5. The 1961–62 Jupiter-Uranus opposition had an unusual span: It was centered on the year 1962 but had an early approach in the spring of 1961 and finished in early 1963. (See end of this note for exact months and orbs.) The representative Promethean phenomena of this period closely paralleled this extended pattern. The first space flights by Gagarin and Shepard took place in a three-week period in April and May of 1961 when Jupiter and Uranus were within 17° and 15° of alignment, respectively. During the main span of the alignment, in 1962, occurred John Glenn’s space flight, the launch of the Telstar satellite, and the launch of the first orbiting solar observatory.
A similar timing is visible in the history of the civil rights movement of the 1960s: the Uranus-Pluto conjunction spanned the decade, while the Jupiter-Uranus opposition in the spring of 1961 and 1962 coincided with significant milestones in that longer trajectory. The movement was first decisively galvanized on a national scale in May 1961 when the Freedom Riders, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality and comprising more than 70,000 students of both races, began their demonstrations throughout the South to break down segregation barriers in interstate transportation. In September 1962, James Meredith attempted to enter the segregated University of Mississippi. The ensuing riots, deployment of federal troops, and national attention further galvanized the growing movement for racial equality. Note 15 below examines other events of this Jupiter-Uranus alignment that served as catalysts for the longer-term cultural movements and processes of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s.
Jupiter and Uranus first moved within 20° orb in late March 1961 and were within 15° for most of May. Because of retrograde motion, Jupiter moved back outside the 15° range at the end of May and outside the 20° orb in early July; it did not return until January 1962 (within 20° then 15° in that month). The two planets remained within 15° orb for the entire year of 1962; they finally moved beyond the 15° point in February 1963, and beyond the 20° point in March.
6. Kennedy (who was born with a Jupiter-Uranus square) made a second widely quoted speech that summoned the nation to reach the Moon, on Sept. 12, 1962, when the Jupiter-Uranus opposition was closer to exact:
We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.
A diachronic echo of these first manned space flights took place in coincidence with the most recent Jupiter-Uranus opposition in October 2003, when China successfully launched its first astronaut into space, thereby becoming the third country, after the United States and the USSR, to accomplish this feat.
Jupiter-Uranus alignments seem to coincide with not only the achievement of such feats in the field of space travel and aviation but also the impulse to do so, irrespective of the outcome. During the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 2003–04, a distant echo of Kennedy’s commitment to land a man on the Moon was George W. Bush’s call for another such landing by 2020 to facilitate a subsequent manned expedition to Mars. During the immediately preceding Jupiter-Uranus opposition in July 1989, Bush’s father when president had proposed a similar program of a return to the Moon as a stepping stone to Mars. The project was dropped after NASA’s cost estimate of $400 billion was viewed as beyond the capacity of the U.S. budget. (Saturn was in conjunction with Uranus at that time, and both planets were opposite Jupiter.)
7. Such a feat did take place, however, in earlier eras in the human imagination, and it is striking how consistently the theme of space flight and aviation in the realm of literary fiction and the cinema was correlated with the Jupiter-Uranus cycle. Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, which made many assumptions about space flight that later proved to be accurate, was published during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1865. H. G. Wells wrote The First Men in the Moon during the conjunction of 1900. In film, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first epic space flight film, coincided with the triple conjunction of 1968–69. George Lucas’s Star Wars was produced during the succeeding opposition of 1976–77 (released in May 1977, two months after the opposition ended). The following conjunction of 1983 coincided with The Right Stuff, which was based on the first astronauts’ space flights (which had occurred during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1961–62).
In a related category, Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech of March 1983, in which he set forth his technological fantasy of a nuclear space defense system, took place during the same Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1983 (and coincided as well with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1981–84 and the greatly intensified Cold War tensions and fears of a nuclear Armageddon that dominated that period). Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “Balloon Hoax,” in which he published a widely believed newspaper report about a supposed transatlantic balloon flight that landed on the coast of South Carolina, took place during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1844–45 (cf. the Wright brothers’ first flights on the coast of North Carolina during the conjunction of 1900 and Lindbergh’s actual transatlantic flight during the conjunction of 1927).
8. The extraordinary conjunction of the Sun, Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto at Descartes’s birth on March 31, 1596, was also aligned in conjunction with Mercury—aptly paralleled by Descartes’s fundamental assertion of the cogito and rationality as both the foundation for the identity of the autonomous self and the method for establishing its existence: “I think, therefore I am.”
9. The specific milestones were Jeremy Bentham’s Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), the classic exposition of Utilitarianism; David Ricardo’s On The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), the most important work in economic theory between Adam Smith and Marx; Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous nine-month visit to the United States (1831), which resulted in his classic political analysis, Democracy in America. During the period of the next conjunction (1844–45), Marx and Engels began their historic association: They met in Paris in August 1844, collaborated on Die heilige Familie, the first statement of the theory of Marxist communism, and published it in February 1845. During this same fertile period, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, while Marx wrote what are now known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and the Theses on Feuerbach, which set forth the philosophical foundations of Marx’s thought. Fourteen years later, during the next conjunction (1858–59), John Stuart Mill—heir to Hume, Bentham, Ricardo, and Tocqueville—published his most renowned and most conspicuously Promethean work, On Liberty.
10. The conjunction centered on the year 1858 was astronomically unusual in that, because of their apparent retrograde movements relative to each other, Jupiter and Uranus were within 15° of exact conjunction in three separate periods between July 1857 and March 1859 (July to October 1857, February to August 1858, and December 1858 to March 1859), approximately fourteen months spread out over a twenty-month period. Wagner began the composition of Tristan in August 1857 near the beginning of the conjunction and completed it twenty-four months later. The Darwin-Wallace announcement of the theory of evolution occurred during the central segment of the conjunction in July 1858, while John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty was published during the last segment in March 1859.
The Jupiter-Uranus conjunction centered on the year 1803 that coincided with the Eroica was another case of this kind. The alignment first moved within 15° in October 1802 and finally left it in July 1804. This extended period of the conjunction closely coincided with the full span of Beethoven’s composition of the Eroica: The first sketches for the symphony were done in October 1802, the principal period of composition took place in the summer and fall of 1803 when the conjunction was exact, and he completed the final fair copy by April of 1804.
Generally speaking, I found that such discontinuous alignments tended to coincide with archetypally relevant phenomena from
the time the planets first moved within the orb to the time they moved beyond it for the last time. This was also true of personal transits of the outer planets, in which similar retrograde and direct movements across the natal chart positions occur.
11. As in 1968–69, when a Jupiter-Uranus alignment took place near the end of or soon after a longer Uranus-Pluto alignment, events that were clearly climactic expressions of the Promethean-Dionysian archetypal impulses that had been developing during the longer alignment regularly coincided with the approximately two-year period when all three planets—Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto—were in broad conjunction. The wave of epoch-making events in modern thought and culture that took place in the 1857–59 period closely coincided with Jupiter’s moving into alignment with the Uranus-Pluto conjunction, which began as the latter had entered the final penumbral 15°to 20° range: Wagner’s composition of Tristan und Isolde (1857–59), the publication of both Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (April 1857) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (June 1857), Darwin’s and Wallace’s announcement of the theory of natural selection and Darwin’s beginning The Origin of Species (July 1858), and the publication of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (February 1859). All five of these cultural milestones can best be understood in the context of the long Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1845–56 period that led up to their concrete emergence during the later penumbral period of the triple conjunction. The ideas and impulses expressed in these works were not only being developed during that longer period; they also all clearly reflect the characteristic themes of the Uranus-Pluto archetypal complex.
In Darwin’s and Wallace’s evolutionary theory, these themes are evident not only in its revolutionary impact on society and cultural beliefs but also in its focus on and intellectual-cultural awakening to such Plutonic themes as the struggle for existence, nature “red in tooth and claw,” biological instinct, ceaseless transformation and evolution—with these in turn combined with Promethean themes of evolution’s unpredictable variation and ceaseless creative innovation. In Mill’s Liberty, they are evident in that essay’s specific focus on Promethean themes of political freedom and emancipation, and its direct association with the political and intellectual developments of the two immediately preceding revolutionary Uranus-Pluto eras of 1845–56 and the French Revolution.
With Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, we see the presence of the Uranus-Pluto complex in its Promethean liberation or awakening of Plutonic themes previously not explored so directly and powerfully in poetic literature—the violent and erotic, the perverse and morbid, the sordid and taboo, the instinctual and urban underworlds. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which like Les Fleurs du mal was prosecuted for immorality, was as transformative for the modern novel as Baudelaire’s work was for modern poetry. Wagner’s Tristan similarly represented a Promethean revolution in the history of nineteenth-century music while also embodying the Dionysian energies so characteristic of Uranus-Pluto periods. Moreover, its character was associated with the revolutionary political developments and upheavals in European society and culture during the preceding Uranus-Pluto decade, such as the revolutions of 1848–49 which Wagner directly participated in and publicly supported.
This same period of the broad triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto in 1857–59 also coincided with significant revolutionary political phenomena in several areas of the world, such as the Sepoy Mutiny (which began in May 1857), which was the direct outgrowth of developments in India that had taken place during the 1845–1856 period of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction and bore the characteristic features of the latter archetypal complex. Similarly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction, which both articulated and galvanized the national antislavery debate just before the Civil War, grew directly out of the radical changes in social attitudes and intensified abolitionist sentiment in the United States that had developed during the 1845–56 period of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction.
12. A remarkable wave of significant works of short fiction was produced during the fourteen-month period of that conjunction, from September 1885 to November 1886. In addition to Arthur Conan Doyle’s writing of the first Sherlock Holmes story, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Tolstoy wrote his greatest short work, The Death of Ivan Illich, Joseph Conrad wrote his first story (the prototype of The Black Mate), and the stories of Anton Chekhov first received public and critical acclaim.
13. Salinger began writing stories during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1934. He wrote his first Holden Caulfield story seven years later during the conjunction of 1940–41. Seven years after that during the opposition of 1948 he published in The New Yorker his first mature work, A Perfect Day for Bananafish, which was also the first Glass family story. And seven years after that during the conjunction of 1954–55 he published Franny, the first work of his final phase of longer stories. Salinger’s most famous work, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in 1951 when Uranus was transiting in exact conjunction to his natal Jupiter, a once-in-a-lifetime personal transit that lasts three years.
14. For simplicity and clarity, I have focused this survey of the relatively brief Jupiter-Uranus cycle on the conjunctions and oppositions only. However, as with the other cycles we have examined, the square alignments halfway between the conjunctions and oppositions consistently coincided with archetypally relevant events that formed intricate synchronic and diachronic patterns with the axial alignments we have been examining. For example, the Jupiter-Uranus square alignment of 1951 coincided with the song that after years of debate was recognized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as the first rock and roll song: Rocket 88 by Ike Turner, produced by Sam Phillips in Memphis. Phillips later discovered and recorded Elvis Presley when the 1954–55 Jupiter-Uranus conjunction occurred, at the start of the larger wave of songs (by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley and the Comets, and Buddy Holly) that marked the birth of rock and roll.
The 1951 square alignment also coincided with the publication in July of that year of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which has been called the beginning of the specific youth counterculture whose end was marked by the death of John Lennon twenty-nine and a half years later in December 1980 (exactly one Saturn cycle later). It was also in 1951 during this square that Jack Kerouac wrote most of On the Road in a legendary three-week creative burst of nonstop single-spaced typing on a 120-foot “scroll” of paper he had taped together (April 2–22).
15. In addition to the emergence of Dylan, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, as well as the major milestones in space flight and the civil rights movement (see note 5 above), the Jupiter-Uranus opposition centered on the year 1962 coincided with the dawn of the ecology movement with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the start of the women’s movement with the completion of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique (July 1962) and the publication of Doris Lessing’s early feminist classic Golden Notebook, and the revolution in philosophy of science marked by the 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It was also in this year that Harry Hess postulated the theory of sea-floor spreading that started the plate-tectonics revolution in the Earth sciences, and Benoit Mandelbrot invented fractal images.
The Esalen Institute opened in 1962, inspired by Aldous Huxley and other prophets of a coming transformation of humanity, and began the human potential movement as the first of countless similar growth centers that flourished in the following years. Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being marked the beginning of humanistic psychology. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert first took LSD at Harvard, the Good Friday experiment using psilocybin was conducted at the Harvard Divinity School, and Ken Kesey, the future leader of the Merry Pranksters, published One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy. Pop art emerged with Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and Roy Lichtenstein’s first one-man show in New York. In the same year Tom Hayden and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) drafted the i
nfluential Port Huron Statement, their founding declaration that advocated student activism in the pursuit of radical social reform. Cesar Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association in the same year. Michael Harrington wrote The Other America, which helped catalyze social reform and the War on Poverty. Algeria won its revolutionary war of independence from France (having started it in late 1954 during the immediately preceding Jupiter-Uranus conjunction; this parallels the same sequence of the American revolutionary war of independence from England, which began in 1775 during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction and was won during the following opposition of 1782–83).
Finally, it was in 1962 that Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which commenced the radical transformation of the Roman Catholic Church during the Sixties. And in the Soviet Union, the landmark publication in 1962 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich signaled a new period of cultural liberalization under Khrushchev. Both of these institutions’ liberalizing phases were sharply slowed and to some extent ended when Saturn opposed the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the mid-1960s after Pope John XXIII was succeeded by the more conservative Paul VI and Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev.
16. The 1968–69 triple conjunction also marked the turning point for Miles Davis’s virtuoso side-men of this time—John McLaughlin, Herbie Hancock, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Josef Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Chick Corea—all of whom went on to form their own groups, which in turn became the dominant influences in the evolution of jazz-rock fusion in the 1970s.
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