Uranus-Pluto Cycles: Living into
the Troubles
If a year is a period of time
marked by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, the orbits of the three outer
planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto mark periods of time that are longer than a
typical life, periods of time that begin before a person is born and end after
a person dies. Some astrologers have thought of these in terms of generational
effects (largely because all people born in a particular decade, for instance,
will likely share Neptune and Pluto sign placements). I think of these planets
as describing periods that are generational for a different reason — these
planetary cycles reflect dynamics that occur across several generations and
thus mark episodes of intergenerational duration.
The key points with respect to
outer planet cycles are 1) that the planetary cycles of the outer planets are
longer than most of the kind of things human beings try to explain (while we
can say what happens in a car crash, our ability to explain things that take
longer than 3-5 years is actually quite limited), and 2) things happen that we
have difficulty explaining and we frequently try to understand what’s happened
with what I would call religious language or by thinking of something else that
happened that this new thing could be like.
Most contemporary astrological
texts attempt to describe the influences and effects of outer planet cycles by
using the language of 19th and 20th century spiritualism,
speaking of, for instance, “transpersonal dimensions” of self and/or discussing
the planets in terms of spiritual insight and transformation. I prefer not to
use that language because, as a religious studies scholar, that language seems
culture specific and because I don’t share all of the assumptions of that
worldview. In particular, I doubt the meaning of our life is to “transcend,”
and, in the context of American fantasies of community and unity, I am
suspicious about the prediction of any “collective consciousness.” This doesn’t
mean I am trying to be “scientific;” it just means I’d rather use language
differently. When I do use the spiritualist and transpersonal descriptors for
outer planet influence it’s to refer to
things said by and for people who think in such terms.
***
Some of the traditional images
used to describe Uranus’ influence include lightning, revolution, high-voltage
generation, accidents, the Tarot card “the Tower” (which depicts a tower that
has been struck by lightning and is collapsing). Uranus governs flashes of
insight, catastrophe, and earthquake; people who have strong Uranus influences
are extra-independent, sudden, quirky — they like explosive show, are
intuitive, are future-oriented. In our culture, some of these qualities are
prized — independence, an ability to radically re-invent oneself, the sense
that the answer to any problem is to pick up traces and move on. What the
Chinese call shen (we translate as
spirit) which means something like a thing that stands up, an in-breaking that
occurs that awakens.
If we were to think Uranus in
the context of yoga or tantric practice, we would be talking about what
practitioners call kundalini, a
lightning quick flash that shoots up through the body. Perhaps in this sense,
Uranus marks our experience of levels of bio-electrical energy our body
typically mutes or transposes, as if our body was a rheostat that made it
possible for us to know world in a functional way. I like this last, if only
because it allows us to think of patterns or dynamics of phenomena that exceed
a scale that is meaningful to the kind of creature we are. It’s not that those
dynamics or patterns aren’t there, it’s that, like the peahen who can only fly
as high as a tree, we don’t have a good way to understand a bird that is the
size of an ocean.
Some astrologers have
thoughtfully suggested that the stressful Uranus aspects have similarity to
post-traumatic stress disorders. Folks who think in terms of reincarnation will
sometimes say folks’ difficult Uranus aspects reflect war-trauma from previous
lives. Both of these thoughts suggest that trauma has an impact that “cracks”
the achieved bodily-sense of world and, at such times, we are open to too much,
to more than the body-self is meant to make sense of — the “ground” has quite
literally been shaken, the tower smashed and fallen.
Because we have difficulty
bearing our creaturely finitude, revolution and sudden freedom also excite us,
and despite its association with violent catastrophe and accident, many
astrologers celebrate Uranus and the revolution and change it’s imagined to augur.
When we imagine these, we rarely take note of the violence each entails, the
fact that these mark the sudden, often catastrophic collapse of the ability to
manage impossible stressors in other ways.
***
Pluto is typically thought in relation to processes of
death, the process of actual, difficult and slow, relentless removal, of facing
the absent or gone. It can also be thought of in relation to what fear or
hatred of death stirs in us — an intensified, ruthless desire to control, even
more passionate attachment, the fantasy of absolute control and immortality.
There is both a glamor to Pluto (in the intensification of will) and a terrible
sense of self-removal and utter self-control. As with death, Pluto’s course can
be ultimately benign, but it requires something of us, and often the more
negative expressions of Pluto are associated with efforts to desperately
control — secret police and secrecy more generally, violent self-abnegation and
self-mutilation, desperate bargaining.
Although death challenges us in its implacable frustration
of our will, it also appears to be our best image for the scene or context of
processes of inexplicable healing and transformation, for rescue out of
darkness and resurrection, and thus for radical and redemptive change. The
descent of New Jerusalem. Dreams of dying and dismemberment that lead to
restoration and confer power. In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, we are told
that all existence is quite literally
bardo — a passing between that
happens not only at death or from waking to sleep, but with every instance of
attention and awareness, as every thought blooms. Bardo, a word that may be etymologically related to the Persian barzack (barrier, partition), a word Ibn
al-Arabi used to designate the activity or actor that differentiates between
things.
Death as passage or partition—as striation, perhaps, in
Deleuze’s sense (and thus his emphasis on fluidity aS fantasy)—as the thin herm
of sand along which a shell slowly forms that H.D. sings of in Trilogy—as the poles that walk, stilt
like across Pollack’s paining Blue Poles.
As the hard stuff of coming into and having form, of being creaturely amidst
the pleurisy of star and air and matter.
***
On Oct. 9th, 1965,
Uranus and Pluto were conjunct in the sky at 18° Virgo. Because of retrograde
motion, outer planet transits often occur in sets of three — this first
conjunction at 18° Virgo was followed by two more on April 4th, 1966
and June 30th, 1966. The close timing between the last two suggests
that Uranus went stationary direct very soon after the second conjunction.
Conjunctions of Uranus and Pluto
occur every 101-140 years (this is because Pluto’s orbit is eccentric, and
Pluto’s transit of different parts of the Zodiac occur at varied speeds). The
previous two conjunctions of Uranus and Pluto occurred in 1710 (in Leo) and
1850-51 (in Aries). The last opposition between Uranus and Pluto occurred in
1901-2 close to the most recent Neptune – Pluto conjunction (in Gemini) in
1891-1892. The opposition phase of the 1821 Uranus-Neptune cycle occurred five
years after the 1901-2 Uranus-Pluto opposition and lasted from 1906-1910. I
will write more about the unique features of this particular period (1888-1912)
in my next post. For now it’s worth noting that the waning square of the 1850-1
Uranus-Pluto square took place during the worst years of the Great Depression
from 1932-34.
When planets form aspects, a rule of thumb is that the
slower moving planet controls or affects the faster moving planet in its career
away from the conjunction. The planetary cycle that begins at the conjunction
develops as the faster moving planet differentiates and pulls away. The first
quarter marks a crisis in that differentiation (and the possibility of such) in
that it marks a moment where the faster moving planet is “turned” toward the
subsequent opposition. The differentiation of the planetary effects and
influences now moves toward some form of integration (which occurs at the
opposition) and which integration subsequently collapses or disperses (at the
third quarter). This means that what emerges over the course of a given
planetary cycle is not, strictly speaking, visible at the “new moon” phase, but
only visible at the opposition, where the faster moving planet now shines with
the effects lent to it by the slower moving planet. That is, what comes to
light, comes to light in terms of the faster moving planet, which effects
reflect the integration of slower moving planet influence.
Uranus and Pluto mark difficult but also very different
kinds of change (sudden, eruptive versus implacable and absolute). There’s a
strong contrast between the intense desire for freedom marked by Uranus and the
intense subjection marked by Pluto — the planets appear to work furiously in
opposite directions and to signal very different kinds of time (sudden,
immediate versus long-term and absolute). That said, the Uranus-Pluto cycle
should describe a process by which Uranus internalizes and is brought to task
in relation to the facts / conditions Pluto discloses. Hence the cycle would be
marked by both an escalation of destructive will or as apocalyptic
transformation (sudden, absolute revelation), with the culmination of what is
realized under the influence of the cycle occurring at the opposition.
In my discussion of the basic delineations for Uranus and
Pluto, I describe both positive and negative effects — catastrophe but also the
tremendous energy and release associated with a thunder storm, the persistence
of life coupled with the fact of death. One way to think this difference is as
yet another indication that making sense of or bearing the fact disclosed (the
fact realized across the planetary cycle’s duration) is too large for us to
easily manage in personal, creaturely terms. We do rise to meet Uranian catastrophe
and can imagine at times that we could have the power of an earthquake or
storm, but we have no good way of managing the forces — even the yogic
disciplines are crude essays that often
go awry. And we have almost no way to face death and the strongest desire not
to do so. In both cases, these are forces we can barely contain, that most
often cannot be managed well.
In order to understand where we are in the current
Uranus-Pluto Cycle (begun in 1965-66), let’s look at a set of such cycles.
The last four complete cycles of Pluto and Uranus are as
follows:
1455-1456 conjunction in Leo // 1538-1540 opposition (Leo –
Aqu)
1597-1598 conjunction in Aries // 1648-1649 opposition
(Sag-Gem)
1710 conjunction in Leo // 1792-94 opposition (Leo-Aqu)
1850-1851 conjunction in Aries // 1901-1902 opposition
(Sag-Gem)
As noted above, the current cycle began in 1965-66 in Virgo;
the first square occurred from 2011-2016, and the opposition will occur in
2046-48 (Vir-Pic).
There is not sufficient space here to look at each of the
prior cycles closely (to consider other aspects to the planets at critical
phases). However, events linked to the opposition (the moment at which
something related to the conjunction is irretrievably realized) include the
following:
1538-1540 — Spanish conquest of Peru and Columbia;
excommunication of King Henry VII and
beginning of English Protestant Reformation; Ottoman expansion into Eastern Europe under Sulieman the
Magnificent is halted at Vienna but extends across
Mediterranean; apex of Ming Dynasty in China
1648-1649 — End of Thirty Years War in Europe; English
Revolution; collapse of Ming Dynasty and
founding of Qing; Zenith of Mughal Empire
1792-1794 — French Revolution; Third Anglo-Mysore War
between East India Company and Kingdom
of Mysore; apex of Qing Dynasty
1901-1902 — death of Queen Victoria and election of Theodore
Roosevelt to be president; Wright
Brother’s flight; the beginning of the 3rd Saudi State; end of the Boxer Rebellion (collapse of Qing); Boer
War; 1st exhibit of Van Gogh’s work in Paris
It is certainly the case that atrocity and transformation
can be found in any given year, and significant cataclysms (the US Civil War,
WWI and WWII, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and so on) are not tied to critical phases of the
Uranus-Pluto cycle. That said, the periods noted above do coincide with both
the excess and triumph of imperial projects and significant violent
revolutionary rupture marked by new iterations of authoritarianism. The rise
and fall of Chinese Empires in particular is tied to succeeding cycles.
Further, the oppositions that fell when Pluto was in Aquarius and Uranus in Leo
(1538-40 and 1792-94) both reflect the emergence of a new autocratic
revolutionary genius (Leo) in whom was integrated the power and will of
futurist idealism (Aquarius).
The Uranus-Pluto cycle that began in 1965-66 is the first of
a new set of cycles that will begin in signs other than Leo and Aries (Virgo,
Taurus, eventually Libra). The opposition for the phase (2046-48) will occur in
Early Pisces/Virgo with Pluto in Pisces and Uranus again in Virgo. The
opposition will occur after the most
recent transit of Pluto through Capricorn and Aquarius (see my last column).
Significantly, the conjunction in 1965-66 was further complicated by Saturn’s
transit of Pisces in 1966. For most of the second half of the 1965-66
conjunction the aspect pattern was thus intensified by an opposition to Saturn.
At the opposition phase Saturn will be in Sagittarius forming a T-square to the
opposition.
***
The “story” of the Leo-Aquarius axis is a tension between
the figure of the autocratic (or at least exceptional) leader (Leo) and the
masses / society (and the sense of self as a member of such) brought about by
or which becomes possible in relation to that leadership (Aquarius) — and the
existence of this as a fixed feature of human social process. The story opened
out in the Virgo-Pisces axis is a different one, related to a tension between
the continuous analysis and practice necessary to manage (service) otherwise
arbitrary social practices (a process that leads to or clears a place for us to
at least imagine we can realize the
beautiful life — i.e. Virgo-Libra) and sensitivity to and immersion in the
actual pain produced by and in such social practices (a process that leads to
or clears a place for us to attempt to act to justify such harm — i.e.,
Pisces-Aries).
A transit of Uranus through Virgo might portend a period of
time marked by both lightning-like disruption-innovation with respect to the
management and service of extant social practices and forms and considerable
idealism with respect to the implications of proper service in any “new” social
arrangement. This was a period of time during which breakthroughs in medicine
(birth control, vaccination) and the refinement of electro-mechanical systems
(space race, early computing) significantly altered our sense of the world
(community) within which we lived and to which we owed service. The World’s
Fair of 1964, Walt Disney “It’s a Small World After All,” the explosion of
consumer culture and marketing, the “Best and Brightest” whose analysis and
management of material systems would realize the promise of the Enlightenment.
A transit of Pluto through Virgo might portend having to
face the death of prior forms of service by which people found a place within
larger social networks, but also the difficulty and violence with which people
might resist that death, might hold on to what had otherwise become a ghost —
the violence that might be pursued to stave off that death and perhaps a new
apocalyptic anticipation given the tension produced by the difficulty of any
reckoning. Pluto’s transit of Virgo from 1958-1970 marked a period of time
during which the environmental effects of resource extraction began to be
recognized; it also marked a period of time during which a community of parents
who had gone to war in WWII according to one notion of service had to begin to
face the possibility of the death of the social orders they had lived by. The
transit of Pluto through Virgo marked the successful and violent culmination of
Civil Rights struggles in America, the long violence of the war in Vietnam, the
difficult and woefully incomplete process of decolonialization in Africa.
The conjunction of Uranus and Pluto in 1965-66 suggests a
period of time during which lightning-like disruption-innovation with respect
to the service of social practices was “lit up” by the tensions related to the
difficult but actual death-exhaustion of specific notions of the service by
which a person found a social place — notions of service whose coherence had
been exhausted. When we think of the death of the 19th and early 20th
century social forms (socialist, nation state) — however unevenly realized in
the 1960s and 70s — we forget that this was also the death of an individual’s
sense of a world into which they fit, the death of an idea of a possible social
order.
Events specific to this period include the largely unknown
massacres of Indonesian communists (sponsored by British and American
governments) in the Suharto military coup, Mao’s launch of the Cultural
Revolution (May-Aug 1966); the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama; Watts
Riots; 1st Marches against the Viet Nam War; Ronald Reagan’s
election as governor of California.
Even as there was a sense of disruption-innovation “lit-up”
by the need and refusal to face the effects of the violence of WWII and the
forms of colonialism that underpinned the war, there was also a need,
practically, to face the limits imposed on us by the needs of all (Saturn in
Pisces opposing Uranus-Pluto in Virgo). Hence, this was also a period of time
marked not only by the expression of new forms of authoritarian control
exercised in the name of freedom, it was also a period of time in which the
actual limits we might face in realizing anything like Disney’s “Small World”
became desperately apparent. This might have been expressed in the form of a
new pessimism about the degree to which any
structure or self-discipline might make it possible to meet such goals.
With respect to this, it’s worth noting that the forms of
progressive critical social theory that became popular in the wake of the
failures of utopian action in 1968 (Foucault, Deleuze, the Frankfort School)
all to some degree articulated positions that critiqued (perhaps demonized)
structural analysis and solutions, preferring instead, for instance, to imagine
totalized (oceanic, Piscean) forces, to celebrate fluidity over striation (and
thereby keep the possibility of freedom alive) or to think social process in
terms of a negative dialectics. It is worth asking whether and how this thought
actually did the work of facing up to the death of real people and the forms of
their social practice that haunts this period. Far from staging any real moral
critique of the new forms of authoritarian violence let loose in the 60s, the
call that we turn away from structural analysis might be yet another of this
era’s refusals that, like the government reactions, marked an inability to face
the deaths that haunted this period of time.
And so a period of terrible convulsion related to the death
of empire and colonialism, and of violent government and political reaction, of
rapid transition to new, supposedly more brilliant social forms and possibilities
(in medicine, in the dream of the appliance, with respect to sexual norms), a
time when the “New Jerusalem” of the earth as a single world first dawned as an
actual image transmitted from space, even as folks paying attention began to
see the environmental catastrophe we had unleashed on ourselves, a time during
which different communities of people attempted in different ways to respond to
the death of prior social form by imagining new utopian possibilities and by
thinking themselves to be the people in whom that new future would be realized,
and the violent repression of this and/or the degree to which the actual limits
of our social and personal capacities revealed itself, violently, in the
failure of liberation and anarchical projects.
In 1965-66, Bob Dylan would tour England (captured in the
great documentary Don’t Look Back),
the Velvet Underground would play in Columbus and Cleveland Ohio (who went to
those shows? what did they hea?). On December 4th, 1965, a band
called the Warlocks played at the second of Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests; this was
followed by the three-day “Trips Festival” in San Francisco in January 1966.
***
If 1965-66 was the year in which the seed of the next
Uranus-Pluto phase came into being, astrological thought would look to the
years of the first square (2011-2015) as a moment of crisis in the processes by
which that seed is actually realized in material processes and social
practices. It’s difficult news — arguably the economic collapse of 2008 ushered
in a period of crisis for the “dreams of power” (whether in the United States
or Russia, in China, in Europe, or in utopian terms) inaugurated in the
convulsions of the 1960s. We continue to experience a radical shift with
respect to social forms inaugurated by technological innovation in medicine and
media that emerged in the 1960s but we are increasingly unable to manage the
delivery of care. 2011-2015 saw the emergence of the first cracks in the
European Union, the failure of the Arab Spring and the start of what may be the
first mass migrations and attendant social violence linked to climate change.
Looking forward 30 years to the opposition, it is difficult to imagine these
“dreams of power” won’t be realized in the form of false springs and “social
catastrophes” along the lines of King Henry VIII’s divorce from Rome (and the
subsequent rise of the British Colonial Empire), the English and French
Revolutions, and the false dawn of the first decade of the 20th
century.
If you were born in 1965, and you live, you’ll be 81 in 2046
as the opposition phase commences. The children born from 1987-1997 will be in
their fifties and sixties and their children will be in their thirties. And the
people born in the 40s who were in their twenties during the 60s are already
dying and will almost all be dead. The style pages of the media like to pit
generations against each other, to assign blame, but the catastrophe of WWII
which to date we have barely been able to face was the world into which the
first of these generations was born. It’s not that one generation or another is
at fault, but that all of us experience the effects of prior catastrophe and
the onset of new catastrophe at different developmental moments, and each of us
can only do so much.
The first reaction we might have to thinking this might be
to think it frees us to double down for ourselves; and it’s true enough that
each of us has to come to terms with the fact that we face “troubles” (as the
Irish say) that are beyond our ability to make right. But at the very least,
the place to start is to face death, not as something to overcome, and not as
the indication of a power to which we must be passive, but in the deepest
sense, as life’s sister, not because life is death, but because life is life.
If there was anything I could make anyone feel it would be that. How important
it is to mark the dead, how it takes nothing from us to do this.
***
And, as we continue to dream together about what may be,
it’s worth noting that J.K. Rowling was born on July 31st 1965 just
before the series of conjunctions began. In addition, many of the leading women
playing political and legal roles on TV in shows popular in the last five years
were born during the opposition between Oct 1965 and June 66: Julianna
Margulies (the Good Wife), Robin Wright and Diane Lane, Tia Leoni (Madame
Secretary), as well as the producer J.J. Abrams (Lost) and Josh Brolin who
played Thanos in the Marvel Avengers Films. We might look to this to think of
the forms in which that seed from 1965-66, that long howl of amplified shout,
is being realized — at least at the level of myth and story.
Other Celebrities Born during the Conjunction:
Ben Stiller (Nov 65)
Bjork (Nov 65)
Patrick Dempsey (Jan 66)
Douglas Henshall (actor)
Cindy Crawford (Feb 66)
Billy Zane (Feb 66)
Jeffery Dean Morgan (Apr 66)
Cynthia Nixon (Apr 66)
Helena Bonham Carter (May 66)
Janet Jackson (May 66
Mike Tyson (June 66)
John Cusack (Jun 66)
Other Celebrities born in the 1965 Prior to the Conjunction:
Sarah Jessica Parker (March 65)
Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man; Apr 65)
Elizabeth Hurley (June 65)
Shania Twain (Aug 65)
Viola Davis (Aug 65)
Charlie Sheen (Sept 65)
Steve Kerr (coach of the Golden State Warriors; Sept 65)
Kyle Chandler (Friday Night Lights; Sept 65)
Other Celebrities born in 1966 After the Conjunction
Matthew Fox (star of Lost;
July 66)
Halle Berry (Aug 66)
Salma Hayek (Sept 66)
Adam Sandler (Sept 66)
Luke Perry (Oct 66)
David Cameron (ex-Prime Minister of Great Britain; Oct 66)
Sherman Alexie (Native American author; Oct 66)
David Schwimmer (Ross on
Friends; Nov 66)
Michael K. Williams (Omar on The Wire; Nov 66)
Keifer Sutherland (aka Jack Bauer; Dec 66)
C. Thomas Howell (Deadwood,
Justified; Dec 66)
It’s not an insignificant list of figures in terms of whom
we think our current myths: Harry Potter,
The Avengers, Friday Night Lights, Lost, Deadwood, The Wire, Sex and the City, 24.
These the stories in terms of which we’ve been imagining the
coming troubles.
David Need
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