Even as many of us spend our days, in that now universal Californiaism, surfing the datastream, we can hardly ignore the deeper, more powerful and more ominous undertows that tug beneath the froth of our lives and labors. You know the scene. Social structures the world over are melting down and mutating, making way for a global McVillage, a Gaian brain, and a whole heap of chaos. The emperor of technoscience has achieved dominion, though his clothes are growing more threadbare by the moment, the once noble costume of Progress barely concealing far more wayward ambitions. Across the globe, ferocious postperestroika capitalism yanks the rug out from under the nation-state, while the planet spits up signs and symptoms of terminal distress. Boundaries dissolve, and we drift into the no-man’s zones between synthetic and organic life, between actual and virtual environments, between local communities and global flows of goods, information, labor, and capital. With pills modifying personality, machines modifying bodies, and synthetic pleasures and networked minds engineering a more fluid and invented sense of self, the boundaries of our identities are mutating as well. The horizon melts into a limitless question mark, and like the cartographers of old, we glimpse yawning monstrosities and mind-forged utopias beyond the edges of our paltry and provisional maps.
From this summary of the dissolving, disorienting consequences of the new techologies, Davis immediately turns to the religious, mythic, mystical, and esoteric impulses that are no less conspicuous and widespread themes of the age:
Regardless of how secular this ultramodern condition appears, the velocity and mutability of the times invokes a certain supernatural quality that must be seen, at least in part, through the lenses of religious thought and the fantastic storehouse of the archetypal imagination. Inside the United States, within whose high-tech bosom I quite self-consciously write, the spirit has definitely made a comeback—if it could be said to have ever left this giddy, gold rush land, where most people believe in the Lord and his coming kingdom, and more than you’d guess believe in UFOs. Today God has become one of Time’s favorite cover boys, and a Black Muslim numerologist can lead the most imaginative march on the nation’s capital since the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon. Self-help maestros and corporate consultants promulgate New Age therapies, as strains of Buddhism both scientific and technicolor seep through the intelligentsia, and half the guests on Oprah pop up wearing angel pins. The surge of interest in alternative medicine injects non-Western and ad hoc spiritual practices into the mainstream, while deep ecologists turn up the boil on the nature mysticism long simmering in the American soul. This rich confusion is even more evident in our brash popular culture, where science-fiction films, digital environments, and urban tribes are reconfiguring old archetypes and imaginings within a vivid comic-book frame. From The X-Files to occult computer games, from Xena: Warrior Princess to Magic: The Gathering playing cards, the pagan and the paranormal have colonized the twilight zones of pop media.
These signs are not just evidence of a media culture exploiting the crude power of the irrational. They reflect the fact that people inhabiting all frequencies of the socioeconomic spectrum are intentionally reaching for some of the oldest navigational tools known to humankind: sacred ritual and metaphysical speculation, spiritual regimen and natural spell. For some superficial spiritual consumers, this means prepackaged answers to the thorny questions of life; but for many others, the quest for meaning and connection has led individuals and communities to construct meaningful frameworks for their lives, worldviews that actually deepen their willingness and ability to face the strangeness of our days. (pp. 1–2)
19. Ecstasy, which during these years of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction became the most widely used psychoactive drug after marijuana in the United States, was first synthesized during the Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1912. Though, like LSD and marijuana, it has been proven in numerous studies to have therapeutic value, its prohibition by the U.S. government has confined its use to underground countercultural recreational and ritual purposes, often on a mass scale.
It was during the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction in 1821 that Thomas De Quincey invented the discourse of recreational drug use with the publication of Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Baudelaire, the next major Western writer to describe the effects of recreational drug use, was born in 1821 (the same year as De Quincey’s Confessions) during the same Uranus-Neptune conjunction exactly one cycle ago.
Here too should be mentioned the close association of unitive and mystical experiences with biochemical changes in the body variously produced, whether by visionary plants, synthesized psychoactive substances, or specific somatic methods such as special breathing or dietary practices. The enormous popularity of the use of MDMA or Ecstasy during the conjunction period of the later 1980s and 1990s, the dissemination throughout the world of indigenous shamanic rituals using visionary plants such as ayahuasca and mushrooms, the unprecedented ubiquity of psychoactive drug use among the young, the spread of transformative breathing practices such as holotropic breathwork, the wave of scholarly conferences devoted to psychedelic therapy and shamanic practices, and the popularity of works explicating such experiences by authors such as Terence McKenna and Huston Smith are all characteristic of this theme of the Uranus-Neptune complex.
As regards the diachronic sequence in this area, it was during the preceding Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1901 that William James first articulated the philosophical and religious implications of such practices in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and it was during the intervening square of the 1950s that extensive psychedelic research and therapy began, and that Aldous Huxley explored the significance of chemically mediated mystical experiences in The Doors of Perception. Underlining the special connection between the chemical and the spiritual—two seemingly distinct categories within the Neptunian archetypal complex—Huxley addressed the critique made by conservative religious authorities against the spiritual validity of experiences mediated by such substances as psilocybin, mescaline, and LSD:
God, they will insist, is a spirit and is to be worshiped in spirit. Therefore an experience which is chemically conditioned cannot be an experience of the divine. But, in one way or another, all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely “spiritual,” purely “intellectual,” purely “aesthetic,” it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence. Furthermore, it is a matter of historical record that most contemplatives worked systematically to modify their body chemistry, with a view to creating the internal conditions favorable to spiritual insight. (The Doors of Perception [New York: Harper Perennial, 1990], p. 155)
20. Alice in Wonderland, whose many themes and general character represent a paradigmatic expression of the Uranus-Neptune archetypal complex—sudden unexpected shifts of reality, fantastic transgressions of conventional logic, the synthesis of the trickster and the imagination, the ingestion of psychoactive substances—was published by Lewis Carroll in 1865 during the Uranus-Neptune square alignment of 1863–74, as was Through the Looking-Glass, in 1872. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was born near the end of the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction with his Sun halfway between Uranus and Neptune in broad triple conjunction. The widely viewed and highly creative cinematic adaptation of 1999 cited in the text was made for television during the most recent Uranus-Neptune conjunction, exactly one cycle after Lewis Carroll’s birth. The most widely viewed previous version was the 1951 Disney animation feature which was produced in coincidence with the preceding Uranus-Neptune square.
21. A similar continuity and archetypal shift between the two eras can be seen with respect to shamanism itself. While, for example, the writings of Carlos Castañeda that began to be published in the late 1960s (The Teachings of Don Juan, Journey to Ixtlan, Tales of Power) emphasized the achievement of extraordinary personal power such as that of a traditional sorcerer, and portrayed his teach
er don Juan as a shamanic Übermensch, the characteristic spirit of the 1990s was that of sacramental participation in shamanic rituals using sacred medicines such as ayahuasca or mushrooms, shared in groups that formed sacred circles, with the purpose of opening to states of religious ecstasy and psychospiritual transformation. Increasing numbers of American and European seekers traveled to South America and other indigenous tribal areas to experience such rituals and undergo shamanic initiations. Brazilian churches such as the Santo Daíme and the Uniao do Vegetal, with thousands of members combined shamanic and Christian practices and symbols, centering these on the ritual ingestion of ayahuasca as the sacrament of communion. Rapidly spreading in the later 1980s from the rain forests of Brazil to large cities such as Rio de Janeiro, ayahuasca ceremonies in the 1990s began to be held in many European cities—Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin—and in several areas of the United States in an underground manner, becoming one of the faster growing religious practices in the world despite attempts by the U.S. government to suppress it.
22. A key work in articulating the participatory turn in the philosophy and psychology of religion is Jorge Ferrer’s Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Part VIII: Towards a New Heaven and a New Earth
1. In addition to Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), see especially Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). In the present context, typical research problems included attempting to “fit” a given event into a particular planetary cycle with too simplistic and Cartesian an understanding of the multiple cycles’ complex interaction; prematurely assessing the event in question, misjudging its deeper character and significance; measuring the planetary alignments with consistently too narrow an orb; and insufficient understanding of the relevant archetypal complex.
2. As with any future event, it is possible that a combination of astrological insight, empirical observation of the context, and the employment of some other intuitive faculty—divinatory, clairvoyant, precognitive—could have produced a specific prediction of terrorist activity on that day. But I believe that the contemporary Western astrological paradigm, apart from any contribution from an intuitive divinatory faculty, is best understood as archetypally rather than concretely predictive.
3. I observed this on a personal level in the course of writing the present book, whose final composition took place at a rapid pace during this twenty-four month period of the Jupiter-Uranus-Neptune alignment in 2002–04, after a much longer gestation period of research and reflection that extended throughout the twenty-year period of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction.
4. In the course of each five-hundred-year Neptune-Pluto cycle, the two planets move into one sextile (60°) alignment and one trine (120°) alignment that are unusually long, each lasting approximately one hundred years. The most recent example of such a trine began at the end of the seventeenth and lasted for almost the entire eighteenth century, the pivotal century of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the emergence of the democratic revolutions. In the last chapter I discussed the much shorter grand trine of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto that took place in the later 1760s and the 1770s (about three-quarters of the way through the longer Neptune-Pluto trine). The century-long Neptune-Pluto trine on its own terms coincided with an age that bore the marks of a confluent activation of this archetypal combination. Relevant here, in the Western context, are the diverse intellectual and cultural impulses and the powerful evolution of the human spirit associated with those many remarkable individuals who flourished, were born, or both during this alignment: in music, for example, this alignment encompassed the period from Bach and Handel to Mozart and Beethoven; in the emergence of the modern novel, from Defoe and Richardson to Fielding, Sterne, and Austen; in the development of modern philosophy, from Leibniz, Locke, and Berkeley to Hume, Kant, and Hegel. We can also recall the many other lastingly influential thinkers of the Enlightenment, from Voltaire, Vico, Swift, Montesquieu, and Diderot to Condorcet, Gibbon, Smith, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft; the founding fathers and mothers of the American nation, from Franklin and Jefferson to the Adamses and Madisons; the major Romantics, from Rousseau, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller to Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, de Staël, Novalis, and Hölderlin.
The preceding instance of such a sustained Neptune-Pluto trine during the previous five-hundred-year cycle occurred at the peak of the High Middle Ages and lasted most of the thirteenth century, the century of Chartres Cathedral, of Parzival and Tristan and Isolde, of Francis of Assisi and Dominic, of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and of the births of Dante and Meister Eckhart. The profound evolutionary shift in the relationship between spirit and nature associated with the Neptune-Pluto archetypal complex is highly visible, for example, in the personality and religious sensibility of Francis of Assisi, as it is also in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
For the current Neptune-Pluto sextile, a comprehensive comparison of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s and the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1990s should take into account that Neptune and Pluto were in sextile alignment with each other during both periods. The Uranus-Pluto conjunction of the 1960s was therefore always in confluent aspect to Neptune and had a distinct corresponding archetypal confluence between the Neptune archetype and the dominant Promethean-Dionysian impulse of the era. Suggestive evidence for this confluence can be found in the pervasive idealism as well as the important spiritual, esoteric, and unitive dimension (Neptune) of the 1960s’ counterculture. The major role of psychedelic experience in shaping and inspiring the emancipatory sensibility of that era strongly suggests such a complexified archetypal gestalt.
Conversely, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the later 1980s and 1990s formed a sextile aspect to Pluto throughout the period of that alignment. A corresponding Plutonic inflection of the dominant Uranus-Neptune complex can be observed: for example, the distinct presence of such Plutonic themes as the role of sexuality, political power, and evolutionary and ecological issues in shaping the various manifestations of the Uranus-Neptune gestalt discussed in the text.
Looking forward to significant multi-planet configurations in the distant future: The next Jupiter-Uranus-Pluto triple conjunction, such as last occurred in 1968–69, will take place one hundred years from now, in 2106–07. The next Uranus-Neptune-Pluto triple conjunction, as occurred at the time of the great Axial Awakening of the sixth century BCE, will take place during the thirty-year period of 3357–87, in the next millennium. In the year 3370, all three of the outermost planets will be within 2° of exact alignment, for the first time since the Axial Age.
Sources
Part I: The Transformation of the Cosmos
“all was Light”: Alexander Pope, Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton (1730).
“whatever shape thou shalt prefer”: Pico della Mirandola, “On the Dignity of Man” (1486), in E. Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 224–25.
“six thousand years for a witness”: Johannes Kepler, The Harmonies of the World, V (1619), trans. Owen Gingerich, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), vol. 7, s.v. “Kepler, Johannes.”
“noble and arduously won discoveries”: Nicolaus Copernicus, De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium (1543), trans. D. F. Dobson and S. Brodetsky, Occasional Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 2, no. 10 (London: Royal Astronomical Society, 1947). Quoted in Thomas S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p.137.
“not the Earth”: Martin Luther, Table Talks (1539), quoted in Kuhn, p. 192.
“above that of the Holy Spirit”: John Calvin, Commentary on Gen
esis (1554), quoted in Kuhn, p. 192.
“towns and mountains thrown down”: Jean Bodin, Universae Naturae Theatrum (1597), quoted in Kuhn, p. 190.
“mistress of their belief”: Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems—Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), trans. S. Drake, 2nd rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 328.
“wrong in what they denied”: John Stuart Mill, “Coleridge” (1840), in Essays in Politics and Culture, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (New York: Doubleday, 1962), p. 136.
“whose contradictory is also true”: Oscar Wilde, “The Truth of Masks” (1889), in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 432.
“disenchanted”: (“the knowledge or belief that…there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”): Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation” (1919), From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 139.
“definitive and irreversible”: Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 8–9; see also pp. 3–11.
“one conception of reality with reality itself”: Robert Bellah, “Between Religion and Social Science” (1969), in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970; Berkeley: University of California, 1991), p. 246.
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