Of course the historical shift from the one era to the other is not one of simple contrast. In the examples cited for the period of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction, we can see both the definite continuation of emancipatory impulses and the highly charged drive towards radical change that decisively arose during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the 1960s. As discussed in earlier chapters, the underlying archetypal forces that emerge during a specific alignment do not suddenly cease after the alignment is over but continue to unfold in a multitude of ways. These subsequent manifestations are significantly shaped by the new contexts of the later epochs, and informing these new contexts, I believe, are the new archetypal dynamics of the later eras, which correspond to the new planetary alignments then taking place in the various unfolding cycles. It is not, therefore, a matter of simplistically comparing two eras as if they were entirely distinct and separate Newtonian objects. Rather, to use a homely (albeit Olympian) metaphor, the process more resembles the passing of a baton, which is carried into the new context. The later era seems to contain the earlier within it in a causally efficacious manner, and continues to embody and evolve the dominant archetypal impulses that explicitly emerged during the earlier planetary alignment. But it does so in a way that distinctly reflects the changing archetypal dynamics of the new era, corresponding to its own specific convergence of planetary alignments.
The feminist revolution during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s, for example, was centered above all on achieving the empowerment and personal autonomy of women—political, economic, sexual—as the means for and measure of their liberation. This powerful impulse continued throughout the following decades, evolving and critically redefining itself year by year. During the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the later 1980s and 1990s, the feminist impulse expressed itself in a new diversity of forms, many of which favored the cultivation of what were experienced and identified as “feminine values”: greater holistic awareness in various forms, with an emphasis on intuition and empathy, relational sensitivity, ecological embeddedness, a more fully embodied consciousness, creative pluralism, the preference for peaceful dialogue over competitive aggression, nurture and care, the dignity of the maternal, the sacredness of childbirth, with all these values and qualities often associated with explicitly spiritual themes. A new recognition and cultivation of “women’s ways of knowing” emerged, reflecting epistemological orientations different from those of the mainstream modern mind.
During the later 1980s and 1990s, the spiritual and religious dimension of feminism became far more pronounced than it had been in the 1960s. The affirmation of women’s spiritual authority in religion became a central concern, with widespread pressure to permit the ordination of women as ministers and priests, often in defiance of conservative authorities, and with similar developments in Jewish, Buddhist, and other religions. The increased recognition of the feminine dimension of the divine, the rapid rise of a movement that sought to recover a “Goddess tradition” of religious imagery and ritual, the growth of the Wiccan movement and the invocation of an “Earth wisdom,” the emergence of ecofeminist spirituality, the increasing popularity of Sophianic Christianity, the upsurge of interest in and reported visions of Mary in Roman Catholic popular piety, and the founding of academic programs in women’s spirituality during this period all suggest the constellation of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex. Historical perspectives were similarly configured through this lens, as the pioneering archaeological work of Marija Gimbutas was embraced by many as demonstrating the existence in ancient Europe of a peaceful egalitarian and matristic society that reflected the primacy of spiritual and aesthetic values. Such perspectives encouraged fresh renewals of a utopian idealism not unlike other forms of utopian visions we have seen associated with Uranus-Neptune alignments in the past, but now centered on the restoration of women and the feminine dimension of existence to the center of cultural and spiritual life.
A parallel shift can be observed in the history of gay and lesbian emancipation in these two eras. Again, the dominant impulse that emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s was the assertion of personal freedom, political empowerment, and sexual liberation. While these aspirations continued to be significant in the following decades, they were joined by new concerns and values that reflected themes characteristic of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction that began in the mid-1980s. Partly under the impact of the AIDS epidemic (which started during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in the period just before the beginning of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction), a new spirit of compassionate service focused on healing, altruistic sacrifice of often heroic proportions, and the recognition of the spiritual dimension of life emerged. As this period progressed, through the 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the collective impulse in the gay and lesbian community increasingly reflected an affirmation of relational and spiritual values, expressed through an insistence on the right to enter into marriage sanctioned by both religion and civil society, and to serve as priests, ministers, and bishops in positions of religious authority in the free and open exercise of their spiritual beliefs.
Science and Technology
Scientific theories during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction were influenced by this archetypal gestalt in highly visible ways as well. First among these was the postmodern deconstructive recognition that all such theories were radically affected and permeated, usually unconsciously, by nonempirical factors—gender, class, race, ethnicity, language, myth, personal ambition, the human impulse towards self-aggrandizement, the urge to control or conquer nature, and so forth. While the basic revolutionary insight into the nature of paradigms first decisively emerged during the 1960s in the aftermath of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, it was during the later 1980s and 1990s that this insight became pervasive in both the academic world and popular culture. Nor was it simply a matter that Kuhn’s theory became more widespread. Rather, it was further developed and revised in specific archetypally appropriate ways, having been articulated, for example, in new, more psychologically nuanced forms, such as the feminist turn given Kuhn’s theory by Evelyn Fox Keller and Carolyn Merchant, the ecological turn given by the work of Theodore Roszak and Ralph Metzner, and the transpersonal and archetypal inflections given by the work of Stanislav Grof and James Hillman.
Specific disciplines within the sciences appear to have been significantly affected by these shifting archetypal dynamics from the one era to the other. For example, cosmological theory in the 1960s was dominated by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation that gave powerful evidence for the big bang theory of cosmogenesis. The sudden liberation of unimaginably potent elemental forces at the birth of the cosmos, driving cosmic evolution in a massive centrifugal explosion of energy and stellar matter from an extremely hot, dense primordial condition, is superbly reflective of the Uranus-Pluto archetypal complex, simultaneously Promethean and Dionysian in mutual activation. While this theory continued to be developed during the succeeding decades, a shift occurred in the 1990s, partly because of new information mediated by the Hubble Space Telescope, as new and more complex multidimensional cosmological theories emerged that incorporated processes and phenomena scarcely conceivable by the ordinary human imagination—not unlike the situation that resulted from the Einsteinian relativity revolution during the last Uranus-Neptune opposition at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Another facet of the same complex that was visible in the field of cosmology during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction was the extraordinary rise of theories of cosmological evolution that specifically integrated a spiritual dimension. This impulse was evident in a range of forms, including John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s widely discussed proposal of an anthropic cosmological principle in which certain universal constants in cosmic evolution are seen as precisely calibrated to permit the existence of human life, and various spiritually suggestive statements by prominent scientists such as the astronomer Allan Sandage’s declaration that the big bang could
only be regarded as a “miracle.” The same impulse was expressed more comprehensively during this alignment in the development of a “sacred cosmology” and spiritually informed vision of cosmic evolution, Teilhardian and Whiteheadian in inspiration, by such thinkers as Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme, and David Ray Griffin. Each age reconfigures its cosmology, its historical perspectives, and its evolutionary metanarratives in accord with its own zeitgeist, one of whose most exact indications is, I believe, the specific state of archetypal dynamics associated with the planetary configurations of the time.
The metamorphosis of the Gaia hypothesis from the 1960s to the 1990s displays the same archetypal progression. In its original formulation by Lovelock in the late 1960s, the Gaia hypothesis was principally a theory concerning the dynamic interrelationship of the Earth’s physical, biological, and chemical processes, which suggested that the Earth was a systemically integrated web of life with emergent properties of self-regulation. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, the Gaia hypothesis came to be seen by the wider culture as the basis for a more spiritual and mythopoetic orientation towards ecological issues, whereby the Earth was regarded not only as an intricately self-sustaining and self-organizing life system but as Gaia herself, the Earth goddess, a cosmic being of sacred status and value in the universal scheme of things. Despite attempts by the scientific community and Lovelock himself to restrict the hypothesis to entirely scientific and naturalistic parameters, the term “Gaia” in the discourse of the wider culture was increasingly associated with an attitude of reverence towards all forms of life on the planet, with sacred rituals and invocations, and with an ecological activism ultimately informed by spiritual values and an underlying sense of mystical unity with nature.
Theories of biological evolution during the two eras also suggest a shift of the dominant archetypal influences corresponding to the two different planetary conjunctions. Characteristic theories of human and primate evolution in the Sixties were embodied in widely disseminated works by Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, and others that emphasized the struggle for survival and the innately aggressive, territorial, sexually rapacious naked ape—generally imaged as a male hunter—all strongly suggestive of the Uranus-Pluto archetypal complex. By contrast, research and theories in the Nineties, as reflected in the work of scientists such as Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, emphasized innate tendencies towards cooperative behavior in primates, the relational imperatives of the community, the greater role of maternal factors, ecological embeddedness, creative play, and distinctive signs of an emergent consciousness and even an emergent morality in nonhuman animals. Comparable shifts in scientific theory and research in these years occurred in related fields such as interspecies communication and cultural anthropology.
The scientific exploration of space in the two eras presents an analogous pattern of development. We have repeatedly observed the close association of Uranus and the Prometheus archetype with the scientific-technological impulse to break free of gravitational constraints, explore new horizons, ascend into the air and into outer space, and open up the possibility of a fundamentally new relationship to the cosmos. The difference between the Uranus-Pluto conjunction period of the 1960s and the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1990s is instructive. The Sixties saw the titanic achievement of the first manned space flights and climaxed in the Moon landings, which required the deployment of unprecedentedly powerful technologies of propulsion to break through the gravitational pull of the Earth and to reach intended destinations in outer space. The entire trajectory, from the first flights by Gagarin and Shepard in 1961 to the last Moon landing in 1972, took place precisely during the only Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the twentieth century. By contrast, the most exciting advances in the exploration of space during the 1990s were largely centered on and made possible by the technological breakthrough of the Hubble Space Telescope and the flood of unprecedented images and new vistas of the cosmos that it afforded, with immediate consequences for cosmological theory and the astronomical imagination.
The Hubble Telescope of the 1990s captured public attention more than any scientific venture since the space program and Moon landing of the 1960s. The Promethean principle of technological breakthrough and liberating advance associated with Uranus was vividly present in the major space activities of both decades, but the activities of the 1960s had a distinctly Plutonic quality and potency while those of the 1990s were distinctly Neptunian, when nearly all such efforts were concerned with electronically transmitting new images, which radically shifted the cultural vision and stimulated the cosmological imagination, revealed the previously invisible, opened up the possibility of new and multidimensional realities, and aroused feelings of cosmic wonder and spiritual awe. Even the space station, one of the few space projects of this era that involved astronauts rather than instrumental probes and telescopes, was of a different character from that of the 1960s’ feverishly competitive “space race.” Instead, the space station constituted a multinational collaborative effort, one dedicated to forming globally cooperative and collective living arrangements in space, themes that distinctly echo the idealistic, boundary-dissolving, utopian impulses of the Uranus-Neptune complex.
Interestingly, efforts during the 1990s to repeat or extend the manned space explorations of the 1960s consistently collapsed while the more archetypally apt observational activities flourished. Conversely, just as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction approached the 20° point in 2004, the Hubble Telescope, in the absence of regular maintenance, began to lose its functionality. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration provisionally decided to cut funding for the future maintenance of the Hubble Telescope in favor of future manned space expeditions to the Moon and Mars, which it has scheduled, coincidentally, for the period when Uranus next moves into alignment with Pluto in the 2010s.17
The dominant technologies of the two decades also closely reflect the two different archetypal complexes, Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune. The characteristic technologies of the 1960s were not only the rocket-powered propulsion of the space flights but also other technologies of a similarly Promethean-Plutonic nature such as nuclear power and jet propulsion, as deployed in the rapid proliferation of nuclear power plants and global jet aviation during that decade (including, for example, the development of the supersonic Concorde, whose first flights took place in 1969). By contrast, the dominant technologies of the 1990s involved the nearly invisible silicon chip, subtle rather than titanic in its workings, which brought a radical expansion and acceleration of the computer revolution and the rapid development of a plethora of digital, multimedia, and communication technologies. Here too could be mentioned the emerging vision of molecular nanotechnology as the foundation for a future manufacturing revolution. Above all, the new technological capabilities of this decade were expressed not in rocket propulsion and nuclear power but in the rapid pervasive shift of the collective consciousness produced by the high-tech dissolution of global, commercial, relational, and epistemological structures and barriers—all characteristic Uranus-Neptune motifs. These technologies were in turn often associated with utopian, esoteric, and mystical ideas and impulses.18
A family of sciences and technologies that appears to be especially correlated with the Uranus-Neptune cycle is that of chemistry and biochemistry, microbiology, genetics, and pharmacology. In this category, the Promethean impulse—scientific, experimental, liberating, defying limits, bringing sudden breakthroughs, opening new possibilities of human autonomy with respect to nature—is combined with such Neptunian themes as the chemical and liquid, the microscopic and invisible, processes involving fusions and mergings, and a concern with healing, drugs, and chemically influenced changes in both the body and the psyche. The diachronic correlations in this category can be recognized historically as going back to the ambiguous borderline of alchemy and chemistry, as in the work of Robert Boyle, a student of alchemy and a pioneer of chemistry, whose experiments began in 1654 during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1
650s. Lavoisier, the founder of modern chemistry, was born in 1743 during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune opposition. Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics and the discoverer of the laws of heredity, was born in 1822 during the immediately following conjunction, and his major discoveries were first published during the years 1865–69, in exact coincidence with the following Uranus-Neptune square. This sequence of quadrature alignments continued: Mendel’s advance remained unrecognized until, as discussed earlier, it was simultaneously rediscovered by three different scientists and the science of genetics was first named by William Bateson, all in 1900, just as the following Uranus-Neptune opposition was beginning.
The quadrature sequence continued yet again: It was during the immediately following Uranus-Neptune square alignment in 1953 that Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule at the Cavendish Laboratory, and thereby revealed the means by which inherited characteristics are transmitted from one generation to the next. Finally, completing the quadrature cycle, it was during the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the late 1980s and the 1990s that these developments came to a climax in the Human Genome Project, the rapid acceleration of biotechnological science and industry, recombinant DNA research, and widespread experimental genetic manipulation of cell tissue, plants, and animals. The first successful genetic cloning, of the sheep Dolly, took place in Scotland in 1997 (coinciding as well with the most recent Jupiter-Uranus conjunction), and the first successful cloning of a human embryo took place in 2004 in South Korea at the end of the Uranus-Neptune alignment period (during the most recent Jupiter-Uranus opposition in a diachronic sequence with Dolly’s cloning).
B000OVLIPQ EBOK Page 62
