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Palden
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Written in 1991 and still very relevant!
In this piece, I seek to give an overview of what I understand to be the nature and essence of our current times. This is from an astrological and holistic historical viewpoint – focusing on the collective psyche and the actions and events it both intentionally and unwittingly creates. World events are here seen as symbolic exteriorisations of what is going on within humanity's collective psyche, and the passage of history is seen as a learning journey with meaning and evolutionary purpose.
Here we shall look at the 1990s and the first decades of the 2000s. It is, however, impossible to do so without putting these chosen decades into a larger historical context, stretching from the past to the future. So, I'm going to put human history into three different scales of context, before tackling the 'immediate longterm present':
1. the period from the -570s to the +3370s (a megacycle of 3,940 years);
2. the much shorter (but to us still long) period between 1892 to 2480 (a cycle of 497ish years);
3. the period 1965-2048, through which you and I are living out our lives.
Why these dates? All of these periods relate to cycles of motion of the slower planets of our solar system – Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Their individual movement-patterns are:
In their individual orbits, each of these have a cycle of relationship with one another (measured by the changing angles they form to each other):
Additionally, the 3,940 year cycle (eight 495-year Neptune-Pluto cycles) is a mutual cycle of relationship between Uranus-Neptune-Pluto. Let's look at this megacycle first.
Humans have been active on planet Earth for well over a million years but homofemina sapiens has been around mostly in the last 30,000 years. If we go back to the archaeologically-acknowledged (though debatable) roots of civilisation, we're looking at a 6,000 year time-span. Over this latter period, it is most relevant cycles to look at the megacycles of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Their mutual conjunctions (where they all meet in the same place in the zodiac – a conjunction is the end and beginning of a cycle) have taken place around -8,400, -4,500 and in -577 to -574, Nebuchadnezzar's time. The next comes in +3370 – we'll have to wait for that one!
The three historic dates demarcate three major phases in human history. In the first cycle, humanity was technically relatively simple, nomadic, tribal, localised and probably matrifocal – though there were some towns, and people were embarking on a process of profound change. The big change brought about during this cycle was the establishment of agriculture, settled village life, barter-trade, armed warfare and growing social specialisation – in Iraq, Egypt, the Balkans, Sindh, MesoAmerica and China – with all the technical, social and conceptual changes accompanying this.
In the second cycle (-4,500 to -577), urban civilisations were born in the above-named areas. These developed from local city-states to confederacies to large conquering empires. Divine rulers and priests held power, and captured slaves did most of the work. Engineering and transport, culture, complexifying thought, literacy and organisations, agriculture, medicine and religion all went through great and various local evolutions, as humanity reached out to the future – while still addicted to the past, to blood relations and traditions. During the following cycle, this was to shift, from the -570s onward.
From the -570s on, the male half of the race was undoubtedly in charge of human fate. Within a cen tury, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Zoroaster and 'Deutero-Isaiah' had done their work, creating new, universal thoughts born within the soul of their time. Proto-science, philosophy, republican democracy, banking and currency were precedentially, albeit locally, alive. Interest-groups superseded tribes. Civilisations began to dominate the world.
The trouble with civilisations is that their inhabitants become attached to their forms of governance, law, order and economy. Their cultural core (the stuff of the collective psyche) dwindles as urbanity grows, and what is left is containing walls, perhaps grand achievements, yet static. A civilisation dies unless it can transform itself: only the Chinese have come close to emulating perpetuity. The first half of the current cycle, from -577 (when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto conjuncted in Taurus) to the +1390s (when Neptune and Pluto, conjuncting in Gemini, were opposed by Uranus in Sagittarius), saw two waves of civilisations come and go: the Hellenistic (Greek and Roman), the Mexican (Olmec) and the Chinese, followed by later second-wave empires (Islamic, Byzantine, Carolingian, T'ang, Mayan, Aztec, Gupta, Mongol). All had a claim to greatness, but complete world-domination fell upon none of them – until the later arising of an upstart, amoral civilisation in West Eurasia, the Europeans.
The home stretch of the megacycle (from the +1390s onwards) started with the European Renaissance (more correctly a 'naissance'), which gave birth to a massive quantum change. Blessed with printing, gunpowder, finance through lending, secularity (merchant class power), cultural arrogance and 'two-hearted' morals, this people came to industrialise, to transform their society and to colonise or dominate every useful corner of the world, during the Neptune-Pluto cycle from 1398-1892. This was the foundation work which gave rise to the Global Village of our time. The Arabs and the Chinese had a chance to be its founders, but they were both too cultured and too inactive to do so. So the Euros did it.
So what's so special about the 1890s? We need only to look at what arose in the 15 years after the 1892 Neptune-Pluto conjunction to see: electric power, motorised transport, air flight, telecommunications, plastics, antibiotics, nuclear physics, psychotherapy, the worldwide spread of Euro-technology, the emergence of planned economies, general public education, mass production, techno-warfare, socialist parties and the final charting of the world. Here also came the emergence of early feminism (suffragettes), Third World nationalism, the New Age movement (through Theosophy and Spiritualism) and science fiction. All of these have characterised 20th century life, which was spearheaded by the two superpowers of USSR and USA.
The significance of all these is that they all are facilitators of a global awareness and interlinked civilisation, possessing a corpus of ideas which are largely humanistic, scientific, meritocratic, cross-cultural and cooperative: they are the foundations of a unified world system. The 20th century has brought an absorption of this civilisation by non-European races, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic and Latino. Like some earlier longer-lasting civilisations (such as the Hellenistic, Chinese and Islamic spheres), this has become a 'universal civilisation' (Toynbee's term), where its source-point (Europe) is no longer central and decisive, and where colonised peoples uphold and drive the civilisation.
However, the rub is this: the world system has so far been based on Euro-American lines and values. The big currently-emergent change is that the Euro-American originators of this system now must begin absorbing the cultural civilising influences of previously client-races and culture-groups – especially Chinese and Muslims. The medieval European dualism of religion and business has led to a modern secular system with marginalised religion and morals, which to outsiders appears hypocritically-Godless, amoral and crowded with double-standards. Just as the Roman empire became a multinational system run by Syrians, Spaniards, Germans and Libyans, and the Chinese system became dominated by Mongols and Manchurians, so the world system is transforming into a multinational system, spiritually, culturally, technologically and economically.
Thus, the initial tasks of this cycle, 1892-2387, are: 1. development of this global system – and a confrontation with the consequences it brings; and 2. human survival in the face of global crisis. Faxes transcend borders, the whole world wears jeans and T-shirts and Chinese take-aways are in every town. The peoples of the world are being forced to drop old, parochial national-regional realities and to face up to being planetary neighbours. Being globally threatened with self-created ecological and demographic disaster, we must fundamentally change our civilised practices, to ensure sustainability in relation to our plane tary home. The critical point of this challenge will arise, I believe, in the 2060s (at the opening 90&#deg; aspect of Neptune-Pluto, for reasons which we'll come to), where our success or failure (or both) will be irreversibly manifest. But the choices are being made now, in the 1990s, around the time of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993 – if they weren't already made in the 1930s or 1960s, for better or worse.
The 1890s Neptune-Pluto conjunction (in Gemini) brought a quantum change, an exponential leap: world civilisation was born, out of the arms of Europe, midwifed by the bickering twins USA and USSR. Nowadays we drive our Toyotas, fly our jumbo-jets, phone intercontinental via satellite, do our yoga and munch our pizzas, chow meins and bananas, without remembering how new this daily hi-tech reality of ours is! It moved into majority-mainstream only in the 1960s yet, already in the 1990s, ecological, cultural and demographic realities bring its continued growth into question. It's now clear that technological ingenuity must reorientate itself from wasteful packaged consumerism, gadgetry and 'smart' weapons to solutions which enhance natural processes and ensure our survival. Diplomacy needs to move from Euro-American two-faced gentlemanliness to a genuine Uniting of Nations, and ordinary people need to re-examine our tendencies to think in terms of Them'n'Us.
We stand at a similar situation to many earlier civilisations: having got to where we are, what have we done all this for, where are we going and what are we seeking to achieve? At such a point of achievement as the 1960s-90s, our civilisation must answer this unavoidable question, otherwise downfall is ensured. Otherwise, we will not measure up to the challenges which history throws at us, in a lethal historical mix. Our emperors and priests have gone, and what we are left with is the voice of the people: 5-6 billion of us, increasing by one billion in the 1990s. What we need to do is to evolve constitutions and procedures, macro- and micro-scale, where people may be heard, and governments may have feedback – known as transparency.
We stand today in the early stages of the current 495-year cycle (one century gone and four to go), and various scenarios for our longterm future are visible. Note that these are hypothetical scenarios, reflecting current fears and hopes perhaps more than future realities, and that they are not presented in order of probability:
Personally, I tend to choose the 'lib-dem transformation' scenario, although I do not think this will be as comfortable and rational as many would see it. There could be divine intercession of some sort, but we can't rely on it. Many believe that this involves bringing the whole world up to a level of staid affluence and techno-diplomatic sensibility which Euro-America currently enjoys, but my feeling is that a considerable reduction in affluence of developed countries will be needed, to balance and reduce world resource-use, differentials and insecurities.
World change occurs only partially through discussion and legislation: critical issues get worked out mainly through force of events. The collective unconscious tends to intervene in institutional, normal reality, however reformist, to bring out a more chaotic though natural correction of past ills. One paradox is that, whenever liberal reform lightens the oppression of the past, complicating issues bubble up amongst ordinary folk or in critical departments of the social system, to overwhelm any rational, stagewise changes which might be instituted from above – an example being the arising of the 'nationalities question' in USSR at the time when perestroika was declared, which demanded larger changes than the reforming central government was willing to bring about. The result was the breakup of the Soviet Union and its virtual take-over by gangsters.
This complicating factor is perhaps Ber today than it has been for a long time. A parallel is to be found in the immigration of barbarians into the Roman Empire, which itself was belatedly and half-heartedly seeking to reform itself in the +300s-400s (Constantine's reorganisation), leading to the eventual disastrous downfall of Western civilisation and Romanitas. Our capacity (or incapacity) to deal with such B tangential influences through legislation, diplomacy and consensus is likely to be decisive in the next few decades: disorder, insecurity and inability to execute changes leads either toward disintegration or to an outbreak of militant totalitarianism, both of which can stall reform and change.
There is no way an astrologer can (or should) predict which way things are going to go, but it is possible to forecast energy-conditions and potentialities and to point out possibilities, in the light of past patterns and current likelihoods. These words are being written at a time (early 1991) when things are very much in the balance: the 1989 triumph of liberal-democratic ideals are at grave risk of being eroded and overtaken by belligerent, schismatic and oppressive forces, and the early 1990s are likely to be decisive in this. The problem is that liberal reform relaxes social control, releasing crime, divergence and unrest, while conservative authoritarianism, often successful in suppressing disorder, creates exacerbated problems for later times.
All problems cannot be resolved overnight, but great progress can be made over a half-century – which in history is a short time. My qualified astrological guesstimate would put the 'midnight hour' of the current world crisis in the 2040s-60s – the period lying between the next Uranus-Pluto opposition (180&#deg;, 2040s) and the Neptune-Pluto square (90&#deg;, 2060s) – and it just so happens that the current scientific understanding of population demographics, climate change, ecological and social factors tends also to put the crunch-point in the 2040s. But the 1990s are decisive, since we now have to make the necessary plans, policy decisions and remedial actions to prevent future disaster. We're already 20-30 years too late, but perhaps not irredeemably so. The choices now being made are of the ultimate kind. And their effects will visibly unfold in the ensuing decades. But the end of the 21st century will not be reached without radical action.
At all times, humanity has choice in the matter of creation of future history. This choice increases at certain times – at what I call power periods in history – when the collective unconscious of humanity is stirred up, to erupt outwards as fundamental or quantum social, psycho-spiritual and historical changes. These periods take place at times when the three outer planets of our solar system form critical angles (aspects) to each other or, even more, when they form configurations in which all three are linked by aspect. The biggest aspects are the conjunction (0&#deg;), the square (90&#deg;) and the opposition (180&#deg;). Configurations are also stepped up if they involve the somewhat faster-moving planets Jupiter (on a 12-year cycle), Saturn (29 years) and the planetoid Chiron (51 years). When B aspects and configurations take place (with a buildup and aftermath of 5-10 years each side), their subtle energy-frequencies harmonise or cross-resonate, modulating Earth's planetary frequencies, and reflecting through the collective unconscious of humanity. They set up an energy-thrum which penetrates all things.
Recent examples of major power-periods are the 1890s (Neptune conjunct Pluto), 1901-09 (Uranus opposition Pluto, then Neptune), 1932-34 (Uranus square Pluto), 1954-55 (Uranus square Neptune), 1965-66 (Uranus conjunct Pluto) and 1993 (Uranus conjunct Neptune). A classic example of a configuration arose in 1989, when Saturn went over the near-conjunction of Uranus-Neptune, and Jupiter and Chiron did an opposition to all these. During such power-periods, certain conditions prevail:
All this leads to immense and profound world changes, often much large and deeper than could have been predicted – except perhaps by visionaries and seers. Sometimes these changes are needed and foreseen (although the way they arose was unforeseeable – an example being the fall of the Soviet bloc in 1989), and at other times they simply fall upon humanity – though never without context, purpose and timeliness (such as the many changes of the mid-1960s).
It's worth looking at the stages of the 495-year Neptune-Pluto cycle we are in:
If the task of this whole 495-year cycle (the opposition is the half-way point) is the building and integration of a global society, embodying a set of values which enhance life and induce cooperation with nature and between humans, then the essential building of this order will need to have been done by the 2130s – if not, we'll betray the drift of our current history.
Having built ourselves a vehicle with which to achieve something, what shall we achieve? This is the question for the second half of the cycle, which lasts from 2140-2480. During the previous Neptune-Pluto opposition of 1644-48 Baroque, war-weary Europe was re-carved at the Peace of Westphalia, the English Civil War and the French Fronde were afoot, serious colonialism entered a new phase, the Manchu Ch'ing dynasty began in China, and the scientific revolution was laying the foundation for the later industrial and technological revolutions.
All this is rather large-scale, but it is important to look at things this way. It puts our current history into perspective: we are in the earlier stages of a very long journey, where the issues look as if they concern global coexistence, technological and ecological sustainability, cultural cross-fertilisation, psycho-spiritual growth-breakthrough and the handling of immense challenges on a mammoth scale. We have a potential maturing of the purpose of human history, wherein the pains and learnings we have gone through could be coming to fruition: if not, we humans are a dying breed.
The directions taken during the long sextile (60&#deg;) phase (1950-2030) are vital, since progress or failure will be determined by them, to be tested at the square aspect in the 2060s. This sextile-period is a drawn-out phase of youthful growth of the stem of a plant, and its proper rooting in the soil. The square is a major crisis of manifestation (an emergence from youth) in which the plant begins to approach flowering. Our grandchildren and their children will be dealing with it.
Since we are already well in the closing half (1390s-3370s) of the current 3,940-year megacycle, we are, in this much larger context, dealing with the results of our past actions – even though, in the context of the smaller 495-year cycle, we are currently opening up the future. We are nowhere near the conclusion of the megacycle, but the climax, in the 1390s, marked the end of the 'Light Ages' of most parts of the world except Europe, and the beginning of the European Renaissance, which led Europe to forcefully create the preconditions for the Global Village. This putting into place of these preconditions took place in one 495-year cycle, ending 1892. The end of the current cycle in the 2380s will mark the beginning of the closing quarter of this trans-millennial megacycle. I do inherently assume a peaceful and completed end to human life on planet Earth, and I have preferences, but have no idea when this might take place: speculation can go too far, and humanity plays a strange poker game!
As in the case of individuals, the hurts and contradictions of the past are never simply forgotten or dropped – they become buried in the unconscious. They linger as potential or dormant cancers in the psychic body of humanity, awaiting conditions in which to emerge. For example, the white race currently bears a burden of guilt for the atrocities it has perpetrated on people of the world in recent centuries. Unconsciously it seeks to redeem this through foreign aid (often ineffective), political influence (often overbearing), economic support (often expensive to repay), cultural export (Coca-Cola and Perry Mason) and non-white immigration into industrial countries.
I am assuming that the root-wish of all humans, when all obscurations are removed, is basic happiness, fulfilment, peace, security, creativity and a sense of divinity. If this is what the human race seeks, it comes only through a clearing of pain from the world psyche, awakening true human greatness, wholesome, creative and liberating qualities for all, without exception. These ills are cleared out of the world psyche by our dealing well with situations where we are put to the test, where we make historical choices applied to specific situations.
One such current ill is the antipathy between Islamic and Euro-American peoples. Both peoples live in the unconscious shadow of the Crusades, the centuries-long Arab-Ottoman threats to Europe, the indebtedness Europe owes to Islam for transmitting ancient and classical knowledge to us during the Renaissance, and the havoc wreaked on the Middle East by oil-hungry imperialists. The threatening and paranoiac relationship of Islamic and post-Christian peoples makes for a major knot in the world psyche, affecting the fates even of Chinese and Peruvians.
In the 2000s, we are needing to address a bundle of gigantic questions which we have hitherto avoided. We need, I believe, to embark on a timetabled, planned programme of world reform-transformation effort, with at least a 50-year perspective. Beyond this, the future of the world is anybody's guess – a practical mega-exercise in applied Chaos Theory! We need to embark on a state of mobilisation akin to our dedicated war efforts – except without the warfare. All hands on deck.
The name of the game from the 1990s onwards is cooperation and constructiveness – or collapse and disaster – worldwide. Circumstances will precipitate such action by necessity. Several rules are likely to hold true:
We are now in a crucial testing period (but not a zenith) of the whole history of civilisation. Civilisations have been through similar testing points before, but the difference today is that the issues and effects are global and potentially disastrous in extent. It does not require an astrologer or historian to point this out, since many aware people seem to know it in their bones – even if they might not know what to do about it!
Having looked at the large perspective on our current time, let's narrow things down to the period within the span of our own lifetimes – which is what matters to us.
Let us now look at a shorter time period, based on a different cycle, the Uranus-Pluto cycle. Uranus and Pluto last conjuncted in 1965-66 in Virgo, and they are now passing through their opening half-cycle, to reach opposition (180&#deg;) in 2046-8, in Virgo-Pisces: people born in the 1960s will experience this historical 'hemicycle' to be synchronised with their personal life-cycles – in the late 2040s they will be in octogenarians.
Neptune-Pluto cycles tend to influence our collective experience of total reality like an underlying engine of history, a basic pulse lasting nearly 500 years. The major aspects of the shorter Uranus-Pluto cycles (111 and 143 years, alternating) have a mutative, eruptive, stimulating and innovative effect, creating unprecedented new alternatives into the mainstream of society and history. Individual genius, popular revolt, radicalism or sheer dire necessity (the mother of invention) tend to be the media of change in these cycles. Since this can sometimes be forceful and shocking, polarisation grows between people favouring change and people or authorities opposing it – whoever 'wins' in the short-term often 'loses' in the longterm. Major aspects of these planets shake up the world, planting seeds which can appear tangential or extreme, yet become centrally appropriate in the course of time. In 1965-66 (the Uranus-Pluto conjunction), it was cranky to be vegetarian: by the time of the semisquare (45&#deg;) in 1986-7, it was well-known as a valid dietary option, and meat-eaters were beginning to get defensive.
Let's look back a bit. The Uranus-Pluto opposition of 1792-4 (Leo-Aquarius) brought the French Revolution, after a conjunction in 1710 in Leo had reinforced royalty, cabinet diplomacy and a genteel, exploitative aristocratic status quo which was to characterise the 1700s. After a period of European peace, the French revolutionaries reintroduced large-scale warfare (behind Napoleon), and broadcast Europe-wide the new idea of human rights, constitutionalism and a law applying equally to all.
The following conjunction of 1850-51 (in Aries) saw bourgeois revolutions in most European states (1848), the extension of USA to the West Coast, the start of the industrialisation of Japan, Germany, USA and Russia, decline for the Ottoman empire, and the self-congratulatory Great Exhibition of London.
The subsequent opposition of 1901-2 (Sagittarius-Gemini) brought flight, the electrical age, radio, Quantum Theory, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams and set off the 20th century. Approaching were the first hints of the impending Russian revolution, thrusting socialism upon the world, and the First World War. This opposition played a part in a three-wave period of intensity – 1892-3 Neptune-Pluto conjunction, the 1901-2 Uranus-Pluto opposition and the Uranus-Neptune opposition in 1907-10 (Capricorn-Cancer).
The 1965-6 Uranus-Pluto conjunction (in Virgo) brought the high-tech nuclear age, the 'space race' and Moon landing, Silent Spring and Strontium-90 in milk, supermarkets, nylon, TVs, cars and overseas holidays. What was seeded took the form of the consciousness revolution, sparked by a spiritual technology, LSD. This was in a sense a culmination of an undercurrent going back to the French revolution: Germaine Greer, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, rioting students, macrobiotics and geodesics, psychotherapists, Tolkien and the Beatles all spelled out the message of the day.
What better symbol of Virgo's detail-orientation than the emerging microchip technology of the time? Biotechnology, satellites and lasers too. What better example of its criticalness than the student protest movement? China went through its cruel Cultural Revolution and much of Africa found independence – this was the end of colonialism, an important stage in the growth of the Global Village. The Global Village concept was born at this time.
The synchronous emergence of the microchip and the consciousness revolution belied a common historical characteristic: such synchronous events might seem disconnected, yet they often end up moving together decades or centuries later, contributing to the same historical development. Add in the 'permissive society' (stimulated by the contraceptive pill – Neptune was in Scorpio), and a historical formula becomes visible, heralding major longterm social change. We now see these changes clearly unfolding in the 1990s.
Proceed now to second half of this article
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© Palden Jenkins, 1991. All of these articles are copyright. They may individually be copied and shared with others in a spirit of knowledge-sharing and fair play, but they may not be sold, printed or reproduced in quantity or changed in form without the permission of the copyright holder. Magazine and other editors may e-mail me for permission to reprint. E-mail: