The preceding opposition of the 1787–98 French Revolutionary epoch coincided with the establishment of freedom of the press in the United States by the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1789, as well as with numerous developments in this area associated with the revolution in France such as Babeuf’s publishing of the first socialist journal, Le Tribun du Peuple. The conjunction of 1705–16 coincided with the rapid development of the press and political and cultural journalism in England. Publications included Daniel Defoe’s Review, Jonathan Swift’s The Examiner, and Addison and Steele’s The Tatler and The Spectator. The preceding opposition of the English revolutionary period of 1643–54 coincided with a similar flourishing of the dissident press in England, and with John Milton’s seminal manifesto for freedom of the press in 1644, the Areopagitica. The preceding opposition during the radical Reformation coincided with Luther’s influential publishing of his German Bible in 1534, the same year as Henry VIII’s rejection of papal control in England. Finally, the first conjunction of the early modern period, 1450–61, coincided with Gutenberg’s development of the printing press itself, which made possible the entire sequence of subsequent cyclical developments just cited.
9. Thus Wordsworth’s famous lines from The French Revolution As It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!
And from The Prelude (Book VI, 340–42):
Europe at that time was thrilled with joy,
France, standing on the top of golden hours,
And human nature seeming born again…
So also Wordsworth’s contemporary, the young Romantic poet Robert Southey:
Few persons but those who have lived in it can conceive or comprehend what the memory of the French Revolution was, nor what a visionary world seemed to open upon those who were just entering it. Old things seemed passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race. (The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. E. Dowden [Dublin, 1881], p. 52)
10. The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, stage play by Peter Weiss (1964), film directed by Peter Brook (1967).
11. The Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1705–16 that coincided with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the births of Rousseau and Diderot also coincided with the massive social upheavals, revolutionary transformation, and intensive modernization of Russia propelled by Peter the Great during these same years, and with the great shift in the balance of imperial power in Europe, from Spain and France to England, produced by the War of the Spanish Succession from 1702 to 1714.
12. Freud was born in May 1856 when Uranus was 16° from exact conjunction with Pluto (with the Sun 4° from Uranus, 12° from Pluto). I regularly found such configurations, when the Sun was positioned between two other planets, to be correlated with heightened expressions of the relevant archetypal principles in complex interaction.
13. There were three quadrature alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle in the life of Schopenhauer: the opposition of the French Revolutionary epoch, when he was born; the following square, when he wrote and published The World as Will and Idea, in 1818–19; and finally the conjunction at the end of the cycle, during the 1845–56 period when his philosophy was first widely read and began to exertits cultural influence, which occurred after the publication in 1851 of his volume of essays and aphorisms entitled Parerga und Paralipomena.
14. Nietzsche was born in October 1844, when Uranus had moved to 19° from exact conjunction with Pluto. As we will examine later, at this time Jupiter was in close conjunction with Uranus (7°) at the beginning of a broad triple conjunction with Pluto. Nietzsche was also born with Sun and Pluto in exact opposition, comparable to Freud’s Sun-Pluto conjunction though considerably more exact, which is often associated with a strong personal identification with the Dionysian principle.
15. The steep rise in the numbers of nuclear power plants ordered each year beginning in the 1960s is well represented by a graph from the Nuclear Energy Institute showing the “rise and fall of nuclear power,” available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/maps/chart2.html. The rise begins at the time of the exact Uranus-Pluto conjunction in 1965–66 and extends through 1974, when the conjunction reaches the 20° point of separation, after which there is a steep decline. The arc of the timeline in close correlation with the Uranus-Pluto alignment closely resembles the trajectories of other archetypally relevant phenomena during those same years, such as the number of manned space expeditions in the Moon program or the annual number of student rebellions, antiwar demonstrations, civil rights marches, black power demonstrations, and urban riots. Measures of other relevant phenomena show a rapid rise beginning with this period but not declining afterwards, as in statistics measuring sociological shifts in sexual mores, divorce, births to unmarried women, number of pornographic institutions (from 9 in New York City in 1965 to 245 in 1977), and the like. Similarly, in the category of industrial technology during the preceding Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1896–1907, the number of cars produced during that decade increased from 25 per year at its start to 25,000 at its end, and continued to increase thereafter.
16. In his youth Nietzsche first employed the word Übermensch to refer to Byron; the term took on a radically transformed meaning in his mature work. Elvis Presley, who embodied and anticipated the disruptive awakening and eruption of the Dionysian that fully emerged on the collective level during the 1960s, was born during the Uranus-Pluto square of the 1930s (in close alignment with Venus and the Sun).
17. The intimate relationship between Shelley’s life and work on the one hand and the French Revolutionary period on the other, both born during the Uranus-Pluto opposition, was played out in a multiplicity of ways. Shelley wrote both insightful analyses and impassioned poetry on the significance of the French Revolution. The direction of his political convictions was deeply influenced by William Godwin’s An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, which Godwin was writing in the year Shelley was born (published 1793). Finally, Shelley eloped with and later married Mary Godwin, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the two proponents of English radical thought of the 1790s whose work was so emblematic of that era and influential in subsequent Uranus-Pluto periods; both were born during the preceding Uranus-Pluto square.
18. The close association of the Uranus-Pluto cycle with technological advances, the drive for progress, and the impulse for invention and experiment is suggested not only by the many milestones in the history of technology cited in the chapter but also by this cycle’s frequent correlation with the birth of individuals whose lives and work reflected these themes in especially significant ways. Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering discoveries of the nature of electricity and lightning and the multitude of his practical inventions (Franklin stove, lightning rod, bifocal glasses) are representative of this tendency. The archetypal association of both the astrological Uranus and the mythic Prometheus with electricity (the fire stolen from the heavens) is evident here as well.
Franklin was born during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the early eighteenth century, in 1706, and during the immediately following opposition, in 1791, was born Michael Faraday, the great experimental scientist who discovered electromagnetism and invented the electric motor, generator, and transformer, which ultimately moved the Industrial Revolution from steam power to electricity. The immediately following Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the mid-nineteenth century coincided with the births of both Edison (1847) and Tesla (1856). Many individuals in the generation born in the 1960s during the most recent conjunction, being notably comfortable with high technology, have played central roles in advancing and disseminating the computer revolution that began during the era of their birth.
19. Many other characteristic themes of the Uranus-Pluto cycle are in evidence for the conj
unction period of 1592–1602 in addition to the milestones of the Scientific Revolution, the intensified creativity of the Elizabethan period, and the titanic struggle and unleashed instincts of Shakespeare’s plays cited in the text. The heightened impulse to explore new horizons and assert power again clearly expressed itself through the rapid advance of European global exploration and commerce at this time: Both the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company were founded during this alignment and sent out voyages and began colonization; both England and France penetrated into North America (John Smith on a whaling expedition explored and named New England, the French built settlements on the St. Lawrence); the Spanish-Basque navigator Vizcaíno sailed north along the California coast, and reached and named Monterey Bay. The sustained Irish rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, took place throughout the period and repeatedly defeated the British armies sent by Elizabeth to quell it. A major milestone in the history of religious freedom was marked by the Edict of Nantes (1598), which granted the Huguenots (Protestants) religious freedom in France. An interesting form of the theme of unleashing the forces of nature’s power can be recognized with the start during this decade of the encierro (running of the bulls) in Pamplona, Spain.
20. As on several other occasions in these chapters, I am here considering from a different vantage point many of the same phenomena that I examined earlier. Though the earlier themes—scientific and technological revolution, for example, or erotic liberation—often overlapped with the present category, my specific focus here is on cultural creativity per se. The phenomenon of creativity seems to be associated with all three of the outermost planetary archetypes, each with a different inflection. We will examine correlations with Neptune and its distinctive qualities and motifs in a later section. In the Uranus-Pluto cycle here discussed, the Promethean principle associated with Uranus comprises those aspects of creativity that involve inventiveness, sudden unexpected awakenings and quantum leaps, the exciting impulse to bring forth the new, sudden shifts in the unfolding of reality, brilliant and dazzling breakthroughs, and the urge to free the human being from constraints and burdens. By contrast, the Plutonic-Dionysian principle concerns more the elemental aspect of creativity—from the depths, from the evolutionary wellspring of nature and from the depths of the unconscious, chthonic and libidinal—i.e., creativity as the polar complement and counterbalance of the destructive aspect of the same encompassing and fundamentally ambiguous Pluto archetype.
Thus the dynamic synthesis of these two archetypal principles, Promethean and Dionysian, that tends to occur during alignments of the Uranus-Pluto cycle is especially synergistic in constellating creativity. Shakti, the supreme Indian goddess and the principle of divine creative power, is in many respects a synthesis of these two principles (combined with Neptune as well). Uranus-Pluto periods can be seen as eras marked by the especially vivid awakening and empowerment of Shakti in the collective psyche, as expressed in sustained and widespread surges of cultural creativity and eros.
21. A similar comparison could be made to Whitehead’s process philosophy, in which the concepts of causal efficacy and concrescence suggest the continual inheritance and composition of the entire past into every present actuality.
22. On this fragment from Xenophanes, W. K. C. Guthrie comments: “The emphasis on personal search, and on the need for time, marks this as the first statement in extant Greek literature of the idea of progress in the arts and sciences, a progress dependent on human effort and not—or at least not primarily—on divine revelation” (A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962], 399–400).
Part V: Cycles of Crisis and Contraction
1. See, for example, Robert Hand, “A Crisis of Power: Saturn and Pluto Face Off,” The Mountain Astrologer, July-August 2001 (also available at http://www.mountainastrologer.com/planettracks/hand/hand.html), and Robert Zoller’s analysis, discussed in Luke Andrews, “Prediction and 11th September 2001,” http://new-library.com/zoller/features/.
2. The Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 that coincided with the start of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race first reached the penumbral 20° point in August 1945. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, took place when Saturn and Pluto were 21° from exact alignment. At that time, the Sun was in close conjunction with Pluto, 4° from exact alignment. (Cf. the Bhagavad Gita’s invocation of the Pluto archetype as recalled by J. Robert Oppenheimer when he witnessed the first atomic explosion: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”)
3. The widespread awakening of terrorist activity in the second half of the twentieth century occurred most notably during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s; assassinations, terrorism, and violent dissidence pervaded the entire decade. As discussed in that section, the periods of earlier Uranus-Pluto alignments, such as the French Revolution, the 1848 period, and the turn of the twentieth century, all coincided with similar waves of assassinations, terrorism, and the emergence of philosophies of anarchy and violent revolution. I believe this can be understood as the disruptive awakening or liberation (Uranus) of violent instincts and social turmoil (Pluto) in association with revolutionary or emancipatory impulses and agendas (Uranus). Subsequent or overlapping Saturn-Pluto quadrature alignments seem to coincide consistently with major crises of terror and repression; both sides of the conflict often express both sides of the archetypal gestalt in complex synthesis.
4. After the major aspects, one of the categories with the most consistent archetypal correlations in historical and biographical research was that of planetary midpoints. When one planet was positioned in very close (within 2° to 3°) aspect, especially in conjunction, to the exact midpoint of two other planets, all three corresponding planetary archetypes appeared to be brought into complex mutual interaction. In October 1929, just before the longer T-square alignment they were about to enter, Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto formed an exact midpoint configuration. Uranus reached the exact midpoint of Saturn and Pluto as the latter two planets approached their opposition alignment for the first time. On October 29, 1929, Uranus was exactly—less than 0°10'—at the Saturn/Pluto midpoint. The three planets then moved into an increasingly close T-square that lasted from 1930 to 1933. After Saturn moved out of this alignment, Uranus and Pluto continued to be in a 90° square within 10° orb until 1937 and within 15° orb until 1939. Just as the longer Uranus-Pluto alignment was finished, Saturn moved into square to Pluto in 1939 in coincidence with the beginning of World War II.
5. In addition to the major scandals associated with the Catholic Church hierarchy and many corporations such as Enron, the Saturn-Pluto opposition of 2000–04 also coincided with accusations against the Bush administration of complicity in the events of September 11, most notably by the philosopher and theologian David Ray Griffin in The New Pearl Harbor (Interlink, 2004). Many others made references to Watergate during this time, including John Dean, a central figure in the revelations that brought about the resignation of Nixon during the Saturn-Pluto square of 1973–75 (John W. Dean, Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush [Boston: Little, Brown, 2004]).
Numerous other historic scandals similar to Watergate and the Dreyfus Affair that coincided with the Saturn-Pluto cycle could be cited, such as the series of scandals surrounding the Environmental Protection Agency during the first Reagan administration in 1981–84 or the Teapot Dome scandal during the Harding administration beginning in 1921 during the Saturn-Pluto square. In France, the famous Affair of the Diamond Necklace and the resulting trial before the Parlement that involved Cardinal de Rohan, Marie-Antoinette, and the court of Louis XVI took place during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1785–87, just before the French Revolution. Innumerable less historic but in their own circles significant scandals coincided with alignments of this cycle, such as the one that occurred at the San Francisco Zen Center during the last Satu
rn-Pluto conjunction in 1983.
The same pattern is evident in personal transits to individual natal charts: Both Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton were born during the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1946–48 and underwent major personal transits of Saturn or Pluto across their natal Saturn-Pluto conjunction at the time of the scandals involving accusations of sexual misbehavior in 1991 and 1998, respectively. In both cases we see such characteristic themes of the Saturn-Pluto complex as trial and judgment about sexual activities, deep public humiliation, and, with Thomas, the vivid metaphor with which he attacked his judges, “This is a high-tech lynching.”
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