Excerpted from:
Prometheus the Awakener
by Richard Tarnas
AFTERWORD
The Uranus-Neptune Cycle
The Uranus-Neptune combination is associated, both in history and in personal
biographies, with periods in which the archetypal--the mythic, the spiritual,
the transcendent, the imaginal, the numinous--is suddenly awakened and
liberated in new ways into human consciousness. We see this all around
us now: the tremendous upswelling of interest today in an astonishing
multiplicity of spiritual paths and traditions, in esoteric disciplines,
in the transpersonal movement, in meditation and mystical religious traditions,
in Jungian and archetypal psychology, in mythology and ancient religions,
in shamanism and indigenous traditions, in the recovery of Goddess spirituality
and the feminine dimension of the divine, in ecofeminist spirituality,
in psychedelic self-exploration and new forms of experiential psychotherapy
that effect profound changes of consciousness, in the emergence of holistic
and participatory paradigms in virtually every field, in the unprecedented
convergence of science and spirituality. We see it in the collective awakening
of an intense desire to merge with a greater unity--to reconnect with
the Earth and all forms of life on it, with the cosmos, with the community
of being. We see it in the powerful new awareness of the anima mundi,
the soul of the world. And we see it in the widespread urge to overcome
old separations and dualisms--between human being and nature, between
spirit and matter, mind and body, subject and object, intellect and soul,
and, perhaps most fundamentally, between masculine and feminine--to discover
a deeper unitive consciousness.
Of equal importance in making possible this great shift in world view,
we see signs of Uranus- Neptune in the decisive emergence of "postmodernity"
itself in our era, bringing the radical dissolution and deconstruction
of so many long-established structures and boundaries, roles and hierarchies,
so many once-firm certainties and beliefs and limiting assumptions. The
cultural consciousness has experienced a shift into a state that is fundamentally
between paradigms-- unprecedentedly flexible, free-floating, uncertain,
disoriented, epistemologically and metaphysically confused, and yet open
to possibilities and realities not even permitted within the arena of
sensible discourse in an earlier generation. Mainstream modern culture
is awakening to the unsettling but ultimately liberating truth that, as
a certain dramatist born under a Uranus-Neptune opposition several centuries
ago once put it, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Given an orb of 10-15*, which appears to be the usual range within which
these great outer-planet conjunctions and oppositions are archetypally
operative, the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of our time began around 1985
and will last until just after the turn of the millennium, in 2001 (being
within 10* orb between 1988 and 1998). We saw this archetypal combination's
Neptunian activation of the Prometheus impulse first emerging in the international
political arena with the rise of perestroika and glasnost under Gorbachev
in the Soviet Union, and in a widespread intensified urge for international
peace combined with the growing dissolution of global barriers through
communications technology. And it achieved its most dramatic impact with
the great and seemingly miraculous successful revolutions that swept Eastern
Europe when Jupiter came into opposition to the Uranus-Neptune conjunction
in 1989-90 (a conjunction that also, significantly, involved Saturn--hence
the crucial elements of the sudden breakdown of old structures, the end
of the Communist dream, the widespread disillusionment and despair that
overswept the peoples of Eastern Europe, as well as the presence of practical
idealism in the service of radical social- political restructuring).
Thus the first half of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction has coincided with
the liberation not only of millions of people from the oppression of the
Communist belief system, but of the entire planetary consciousness from
the imprisonment of the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear apocalypse.
Also appropriate to Uranus-Neptune, these years witnessed the unexpected
spread throughout the world of the Promethean democratic ideal, vividly
illustrated in the appearance in Tiananmen Square of the Goddess of Liberty
statue constructed by the gentle student rebels of China.
Of course every archetypal combination has its shadow side, and the Uranus-Neptune
conjunction is no exception. The collective psyche's highly activated
thirst for transcendence, while ultimately spiritual in nature, has brought
forth a wide range of less exalted impulses and behaviors. The collective
impulse toward escapism and denial, passivity and narcissism, credulity
and delusion, the hyperstimulating rapidity of technologically produced
images signifying nothing, the hypnotic fascination with and addiction
to image ("image is everything"), indeed the widespread obsession
with addictions of all kinds--from drugs and alcohol to consumerism and
television--these and many more forms of accelerated and intensified maya
make less unambiguous the positive virtues of such other characteristic
Uranus-Neptune phenomena as interactive electronic multimedia and "virtual
reality." (We see suggestive signs of a disruptively hyperactivated
Neptune on more literal levels as well, with massive floods, tidal waves,
disasters at sea, oil spills, industrial accidents involving liquids and
gases.) The intensified religious consciousness of the age has given rise
to cult movements, fundamentalist fanaticism, and a host of eccentric
"new age" infatuations. The dissolving of rigid structures in
the psyche permitting the emergence of non-ordinary states of consciousness
can lend itself not only to higher levels of consciousness and genuine
mystical illumination, but to destructively delusory states as well. Seldom
has the need for discernment been more critical.
Yet I believe that a larger historical perspective of the Uranus-Neptune
cycle gives much grounds for hope. As we consider the potential archetypal
significance of this combination in terms of fundamental paradigm shift,
spiritual and psychological awakening, and the accelerated emergence of
an archetypal awareness into the cultural psyche, it is useful to recall
the extraordinary confluence of events that coincided with the last Uranus-Neptune
opposition which extended throughout the first decade and a half of the
twentieth century: the revolution in human self-understanding mediated
by depth psychology, especially Jung's archetypal psychology and his deepening
of Freud's psychoanalytic breakthrough (which continued its own important
evolution during these years); the revolutions in physics and cosmology
(Einstein's relativity theory, Planck's quantum theory); in painting and
the visual arts (Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Kandinsky); literature (Joyce,
Proust, Kafka, Rilke); music (Stravinsky, Schoenberg); philosophy (William
James, Bergson, Husserl); spiritual activism (Gandhi, Tolstoy), esotericism
and mysticism (Rudolf Steiner, Aurobindo). The remarkable coalescing of
these and many other related events and trends precipitated a radical
transformation of vision for the entire culture, as well as the seeds
for future profound changes in the cultural psyche.
If we move back to the immediately preceding Uranus-Neptune conjunction,
that of 1815-1829, centered around the year 1821, we find a similar emergence
of the archetypal, mythic, transcendent, and numinous into the collective
psyche with the great age of Romanticism at its height. Here was Shelley,
reading Plato at sea and writing Prometheus Unbound, seeking to combine
the ideal spiritual realm with a revolution in consciousness bringing
new freedom to humanity. Here was Keats writing his great odes, beginning
with "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (where he compares
his awakening to the numinous mythic realm to the discovery of Uranus:
"Then felt I like a watcher of the skies..."). Here also was
Keats's influential conception of "Soul-making," described in
a letter to his brother in 1819, later to become so central to the archetypal
psychology of the late twentieth century. Here was Byron, Schubert, Stendhal,
Scott; and Coleridge working out his profound Romantic philosophical perspective
in his Biographia Literaria; Hegel articulating his absolute Idealism
in his Encylopaedia; Goethe and Beethoven in their inspired culminating
years--the completion of Faust, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis,
the late quartets. And here was the great wave of births of individuals
whose extraordinary imaginative visions would so enrich world literature
in the nineteenth century--Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Melville, Flaubert, Turgenev,
the Brontes, George Eliot, Baudelaire, Whitman.
The emergence of an archetypal consciousness, whether it takes the form
of an enhanced awareness of the ideal, a resurgence of Platonism, a new
appreciation of the mythic, or a heightened access to the imaginal, seems
especially characteristic of Uranus-Neptune alignments, and nowhere is
that more evident than in the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the 1470s
and 1480s, at the heart of the Renaissance (a conjunction closely resembling
our own with Uranus and Neptune in harmonious sextile to Pluto). Here
was that luminous period that saw the Florentine Academy's Neoplatonic
revival at its height during the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with
Ficino writing the Theologia Platonica and publishing the first complete
translation of Plato in the West, Pico della Mirandola composing the manifesto
of Renaissance Humanism, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, Leonardo da
Vinci beginning his artistic career with The Adoration of the Magi, and
Botticelli painting The Birth of Venus, the paradigmatic embodiment of
the Renaissance's rebirth of archetypal beauty. And here also we find
the births of those artists who would fulfill the Renaissance idealist
imaginative vision, Raphael and Michelangelo, as well as of Copernicus
and Luther, the two men who would initiate the great paradigm revolutions
beginning the modern era, the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation.
So also with the major religious awakenings of history. We see it, for
example, in the Great Awakening that swept America during the conjunction
of the 1730s and 1740s, or in the great wave of mystical fervor that swept
Europe in the first two decades of the fourteenth century (during the
conjunction that also brought Dante's Divine Comedy and the birth of Petrarch),
or in the birth and rapid spread of Islam under the prophet Muhammad during
the conjunction of the 620s and 630s.
Moreover, we find that the birth of Christianity itself took place during
the Uranus-Neptune alignment of c. 15-35 AD, an opposition, encompassing
most of the events described in the New Testament, including the period
of Jesus of Nazareth's ministry, his crucifixion (during the Saturn-Pluto
opposition of 29-30) and the revelatory events immediately following,
and the conversion of St. Paul.
Moving back yet farther, we find that Uranus and Neptune were again in
conjunction in the last decade of the fifth century BC and the first decade
of the fourth, which encompassed that historic period in ancient Greece
that brought Socrates's most influential teaching as well as his death,
in 399 BC in Athens--this event initiating the birth of Platonism, and
indeed of the entire Western philosophical tradition that is rooted in
Socrates and Plato.
Finally, we move back one more cycle to that epoch- making Uranus-Neptune
alignment that was joined by Pluto in the only triple conjunction of the
outermost planets in historical times, extending from the 580s to the
560s BC. Here we find the heart of the great "axial age" that
brought forth so many of the world's principal religious and spiritual
traditions: the age of Gautama Buddha in India, of Lao-Tse in China, of
Zoroaster in Persia; the age of the major prophets of ancient Israel,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Second Isaiah, when the Hebrew Scriptures began
to be compiled; the age when the oracle of Delphi was at the height of
its influence in ancient Greece; the age of the earliest Greek philosophers,
Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras.
Thus there is reason to believe that our own experience of Uranus and
Neptune in conjunction will not be without its enduring blessings.
© 1995 by Richard Tarnas
Excerpted from:
Prometheus the Awakener
Spring Publications, Woodstock, CT
|