17. In the poem Keats famously confused Balboa with the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés (Cortez), who invaded Mexico six years later: “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific…”
18. During the intervening Jupiter-Uranus conjunction between these two oppositions, in 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. During the following conjunction, in 1886, he wrote his philosophical summation, Beyond Good and Evil.
19. The Statue of Liberty was conceived of and proposed during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1865 by the Frenchman Édouard Laboulaye, chairman of the French antislavery society, who was inspired by Lincoln’s death and the emancipation of the slaves at the end of the Civil War. Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the sculptor of the statue, was present at the dinner in which Laboulaye made the proposal.
20. There were two times in which Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto came into broad triple conjunction in the nineteenth century, though neither was as close as the 1968–69 conjunction. These alignments occurred at the very beginning and end of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the mid-nineteenth century. The first time was in 1844–45, when the three planets moved within 20° of exact alignment, at times reaching as close as 15°. The second time, discussed in notes 10 and 11 above, took place in 1857–58 at the very end of the same Uranus-Pluto conjunction when Jupiter returned and the three planets moved to within 21° of exact alignment.
The coincidence of the first of these periods, 1844–45, with the start of Marx and Engels’ collaboration, Darwin’s first exposition of his evolutionary theory, Thoreau’s Walden Pond period, Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and the birth of Nietzsche are all suggestive of this larger triple-planet archetypal complex. The later 1857–58 period, which extended to the spring of 1859 when Jupiter and Uranus were still within 15°, coincided with the various milestones discussed in note 11 above: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Darwin’s and Wallace’s joint public announcement of the theory of evolution and the beginning of Darwin’s writing The Origin of Species, and Mill’s On Liberty, as well as such political phenomena as the sustained upheaval in India initiated by the Sepoy Mutiny, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the United States.
Halfway between the above two periods, in 1850–52, was the closest axial alignment of Jupiter, Uranus, and Pluto during the nineteenth century, when Jupiter moved into opposition to the nearly exact Uranus-Pluto conjunction,. This long opposition (moving in and out of 15° range between November 1850 and October 1852) coincided with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1850–53, discussed at length in earlier chapters, which coincided with its own archetypally distinctive cultural phenomena that were often antithetical in character to the Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto complex. Yet the latter was conspicuously in evidence, even if always combined with the Saturn-Pluto complex. The power of Melville’s Moby Dick of 1851, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech to the women’s rights convention in Akron in 1851, the emancipatory and transformative impact of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin of 1852, the widespread cultural reaction against religious orthodoxy influenced by Schopenhauer’s philosophy after the publication of his essays in 1851, and the enormous display of technological and scientific progress in London’s Great Exhibition and Crystal Palace of 1851 are all suggestive, each in its distinctive way, of this larger combination of multiple archetypal influences (Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto as well as Saturn-Uranus-Pluto).
The triple Saturn-Uranus-Pluto conjunction, lasting from 1850 to 1853, was also reflected in the harsh conservative backlash of the European powers in the aftermath of the events of 1848 and the many measures taken during that period to suppress radical and revolutionary political movements. It was of course 1848 that brought the greatest eruption of social and political turmoil during the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the nineteenth century—indeed, at any time in the nineteenth century—and this wave of revolutionary upheaval coincided precisely with the brief period in which Jupiter was in close square alignment with both Uranus and Pluto and when Saturn was not in the configuration.
21. In astronomy and space exploration during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 2002–04, there occurred the first manned Chinese space flight; the first successful private space flight (Space-ShipOne); the launching of the Spitzer Space Telescope and its first major discoveries of early star formation and the youngest planet ever observed (in a diachronic pattern with the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope during the immediately preceding Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1989–90); the successful Mars probe which beamed images back to the Earth from the robotic rovers Spirit and Opportunity; the Cassini’s reaching Saturn; and the launching of the Stanford space probe to test Einstein’s general theory of relativity (in a diachronic pattern with the announcement of the Príncipe Island expedition’s results during the opposition of 1919–20). Also at this time occurred the first successful quantum teleportation (achieved independently and simultaneously in Austria and the United States).
In the area of Promethean social and political phenomena, besides the global demonstrations against the war in Iraq, characteristic Jupiter-Uranus events included the wave of same-sex marriages celebrated in New England and on the West Coast in the wake of the landmark Massachusetts court ruling (in a diachronic pattern with the Stonewall uprising during the conjunction of 1968–69), and the unprecedented success and popular embrace of anti-establishment documentaries such as Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11, as well as The Fog of War, The Corporation, Outfoxed, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War, and The Yes Men.
Characteristic of the Jupiter-Uranus complex as well was the revolution in the music-recording industry produced by the rapid spread of iTunes during the same period (much as CDs produced a comparable revolution during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1983). Other cultural phenomena of a Promethean character include the Internet’s rapid transformation during the 2002–04 period into a conduit and amplifier of political dissidence and intellectual independence (against the backdrop of the conservative empowerment during the Saturn-Pluto opposition of these same years), evident in the widespread influence of progressive activist organizations, such as MoveOn.org, and the surge in popularity of blogs and other websites that carry news and opinion outside the mainstream media.
Part VII: Awakenings of Spirit and Soul
1. Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences, which was later taken up by Baudelaire (born during the following Uranus-Neptune conjunction) and which linked the natural and human world with the spiritual and divine through linguistic analogy as in the tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah, was set forth in his essay “A Hieroglyphic Key” in 1741 during this Uranus-Neptune alignment.
2. Contemplating the poignancy of this passage, which was written while Condorcet was hiding from the Revolution’s punitive terror, his death in prison only a few months away, Charles Taylor remarks, “There were, indeed, ‘errors, crimes, injustices’ for which he needed consolation. And it adds to our awe before his unshaken revolutionary faith when we reflect that these crimes were no longer those of an ancien régime, but of the forces who themselves claimed to be building the radiant future” (Sources of the Self, p. 354).
3. During the fourteen months of this Jupiter-Uranus conjunction within the larger Uranus-Neptune conjunction that continued for another decade, a wave of major creative activity occurred in English Romanticism. In the first month of the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction (December 1816), the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley and of John Keats received their first major public attention when Leigh Hunt published his influential article on the “Young Poets.” Keats then published his first volume of poems, which included On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, and met Shelley and Wordsworth for the first time. Shelley published his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty and wrote The Revolt of Islam, his visionary defense of the revolutionary impulse. Mary Shelley wrote most of Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus at this time. Byron complete
d his major autobiographical poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and wrote Manfred, his first poetic drama, while Coleridge published his seminal work of Romantic philosophy, Biographia Literaria. Many other milestones of Romanticism took place in 1817 as well, such as Beethoven’s beginning the composition of the Ninth Symphony and Hegel’s publishing his Encyclopedia. This was the same rare configuration (Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune in triple conjunction) that occurred at the time that Dante began to compose La Divina Commedia (1306) and that Pico composed the Oratio de Dignitate Hominis (1486).
4. In the Julian Calendar then in use in England, Newton’s birth occurred on December 25, 1642 (Old Style), which with the introduction of the Gregorian Calendar became January 4, 1643 (New Style). Scholars have speculated that Newton’s birth on Christmas Day, combined with the absence of a worldly father (who died when Newton was in utero) in echo of the birth of another world redeemer, influenced Newton’s self-image, mystical leanings, and biblical obsessions.
5. During the crucial years at the start of the Divine Comedy’s composition, 1304–07, Dante had personal transits of Uranus opposite natal Uranus, Neptune opposite Uranus, Uranus square Neptune, and Neptune square Neptune. This combination of transits is essentially identical to what Jung had in the 1913–18 period when he underwent his own midlife period of psychospiritual transformation and creative awakening (see note 11 below).
6. Charles Dickens, born in 1812 just as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the Romantic epoch reached the 20° range, is a good example of how certain individuals born at these cuspal or penumbral moments just at the start or end of an outer-planet axial alignment seem to serve as important outliers of the larger archetypal impulses that emerged at that time. In Dickens (whose Sun and Moon were in close major aspect to Uranus and Neptune, respectively), the distinct presence of the Uranus-Neptune gestalt is evident in the sustained act of imaginative revelation he brought to the nineteenth-century novel as a genius of the creative imagination not unlike Shakespeare or his contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. It is also visible in his repeated rendering of highly characteristic Uranus-Neptune themes, such as the sudden spiritual epiphany that climaxes A Christmas Carol: supernatural apparitions and revelatory visions, the unexpected influx of divine grace, radical shifts of consciousness, the experience of resurrection and rebirth, and the awakening of universal compassion. Also relevant was Dickens’s enduring role in awakening the collective consciousness of the Victorian age to a new empathy for the poor and helpless of humanity.
7. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, pp. 430–32.
8. The complex relationship between Romanticism and modernism, the latter being at once a development and an antithesis of the former, is explored by Taylor in Sources of the Self, “Epiphanies of Modernism,” pp. 456–93.
9. To these could be added two immensely influential works of philosophy from two radically different perspectives that have shaped postmodern thought, W. V. O. Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) at the beginning of the alignment and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) at the end.
10. In addition to the close Uranus-Neptune square alignment world transit in 1955–57, during these years Salinger was simultaneously undergoing a personal transit of Neptune trine natal Uranus and transiting Uranus conjunct natal Neptune, a remarkable convergence of Uranus-Neptune personal and world transits.
11. As discussed in the chapter “Personal Transit Cycles,” the crucial period for the formation of Jung’s psychology was 1913–18. This period began with Jung’s break from Freud, the series of intense prophetic dreams just before World War I, and his sudden confrontation with the archetypal unconscious, and continued through the years of sustained psychological and intellectual ferment from which emerged Jung’s basic understanding of the psyche and the process of individuation. The entirety of this period coincided with the world transit of the Uranus-Neptune opposition. It also coincided with an extraordinary convergence of once-in-a-lifetime personal transits for Jung of both Uranus and Neptune in the sky transiting in hard aspect to both his natal Uranus and Neptune configurations. These natal aspects were especially significant in Jung’s birth chart, since he was born with Neptune in exact square alignment to the Sun (less than 1°) and with Uranus in exact square alignment to the Moon (less than 1°).
Such a convergence of world and personal transits of Uranus and Neptune both in the sky and in the natal chart is rare and suggests a potentially extraordinary activation of the archetypal gestalt associated with the Uranus-Neptune combination: as a world transit, constituting a general condition in the collective psyche, and as a series of personal transits. Every one of these alignments, both transiting and natal, was a dynamic quadrature aspect (conjunction, opposition, or square). As discussed in note 5 above, a similar convergence of Uranus-Neptune world and personal transits occurred to Dante as he wrote La Divina Commedia (except that we do not know the position of the Sun or Moon at Dante’s birth, only the slower-moving outer planets such as Uranus and Neptune).
12. In the series of overlapping alignments, the longest of the three, the Neptune-Pluto conjunction, was within 20° orb between 594 and 560 BCE, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction was within 20° orb between 586 and 566, and the Uranus-Pluto conjunction was within 20° orb between 583 and 570.
13. The First Isaiah, whose themes closely anticipated those of the second, began his prophecies between 750 and 740 BCE, in coincidence with the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction. This earlier conjunction, which was within 20° orb from 758 to 737, also coincides with the approximate period scholars estimate for the composition of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days. (The dating for the Homeric epics continues to be too ambiguous and elusive to permit any reliable correlations.)
14. The Tianenmen Square protests, crackdown, and massacre took place in June 1989, when Saturn was in close conjunction with Uranus (8°) and Neptune (1°) and when the Jupiter-Uranus opposition was just beginning (17°). One can see the familiar Jupiter-Uranus motif in the Tianenmen protests both in the heightened impulse for freedom and rebellion and in the eloquent allusion to the Statue of Liberty, which was erected during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction of 1885–86 (and conceived during the Jupiter-Uranus opposition of 1865). The archetypal complex associated with the Saturn-Uranus (and Neptune) conjunction was in evidence in the crackdown and defeat of the idealistic demonstrators for freedom. The Jupiter-Uranus alignment moved into close opposition during the summer of 1989 and was in close orb throughout the period of the rapid consecutive Eastern European revolutions in the fall of 1989. I will explore elsewhere the important archetypal correlations involving the longer Saturn-Uranus-Neptune triple conjunction of 1986–91.
15. In its capacity to reveal unimaginably remote cosmic epochs, the Hubble Space Telescope essentially functioned in the role of a time machine, transporting astronomers through time itself. This capacity suggested another characteristic theme of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex: the technologically mediated dissolving of and liberation from seemingly absolute structures of time and space. H. G. Wells, the author of the original Time Machine, was born during the Uranus-Neptune square in 1866.
16. In this light, the archetypal complex associated with the Uranus-Neptune conjunction can now perhaps be seen as subtly pervading the entire vision and tenor of the present work (which took form throughout the long period of this conjunction), invisibly shaping its themes and orientation in the same way that Flaubert (born in 1821 with an exact Uranus-Neptune conjunction) said an author should be in his novel: like God in the world, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
17. Major space and aviation accidents, such as the Apollo I disaster in 1967 and the crash of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986, showed a tendency to coincide with Saturn-Uranus hard aspects. These contrast with the correlation of successful breakthrough flights in coincidence with Jupiter-Uranus alignments: e.g., the first manned space flights by Gagarin, Shepard, and Glenn in 1961–62; the fi
rst Moon landing in 1969; the successful Apollo-Soyuz linkup in space and the first successful Mars probe by Viking I in 1975–76; the Galileo space probe to Jupiter, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), and the Hubble Space Telescope all launched in 1989–90; and the first successful Chinese manned space flight in 2003.
We see for example the successful landing of the Mars Pathfinder’s Sojourner Rover during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in 1997 followed by the failure of the Mars Polar Lander during the Saturn-Uranus square in 1999. This was followed most recently by the two successful Mars landings of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers during the next Jupiter-Uranus opposition in 2004. (An exception to this pattern was the crash of the space shuttle Columbia over Texas in February 2003 during the Saturn-Pluto opposition, 3º from exact, one month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq; Jupiter and Uranus were then near the beginning of their opposition, 15º from exact.)
In some cases, both Jupiter and Saturn were in alignment with Uranus, as during the Hubble launch in 1990, which initially failed to provide clear images due to a microscopic flaw in the telescope’s primary mirror. At this time Saturn was in a rare triple conjunction with Uranus and Neptune, appropriate to the technical error that produced a failure of astronomical vision with the hopelessly blurred images, and a crushing disappointment for astronomers. The imperfection was repaired in December 1993 by astronaunts during five dramatic spacewalks just as the Uranus-Neptune conjunction reached exactitude. After this, the flood of spectacular images commenced and continued through the rest of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction period.
18. An insightful survey of many relevant phenomena in this category during the 1990s is Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (New York: Three Rivers, 1998), “a secret history of the mystical impulses that continue to spark and sustain the Western world’s obsession with technology, and especially with its technologies of communication” (p. 2). In his introduction, Davis describes the current milieu with lively metaphors, all of which are saturated with the archetypal motifs of Neptune and Uranus in combination:
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