and I see nothing with my eyes, and there’s a drumming in my ears,
and sweat pours down me, and trembling seizes all of me,
and I become paler than grass,
and I seem to fail almost to the point of death in my very self.
Something of the Shakespearean eruption of romantic-erotic intensity is present here, a lyrical inflection of the Dostoevskian brain fever, and a suggestion of Whitman’s full-bodied poetic eros as well. The same three planets were in dynamic alignment in every instance, but this time as a triple conjunction.
The compression of these dazzling wonders of the ancient world—cultural, religious, scientific, philosophical, artistic—into a brief period in exact coincidence with the Uranus-Neptune-Pluto conjunction was paralleled in the contemporary architectural magnificence of Nebuchadnezzar’s imperial capital of Babylon. The reign of Nebuchadnezzar as King of Babylon from 605 to 562 BCE coincided almost precisely with the entire epoch. During that period he restored virtually every temple in the empire over which he presided. Babylon was a great city of palatial grandeur, with monumental public buildings faced with brightly colored enameled tiles, canals, broad avenues, winding streets, and the Hanging Gardens filled with exotic flora and irrigated by waters carried from the Euphrates.
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