“Watch and listen, you solitaries! From the future come winds with a stealthy flapping of wings; and good tidings go out to delicate ears.”
Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spake Zarathustra
My spiritual mentor once stated that the entire solar system, which he rather called a “Solar Entity,” is the embodiment of Man, is Man, with the planets’ orbits serving as “wheels within wheels” turning the thinking Mind of Man, the planets themselves being the manifest form of Mind orbiting a radiant star, the source of his own being and of all life on earth. When I first heard this scenario back in the 1970’s, I thought it sounded wonderful, even plausible, although I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about, nor how it all worked.
The idea was only a beautiful theory to me . . . until I read COSMOS AND PSYCHE, an “epoch making” book by distinguished philosopher and cultural historian Richard Tarnas, who shows exactly how it works. To borrow a quote from the back cover of the book by one impressed reader, “This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book.” It was that powerful a read, all 492 pages.
Basically, the author assigns archetypal energetic characteristics to the influence each planet in our solar system exerts upon the human psyche. The archetypes are not in the energetic fields of the planets themselves, but are rather latent in the collective human psyche and brought forward into manifestation, through individuals as well as the collective body, during specific alignments (conjunctions and oppositions, as well as other dynamic configurations) of the planets. Each planet has its own characteristic and archetypal “personality.”
HOW HISTORY KEEPS REPEATING
These planetary alignments occur repeatedly and with clockwork precision, a phenomenon that the author researches tenaciously and meticulously covering every significant alignment and event that have occurred on the planet since the birth of Jesus in 4 BC, and several decades prior to that, to the present millennium, and every significant historical figure from King Herod the Great and Jesus to the Bush presidencies up until the publication of his research in 2007.
The author calls these events “coincidences,” but the reader is given the incontrovertible impression of a cause-and-effect relationship. Just to give a sampling of the author’s comparison of past planetary alignments to present and possibly future alignments and events, here’s an excerpt from his book:
From the survey of planetary cycles we have already studied we can tentatively extrapolate from previous correlations as well as from current trends to assess what kinds of cultural and historical phenomena might coincide with these next alignments. The immediately preceding alignments of any cycle tend to be especially relevant. For example, the already approaching Uranus-Pluto square alignment that will extend through 2020 points to the possibility of a significant cyclical development of the cultural impulses and archetypal dynamics that emerged during the 1960s. Characteristic themes we have observed for this cycle in past centuries include heightened impulses for radical social change and cultural creativity, accelerated technological and scientific advance, the empowerment of progressive and reformist political movements, intensified feminist civil rights, and countercultural activity, increased drive for freedom and autonomy at both the individual and collective level, pressure towards radicalization in many spheres of action and ideas, intensified ecological activism, and awakening of the instincts and nature in many senses, changes in the global balance of power, large demographic shifts, and the activation of mass energies and mass movements of various kinds. Generally speaking, Uranus-Pluto eras have tended to bring forth the catalyzing of powerful forces in many forms, the awakening of a will to power that can be both creative and destructive, and a tangible intensification and acceleration of human experience.
All of these specific themes have been strongly in evidence during past Uranus-Pluto alignments with considerable consistency. Yet as to which of them will be visible during these next fifteen years, we of course cannot know. If we consider feminism, for example—from Mary Wollstonecraft and the women of the French Revolution through the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention in 1848 and the suffragettes of the early 1900’s to the women’s liberation awakening of the 1960’s—the Uranus-Pluto cycle has been highly consistent in its correlation. The developing diachronic pattern suggests that with this next dynamic alignment of Uranus-Pluto another period of both the spontaneous empowerment of women and an intensified striving for equality and self-sovereignty is on the immediate horizon. Because the alignment is a square [90 degrees], the potential for stress and struggle in that process is high, but considering the clear sequence past correlations, it seems to me altogether likely that another feminist propulsion will infuse itself into the culture and that women will emerge from the next decade and a half with considerably more political and economic power than now. Yet one can never be certain how these archetypal forces will become concretely embodied, only that they will tend to do so in a way that is consistent with their character and grounded in the developing cultural context. . . .
The natural human tendency is to want to know that the general outlook for the foreseeable future is uniformly positive and will only get better, with blue skies as far as the eye can see. Yet there are advantages to knowing of a potentially challenging reality in advance, facing it squarely, preparing for it, and recognizing its signs and characteristic motifs, its dangers, and its positive potential when it is consciously assimilated and enacted. Perhaps equally important, it can be psychologically centering and spiritually fortifying to recognize that such periods may represent the unfolding of larger cycles of archetypal development and human evolution in a context that is in some sense cosmic, subtly ordered and intelligible, rather than arbitrary, random, and meaningless.
The overall perspective one is afforded as one moves with the author through the centuries of the previous two millennia and into the current era is the progressive nature of the evolutionary continuum guiding the transformation of human consciousness, orchestrated by the symphony of our Solar System performing the “Music of the Spheres,” all accomplished and performed under the hand of Divine Providence, whose Presence is clearly evident, as well as acknowledged by the author himself.
Each major event initiates a cycle, or advances the previous ongoing evolutionary cycle in its field, and one historic legend or memorialized actor on the world stage (inventor, artist, philosopher, writer, scientist, astronomer, discoverer) gives birth to something new, such as new ideas or inventions, or further develops and implements the ideas and inventions of those who had gone before—all guided and moved along by the clockwork precision of the repeating planetary alignments, one such occurring even as I write.
FIVE PLANETS ALIGN THIS MONTH
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn moved into alignment on January 6th and will stay in alignment through February 20, 2020. We are likely to experience an energetic jolt and upgrade from this once-in-a-decade alignment. The last one occurred in 2005.
Richard Tarnas describes the archetypal characteristics of these planets in his book. Here is a brief summary:
Mercury: the principle of mind, thought, communication, that which articulates the primary creative energy and renders it intelligible; the impulse and capacity to think, conceptualize, to connect and mediate, to use words and language, to give and receive information….
Venus: the principle of desire, love, beauty, value, the impulse and capacity to attract and be attracted, to love and be loved, to seek and create beauty and harmony, to engage in social and romantic relations, sensuous pleasure, artistic and aesthetic experience; the principle of Eros and the Beautiful; Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty.
Mars: the principle of energetic force; the impulse and capacity to assert, to act and move energetically and forcefully, to have an impact, to press forward and against, to defend and offend, to act with sharpness and ardor; the tendency to experience aggressiveness, anger, conflict, harm, violence, forceful physical energy; to be combative, competitive, courageous, vigorous; Ares, the god of war.
Jupiter: the principle of expansion, magnitude, growth, elevation, superiority; the capacity and impulse to enlarge and grow, to ascend and progress, to improve and magnify, to incorporate that which is external, to make greater wholes, to inflate; to experience success, honor, advancement, plenitude, abundance, prodigality, excess, surfeit; the capacity or inclination for magnanimity, optimism, enthusiasm, exuberance, joy, joviality, liberality, breadth of experience, philosophical and cultural aspiration, comprehensiveness and largeness of vision, pride, arrogance, aggrandizement, extravagance; fecundity, fortune, and providence; Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods.
Saturn: the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, binds, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to separate, to divide and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, loss, alienation; the labor of existence, suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of “no exit”; pessimism, inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, solitude, concentration, conciseness, thoroughness and precision, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom. . . .
This will be an intense seven weeks under the stars . . . and a fabulously exciting decade of radical change and evolution for the human species, as astrologist Pam Gregory foretells in the clip below—well worth viewing.
Today, January 10th, we have a Lunar Eclipse. Lots happening in our solar system and cosmos. I will share more from Richard Tarnas’s epoch book, COSMOS AND PSYCHE, in my next post of this new series. Until then,
Enjoy the ride,
Anthony
Email: tpal70@gmail.com
Healing Tones 