Signs of the Times

By Eugene Johnson

A few days ago my friend Roy and I were talk­ing about our col­lec­tive pen­chant for nam­ing and num­ber­ing things. In the num­ber­ing cat­e­gory we see a lot of the ‘index’ these days. Every area of life that has a sta­tis­ti­cal aspect to it will dis­play at least a few indices to quan­tize what it is doing; the finan­cial sec­tor would arguably have the most.

I thought that Roy was jok­ing when he said that there was even a Rap­ture Index. But, later I checked it out on Google, and sure enough there is such a thing. In fact, accord­ing to the site, the Rap­ture Index today is near an all-time high, 172. You can get a grip on the rel­a­tive power of this num­ber by the fact that the Index, in its high­est read­ing, was 182, on Sep­tem­ber 24, 2001. I sensed that things were tense but didn’t think that we were near 9/11 stress lev­els yet.

If this sounds a bit too weird to be true, check this out for your­self at http://www.raptureready.com/rap2.html

I have to include here a bit of the text from the site: “You could say that the Rap­ture Index is a Dow Jones Indus­trial Aver­age of the end time activ­ity, but I think it would be bet­ter viewed as a prophetic speedome­ter. The higher the num­ber, the faster we’re mov­ing towards the occur­rence of pre-tribulation rapture.”

It would be funny if these peo­ple were not dead seri­ous, and the fact that about 20% of the Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion (accord­ing to some opin­ion polls) thinks this way. At the other end (shall we say the Left End) of the san­ity spec­trum we have had a wild, wide vari­ety of end-time pre­dic­tions over the years; the most cur­rently pop­u­lar is based on the year 2012, end­ing of the Mayan Cal­en­dar. Mean­while, the Silent Major­ity, who occupy the mid-section of the Great Bell Curve ‘live in quiet des­per­a­tion’ wait­ing for the ‘other shoe to drop’. There is a wide­spread sense that ‘some­thing huge’ will have to sweep across the coun­try before the dark cloud of angst will be blown away and there is not much any one per­son can do about. So, what’s up?

Soci­ety his­tor­i­cally has not been well-served by those it has looked to for pre­dic­tions of future trends and events. We have to look no far­ther than the finan­cial col­lapse in the fall of 2008 for an exam­ple of this. How could an event which some com­pare in sever­ity to the mar­ket col­lapse of Black Tues­day, Octo­ber 29, 1929, catch all the finan­cial ‘experts’ com­pletely by surprise?

The poor track record of mod­ern prog­nos­ti­ca­tors is the result of many fac­tors but prob­a­bly the great­est hand­i­cap they work under is the belief in lin­ear time and the uni­di­rec­tional move­ment of his­tory. ‘Lin­earists’, seek­ing to view the future, are reduced to a straight-line extrap­o­la­tion of events of the recent past, thus history’s last act is often taken to be the her­ald of if the shape of things to come –which is very sel­dom is. It has been said that look­ing toward the future in this man­ner is like try­ing to drive a car by look­ing in the rear view mir­ror. Asso­ci­ated with the lin­ear time world-view is the West­ern notion of history-as-progress, Dar­win­ism, and the the­o­log­i­cal link­ing of reli­gious scrip­ture to lit­eral his­tor­i­cal events. Our mind-set is firmly rooted in con­vic­tion that human inge­nu­ity will ‘fig­ure out a way’ of any prob­lem that besets us.

Time also can be seen as sim­ply chaotic. From this point of view, his­tory has no dis­cern­able path or pat­tern, events fol­low one another ran­domly and any effort to impute mean­ing to them is a fool­ish waste of energy and time; a view that is rapidly gain­ing ground in this so-called ‘post-modern’ era. In acad­eme, many his­to­ri­ans throw up their hands, cover their ears, when any sug­ges­tion is voiced that the past offers any lessons what­so­ever for life in the present or future. There is no ‘sin­gle his­tory’, no con­nec­tions or pat­terns in events, just a mul­ti­tude of sto­ries. Polit­i­cal pow­ers are the pri­mary shapers of events many say.

Time and his­tory can also be inter­preted as cyclic. The ancients were able to see a link­age between the nat­ural cycles of the plan­ets, human activ­ity, the sea­sons and plant life; indeed, it was this psy­cho­log­i­cal achieve­ment that sep­a­rated them from the prim­i­tive men­tal­ity with its chaotic time per­cep­tion and which pro­vided the basis for the first human civ­i­liza­tion. It is doubt­ful that civ­i­liza­tion as it has been known can be sus­tained with­out the per­cep­tion of time as some mix of lin­ear and cyclic patterns.

The obser­va­tion, chart­ing and study of the cycli­cal move­ments of the plan­ets became the basis of the first sci­ence of human­ity. This, along with the expe­ri­ence of the rhythms of the sea­sons enabled tra­di­tional soci­eties to intuit the under­ly­ing unity of life, time and nature. Cycles in them­selves are sim­ply end­less mean­ing­less rep­e­ti­tions. How­ever, a cycle unfolds in phases, four fun­da­men­tal phases, per­mit­ting a quar­ter­ing of the cir­cle and the fix­ing the four car­di­nal direc­tions in space; the equinoxes and sol­stices of the four sea­sons. Human life has its ‘four sea­sons’ — child­hood, young adult­hood, midlife, and elder hood.

Dur­ing the past few years sev­eral excel­lent books have appeared that have taken a view a his­tory though the lens of ‘sea­son­al­ity’, the gen­er­a­tions, of human life and cor­re­lated these with his­tory. William Strauss and Neil Howe have done the most exten­sive research in this area, their first book, “Gen­er­a­tions, The His­tory of America’s Future” appeared in 1991. In 1997, they pub­lished, “The Fourth Turn­ing, What the Cycles of His­tory Tell Us about America’s Next Ren­dezvous with Des­tiny”; sev­eral other books and papers have fol­lowed these.

Their work is com­plex and com­pre­hen­sive so I can only give a brief over-view of it here. What they show is that the most pow­er­ful shaper of his­tory is the rela­tional dynam­ics of the four gen­er­a­tions liv­ing at any given point in time. The effects of pol­i­tics, eco­nom­ics and tech­nol­ogy are not the pri­mary dri­vers they con­tend. They divide Anglo-American his­tory into ‘saec­ula’, or sea­sonal cycles of his­tory. These ‘saec­ula’ are fur­ther divided into gen­er­a­tions by birth year and are clas­si­fied as one of four types — Prophet/Idealist, Nomad/Reactive, Hero/Civic and Artist/Adaptive — and these four gen­er­a­tional types appear in sequen­tial order through in four his­tor­i­cal ‘turn­ings’ or ‘saec­ula’ – Awak­en­ing, Unrav­el­ing, Cri­sis and High. An easy way to con­cep­tu­ally grasp the essen­tial mean­ing of these is to relate them to the four sea­sons, thus a High Turn­ing is a ‘spring­time’, an Awak­en­ing Turn­ing is a ‘sum­mer’, an Unrav­el­ing, a fall sea­son and a Cri­sis Turn­ing, a win­ter’, his­tor­i­cally and culturally.

In “The Fourth Turn­ing”, page 99, a ‘turn­ing’ is described as “an era with a char­ac­ter­is­tic social mood, a new twist on how peo­ple feel about them­selves and their nation. It results from the aging of the gen­er­a­tional con­stel­la­tion. A soci­ety enters a turn­ing once every twenty years or so, when all liv­ing gen­er­a­tions begin to enter their next phases of life. Like arche­types and con­stel­la­tions, turn­ings come four to a saecu­lum and always in the same order”

The First Turn­ing is a ‘High’, fol­lows a ‘Cri­sis’ period, and brings a spirit of renais­sance to a com­mu­nity as the peo­ple want to put the strug­gle and suf­fer­ing of the cri­sis period behind them. Any social issues left unre­solved by the Cri­sis must now remain so. Post– World War II Amer­ica was a High Turn­ing, spanned the period from 1946 to 1961, and was a time of very high opti­mism in the coun­try. The pre­vi­ous High was dur­ing the Gilded Age, 1865 to 1886, when there was a mas­sive surge in indus­trial expan­sion fueled by a rate of cap­i­tal for­ma­tion unmatched in U.S. history.

A Sec­ond Turn­ing fol­lows a High and is described as an Awak­en­ing and “arrives with a dra­matic chal­lenge against the High’s assump­tions about benev­o­lent rea­son and con­ge­nial insti­tu­tions. The outer work now feels triv­ial com­pared to the inner world. New spir­i­tual agen­das and social ideals burst forth, along with utopian exper­i­ments seek­ing to rec­on­cile total fel­low­ship with total auton­omy.” The years 1964 to 1984, was an Awak­en­ing Turn­ing described as a Con­scious­ness Rev­o­lu­tion. The pre­vi­ous sec­ond turn­ing was dur­ing the Great Awak­en­ing of 1886 to 1908.

The Third Turn­ing brings an Unrav­el­ing period “as a society’s wide embrace of the lib­er­at­ing cul­tural forces set loose by the Awak­en­ing set in. Peo­ple gen­er­ally have now had their fill of spir­i­tual rebirth, moral protests and lifestyle exper­i­men­ta­tion. Con­tent with what they have become indi­vid­u­ally, they vig­or­ously assert an ethos of prag­ma­tism, self-reliance, laissez-faire and nation­al­ism. While per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion is high, pub­lic trust ebbs amid a frag­ment­ing cul­ture, hence, Cul­ture Wars arise. The approach­ing specter of pub­lic dis­as­ter ulti­mately elic­its a mix of paral­y­sis and apa­thy that would have not been seen in the pre­vi­ous turn­ings. A Third Turn­ing, accord­ing to Strauss and Howe began in 1984. At the time of writ­ing their book in 1996 they pro­jected the end of the turn­ing at around 2005. How­ever, in ret­ro­spect, since the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, I sus­pect they might move the date for the end of the Unrav­el­ing and the unset of the Cri­sis Turn­ing near to the date of the attack. The imme­di­ately pre­ced­ing Unrav­el­ing Turn­ing was 1908 to 1929, Pro­hi­bi­tion and World War I.

The Fourth Turn­ing, a Cri­sis, “arises in response to sud­den threats that pre­vi­ously would have been ignored or deferred, but which are now per­ceived as dire”. This seems to be an apt descrip­tion of the sit­u­a­tion imme­di­ately fol­low­ing the attacks on the World Trade Cen­ter in 2001. Strauss and Howe write that fourth turn­ings have pro­vided the great pivot points in Anglo-American his­tory. Dat­ing back to the fif­teenth cen­tury there have been six (War of the Roses 1459–1487, Armada Cri­sis 1569–1594, the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion 1675–1704, the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion 1773 – 1794, the Civil War 1860 – 1865, and the Great Depres­sion 1929 – 1946). The present period is called the Mil­len­nial Cri­sis and is pro­jected to con­tinue until some­time around 2025.

Strauss and Howe never refer to astrol­ogy in their writ­ing. They really didn’t need to because their research stands firmly by itself. What they have done is pro­duce a very strong case for the real­ity of a cycli­cal rhythm in human soci­ety, and in doing this they pro­vide at least indi­rectly a the­o­ret­i­cal basis for the astro­log­i­cal organon. There are many inter­est­ing cor­re­la­tions between plan­e­tary pat­terns and their con­clu­sions that I will explore in this essay. For exam­ple, accord­ing to the author’s cal­cu­la­tion there have been six com­plete saecu­lums (of four turn­ings) since the first High of the Tudor Renais­sance begin­ning in 1487, and then count­ing for­ward until the onset of the present Cri­sis period gives 518 years, and this num­ber divided by 6 gives 86 years as the aver­age length of one com­plete saecu­lum (four Turn­ings) This cor­re­lates fairly closely with the orbital period of Uranus, 84 years. Uranus is the planet often most closely asso­ci­ated with human­ity and the ideal length of human life.

The cycle of Jupiter and Sat­urn con­junc­tions (about 20 years in length) is the key cycle used by astrologers to delin­eate the major social/cultural peri­ods. Dur­ing the past 24 turn­ings the aver­age length of each is 21.7 years; a very inter­est­ing correlation.

The aspect pat­terns of Sat­urn, Uranus and Pluto are also clearly asso­ci­ated with the cycle of turn­ings. For exam­ple dur­ing the Crisis-era now under­way there is a T-cross pat­tern formed by these three plan­ets. A sim­i­lar pat­tern was present dur­ing the pre­vi­ous Fourth Turn­ing of the Great Depres­sion and WWII. The only triple con­junc­tion of the three plan­ets dur­ing the last 200 years occurred dur­ing the 1850 pre­ced­ing the Civil War. The Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion Cri­sis years had an oppo­si­tion of Uranus and Pluto, and the plan­ets were in square aspect dur­ing the Crisis-eras of the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion (1675–1704) and the Armada Cri­sis (1569–1594).

None of this is to sug­gest that the cycles of the saecu­lum, or astrol­ogy for that mat­ter, in any way restrict human free will or are pre­dic­tive of spe­cific events such as acci­dents, inven­tions, assas­si­na­tions, etc. The authors on page 116 address the ques­tion of “how can the saecu­lum coex­ist with all of history’s chance events and trends…how can any the­ory of social change pre­dict such things?”

“The answer is sim­ple”’ they write,” The saecu­lum nei­ther pre­dicts them nor pre­cludes them. Yes, his­tory dishes out acci­dents. But, for the saecu­lum, what mat­ters most are not the acci­dents them­selves, but rather society’s response to them.”

In Chap­ter 10, ‘A Fourth Turn­ing Prophecy’, the authors write: “A spark will ignite a new mood. Today, (this writ­ten in 1996, an Unrav­el­ing period) the same spark would flame briefly but then extin­guish, its last flicker merely con­firm­ing and deep­en­ing the Unraveling-era mind-set. This time, (now) though, it will cat­alyze a Cri­sis. In ret­ro­spect, the spark might seem as omi­nous as a finan­cial crash (which we have had), as ordi­nary as a national elec­tion (remem­ber 2000), as triv­ial as a Tea Party (but not the one they are refer­ring to!). It could be a rapid suc­ces­sion of small events in which the omi­nous, the ordi­nary, and the triv­ial are commingled.”

“Recall that a Cri­sis cat­a­lyst involves sce­nar­ios dis­tinctly imag­in­able eight or ten years in advance. Based on recent Unraveling-era trends, the fol­low­ing circe-2005 sce­nar­ios might seem plausible:

“Beset by a finan­cial cri­sis, a state lays claim to its res­i­dents’ fed­eral tax monies, sim­i­lar tax rebel­lions spring up in other states caus­ing a con­fronta­tion between the states and the fed­eral gov­ern­ment (not too unlike the state seces­sions in 1861)…treasury bill auc­tions are suspended…Cyberterrorists destroy IRS databases…a global ter­ror­ist group blows up an air­craft and announces it has nuclear weapons inside the U.S. and threaten to det­o­nate them in an Amer­ica city…marshal law declared, a nation­wide strike declared…foreign cap­i­tal flees the U.S. An impasse over the fed­eral bud­get reaches a stale­mate. The pres­i­dent and Con­gress both refuse to back down trig­ger­ing a near total col­lapse of the gov­ern­ment. Dol­lar and bond prices plummet…social secu­rity checks stop going out… Wall Street panic…The Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion announce the spread of a new com­mu­ni­ca­ble virus…”

“…At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tear­ing of the civic fab­ric at points of extreme vul­ner­a­bil­ity – prob­lem areas where, dur­ing the Unrav­el­ing, Amer­ica will have been neglected, denied, or delayed needed action. Anger at “mis­takes we made” will trans­late into calls for action; regard­less of the height­ened pub­lic risk….America will have entered the Fourth Turning…”

“The new mood and its jar­ring prob­lems will pro­vide a nat­ural end point for the Unraveling-era decline in civic con­fi­dence. In the pre-Crisis years, fears about the flim­si­ness of the social con­tract will have been sub­lim­i­nal but ris­ing. As the Cri­sis cat­alyzes, the fears will rush to the sur­face, jagged and exposed. Dis­trust­ful of some things, indi­vid­u­als will feel that their sur­vival requires them to dis­trust more things. This behav­ior could cas­cade into a sud­den down­ward spi­ral, and implo­sion of soci­etal trust….if so, this implo­sion will strike finan­cial markets…the economy…through the Unrav­el­ing, peo­ple will have pre­ferred or at least tol­er­ated, the excit­ing if bewil­der­ing trend toward social com­plex­ity. But as the Cri­sis mood con­geals, peo­ple will come to the jar­ring real­iza­tion that they have grown help­lessly depen­dent on the tee­ter­ing edi­fice of anony­mous trans­ac­tions and paper guar­an­tees. Many Amer­i­cans won’t know where their sav­ings are, who their employer is, what their pen­sion is, or how the gov­ern­ment works. The era will have left the finan­cial world arbi­traged and ten­ta­cled: Debtors won’t know who holds their notes, home­own­ers, who owns their mort­gages, and share­hold­ers, who runs their equi­ties – and vice versa.”

That Strauss and Howe made these pre­dic­tions in 1996 that so accu­rately describe the gen­eral con­di­tions today and the direc­tion events are trend­ing is quite amaz­ing and gives great cre­dence to their meth­ods and find­ings. Per­haps my attempt to com­mu­ni­cate at least a min­i­mal under­stand­ing of their ideas and research has not been suc­cess­ful but I hope this will do deter you from tak­ing the oppor­tu­nity to read their work first-hand.

After read­ing and think­ing about this mate­r­ial I must admit that I am not at all opti­mistic that ‘we the peo­ple’ will fare at all well dur­ing these next years. I will briefly out­line some of my rea­sons for this feeling.

Strauss and Howe write that a Crisis-era is ignited by a cat­alytic event. The attack on the WTC, Sep­tem­ber 11, would seem to fit those cri­te­ria. It was a sud­den shock to the col­lec­tive body which for a time did seem to ‘bring the coun­try together’. The authors stress that national unity and sense of a com­mon pur­pose are vital if a coun­try is to suc­cess­ful nav­i­gate through a Cri­sis period. Unfor­tu­nately the feel­ings of national unity quickly evap­o­rated and we are left with a very, very divided coun­try, and the chasms between the var­i­ous polit­i­cal and inter­est groups is widening.

Diver­sity is pro­duc­ing new racial enclaves. Amer­ica is no longer a ‘melt­ing pot’ but rather more resem­bles a ‘stew pot’ , mean­while ‘immi­gra­tion’ issues heat up that are basi­cally not resolv­able. The Cul­ture Wars con­tinue, not a good sign. Ide­ally the inten­sity of these should abate as the pop­u­la­tion turns its atten­tion to phys­i­cal sur­vival dur­ing a time of exter­nal threats posed dur­ing the Crisis.

The finan­cial ‘melt­down’ in the fall of ’08 has not pro­duced any mean­ing­ful leg­is­la­tion that will break up the finan­cial monop­oly of Wall Street and the six big banks that con­trol most the nation’s finan­cial wealth. Finan­cial astrologers believe that some­time in Sep­tem­ber or Octo­ber this year the ‘other shoe will drop’, and there will be a sec­ond crash. If this does hap­pen the fall-out will be much more dev­as­tat­ing than when the first shoe dropped because at that time the Fed­eral gov­ern­ment bor­rowed money to pump into the sys­tem and keep it afloat. There was also money for unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits. This time around, the gov­ern­ment is tapped out and can not bor­row the amount of money needed. So, be pre­pared for the Great Deval­u­a­tion. Enti­tle­ment pay­ments by the gov­ern­ment may be greatly reduced or suspended.

The cost of clean-up and restora­tion of destruc­tion nat­ural dis­as­ters such as the huge rain­storms, tor­na­does and hur­ri­canes that have pun­ished the land in recent years could be extremely high. The out­look is that the weather will become more unsta­ble in the future as a result of global warm­ing. Then there are the man-made dis­as­ters, such as the oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­ico that will have to be dealt with. All these things requir­ing money the coun­try does not have and are very unpredictable.

The elec­tion of Barack Obama kin­dled our hopes for a more uni­fied and civil soci­ety after the divi­sive two terms of Pres­i­dent Bush. But this has not hap­pened, per­haps it will, even­tu­ally. Dur­ing Mr. Bush’s term the polit­i­cal Left was agi­tated, now it is the polit­i­cal Right that is aflame with right­eous indig­na­tion accus­ing Mr. Obama of being a Com­mu­nist, or a Mus­lim, or a Dic­ta­tor, or not being born in the U.S.A, hence an Impos­tor, or all of the above.

I will close this arti­cle with a few more words about the Sat­urn, Uranus and Pluto cycle that appears to be so sig­nif­i­cant in the turn­ing of the his­tor­i­cal eras. The cycle of con­junc­tions of Uranus and Pluto is about 127 years; it varies some because of the eccen­tric­ity of Pluto’s orbit. Divid­ing this num­ber by four gives thirty-two, this means that about every thirty-two years, or four times in a cycle, we will see a quad­ra­ture aspect between these two plan­ets, i.e., a con­junc­tion, a wax­ing square, an oppo­si­tion, then wan­ing square and another con­junc­tion, com­plet­ing one cycle. Then, because Saturn’s orbital period is nearly thirty years in length it will fre­quently join the mix with Uranus and Pluto mak­ing it a three part­ner dance, rather than two. Indeed, as pre­vi­ously men­tioned the three plan­ets have formed a quad­ra­ture aspect con­fig­u­ra­tion in every Fourth Turn­ing (Cri­sis) period since the War of the Roses Crisis-era of 1459 to 1487, except for the Civil War era when a triple con­junc­tion came together in Aries dur­ing 1850–51.

When the arche­typal mean­ings of these three plan­ets, Sat­urn, Uranus, and Pluto is stud­ied in the light of his­tor­i­cal events it is not sur­pris­ing that quadar­ture align­ments between them so often cor­re­late very closely with his­tor­i­cal peri­ods of sig­nif­i­cant change in soci­ety and cul­ture. Sat­urn, the clos­est planet of the three, rep­re­sents the prin­ci­ple of limit, struc­ture, neces­sity, rule of law, etc., hence its action is to main­tain sta­bil­ity and resist any force that threat­ens to change or upset the sta­tus quo. Uranus, on the other hand, is very much the polar oppo­site of these Sat­ur­nine attrib­utes as it rep­re­sents the prin­ci­ple of change, and all that is asso­ci­ated with change – free­dom move­ments that may blos­som into rebel­lions or rev­o­lu­tions and rapid social changes, and on a more per­sonal level, it is asso­ci­ated with intel­lec­tual bril­liance, tech­no­log­i­cal inven­tion, orig­i­nal think­ing, etc. Pluto’s activ­ity is a lit­tle harder to grasp, which is not all that sur­pris­ing since it is a very small, very dis­tant planet. But, this does not mean that it does not carry plenty of power, in fact, Pluto can be thought of as the power planet in the plan­e­tary hier­ar­chy. Indeed, with respect to the syn­chro­nis­tic tim­ing of its dis­cov­ery in 1930, its activ­ity cor­re­lates closely with the split­ting of the atom and the unleash­ing of atomic power and all that fol­lowed – the mod­ern indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion, mas­sive mil­i­tary forces, rise of fas­cism and other mass move­ments, psy­cho­analy­sis, and the use of it to manip­u­late indi­vid­u­als through pro­pa­ganda, adver­tis­ing, ‘pub­lic rela­tions’, etc. Pluto trans­forms and there is in it a touch of the instinc­tive and ele­men­tal. It inten­si­fies what it contacts.

This is not the place for an exten­sive astro­log­i­cal essay but I do think it is worth tak­ing a few moments to exam­ine in more depth the astro­log­i­cal cor­re­la­tions men­tioned ear­lier. The astrol­ogy here clearly sup­ports and but­tresses the con­clu­sions of Strauss and Howe.

Three of the most piv­otal peri­ods in Amer­i­can his­tory, most his­to­ri­ans agree, were, first, the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion and the years lead­ing up to the adop­tion of the Con­sti­tu­tion; sec­ond, the Civil War Cri­sis and then the Great Depres­sion — World war II period.

There are two other peri­ods of cri­sis in Eng­lish his­tory that had the results gone dif­fer­ently there would prob­a­bly not be an Amer­i­can nation as we know it. One is the so-called Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion, 1675–1692, (the name used today in Eng­land) an event that very few Amer­i­cans would know any­thing about but was highly sig­nif­i­cant because it was this rev­o­lu­tion which over­threw James II and brought the Dutch­man William of Orange to the Eng­lish throne and with him the begin­ning of Eng­lish par­lia­men­tary democ­racy was born. The other major event was the defeat of the Span­ish Armada in 1588 which saved Eng­land from defeat.

The events of each of these five peri­ods unfolded dur­ing a Fourth Turn­ing Crisis-era. Strauss and Howe write that “All five events marked the cul­mi­na­tion of swift and sweep­ing change in the sec­u­lar world. Each sur­round­ing era wit­nessed wide­spread fear for per­sonal and social sur­vival, col­lec­tive unity in the case of peril, and sud­den insti­tu­tional change or inno­va­tion. Appre­hen­sion about the future reached a cli­max – and was fol­lowed (in all but the fourth case, the Civil War) by a sense of vic­tory and the dawn­ing of a bright new era.”

Astrologers and even some his­to­ri­ans have noted curi­ous time sequence between these five events that aver­ages 87 years. Between the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, 1776, and the Japan­ese attack on Pearl Har­bor, 1941, is a span of 165 years, the length of Neptune’s orbital period. And, the year 1861, when the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter, is almost the exact mid-point of this 165 year period. Eight-seven years passed between the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion of 1689 and Inde­pen­dence Day. Pre­ced­ing the Glo­ri­ous Rev­o­lu­tion was a longer period of ninety-nine years to the vic­tory of the Eng­lish fleet over the Span­ish Armada. A set of very fas­ci­nat­ing num­bers for an astrologer as these sug­gest a com­bi­na­tion of Uran­ian and Nep­tun­ian influences.

Turn­ing now to look at the aris­ing T-square, called by some astrologers. The Car­di­nal Cli­max, so named because by late mid-summer the plan­ets will align with Jupiter and Uranus in the first three degrees of Aries, oppos­ing Sat­urn at the first degree of Libra with Mars mov­ing toward it, these plan­ets all in square to Pluto in the third degree of Capri­corn. Astrologers agree that this con­fig­u­ra­tion is the poten­tially the most ‘power packed’ align­ment that has been seen for many, many years.

The last time these three plan­ets were simul­ta­ne­ously in a quad­ra­ture aspect align­ment was from 1964 to early 1968, when Sat­urn opposed the longer Uranus, Pluto con­junc­tion of the 1960s. We all remem­ber those days – a head-on col­li­sion of rev­o­lu­tion­ary (Uranus) impulses with a reac­tionary (Sat­urn) cul­tural milieu, the inten­sity of the con­fronta­tion accen­tu­ated through a release of pent-up col­lec­tive ener­gies (Pluto).

Reflect­ing on what the con­nec­tion might be between our present time and the 1960s in the con­text of the astro­log­i­cal con­di­tions, it is sig­nif­i­cant I think that at that time Uranus and Pluto were in con­junc­tion, an aspect asso­ci­ated with the ‘ini­ti­a­tion of a new cycle’, thus, the 1960s were a time when ‘the Spirit’ moved, and caressed human­ity with fresh inspi­ra­tion which was responded to in very dif­fer­ent ways, pos­i­tively and neg­a­tively – but, astro­log­i­cally, this was only the begin­ning of a longer process. Now we come to the sec­ond phase of that process.

Con­tin­u­ing this line of thought, in the devel­op­ing plan­e­tary pic­ture Uranus is now mov­ing toward its open­ing square with Pluto, the sec­ond phase of the four-fold cycle. The basic mean­ing of the square aspect is “a call to action”, “to walk the talk”, to man­i­fest, give def­i­nite struc­ture and form to what was ini­ti­ated at the con­junc­tion. We do have astrol­ogy that can give a con­cep­tual frame­work, a map, of a kind, to help us fig­ure out what to expect.

From a gen­er­a­tional stand­point we see that Gen­er­a­tion X (named the 13th Gen­er­a­tion by Strauss and Howe as it is the 13th gen­er­a­tion alive since Amer­i­can Inde­pen­dence) born dur­ing the Sat­urn, Uranus, Pluto align­ment of the 1960s (Pres­i­dent Obama is of course a very early cohort of this group) is now com­ing to power. And, the chil­dren born dur­ing the epochal Uranus, Nep­tune con­junc­tion of the late 1980s and early 1990s is reach­ing young adult­hood. In view of this gen­er­a­tional power-house com­ing into its own the over-all out­look for many years to come is for a sus­tained devel­op­ment of ide­al­is­tic cul­tural activ­ity, cre­ative vision and spir­i­tual awakenings.

I will close with a pas­sage from Richard Tarnas’s mag­nif­i­cent book, “Cos­mos and Psy­che, Inti­ma­tions of a New World View”. “If we con­sider then the unfold­ing cycles of the three out­most plan­ets – tak­ing into account the cur­rent align­ment between Nep­tune and Pluto (the long-running sex­tile), the num­ber of years since the most recent Neptune-Pluto con­junc­tion a cen­tury ago, and the com­ple­tion of the sub­se­quent Uranus-Pluto and Uranus-Neptune con­junc­tions of the 1960s and 1990s, respec­tively – our present moment in his­tory is most com­pa­ra­ble, astro­nom­i­cally, to the period exactly five hun­dred years ago with which we began this book: the era brought forth the birth of the mod­ern self dur­ing the decades sur­round­ing the year 1500.

This too was an epoch of extra­or­di­nary tur­bu­lence and uncer­tainty, and also of great cul­tural cre­ativ­ity and dynamism. It was the moment of the High Renais­sance of Leonardo and Michelan­gelo, Eras­mus and Thomas More, in the imme­di­ate after­math of Pico della Mirandola’s new vision of human pos­si­bil­ity in the “Oran­tio” and Ficino’s Pla­tonic Acad­emy in Flo­rence – a period shaped by the rapid spread of a pow­er­ful new medium of uni­ver­sal com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the printed book; the first expe­di­tions to a vast new world that, at enor­mous human and eco­log­i­cal cost, led to the open­ing of the global com­mu­nity itself; and the immense spir­i­tual and cos­mo­log­i­cal trans­for­ma­tions, still unfold­ing, rep­re­sented by Luther’s start of the Ref­or­ma­tion and Coper­ni­cus’ con­ceiv­ing of the helio­cen­tric hypoth­e­sis ….Our post­mod­ern age of cease­less flux and irre­solv­able com­plex­ity, for all its meta­phys­i­cal dis­ori­en­ta­tion, and despite the col­lec­tive entrance­ment pro­duced by the mass media and cor­po­rate mar­ket­ing, has nev­er­the­less brought forth new con­di­tions and pos­si­bil­i­ties that could prove invalu­able for our future…it is per­haps not to much to say that, in this first decade of the new mil­len­nium, human­ity has entered into a con­di­tion that is in some sense more glob­ally united and inter­con­nected, more sen­si­tized to the expe­ri­ences and suf­fer­ing of oth­ers, in cer­tain respects more spir­i­tu­ally awak­ened, more con­scious of alter­na­tive future pos­si­bil­i­ties and ideals, more capa­ble of col­lec­tive heal­ing and com­pas­sion, and, aided by tech­no­log­i­cal advances in com­mu­ni­ca­tion media, more able to think, feel, and respond together in a spir­i­tu­ally evolved man­ner to the world’s swiftly chang­ing real­i­ties than has ever before been possible.”

This is a mar­velous per­spec­tive and a per­fectly real pos­si­bil­ity that could come to pass if we can learn to work together. It all comes down to what our col­lec­tive ‘Community-Spirit Index’ is. I just made that one up. I call it the CSI, sounds impres­sive, I think. If we take as our base­line the High-era of post WWII Amer­ica as 100 what do you think the cur­rent CSI is? My friend Roy says it feels like a num­ber some­where below 30. I said Roy,” you are much too pes­simistic, it must be at least 50!” We can spec­u­late, but the proof is in the eat­ing of the pudding.

Like a young sol­dier does not know what his nerve is until he is in the fire­fight, so, we will not know how the race will stand up together in the tri­als ahead.