Weekend Cyclic Wandering

I've not fallen down an internet rabbit-hole for a while, but did so this week, though this rabbit-hole was not as deep as many, and did eventually lead me back via a T-junction to my very own archives!
My stumble really began outside the internet, in reading an article in a February 1974 edition of The Saturday Evening Post I'd bought in an antique/vintage store on our last trip. I'd been attracted by the magazine's cover illustration of an astrological chart, with Henry Kissinger's photograph at its centre. Title of the article heralded by the cover:
Astrology - Who Believes in It?

The article which, oddly, is not credited to any specific author, is a long one - almost receiving the tl:dr from me(too long did not read). It's printed in fairly small, close font. I did skim it initially, going back to special tid-bits at different times. The piece is certainly not as dismissive as a comparable piece in any current national magazine would be, but then the 1970s were still under a fairly "New Age" atmosphere, astrology back then was enjoying a short respite from ridicule.

My tipping point for rabbit-hole entry was the snippet:

What has astrology to say further about mankind's future? The long-term 794-year recurrence of the two giant planets Jupiter and Saturn in the same part of the Tropical Zodiac correlates closely to a cycle found in history by the great British historian Arnold J. Toynbee. During about half of the cycle the component states of a parochial civilisation engage in civil strife and a "time of troubles". Then during the balance of the cycle they combine as a Universal State or Empire. Northern and Western Europe and North America comprise such a civilisation.......

A 794 year cycle, thought I - Saturn/Jupiter, astrological opposites: Saturn the restrictive limiter, Jupiter the excessive expander. When they come together in conjunction I'm not surprised they make a mark of some kind.

I then began my descent, finding the words of several astrologers on internet pages crossing my eyes, jangling my brain.

If Saturn/Jupiter cycles were the only cycles to watch it'd be easy-peasy, but there are numerous other cycles, certain of my archived posts have explored these. I'm thinking, though, that Saturn and Jupiter, though categorised as inner planets, and still far away are much, much nearer to Earth than outer planets Uranus, Neptune and Pluto whose various cycles are discussed over and over again by mundane astrologers. Whether this fact makes Saturn/Jupiter cycles more significant to us here on Earth isn't clear.

From astrologer Mark Lerner:
[It's necessary to read the whole piece, but just a taster -]

It turns out that Jupiter and Saturn – major planets connected to the social realm, religion, philosophy, education, profession, government and economics – keep energizing the same elemental quality (fire, earth, air or water) in a series of 20-year conjunctions for almost 200 years. Then the Jupiter-Saturn unions shift to the next elemental quality for another series of conjunctions for around two centuries. After a long cycle of 794-800 years, the entire Jupiter-Saturn pattern begins over although never exactly energizing the same degrees of the zodiac as during the previous 800-year cycle.

What is particularly interesting to us, here in mid 2017, is the fact that the 794 year long Saturn/Jupiter cycle will hit a change point in December 2020, when the conjunction will occur in an Air sign, Aquarius, for the first time in around 180 years. Conjunctions have been occurring in Earth signs for the past 180 years. This could reflect the materialistic atmosphere the developed world has experienced during this almost two century time span. Does it indicate that, very gradually (VERY gradually) materialism might recede making way for more a more humanitarian, thoughtful and caring feel? Change of atmosphere will probably be kick-started by an Aquarian revolutionary period, gradually, oh so gradually, morphing into calmer airways during the Gemini and Libra phases.

Whether humans will still be around on planet Earth to encounter these changes is another matter. If climate change proceeds apace, perhaps only the very wealthy who have de-camped to the few safe places Earth will still afford, will be left. How long they could survive without an army of servants and protectors from who knows what, is questionable. So, in the end all speculation is somewhat, as they say, academic.

From my own archives, for any passing reader still interested in this topic, I'd recommend a look at these posts, not missing the comment threads attached too - some interesting stuff there!

http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2010/08/ramblings-on-capitalism-astrology.html

http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2012/09/600-year-arcs-capitalism.html

http://twilightstarsong.blogspot.com/2012/10/600-year-arc-capitalism-astrology-part-2.html

Amalgamating the Jupiter/Saturn pattern with other, outer-planetary cycles is a bit like trying to follow a complex knitting pattern. The full beauty, or otherwise, of the item or garment will not be fully discernible immediately; in the case of planetary cycles, really not fully for centuries, or until, continuing the analogy, we've completed a good few "repeat the above pattern [...] times more". That's a bummer for the average human's less than one century life span!

CYCLICAL & EPOCHAL

Astrology is all about the cycles, in the short and medium term, epochs in the long term. Simple cycles of each planet's orbit around the Sun, more complex cycles of aspects made and re-made between planets as they travel. Some cycles are easy to recognise, once the basics of astrology are understood. Saturn's 28-ish year cycle, punctuated by 4 x 7-year markers, is possibly the most frequently talked-about with regard to natal astrology. Uranus takes roughly 84 years to cycle the zodiac, these days that's near to matching a human life cycle. Longer astrological cycles can identify themselves in corresponence with mundane and historical events and themes.

For an expert's words see
this chapter on Astrological Cycles from Dane Rudhyar's book ASTROLOGICAL TIMING, The Transition to the New Age.


Some older posts of my own relate to cycles - some are definitely astrological, others could well be:


100 year cycle

75-year cycle

60-year cycle

560-year cycle

248-year cycle

Various

“There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.”
~ Chuck Palahniuk, "Survivor".

Surfing the Waves of Revolution ?

Andrew O'Hehir's piece at Salon yesterday , The Age of Revolution: 1989 to 2013 and Counting, - "From the Berlin Wall to Cairo, we live in an era of anti-authoritarian revolution that may transform the world" had me rifling through the ephemeris and my saved astrology links to discover whether 1989 was part of the Uranus-Pluto cycle we hear so much about these days.

For background, a few snips from Mr O'Hehir's interesting essay:

.......But if you can separate the populist and/or military coup against Morsi’s government from short-term political or ideological questions, it fits into a much larger historical pattern that is global in scale. We live in an age of revolution, and specifically of anti-elite, anti-authoritarian revolution. It’s an age that began in earnest with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and shows no signs of slowing down. Edward Snowden, who on Friday was reportedly offered asylum by both Nicaragua and Venezuela, is in his own way a soldier in that revolution, one who has exposed the secrets of the world’s greatest imperial power and made it look both foolish and vulnerable. That’s the thread that connects this week’s explosive news out of Egypt to the bizarre episode of the Bolivian president’s airplane, which was forced to land in Vienna (almost certainly at the behest of someone in Washington), based on false rumors that Snowden might be on board. Screw national sovereignty – the most powerful nation on earth is hunting a computer nerd! In other words, both these things are driving powerful people crazy.

Indeed, historians of the future – assuming there are any – may well compare our era to the great wave of social and political revolutions that transformed Europe in the middle of the 19th century, and ultimately led to the sweeping away of the old aristocratic order. What the conclusion of our current revolutionary wave will look like, and whether it will sound the death knell for the dominant liberal-capitalist world order, I have no idea. But I feel certain that a lot of people in boardrooms, executive suites and presidential palaces are wondering the same thing.

Comments below the article were interesting, at least they were when they didn't descend into the usual skirmish between right and left, or snarks by the grammar/spelling police. One brave soul (cckelsey) even dared to say:

There are those who have studied astrology who suggest that Uranus-Pluto alignments correlate with emancipatory humanitarian impulses across the collective. From what I understand, we are in one of those alignments that will run through this decade though it is not as pronounced as the periods that offered the French Revolution and 1960's. From what I've seen presented, these periods tend to swing into Saturn-Pluto alignments which often offer authoritarian backlash.

That was put down immediately by:

Agent C: @cckelsey I hope you're trying to be funny.

Sigh! Double sigh!!

Commenter Graham Clark said (among other things):

Well heck, if we're going to allow for the twenty years of status quo between the dissolution of the Soviet sphere and the Arab Spring, we might as well go back another twenty and say the new "age of revolution" started in 1968.

He was right - and the 1960s do link back to Uranus-Pluto.

I couldn't see any Uranus-Pluto link in 1989, but there was a fairly rare triple conjunction of Uranus-Saturn-Neptune - in Capricorn that year. The conjunction linked the cycles of Saturn/Uranus (approx. every 45 years), Saturn/Neptune (approx. 35 years), and Uranus/Neptune (approx 172 years).

Looked at from one perspective, the period 1989 to the present (and onward) can be seen as a revolutionary age, still ongoing, for its full flavour hasn't reached the USA yet. While 1989 isn't part of a "matched set" of astrological aspects, it's another piece in the jigsaw puzzle - and fits right in, showing that certain points in the outer planets' cycles do indeed correlate noticeably with mundane events here on Earth. We ride the varied waves of time along with the planets.

From section 87 of one of the most often consulted favourite books sitting on the shelf under my desk: Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes ~

The people learn, unlearn, learn,
a builder, a wrecker, a builder again,
a juggler of shifting puppets.
In so few eyeblinks
In transition lightning streaks,
the people project midgets into giants,
the people shrink titans into dwarfs

Faiths blow on the winds
and become shibboleths
and deep growths
with men ready to die
for a living word on the tongue,
for a light alive in the bones,
for dreams fluttering in the wrists . . .

Sleep is a suspension midway
and a conundrum of shadows
lost in meadows of the moon.
The people sleep.

Ai! ai! the people sleep.
Yet the sleepers toss in sleep
and an end comes of sleep
and the sleepers wake.
Ai! ai! the sleepers wake! . . .