It was this Babylon that was the setting and crucible for the great metamorphosis of Judaism that took place during this epoch. The capture and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 by Nebuchadnezzar and the deportation of most of the Jewish population to Babylonian captivity took place in exact coincidence with the world transit of Saturn in close square alignment to Pluto and Neptune (just before Uranus reached close conjunction with the other two outermost planets). In the ensuing decades, the profound response of the Jewish prophets to those cataclysmic political and spiritual events essentially wrought the transformation of Judaism into a world-historic religion characterized by a monotheistic universalism and an ethical individualism. The writings of Jeremiah and Ezekiel during this era expressed a radically new emphasis on the individual’s relationship to God. Those of the Second Isaiah, born during the triple conjunction, brought forth an especially powerful declaration of a loving God sovereign over all history and all humanity, inspiring generations to come with a vision of hope for the ultimate arrival of the kingdom of God that would liberate his people from the sufferings and injustices of the present age.13 The metamorphosis of the prophetic imagination at this time became the source of inspiration for countless religious figures and movements in later centuries, including many utopian and millennialist visions that emerged again and again during later cyclical alignments of the Uranus-Neptune cycle, from the New Testament period to the twentieth-century civil rights movement:
Thus saith God the Lord, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the Lord have called thee into righteousness, and will hold thine hand, and will keep thee, and give thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the Gentiles; to open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house.
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
(Isaiah 42:5–7; 40:3–5)
We have seen the three-planet combination of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto before, in the quadrature configurations of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries when we discussed the epochal struggles and complex clashing of powerful forces visible in the lives and works of Shakespeare, Galileo, and Dostoevsky. With these paradigmatic figures in mind, we can perhaps to some small degree grasp how overwhelming a transformation of consciousness the Axial Awakening of the sixth century BCE wrought in innumerable human beings across the civilizations of the ancient world, from China and India to Persia, Babylon, Israel, and Greece: the destruction of the old and the birth of the new, the unprecedented shifts in the perception of reality, the epoch-making power of the revelations, the awakening of radically new religious, philosophical, and scientific perspectives—indeed the very birth of philosophy and science as our civilization came to understand them, and the birth of religious traditions that are to this day foundational for the human community. Moreover, in regard to the social aspect of religious evolution, the Axial Age opened up for humanity the possibility of direct engagement with the divine much more widely to individuals, to mystics, prophets, philosophers, and sages whose religious experience and spiritual authority represented an emancipation from the archaic social hierarchy of divine kingship that had previously mediated such experience.
As we consider the advancing Uranus-Neptune cycle and the diachronic patterns of archetypally connected cultural phenomena that unfolded during subsequent alignments, like the births of Platonism and Christianity, we can recognize that many of the great religious and philosophical epiphanies of the Axial Awakening were centered on a profound and enduring transformation in the experience of the numinous. This transformation took radically divergent forms in the various civilizations and traditions—Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian, Jainist, Zoroastrian, Judaic, Greek—each differing in basic ways from each other and developing divergent orientations within their own traditions. The commonality in these various transformations was the disclosure of both a new possibility of relationship and a newly potent distinction, which often became a radically polarized dichotomy, between a reality of ultimate and radically superior spiritual value and a reality perceived as intrinsically or provisionally inferior. The two realities were discerned and defined on many levels, which often overlapped: the divine world of eternity and the empirical human world of flux and finitude, the ontologically primary and the derivative, the transcendent and the immanent, spirit and matter, good and evil, light and dark, above and below, the perfect and the imperfect, the one and the many, reality and illusion, Brahman and maya, nirvana and samsara, the Tao and the conventional world, the kingdom of God and the secular world, the redeemed future and the fallen present, salvation/ enlightenment and the dark imprisonment of the ordinary human condition, the philosopher-prophet-mystic-sage and the unilluminated.
Each religious tradition developed these differentiations and strove to overcome them in diverse ways, those in Asia doing so with far different spiritual and philosophical outcomes from those of the West. Upon these polarities was established the spiritual and intellectual foundation for a great deal of the historical evolution of human consciousness that has transpired since that age, especially in the West, where these dichotomies were especially pronounced and consequential. In a Hegelian and Jungian spirit, one could say that this epochal revelation of dynamically related metaphysical opposites in human experience began a great evolutionary process of dialectical tensions and syntheses, a process in which our own era is now fully engaged.
The great Axial Awakening of the triple conjunction period was an extremely complex phenomenon, a fons et origo with multiple streams. From the moment of their emergence, each of the many religions and philosophies that were born or transformed during this epoch contained an internal complexity that was creatively developed and differentiated in the ensuing centuries. Each stream underwent multiple ramifications, internal divisions, and new divergences seemingly in every possible manner. The new autonomy of the individual, the new capacity for a reflexive awareness that is aware of itself, the new will to question the received and the given, the challenges to long-established religious beliefs and assumptions, the prophetic and philosophical defiance of secular powers and conventional values, the new role of mystics and sages, the new modes of artistic expression that supported greater individuality and critical reflection on the human condition, the general emerging impulse away from the local and towards the universal and away from the traditional and towards the novel, and, not least, the awakening to a transcendent reality that ultimately sought a new kind of incarnation in the world of human history and aspiration: all these crucial characteristics of the Axial epoch set in motion processes that unfolded and dialectically developed in the succeeding centuries and millennia.
From one perspective, then, we can recognize the archetypal dynamics of the triple conjunction as an expression of the titanic evolutionary power, depth, and intensity of the Plutonic principle impelling and empowering the archetypal phenomena of the Uranus-Neptune cycle the alignments of which coincided so consistently with the births of new religions, mystical awakenings, cultural renaissances, artistic revelations, new philosophies, utopian visions, and cosmic epiphanies (Pluto?Uranus-Neptune). In this view, the basic phenomena of the Axial Age during the triple conjunction are clearly those we have seen as characteristic of the Uranus-Neptune cycle, but here they are given an epochal intensity and enduring transformative potency by the presence of Pluto.
From another perspective, we can recognize the archetypal vector during the period of the triple conjunction as one in which the Neptune principle spiritualizes and gives religious, metaph
ysical, and imaginative form to the characteristic Uranus-Pluto cycle phenomena of sudden radical change and revolutionary upheaval, widespread empowerment of creativity, and an intensified collective impulse towards progressive innovation and the striving for new horizons (Neptune?Uranus-Pluto).
Finally, we can approach the triple-planet archetypal complex during this period of the Axial Awakening as an expression of the Promethean principle of Uranus as it suddenly and unexpectedly liberates, awakens, and catalyzes the characteristic phenomena associated with the Neptune-Pluto cycle (Uranus? Neptune-Pluto).
The Neptune-Pluto cycle, involving the two outermost planets, is the longest of all planetary cycles, and its synchronistic historical and cultural phenomena are in certain respects the most profound and consequential. It is approximately five hundred years in length, and the intervening oppositions occur some two hundred and fifty years after each conjunction. The period of each such alignment of Neptune and Pluto on its own, with the 15° orb, lasts approximately twenty-five to thirty years, and with the broader 20° orb, more than a third of a century.
Limiting ourselves here to Western cultural history, we can briefly follow the sequence of Neptune-Pluto cyclical alignments and their extraordinarily consistent coincidence with the beginnings and endings of immense historical epochs of great cultural magnitude. As we have just seen, the triple conjunction of the sixth century BCE coincided not only with the heart of the global Axial Age but also with the rise of Greece and its rapid emergence as a world-historic civilization. The following opposition of Neptune and Pluto of 345–315 BCE coincided precisely with the climax of the classical Greek period and the beginning of the Hellenistic era in coincidence with Alexander the Great’s enormous transformation of the Mediterranean world and western Asia.
The following Neptune-Pluto conjunction coincided with the full ascendancy of Rome in the age of Julius Caesar and Augustus (first century BCE), the next conjunction coincided with the fall of the western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages (fifth century CE), the next with the beginning of the High Middle Ages (tenth century), and the conjunction after that with the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance (turn of the fifteenth century). At the midpoint of the five-hundred-year modern period, the opposition alignment of Neptune and Pluto took place at the climax of the Scientific Revolution in the middle of the seventeenth century. Finally, the most recent Neptune-Pluto conjunction coincided with the great fin de siècle epoch of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth (1880–1905), which commenced the five-hundred-year cycle in which we now find ourselves.
The Neptune-Pluto cycle with its corresponding archetypal complex demands a detailed survey and analysis of its own, which I will provide elsewhere. What can be mentioned briefly here is that, besides the great epochs marking the rise and fall of civilizations suggested above, the major Neptune-Pluto cyclical alignments appear to have coincided with especially profound transformations of cultural vision and the collective experience of reality, which often took place deep below the surface of the collective consciousness. We can recognize some of its characteristic themes in the great crucible of metaphysical destruction and regeneration that Western culture passed through during the last Neptune-Pluto conjunction at the end of the nineteenth century—that end of an age and transformative threshold which was symbolized in the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values, the dying of the gods that had ruled the Western spirit for two millennia and more, the subterranean dissolution of conventional Christian belief and Enlightenment assumptions, the powerful upsurge of “the unconscious” in many senses (including its first being conceptualized at this time), the global interpenetration of the world’s religious and cultural traditions, and the emergence in Western culture of a range of long-suppressed and long-developing cultural phenomena and archetypal impulses that led to the intensely dynamic world of the twentieth century.
Such underlying transformations of the Neptune-Pluto eras tend to be brought to the surface of cultural life in more explicit form during the immediately following Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune alignments, often as creative breakthroughs and sudden awakenings. We saw just such a wave of events and figures in the revolutionary changes and cultural epiphanies that occurred during the overlapping Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune oppositions at the beginning of the twentieth century. These immense, evolving transformative impulses in the deep collective psyche brought forth a further cyclical eruption of intensified cultural creativity and change during the next Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s. This brings us to the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of our own time.
The Late Twentieth Century and the Turn of the Millennium
Our final example of the Uranus-Neptune cycle is the most recent conjunction, which was within 15° of exact alignment from 1985 to 2001. Seen more broadly in its 20° span, this alignment extended through 2004, and the correlations in the later stages suggested the usual “sunset” phenomenon at the close of an extended and cumulative archetypal development.
Looking back over this extraordinary period of the late twentieth century and the turn of the millennium, we can recognize that virtually every one of the major categories evident in past Uranus-Neptune eras played a dominant role in the life of the world community during this most recent alignment: the widespread spiritual renewal of the age, the astonishing multiplicity of spiritual paths and traditions from many cultures and eras disseminating and merging throughout the world, the burgeoning of religious movements in Latin America, Africa, Russia, and East Asia, the Islamic revival in the Middle East and elsewhere, the rapid spread of Pentecostalism and other Christian missionary initiatives on many continents. We can discern the familiar signs of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex during this conjunction in the pervasiveness and intensity of contemporary Western interest in Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism, and Taoism, in meditation and mysticism, in esoteric traditions and mythology, in Jungian and archetypal psychology, in transpersonal theory and consciousness research, in shamanism and indigenous traditions, in nature mysticism, in the convergence of science and spirituality, and in the emergence of holistic and participatory paradigms in virtually every field.
Yet this era was an unusually fluid and complexly ambiguous one, both intellectually and spiritually, and this fluidity and complex ambiguity were similarly reflective of the same archetypal gestalt. Another equally characteristic motif of the Uranus-Neptune cycle that was evident during the period of this alignment was the decisive emergence of “postmodernity,” which developed and in many ways climaxed intellectual and cultural impulses that were set in motion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the convergence of outer-planet alignments discussed at the end of the last chapter. Increasingly central to the life and vision of both academic culture and the larger society during the later 1980s and 1990s, the postmodern sensibility mediated a rapid dissolution and deconstruction of long-established structures and boundaries, roles and hierarchies, and many once-firm certainties, beliefs, and assumptions, all in the service of emancipation.
Reality Isn’t What It Used to Be declared the title of a characteristic book of the 1990s summing up these postmodern intellectual and cultural developments. The recognition of both objective reality and personal identity as “constructed,” as having no independent ground, as being a kind of social myth, with all the liberating and disorienting ramifications of this recognition, was a dominant theme of this era. The postmodern epistemological critique of modern science and its claims to possessing a unique or intrinsically superior access to objective truth played a similarly pervasive role in the cultural life of this period. This critique and dissolution of established structures of belief extended to the presumption of intellectual, spiritual, and cultural hegemony on the part of Western civilization more generally, and it simultaneously undermined and liberated the Western mind, from both within and without.
Essential to this era and precisely reflect
ive of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal gestalt was the widespread sense that the collective Western consciousness had entered into a liminal state that was situated fundamentally between paradigms—unprecedentedly free-floating, uncertain, epistemologically and metaphysically untethered and confused, yet in its radically pluralistic flexibility open to possibilities and realities not permitted in the arena of conventional collective discourse in earlier generations.
A deeply consequential expression of this archetypal complex took place in the international political arena with the rise of perestroika and glasnost during the Gorbachev era in the Soviet Union in exact coincidence with the beginning of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in the mid-1980s. From this time, a gradual movement towards increased political openness and flexible innovation emerged in what had until then been perhaps the most tightly closed and armored society on the planet. Another sign of the same archetypal complex that emerged during these same years was the extraordinarily widespread and spirited awakening to an impulse for global unity and peace that was felt by both sides of the Cold War schism as well as by the larger international community. In Europe, the entire period of the Uranus-Neptune alignment was dominated by the political and economic movement towards the establishment of the European Community, which dissolved long-established national boundaries and societal structures in favor of a continent-wide community of freely circulating people, ideas, and goods. In all these contexts, the impulse towards unification and peace was closely associated with—and catalyzed by—the increasing dissolution of global barriers (Neptune) by the rapid spread of communication technologies (Uranus).
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