Big Picture series Part Seven: Jupiter/Uranus greets the Future!

To read Parts One,Two, Three, Four, Five and Six of the Big Picture series, click on links below:

CONTINUING….

Conclusion

We always have the option of being pessimists, optimists – or a mixture of both – when contemplating the state of our small personal lives and/or the bigger picture of world affairs. Despite an entirely understandable level of collective pessimism in response to current geo-political turbulence and upheaval of an extraordinary nature, I think there is nevertheless room for a reasonable degree of optimism as we survey the future, from whichever lens or range of lenses we choose to view Earthly and planetary affairs.

As an astrologer I have been fascinated and awed by what the behaviour of just one planetary pair, the combination of Jupiter and Uranus, has revealed at a symbolic level in casting light on the patterns and rhythms of both ordinary and deeper time.

It is in our nature as human creatures to be forever moving forward in restless pursuit of knowledge. The historical behaviour of the Jupiter/Uranus cycle describes this well in symbolic terms. Short of being knocked off our orbit into annihilation by a large chunk of lethal inter-planetary rock (always a possibility,we have been discovering, as astronomical knowledge advances!), we will carry on moving forward in terms of the expansion of knowledge, one way or another.

Because we continue emotionally to be tribal carnivores, it is very unlikely that we will ever stop internecine struggles for dominance: so – ongoing warfare to a greater or lesser extent seems inevitable. Because we are imaginative, and appear as a species to be “wired for God”, it is unlikely that we will ever stop annexing whatever Deity our particular tribe favours, as an excuse for attempting to eliminate the opposition whose Deity is perceived as being inferior.

Whether the Ultimate Truth our particular tribe perceives is religious, scientific or political (worst case scenario, all three!) doesn’t really appear from the evidence of history to matter much, in terms of outcome. We stagger on, and will – probably– continue to do so.

However, on the very positive side, we seem to be returning at a number of levels to a profound and world-wide awareness that all life is inter-connected, that we are all ultimately dependent on one another and on our Mother Earth for survival. As the ancient astrologers put it : “As above, so below”. Resources are running out, especially fossil fuels. We must find new ways of surviving on our planet. Hopefully that will – through what looks like increasingly turbulent times in the immediate future – lead to greater co-operation, inspired by an increasing recognition that, in Chief Seattle’s oft-quoted words, “What we do to the earth, we do to ourselves”. Perhaps this is the unfolding future to which that dynamic and innovative Jupiter/Uranus planetary duo is pointing….

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This seven part series is part of an extensive archive of studies of Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions, set in their historical and mythological context, with special focus on the 2010/11 conjunctions and their impact on the lives of ten individuals at different stages throughout 2010-11. Please do browse this archive and take what you need from it for your studies or personal interest. You may reproduce short extracts, as long as any material is reproduced under my name, and with a link back to “Writing from the Twelfth House” – www.anne-whitaker.com

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Biography

Anne Whitaker is a writer based in Glasgow, Scotland, UK. She has a long background in adult education, social work, counselling, supervision and the teaching and practice of astrology. She is the author of “Jupiter Meets Uranus” (AFA 2009) and “Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness – a sceptic’s take on paranormal experience” – for details see her website “Writing from the Twelfth House” – www.anne-whitaker.com

750 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2011

Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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Big Picture series Part Six: Jupiter/Uranus, Aries, Pisces, entropy……

To read Parts One,Two, Three, Four and Five of the Big Picture series, click on links below:

Spring 2011 and The Big Picture: what Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions may reveal

Big Picture series Part Two: Jupiter/Uranus and the new world order?

Big Picture series Part Three: Jupiter/Uranus through the four elements

Big Picture series Part Four: Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions through Aquarius

Big Picture series Part Five: the Aries Point meets the Void

Spring Equinox: 20.3.2011

CONTINUING….

Summarising the patterns

In Take One, following the conjunction through the four elements over 2,500 years, we see two fire/air peaks: the rise of the Roman Empire, then a thousand years later the rise of European and later American colonial Empires: waves cresting, then sinking.

In Take Two, we see a clear innovative technological peak via the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, followed by a slow decline (the 500–1000 CE period had 3 Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions in Aquarius) into the Dark Ages with only one Aquarian conjunction.

The 7 Aquarian conjunctions of 1500 – 2000 CE correlate with the rise and dominance of European and American colonialism: with that, the most breathtaking scientific and technological breakthroughs and advances ever known. However, if this Aquarian conjunction’s behaviour is an accurate predictor, we have already entered a 500 year period of what looks like pretty sharp decline, with only one conjunction in Aquarius – backed up by the backwards shift of the conjunction generally into earth and water from 2050.

This date seems to have cropped up often in recent years across the news media, as a time when amongst other ills, it is estimated that oil will run out if we carry on consuming at an undiminished rate.

Take Three, the movement backwards in time from Aries to Pisces, offers a similar picture, with the two Aries periods in two thousand years roughly correlating with the rise of world-dominating Empires.

What next?

Those symbolic pictures when looked at over long periods of time hold a profound contradiction. If followed “on the face of it” they reveal dynamic forward motion as the Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions in our examples – viewed through fire and air, then through Aquarius, then Pisces and Aries – reveal the ‘growth and awakening of human consciousness’ as they unfold to the pulse beat of their 14 year cycle through the twelve zodiacal signs. The last conjunction was in Aquarius in 1997. This one is in Aries/Pisces in 2010/11. The next one is in Taurus in 2024. The one after that, in Cancer in 2037/8. And so on, forward, forward….

But as we have just seen, the underlying movement in deeper time, as the conjunctions retrograde from 29 degrees to 0 degrees of the signs under examination, is backwards. What could this mean?

In the broadest sense, from a scientific point of view, this could be a symbolic pointer to the process of entropy, the progressive running down of all systems. Over time, everything becomes increasingly disordered. As humans and other living beings are born, mature, decline and die, so do all the great cycles of time: so does the universe. At the end of time, points out Professor Cox in his recent UK Sunday times interview from which I quoted earlier, the “growing chaos of entropy” will stop. Then, he says, “There will be nothing. Nothing for ever.”

From a spiritual perspective, the movement backwards could symbolise the “return to the Source” which mystics across religious traditions have talked about for millennia. All things arise from the Source, and return thence. Theistic religions may call this Source Krishna, for example. Or the Goddess. Or Allah, or God. Non-theistic religions like Buddhism might call it Emptiness, the Void. And modern science might call it the Quantum Vacuum. Take your pick……

At a more mundane level other possible interpretations of backwards motion, as illustrated by the planetary cycles under discussion, may be put forward:

By the time Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions return to occur only in earth and water, roughly from 2050 to 2400 or so, we may have to use our exploratory and innovatory energies in the service not of “progress” as was the case from 1500–1850, but of survival. We may by then be a species on a planet seriously damaged by the shadow side of the Jupiter/Uranus combination: arrogant pursuit of exploration and innovation regardless of the physical, emotional and spiritual cost.

On the other hand, taking a more upbeat view, the conjunction’s move back through earth and water may bring a paradigm shift involving reinterpretation of what it actually means to be human, resulting from changes wrought by the revolution which is already taking place in genetic modification and cloning. Perhaps we will see the beginnings of the evolution of a new humanoid species where micro-technology implants into the human body, and genetic tailoring, will vastly extend the range of which we are capable?

Given life’s eternally paradoxical nature, we can probably expect to see both those facets unfolding simultaneously……

Conclusion: TO BE CONTINUED

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800 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2011
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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Big Picture series Part Five: the Aries Point meets the Void

To read Parts One,Two, Three and Four of the Big Picture series, click on links below:

Spring 2011 and The Big Picture: what Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions may reveal

Big Picture series Part Two: Jupiter/Uranus and the new world order?

Big Picture series Part Three: Jupiter/Uranus through the four elements

Big Picture series Part Four: Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions through Aquarius

CONTINUING….

One day a few months ago, I happened to return to Michelsen’s “Tables of Planetary Phenomena” to indulge my curiosity regarding the historical pulse beat of Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions in Aries and Pisces. I had been reflecting on the contradiction inherent in the conjunction’s first pass at 0 degrees Aries, a point of huge power and surging cardinal force, followed by its slide backwards into the deeply mysterious, diffuse Piscean tides. Aries, the dynamic beginning of the cycle of life: Pisces, the ending – great dissolver of all earthly action back into the great Universal, the Void, the Quantum Vacuum, God, Allah, Krishna, the Goddess, the Divine……what does this contradiction mean, in essence?

Our world, as ever, has been vividly reflecting this prevailing planetary symbolism, as illustrated by just three Big Picture examples – from sea, scientific exploration and social upheaval:

Undersea disruption has been a major feature of this period, producing the world’s worst oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, a few weeks before the 0 degrees Aries first meeting of Jupiter/Uranus on 8 June that year. This caused huge damage both to the marine environment and to the local economy until the spill was finally capped on 19 September 2010, and the conjunction’s retrograde meeting at 29 degrees Pisces.

So has the success of the incredible power of the CERN Large Hadron Collider in beginning to collect data which delves into the mysteries of eg dark matter. To quote the populist UK scientist Brian Cox:“ The LHC is operating in a space where our understanding of physics breaks down……we don’t know where mass comes from, and we don’t know about dark matter. There are lots of theories that predict what it should be and that LHC is designed to find out.” (UK Sunday Times, 27.2.11)

There also seems to have been a rise in aggressively militant atheism, which requires its shadow opposite of equally angry and destructive religious fundamentalism to keep both poles energised. There is a sense that religiosity, a sense of the numinous, is still as alive in the human soul and the human community as it has always been. The problem is that old forms seem to be raging and dying as they dissolve in the tide of rising secularism and scientism. What is to take their place?

With those thoughts in mind I delved once more into the vast range of data in Michelsen’s “Tables of Planetary Phenomena” (a book no research-minded astrologer should be without!). What I found backed up the general picture of the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction’s behaviour viewed first through the lens of the four elements, then the sign of Aquarius: a pattern of rise and fall, initiatory energy for several hundred years followed by dissolution, all against an overall backwards motion.

Looking at the period from 76 CE to 2010 CE, roughly two millennia, a definite picture emerges. The conjunction retrogrades from 29 degrees Aries to 0 degrees Aries between 76 CE and 588 CE, roughly spanning the time of the Roman Empire.

By the end of this period, Europe had begun its long dissolution into barbarism and darkness, symbolised by the conjunction retrograding from the end of Pisces to its very last appearance at 1 degree Pisces in 1334 CE. 29 degrees Aries had re-appeared around eighty years before in 1264 CE, representing the beginning of Europe’s climb out of the Dark Ages toward the Renaissance at the end of the 13th century, when wisdom carefully preserved by Muslim culture during the times of darkness began to seep into a Europe exhausted and depleted in the aftermath of the Crusades which lasted from 1095-1291.

That long and bloody period of religiously-fuelled savagery occurred during the latter part of the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction’s long sojourn in Pisces.

The next journey of the conjunction through Aries, begun in 1264 CE, completed in June 2010. This spans the rise and dominance of European and American imperialism. But, as the conjunction begins its long period of dissolution into Pisces which will last several hundred years (Michelson only takes us to 2093 and the 24 degrees Pisces conjunction!) we are seeing the decline of European and American power, as economic dominance shifts to the east.

We are also seeing the rise of the shadow side of our rational and secular age: worldwide, organised terrorist activity running on the politics of hatred and division, fuelled by economic disadvantage – and fundamentalist religious belief. As Bob Dylan pointed out in one of his great sixties songs “God on our side”: that ancient human habit of annexing God (or whatever name under which the Divine appears throughout the cultures of the world) to justify appalling cruelty and destructive inhumanity, is still alive and well in the psyche of our species.

Summarising the patterns:

TO BE CONTINUED

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850 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2011
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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Big Picture series Part Four: Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions through Aquarius

To read Parts One,Two and Three of the Big Picture series, click on links below:

Spring 2011 and The Big Picture: what Jupiter/Uranus conjunctions may reveal

Big Picture series Part Two: Jupiter/Uranus and the new world order?

Big Picture series Part Three: Jupiter/Uranus through the four elements

CONTINUING….

Take Two: the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction in Aquarius

In “Jupiter Meets Uranus” I made a strong case for the conjunction in Aquarius being “the one most powerfully connected to particularly radical and disruptive social, political and technological shifts”.(p.33) I then returned to examining the Big Picture from 500 BCE to 2500 CE for a second time, creating a table on this occasion which revealed the number of these Aquarian conjunctions throughout each 500 year block. My results were very, very interesting.

The time block which had the most Aquarian conjunctions, ie 7, was 1500 – 2000 CE: “the most innovative, expansive, technologically sophisticated and disruptive in human history!” (p.37)

The runner-up for the most conjunctions in Aquarius was 0–500 CE, with 6. This time roughly spans the period of the rise, dominance and fall of another highly sophisticated technological civilisation already mentioned: the Roman Empire.

And the 500 years with the fewest Aquarian conjunctions? There was only one Jupiter/Uranus conjunction in Aquarius from 1000 to 1499 CE, roughly spanning the time known as the Dark Ages in Europe, which included the Black Death which wiped out a third of the population in the fourteenth century.

Perhaps rather worryingly, in the three millennia I surveyed the only other period with one Jupiter/Uranus conjunction in Aquarius lies ahead – between 2000 and 2500 CE at 2 degrees Aquarius in 2080. This is the last of these Aquarian conjunctions for another 677 years.

Take Three: the Jupiter/Uranus conjunction shifts from Aries to Pisces

Ever since doing the intriguing research briefly described above, I have been reflecting on what the symbolism may be telling us as a human community. Then from the summer of 2009 I began writing what has turned out to be a series of articles, and a research project asking for accounts of the experiences of 10 volunteers “plugged-in” to the three conjunctions at 0 degrees 18 Aries on 8 June 2010, 28 degrees 43 Pisces on 19th September 2010, and 27 degrees 02 Pisces on 4 January 2011.

I will shortly be publishing their assessments of what the year of Spring 2010-Spring 2011 has brought their way. Their stories thus far? Turbulence, disruption and unpredictable change to a high degree for most of them. (and me, as an unofficial participant with Mars/Uranus in the Tenth house triggered by the conjunction’s three passes!)

TO BE CONTINUED

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550 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2011
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page

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To read Parts One,Two, Three, Four, Five and Six of the Big Picture series, click on links below:

Conclusion

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