With all these impulses and developments at work, a certain quality of spiritual expectation concerning a shift in the ages seemed to be overtaking the collective psyche. Prophecies from many traditions abounded and were read against the backdrop of heightened historical urgency produced by accelerating geopolitical, nuclear, and ecological developments in the world. The heavens themselves produced unusual and spectacular phenomena during this conjunction, as with the extraordinarily vivid appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, the widely viewed dramatic crashing of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet into Jupiter, and the preternaturally bright Mars as it orbited nearer to the Earth than at any time in recorded history. Other phenomena such as the continuing mysterious appearance of highly complex crop circles throughout the world provided a terrestrial counterpart to this celestial spectacle, as did increasingly unpredictable and strange weather patterns, the melting of the polar ice caps, and scientific predictions of global climate change. The combination of these diverse phenomena compelled some to call to mind the ancient biblical prophecy: “And I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath.”
The collective psyche’s highly activated thirst for spiritual transcendence and holistic unities during this period also displayed the problematic side of this archetypal complex, which was visible in a wide range of less exalted impulses and behaviors. The intensified religious consciousness of the age gave rise to many New Age infatuations and eccentric cult movements while simultaneously inspiring and bolstering fundamentalist fanaticisms in many religions throughout the world. Cults as diverse in their beliefs as Heaven’s Gate, the Solar Temple, Aum Shinrikyo, and the Branch Davidians all reflected the heightened religiosity and metaphysical suggestibility of the era. Self-encapsulating religious communities and belief systems encouraged varying forms of world-rejection that ranged from the isolationist to the suicidal.
Especially consequential were certain characteristics of the widespread evangelical Christian revival in the United States, which often took the political form of an unreflective reactionary conservatism. In its active mode, this revival aggressively asserted “biblical values” against those of a pluralistic secular society and sometimes combined this assertion with a messianic nationalism (especially catalyzed during the Saturn-Pluto alignments discussed earlier, as in 2000–04). In other instances, the evangelical impulse, much like certain streams in the New Age movement, was combined with an inward-turning withdrawal from active engagement with the complex challenges of modern life and a willful ignorance of the ecological and economic realities of the international community. Especially suggestive of the Uranus-Neptune complex was the widespread belief in an imminent mass “rapture” that would result in the instant physical disappearance of Christian believers as they would be suddenly swept up into the celestial realm with Jesus, leaving behind a world that would descend into apocalyptic tribulation. Over forty million copies of the “Left Behind” series of novels disseminating this belief were sold between 1995 and 2004, second only to the Bible among Christian religious texts in the extent of its readership. The climax of the series came in 2004—appropriately in coincidence with the Jupiter-Uranus opposition as well—with the publication of the twelfth volume, Glorious Appearing, which described the triumphant return of Jesus to the world.
More generally, an intensified psychological tendency towards escapism and denial, passivity and narcissism, credulity and delusion was widely in evidence, aided by a radically increased collective immersion in the artificial reality created by the mass media. These tendencies and pathologies reflect the shadow side of the Uranus-Neptune complex, as does the saturation of the collective consciousness by technologically produced hyperstimulating images signifying nothing. Particularly reflective of this complex was the widespread hypnotic fascination with and addiction to image (“image is everything”) and a collective tendency towards acute epistemological confusion—the conflation of the real with the virtual and illusory, part-fiction biographies and histories, dramatized news, government video releases disguised as television news reports, political spin, docu-dramas, infomercials, “reality shows,” Internet rumors, fabricated news stories and fraudulent journalism, plagiarized scholarship and term papers, the electronically accelerated dissemination of the unsubstantiated and the spurious—a continuous display of postmodern relativism in vulgar form subtly infecting and shaping popular culture. All these suggest the shadow side of Neptune (illusion, disorienting dissolution of boundaries, confusion and conflation, deception and self-deception, fantasy, image, mesmerized passivity) as catalyzed by Uranus (high-speed electronic technology, innovation, the thirst for excitement and stimulation, the new, the ever-changing).
Such themes were epitomized in the dominant MTV video aesthetic, which became increasingly pervasive during the period of this alignment from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. Rapidly shifting disjunctive juxtapositions of images driven by repetitive musical rhythms produced a form of mass-hypnotic entertainment that thrived on dissolving the structures of narrative rationality and personal identity. These cultural tendencies were in turn combined with a widespread susceptibility to and obsession with addictions of all kinds—drugs, alcohol, consumerism, television, mindless channel surfing, celebrity media coverage, video games, pornography, the Internet—all suggestive of the problematic side of the Neptune archetypal principle: addictive, escapist, narcissistic, illusory, mesmerizing. These and many other forms of intensified maya in the global culture compromised the positive potential of such other characteristic Uranus-Neptune phenomena as interactive electronic multimedia, artificial intelligence, the development of spectacularly creative cinematic special effects, and virtual reality.
As we have repeatedly seen, such a combination of positive and problematic manifestations of the same archetypal complex during a particular planetary alignment is altogether characteristic of the historical evidence we have explored in this book. Yet it is in periods of alignments involving Neptune that a quality of irresolvable ambiguity, fluidity, and epistemological confusion seems to be especially prominent. Where does one draw the line between the positive and problematic in many of the above phenomena? Who is to draw such a line? The archetypal perspective suggests something like a metaperspective on this issue, for the radically interpretive, perspectival, situated, and relative nature of all judgments reflects a philosophical position—one might call it postmodern reflexivity—that is itself precisely expressive of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex. This viewpoint and mode of consciousness became pervasive during the years of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, with multiple consequences that have been simultaneously freeing and disorienting. In the end, as in past alignments of this planetary cycle, the outcome was the emergence of a radically heightened creative fluidity and metaphysical flexibility in the collective consciousness of our time.
Many of the most controversial and challenging developments of this era can be seen as reflecting a characteristic vector of the Uranus-Neptune complex—the dissolving of boundaries into unities through technology and change—in its negative form: the loss of distinct cultural traditions, languages, religions, and communities through the mass media, globalization, immigration and assimilation, diffusion and appropriation, thereby provoking many tensions and defensive reactions. A similar dynamic can be recognized in the arts and intellectual property that has resulted from the digitization of all information and the potentially universal instantaneous free access to download music, films, images, and texts—“content”—from the Web. All these were susceptible to technological revisions and intersplicings with results that ranged from the creative and amusing to the distortive and falsifying. Even the characteristic mode of sociopathic adolescent rebellion during this period—the dissemination of strategically deceptive computer viruses through the World Wide Web—reflected another aspect of the Uranus-Neptune complex.
The extraordinary rise of the cell phone with its many complex sociological and psychological rami
fications in the 1990s is an especially vivid symptom of the Uranus-Neptune gestalt. Its nearly ubiquitous use by the end of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction period had not only dissolved boundaries between individuals and locations in ways never before experienced, it also made permeable the boundaries between those on the cell phone and those in their physical vicinity—in restaurants, subways, airports, sidewalks—who could not avoid hearing the conversation and absorbing the other’s private reality into their own. The widespread use of cell phones also produced with unprecedented frequency the phenomenon of experiencing multiple realities simultaneously: individuals conversed on the phone while meeting or partying with others, doing homework, driving in traffic, or walking down the street, remaining continuously engaged, often intensely so, in another world—“multitasking.” Such situations, repeated countless times daily across the world, also contributed to the increasing emergence of “virtual communities” of relationship and dialogue, often combined with a virtual disappearance from the immediate physical context. Several people might be physically present in the same location yet for all practical purposes were invisible to each other as they engaged in conversations with others not present.
The mobility of the phones provided not only an unprecedented degree of accessibility but also frequent confusion and disorientation (and sometimes deliberate deception) about where the person on the cell phone was located at that moment, which might be just outside the door or in a country on the other side of the globe. Interaction across multiple time zones became a daily experience. This condition of “nonlocality” was paralleled in the world of cyberspace and the Internet, there combined with the widespread phenomenon of users adopting multiple virtual identities in chat rooms and other Internet forums. An especially characteristic form of nonlocality that widely emerged at this time was the experience of many well-informed individuals, embedded in the electronically mediated lifeworlds of cyberspace and global television, who found themselves more intimately aware of the state of the world and distant regions of the planet than of their own neighborhood. All these newly emergent qualities of experience in the collective psyche—the dissolving of boundaries, unlimited interconnectivity and accessibility, nonlocality, multiple realities, virtual realities, multiple virtual identities, disorientation, confusion, illusion, global interconnectedness and unity, all mediated by the new technologies—eloquently reflect various distinct expressions of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex.
Just as the era of the 1960s with its Uranus-Pluto conjunction displayed both a powerful emancipatory creative dynamism and a destructive unleashing of instinctual energies in almost every area of human activity, so also the period of this most recent Uranus-Neptune conjunction displayed a distinctly bivalent expression of the relevant archetypal impulses, almost equally divided between the admirable and the problematic. Yet whether they took positive or negative forms, the relevant phenomena during both conjunctions showed the distinctive qualities corresponding to the specific archetypal principles associated with the two outer planets in conjunction at that time. In this very indeterminacy lay both the potential creative freedom and the moral responsibility of the individual and the human community to engage and enact these archetypal forces in the most life-enhancing manner.
Comparing the Sixties and the Nineties
The 1960–72 period was the first era whose correlations we examined in this book’s survey of outer-planet cycles. Here at the end of this survey we may now find it valuable to compare and contrast the two periods—roughly the Sixties and the Nineties—that coincided with the only conjunctions of the outermost planets in the past hundred years. The next such conjunction, between Uranus and Pluto, will not occur for another century. For two such conjunctions of the outermost planets to occur in a single generation is a rare phenomenon, affording us a special opportunity for historical comparison. Both periods are recent enough that for many readers the comparison can rest as much on direct knowledge and experience as on the historical record. This particular comparison also has the advantage of dealing with two conjunctions that had one planet in common, Uranus, so that we can observe both the distinct archetypal similarities, related to the presence in both cases of the highly activated Prometheus principle, and the archetypal differences, related to the presence of Pluto in one alignment and Neptune in the other.
Let us briefly compare the two periods in several categories of cultural phenomena, using as shorthand “the Sixties” to encompass the full period of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction that began about 1960, was exact in 1965–66, and extended into the early 1970s; and “the Nineties” to encompass the full period of the somewhat longer Uranus-Neptune conjunction that began in the mid-1980s, was exact in 1993, and extended through the 1990s into the beginning of the new millennium.
The set of archetypal qualities shared in common by the two eras can be discerned easily enough, and indeed, the similarity between the Sixties and the Nineties has been repeatedly remarked upon. Both were periods of extraordinarily rapid change, and each era was notable in its own way for the widespread destabilization of previously established structures, accelerated creativity, and a radically heightened impulse towards emancipation and experiment. All of these themes of course reflect the Prometheus archetype associated with Uranus, the planet common to the two alignments. Within that archetypal commonality, the differences between the two eras can to a remarkable degree be recognized as reflecting the dominant archetypal presence of Pluto in the 1960s and of Neptune in the 1990s.
Politically, the Sixties were characterized by a volcanic eruption of revolutionary and emancipatory activity that affected virtually every area of human experience. Even the antiwar demonstrations that called for peace and love were infused with an often uncontrollable elemental heat, an overwhelming visceral intensity that repeatedly spilled over into violence and fierce confrontation. Virtually every major university campus in the United States was the site of extremely charged confrontational rebellion, and most of the major cities incurred massive fiery destruction in the urban riots of the decade. By comparison, one thinks of the Velvet Revolution and indeed almost the entire revolutionary collapse of the Iron Curtain in the 1989–90 period, which were accomplished with virtually no bloodshed, a phenomenon that was almost inconceivable until it happened. It was as if a subtle but pervasive liberating shift of the collective consciousness had suddenly emerged in nation after nation, so that long-established structures rapidly dissolved before one’s eyes. This “revolution by dissolution,” as it has been called, is precisely reflective of the two forces at work in the Uranus-Neptune complex, and is as applicable to the World Wide Web and the computer-driven revolution of global commerce and corporate structures as to the radical changes that occurred in the political domain during the same period.
An equally reflective illustration of this contrast between the two eras can be found in China. Beginning in the mid-1960s, during the Cultural Revolution initiated by Mao Zedong, tens of thousands of young Red Guards brought forth an eruption of raging instinct, astonishingly violent on a vast scale for years, that affected millions and caused immense destruction throughout the country, all in the name of revolution and freedom. This tableau of political frenzy during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction can be seen in sharp contrast to the actions of the gentle student rebels in Tianenmen Square in China in 1989 during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, with their Goddess of Liberty idealism and the enduring image of pacifist defiance and pathos that was embodied by the lone student standing unprotected yet quietly resistant in front of the advancing tanks of the Chinese military.
Similarly, the African-American civil rights movement of the 1960s, despite the nonviolent policy of King and many others (which began during the Uranus-Neptune square of the 1950s), moved steadily through the Uranus-Pluto decade towards the heightened militancy of the Black Power movement, the rise of the Black Panthers, armed takeovers of university buildings, and the “Burn, baby, burn” desperate violence o
f the countless urban conflagrations of the decade; again, over 120 cities were torn by riots just in the one summer of 1967. By contrast, the Million Man March in 1995 during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction was marked by mass prayer and collective expressions of religiosity, an explicit spiritual impulse and call to unity characterized more by evangelical than revolutionary fervor. Even in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots (during the Saturn-Pluto square), what was heard most poignantly and enduringly was the brief final utterance by the central figure in the drama, Rodney King, in his cri de coeur for a humane community of peaceful tolerance and mutual sympathy, “Can’t we all get along?”
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