17. In the case of Einstein, Uranus reached the 180° opposition point of its cycle during the years 1918–21. In November 1919, the Royal Society in London announced that its scientific expedition to Príncipe Island, which was formed for the purpose of photographing a solar eclipse earlier that year, had completed calculations that demonstrated a deflection of light at the rim of the Sun, thereby giving dramatic support to Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein was immediately heralded as a genius without precedent, and the theory of relativity was for the first time widely acclaimed by both the scientific community and the larger public. However, the initial major scientific breakthrough in Einstein’s life took place in the summer and fall of 1905, when he published the four papers in the scientific journal Annalen der Physik that transformed modern physics; these contained the special theory of relativity, the equivalence of mass and energy, the theory of Brownian motion, and the photon theory of light. Uranus was exactly at the 120° trine point of its cycle during the years 1904–06, the trine being the major aspect of the Uranus transit cycle that precedes the opposition by approximately fourteen years. On the day that Annalen der Physik received Einstein’s epoch-making paper on special relativity—June 30, 1905—Uranus was within 1° of exact alignment to its position at Einstein’s birth. This exactitude of alignment takes place for a period of less than six months altogether.
The same correlation occurred with Darwin. Uranus had reached the 180° opposition point of its cycle in Darwin’s life during the years 1852–54. It was at this time that the Royal Society first recognized Darwin’s work as a biologist, by awarding him its Royal Medal in 1853 for his research on coral reefs and on barnacles. This work proved to be crucial both for his deepening grasp of the transmutation of species and for his credibility with scientists when he would later publicize his theory. However, it was earlier in Darwin’s life, when Uranus had reached the 120° trine point of its cycle, from February 1837 through December 1839, that he achieved his most important conceptual breakthrough: the first formulation of the theory of evolution in his private notebooks. In 1837, soon after his return from the Beagle expedition to South America and the Galápagos Islands, Darwin recognized that many of his observations could only be understood if species changed over time and evolved in different directions from a common ancestor. The theory lacked a mechanism by which evolution took place until, on September 28, 1838, Darwin read Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population with its theory of the necessary relationship of human population growth to food supply. Extrapolating from Malthus’s idea, Darwin realized that nature enforced its selection of species by eliminating those variations that could not fit into available ecological niches and favoring those that could. On that day, Darwin entered into his “Notebook on the Transmutation of Species” the note that demonstrated that he had solved the problem of natural selection. On that day, transiting Uranus was within 1° of exact trine alignment to its position at Darwin’s birth, again a transit that lasts altogether less than six months within that range of exactitude.
18. I found that both of these forms of Uranus transits (with Uranus either as the transiting planet or as the natal planet being transited) were equally likely to coincide with Promethean phenomena such as significant creative breakthroughs. For example, in their joint discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, announced in the April 25 edition of the journal Nature, James D. Watson was undergoing the one type, transiting Uranus to natal Sun, while Francis Crick was undergoing the other, transiting Pluto to natal Uranus.
19. A more recent example of this same pattern is Joseph Campbell, who, like his mentors Freud and Jung, lived into his eighties. Campbell’s pivotal work, the one with which he will always be most closely identified, was The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he explored the mythology of the liberating hero who confronts an unexpected radical change, inner and outer, to enter a new world of meaning and purpose that he or she then mediates for others. This book was completed in 1948 and published in 1949, in exact coincidence with Campbell’s Uranus-opposite-Uranus transit, with the planet at the 180° opposition point of its cycle from mid-1947 to mid-1950. Campbell lived to be eighty-three, dying in October 1987 in the middle of his Uranus return just as the planet was reaching the 360° conjunction point of its cycle. Before he died, he recorded the famous series of interviews with Bill Moyers, the television broadcasts of which during the remaining months of his Uranus return transit after his death brought unprecedented public attention to his ideas and life work.
The occurrence of such posthumous correlations was in fact noted by Jung. In a lecture on Jung’s birth chart delivered in 1974 in Zurich, his daughter Gret Baumann-Jung mentioned the following anecdote: “Shortly before his death, as we talked about horoscopes, my father remarked: ‘The funny thing is that the darned stuff even works after death’” (G. Baumann-Jung, “Some Reflections on the Horoscope of C. G. Jung,” trans. F. J. Hopman, Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought [1975], 55).
20. In personal transits involving the return of an outer planet such as Saturn or Uranus to its natal position (the Saturn return or the Uranus return), archetypally relevant events consistently began as early as 20° or more before exact alignment and often continued as many degrees afterwards. In the case of the first Saturn return, relevant events and psychological changes typically began to emerge at age twenty-eight (sometimes as early as twenty-seven) and were strongly in evidence through age thirty. The second Saturn return coincided with a similarly extended wave of such events one cycle later, in the late fifties through age sixty.
21. The intensified activation of the Saturn archetype during the first Saturn return period between the ages of 28 and 30 reflects what in Jungian archetypal psychology is referred to as the constellating and potential integration of the senex principle, linked with a rapid transformation, and sometimes suppression, of the puer principle, or child archetype, with which the senex is in dialectical tension. (See note 7 for Part II above, p. 499.)
22. In addition to taking into account the cultural and biographical context, I found that any particular planetary alignment in a natal chart could be understood only within the larger context of the other intersecting planetary alignments that occurred at an individual’s birth. The archetypal tendencies that characteristically coincided with a Sun-Uranus conjunction or any other natal planetary alignment took different forms in accordance with which other planets were in close aspect with that alignment at the person’s birth, thereby forming a larger multi-planet configuration. Shelley again provides an instructive example. Shelley was born not only with a Sun-Uranus conjunction but with both the Sun and Uranus in a close triple conjunction with Venus. This astronomical reality seemed to be elegantly mirrored in the specific character and quest of Shelley’s unbound Prometheus, whose liberation of humankind specifically brought to the world a new reign not only of freedom but of love and beauty.
Viewed by itself, Shelley’s Sun-Uranus conjunction can be seen as his powerful self-identification (Sun) with the Promethean impulse of freedom and rebellion (Uranus), to the point that he depicted Prometheus himself as the heroic center of his most prominent literary achievement. In turn, the triple conjunction with Venus can be recognized in the particular inflection Shelley gave to the Promethean myth, in which love and beauty—the qualities of the archetypal Venus—became essentially tied to freedom, rebellion, and the heroic manifestation of the self. Similarly characteristic of the Venus-Uranus planetary combination were Shelley’s lifelong tendencies towards romantic freedom and unpredictability, sudden awakenings of new love and erotic attraction, impulsive acts of rebellion in the service of love and beauty, and repeated situations of love that defied conventional limitations and structures, as in premarital and extramarital liaisons and other relationships condemned by social opinion or parental authority.
One other example of this same archetypal correspondence involving a Sun-Venus-Uranus configuration will
be helpful to cite here. Richard Wagner, like Shelley, was born with both Sun and Venus in close alignment with Uranus (an opposition). In Wagner’s life and personality, and in the major narratives and heroic characters of his operas, one can readily recognize virtually identical archetypal themes and impulses as those just cited for Shelley: the close association of artistic creativity with romantic freedom, rebellion, and unpredictability; sudden awakenings of new love and erotic attraction; repeated situations in which the impulsive pursuit of such relationships broke free from previous commitments, upset societal conventions, and disrupted established life structures.
Equally instructive is the timing of Wagner’s transits involving this same natal configuration. Transiting Uranus opposed Wagner’s natal Uranus (the same transit as those cited in the last chapter for Galileo, Descartes, Freud, Jung, Friedan, et al.) and conjoined his natal Sun-Venus conjunction in 1857–59. These were the three years during which Wagner composed Tristan und Isolde, his most revolutionary musical work, which marked a critical creative threshold in his artistic evolution. Both in its radically innovative musical character and in its narrative of suddenly awakened romantic and erotic love that defies established social structures Tristan und Isolde precisely reflects the archetypal complex constituted by the Prometheus and Venus principles in dynamic synthesis. Moreover, it was during just these years that the married Wagner suddenly fell in love with Mathilde Wesendonck, the young wife of a patron, and explosively disrupted both marriages. Wagner’s personal romantic drama and his composition of Tristan und Isolde, both precisely reflective of the Venus-Uranus archetypal complex, were so interconnected and mutually inspiring that biographers and musicologists continue to debate the question of which was cause and which effect.
Often two individuals are born with two very different alignments involving the Sun, as in Shelley’s Sun-Uranus conjunction and Schopenhauer’s Sun-Saturn conjunction, with correspondingly contrasting personality traits and biographical tendencies, yet have another planetary combination in common and clearly share the corresponding archetypal themes in their lives. For example, Schopenhauer and Shelley were both born with Venus and Uranus in major aspect (a trine, for Schopenhauer). We can recognize in Schopenhauer’s philosophical thought a suggestive parallel to this alignment, for in the larger context of his pessimistic, profoundly Saturnian philosophy, Schopenhauer also taught as one of his central doctrines that of all areas of human experience, art and aesthetic contemplation (Venus) especially allowed the human being to be suddenly lifted up and temporarily liberated (Uranus) from the bondage of ordinary existence.
In turn, it was specifically this element of Schopenhauer’s thought that influenced Wagner—not the general pessimism but the doctrine of emancipation through art and the special role of artistic genius in mediating that transfiguration—and it was the Venus-Uranus planetary combination that the two men had in common. In other respects, Wagner’s personality more resembled Shelley’s unconstrained heroic Promethean self—indeed, his Promethean self was more extreme than Shelley’s—than it did Schopenhauer’s much more Saturnian self and existential posture. Again, this underlying resemblance in personality and self-expression between Wagner and Shelley is paralleled by their sharing of natal Sun-Uranus alignments, in contrast with Schopenhauer’s Sun-Saturn.
23. In epistemological terms, the active, interpretive, participatory role in archetypal cognition is comparable to and anticipated by Aristotle’s concept of the active intellect, nous poietikos. The active intellect is the faculty of the mind that permits the recognition of universals in phenomena in much the same way that light permits the potentially existing colors in things to become actual. (See W. D. Ross, Aristotle: A Complete Exposition of His Works and Thought, 5th ed. [New York: Meridian, 1959], pp. 146–49.) The original text for the concept is Aristotle’s De Anima, and the perspective has been further developed by Aquinas, Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, and Owen Barfield.
Part IV: Epochs of Revolution
1. By way of visual analogy, a 15° orb on each side of exactitude is approximately the range within which the Full Moon is visible as such, when the Sun is aligned in opposition to the Moon; and conversely, the same orb is the range within which the New Moon is invisible, when the Sun is in conjunction with the Moon. Because of variations caused by the planets’ apparent retrograde and direct motion (produced by their heliocentric orbits as seen from the perspective of the Earth moving in its orbit), the outer planets can move in and out of this 15° range more than once in the course of a single alignment or aspect, though correlations are generally in evidence from the first time the planets move into this range to the last time they move beyond it. Also, the concurrence or overlapping of other major planetary alignments affects the range of this operative orb, and the archetypal character of the coinciding events shows corresponding complexities and inflections.
2. Among countless possible examples from either period, this decree by the French Revolutionary Convention in the 1790s is a characteristic reflection of the era’s historical self-awareness and the epochal transformation a revolutionary generation believes it is responsible for realizing:
The French nation, oppressed, degraded during many centuries by the most insolent despotism, has finally awakened to a consciousness of its rights and of the power to which its destinies summon it…. It wishes its regeneration to be complete, in order that its years of liberty and glory may betoken still more by their duration in the history of peoples than its years of slavery and humiliation in the history of kings. (Cited in J. Barzun, “The French Revolution,” in Columbia History of the World, ed. J. A. Garraty and P. Gay [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], p. 771)
3. See I. Bernard Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 209, 212. The 1790s brought the definitive replacement, outside astronomy, of the earlier meaning of “revolution” as a cyclical return to an earlier condition on the model of planetary revolutions, as in Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,” 1543). Cohen’s work provides a valuable survey of the complex historical relationship between these two meanings and of the long evolution of usage during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries when the two meanings were ambiguously juxtaposed and combined.
4. The juxtaposition of the historical past and the breaking present, and the fluid movement back and forth between literal and archetypal, individual and collective, was characteristic of the Rolling Stones’ music at that time, as it was of the era’s self-consciousness generally:
Everywhere I hear the sound of marching charging feet….
’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street….
Think the time is right for a palace revolution….
But what can a poor boy do, except to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band.
Cf. Sympathy for the Devil, Jumping Jack Flash (both 1968), Gimme Shelter, Midnight Rambler (both 1969).
5. As we will see in Part V, this historical sequence was characteristic of the larger interweaving of planetary cycles in which, for example, major sustained developments initiated during the long period of a Uranus-Pluto alignment subsequently came to a crisis and breakdown of some kind when Saturn moved into hard-aspect alignment with Uranus. Here, the wave of heightened abolitionist activity and other political and social developments during the 1845–56 period led to the Civil War, which began when Saturn moved into square alignment with Uranus in 1861. A similar pattern was visible in the sustained surge of radical impulses and activities in Russian political life during the 1896–1907 Uranus-Pluto opposition (including the founding of the Bolshevik party by Lenin and Trotsky and the Revolution of 1905–06), which led to the Bolshevik Revolution when Saturn moved into opposition to Uranus in 1917.
6. “A number of historians—among them Roger B. Merriman (1938), H. R. Trevor-Roper (1959), E. Hobsbawm (1954), and J. M. Goulemot (1975)—have called attention to the almost simult
aneous occurrence of revolts, uprisings, or revolutions in different parts of Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century—in England, France, the Netherlands, Catalonia, Portugal, Naples, and elsewhere. This was obviously a time of crisis and instability, and it would almost seem that there was a general revolution, of which the geographically separate events were but individual manifestations” (Cohen, Revolution in Science, p. 77).
7. After noting that revolutionary developments in science were taking place in the same general era as the widespread revolutionary political events of the mid-seventeenth century, Cohen adds: “But so far as I know, no one has linked the Scientific Revolution to the other revolutions that occurred in that same century, or speculated that the revolutionary spirit which moved in the realm of politics might have been the same as that which caused upheavals in the sciences” (Revolution in Science, p. 78). Readers of Cohen’s meticulous work will immediately note the extraordinarily consistent correlation of the major revolutionary epochs and events he recognizes as paradigmatic, in both the intellectual and political realms, with the cyclical sequence of Uranus-Pluto conjunctions and oppositions discussed here: the English Revolution, the French Revolution, the 1848 revolutions, the 1960s; Copernicus and Vesalius; Kepler, Galileo, and Gilbert; Descartes and Boyle; Lavoisier and Hutton; Faraday and Maxwell; Marx and Engels; Darwin and Wallace; Planck, Einstein, and Freud; plate tectonics and Kuhn; and so forth. Further significant correlations of a more precisely timed character with Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and others are discussed in the section on the Jupiter-Uranus cycle.
8. The diachronic sequence of correlations of the Uranus-Pluto cycle with significant historical developments in the power of the press, the struggle to establish freedom of the press, and the emergence of mass communication can be quickly sketched: The conjunction of 1960–72 coincided with an unprecedented flourishing of the underground press with hundreds of alternative weekly newspapers suddenly arising in cities throughout North America and Europe, the influential publishing of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times and The Washington Post in conflict with the U.S. government, the new dissemination and power of the mass media generally, and more specifically the unprecedented influence of the media in reflecting and influencing mass opinion against the Vietnam War. The preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907 coincided with the new power of progressive-reformist, muckraking, and yellow journalism, especially under Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, that affected both domestic and international policies and decisions in that era and afterwards. The conjunction of 1845–56 coincided not only with the proliferation of revolutionary and socialist publications in association with the revolutions of the 1848–49 period and Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, but also with the role of the new telegraph in accelerating mass communication throughout the world, the invention of the rotary press that permitted mass printing, the founding of both the Associated Press and Reuters News Service, the London Daily News’s beginning publication as the first cheap British newspaper (edited by Charles Dickens), and the start of publication of the Daily Telegraph in London, Le Figaro in Paris, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune, the first prominent women’s rights newspaper (Lily, edited by Amelia Bloomer), and the rapid proliferation and expanded influence of daily newspapers in the United States generally during those years.
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