"We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves."

       — Mike Carey and Peter Gross

 

Like quite a few other boys from my generation with too much time on their hands, I was fascinated while growing up by all things strange and wonderful, from movie monsters and stories about UFOs to rumors of Neanderthal bodies encased in blocks of ice displayed at state fairs around the country. I even learned there was a name for many of these oddities: “Fortean,” after the famed early-20th-century chronicler of anomalies, Charles Fort. But whatever name you called them by, I was hooked. And the stranger they were, the better.

      

Even from a young age, though, I started noticing how these types of stories seemed to occur in noticeable waves or “flaps.” Sometimes months would go by without a single UFO report, ghost story, or even monster movie being talked about, when suddenly a spate of these popped up in a relatively short span. No doubt psychology and sociology would have much to say about the reasons for that, but astrology has reasons of its own, I’d come to learn, while providing me with a host of useful insights into this most unconventional side of history.

      

In the previous chapter, I explored some of the ways planetary cycles trigger tectonic shifts in society. In this chapter I’ll be focusing on some of the more unusual manifestations that arise during these cycles, including not just anomalous and “Fortean” events but also some of society’s most iconic monsters, both real and fictional. This much is clear: Whenever the outer planets come together, powerful energies are stirred up in the collective unconscious — and the results can sometimes be as terrifying as they are inspiring.

 

The Lure of the Exotic

As astrological students of history know, all the planets play a role in shaping the zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age.” But it’s the interaction of the outer bodies — Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — that seem to play an especially prominent role in shaping the trends and qualities of historical eras.

      

For instance, outer-planetary aspects — especially conjunctions — often accompany breakthroughs and innovations in the arts and sciences. Consider how the Beatles and Bob Dylan reached their creative peaks exactly as Uranus and Pluto came together in the 1960s, also a time when humans first set foot on the Moon. This was a decade of enormous social change and “people power,” when ordinary citizens took to the streets to make their opinions known about civil rights, women’s liberation, and the Vietnam War, among other things. Such movements are typical of the kinds of changes that unfold under the influence of outer-planetary configurations.

      

But there is another side to these cycles that’s generally overlooked, one which reflects a more unusual dimension of their influence. Having lived through two outer-planet conjunctions in my own lifetime (Uranus–Pluto in the mid ‘60s and Uranus–Neptune during the early ‘90s), I became intensely aware during both of these periods of a palpable mood of exoticism wafting through the culture, almost like some mysterious incense, which was accompanied by a heightened fascination with the unconventional and the bizarre. Albert Einstein famously wrote that “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious,” and to my mind that could well describe the mood of periods like these, because of the way they usher in a fascination with all things unusual and extra-ordinary.

      

As an illustration, when Uranus and Neptune came together during the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the obsession with the mysterious and exotic led to a surge of interest in TV shows dealing with fringe subjects like The X-Files, Sightings, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and David Lynch’s classic Twin Peaks. This period saw an explosion of interest in the field of “world music,” with exotic new sounds filtering into the cultural mindstream via performers like Dead Can Dance, Deep Forest, Enigma, Margareth Menezes, and Enya. This period also witnessed a massive increase of interest in spiritual topics that resulted in a spate of publications and workshops devoted to Eastern religions, shamanism, New Age thought, and Native American practices.

      

This “call of the wild” extended not just through space but time as well. Having worked in the publishing industry during that period, I was struck by the extraordinary popularity of any and all media projects related to ancient and “lost civilizations” —particularly Egypt and Atlantis. That trend climaxed with two events in particular: first, the 1993 premiere of NBC’s Emmy Award–winning prime-time special, “Mystery of the Sphinx,” hosted by Charlton Heston (based on the research of John Anthony West and Robert Schoch); and second, the unveiling of tomb KV5 in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1995, the most significant Egyptian burial site discovered since that of King Tut.

      

Or, turning back the clock to the previous Uranus–Pluto conjunction of the mid ‘60s, it was as though the public suddenly developed a newfound openness to previously offbeat ideas and genres, as reflected in TV shows like The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Thriller, The Invaders, One Step Beyond, and the original Star Trek. Musically, teenagers like myself were turning on their radios and hearing strange instruments like sitars and tablas now gracing pop songs by the Beatles, Donavan, and the Rolling Stones, while flautist Paul Horn was recording his jazz-influenced melodies in the sublime open spaces of the Taj Mahal. Books on yoga and oriental/alternative spirituality were becoming hugely popular, among them Jess Stearn’s Yoga, Youth, and Reincarnation; Louis Pauwels’ and Jacques Bergier’s Morning of the Magicians; the collected works of Edgar Cayce; the “ancient astronaut” theories of Erich von Däniken; the faux-Tibetan teachings of Lobsang Rampa; and Linda Goodman’s best-selling astrology primer, Sun Signs.

      

Stepping back further to the once-every-five-hundred-year alignment of Pluto and Neptune, during the late 1880s and early ‘90s, there was a similar explosion of exotic or “fringe” interests taking place then, too, with mystical groups like the Theosophical Society and the Golden Dawn rising to prominence, and the Parliament of World Religions exposing Western audiences to foreign teachings through figures such as Swami Vivekenanda. Composers like Debussy, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky were incorporating oriental motifs into their music, while symbolist painters like Jean Delville and Odilon Redon were taking their art into increasingly mystical directions, just as art nouveau was infusing art and architecture with its own dreamy influences.

      

Rolling back the calendar to the previous outer-planet conjunction of Uranus and Neptune, which climaxed in 1821, we see these planets reflected not only in the growing popularity of gothic fiction but also in the extraordinary art of painters like Caspar David Friedrich with his exquisite depictions of mystery and solitude. This period also played host to a truly iconic event in the history of the human imagination: Champollion’s translation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics in 1822. For students of history and even ordinary citizens at the time, it felt as though the door to a long-lost world of knowledge had suddenly opened, with the promise of great mysteries about to be unveiled. In many ways, this was a period of heightened aspiration and a “yearning for the ineffable,” probably best illustrated in 1824 by the “Ode to Joy” in the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with lyrics like these:

 

 

Brothers, above the starry canopy

Must a loving Father dwell.

Do you bow down, millions?

Do you sense the Creator, world?

Seek Him beyond the starry canopy!

Beyond the stars must He dwell.

 

The Breaking Open of the Untameable

Examples like these suggest to me that certain periods represent especially dramatic “openings” into the collective unconscious, as though the membrane between worlds thins and allows us to intuit realities and ideas normally beyond our grasp. Some of that is likely due to the way these outer bodies — Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto — represent forces outside the conventional framework defined by Saturn, making them inherently unorthodox and “against the grain” in symbolism.

      

But I suspect it also stems from the fact that these bodies are so distant from Earth that they’re essentially invisible to the naked eye — thus symbolizing forces deep in the collective unconscious. The result is that whenever they’re triggered, it feels like tectonic plates shifting deep underground and awakening forces that seem wholly alien or other, as if issued from another world. And in a certain sense, they may well be.

      

On one level, this manifests as a growing fascination with subjects or phenomena that seem mysterious or distant from us in space or time. Because our intuition is now sensing what lies beyond the veil of surface appearances, we’re suddenly attracted to ideas and images that previously seemed bizarre or unconventional.

      

But it’s even possible that such periods produce not only a heightened fascination with the other, but also a greater occurrence of unusual or Fortean events in the world. It’s as though the veil between worlds doesn’t simply become thin but in some sense is actually pierced, allowing for the contents of these alternate realities to bleed through into our world, like a finger being pulled out from the cosmic dike.

      

Take the Uranus–Neptune conjunction of the late 1980s and early ‘90s. Throughout that period, there was a growing interest in the phenomenon of EVP — or Electronic Voice Projection — as researchers like Mark Macy and George Meek gained attention for their work on purported communication with the dead via radio and television technology. That same period also saw a massive increase in the popularity of mediumship (rebranded at the time as “channeling”), with a series of books and TV programs flooding the market on messages received from disembodied beings of one ilk or another. The crop circle phenomenon was also exploding into pubic attention during the early 1990s, as skeptics and believers alike debated whether these increasingly complex formations were messages from aliens, time travelers, parallel dimensions, earthbound invisibles, or simply the work of hoaxers. It’s probably not a coincidence that the popular film Stargate premiered during the peak of this period, in 1994, with its story about a mysterious portal opening up to distant worlds — and in a way it felt just like that to me at the time!

      

And going back to the Uranus–Pluto conjunction of the mid 1960s, this was a decade that witnessed a massive influx of anomalous reports filtering in through the mainstream media, from sightings of UFOs in places like Michigan and Shag Harbour to the iconic filming of an alleged Bigfoot in California in October 1967. The mid ‘60s also played host to one of the most bizarre anomalies of recent times, the Mothman sightings of West Virginia, commencing in 1966 and climaxing with the deadly collapse of the Silver Bridge on September 15, 1967 in that same area.

      

Seven decades earlier, the 1890s were also an active time for Fortean-style incidents, best exemplified by the great “airship wave” of 1896–97, when mysterious floating craft were reported by witnesses around the United States, as well as the pre-Roswell claim of a crashed spaceship in Aurora, Texas in 1897.

      

In his classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience, American philosopher William James pointed out: “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” If even a fraction of the Fortean accounts passed down to us represent real events, then it’s possible that that “filmiest of screens” James described might open wide at certain points, allowing for a true cross-pollination of dimensions to take place.

 

 

Angels and Demons

 

“Wherever God erects a house of prayer, the devil builds a chapel.”

       — Daniel Defoe

 

With every opening up of the collective unconscious comes a certain trade-off, since this piercing of the veil affords contact not just with the lighter and more spiritual aspects of consciousness but its darker potentials as well. Consequently, with the entrance of powerful divine energies into our world, we also find the emergence of powerful negative forces. Time after time, while studying the historical records, I was struck by how often the activation of the outer planets coincided with the emergence of not only great or unusual manifestations but also society’s most notable monsters, both fictional and real.

      

As a case in point, the Uranus–Neptune conjunction of the early 1990s may well have triggered a spiritual renaissance, in terms of books, journals, and teachings, but it also witnessed a milestone in cinematic monster-making with the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (premiering in 1993, the very year that planetary conjunction became exact). The same year, Spielberg gave us another film dealing with monsters of the Nazi variety, with his movie Schindler's List. On the real-world stage, this period also saw the eruption of unspeakable horrors in regions of the world like Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Iraq.

      

Rewinding to the Uranus–Pluto conjunction of the 1960s, this decade witnessed advances in areas like civil rights, science, and the arts, but it also saw the box-office popularity of the Japanese monster franchise headlined by creatures like Godzilla, Gamera, Ghidora, Guiron, and Mothra, and God-knows-what other weirdly named creatures from the Tokyo studios. The ‘60s were also a high-water mark in stop-motion special effects monsters, through the work of Ray Harryhausen in films like Jason and the Argonauts, From the Earth to the Moon, and Mysterious Island. In real life, this decade saw horrendous violence in the Vietnam War as well as China’s Cultural Revolution. And just as the peace-and-love festival of Woodstock was followed several months later by the violence-plagued Altamont concert, so too the largely positive message of the Beatles found its dark counterpoint in the crimes of the Manson family; the two groups even shared a common tagline: “Helter Skelter.”

      

Reflecting back on the Neptune–Pluto conjunction of the late 1800s, this may have been a period rich in mystical, creative, and technological trends, but it was also a time that introduced us to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Arthur Machen’s seminal horror novel, The Great God Pan (1894), and the real-life monster Jack the Ripper. And let’s not forget that the 1890s gave birth to history’s first horror film, Georges Méliès’ Le Manoir du diable.

      

And stepping back earlier to the Uranus–Neptune conjunction of the early 1820s, the same period that gave us Beethoven’s Ninth and the decoding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics also gave birth to that other great icon of modern horror — Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (published anonymously in 1818 and then republished under Shelley’s name in the 1823 second edition).

 

The Lessons of Monsters

So, what can we learn from these monstrous apparitions, whether real or fictional? In much the same way that the creatures of our personal nightmares reveal truths and lessons we need to face within ourselves, I believe the monsters of our collective dreams hold a similar significance. They embody, in exaggerated form, the titanic energies of our own psyches and the lessons we’re struggling to learn as a society.

      

For instance, it’s fitting that Mary Shelley’s story of a mechanical monster should appear exactly in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when more sensitive minds were re-examining the fruits of technological progress, not to mention mechanistic rationality itself. Similarly, Bram Stoker’s Dracula expressed something appropriate to the darker qualities of fin de siècle 19th-century Europe, this being a period not just of mystical and spiritual fascinations but widespread drug epidemics, “decadence,” and late-Romantic escapism.

      

Or consider the atomic-generated monsters of Japanese cinema during the 1950s and ‘60s, an era when people around the planet were gripped by fears of nuclear holocaust and the lingering effects of atomic radiation.

      

What about the monsters populating our collective dreams now? Though I’ve been focusing my attention here mainly on conjunctions between the outer planets, the fact is that any strong relationship between the outer bodies can trigger powerful openings into the collective unconscious. For instance, the Uranus–Pluto square of the early 1850s saw the publication of one of literature’s towering achievements, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which simultaneously introduced us to one of the most iconic fictional monsters — Ahab’s great white whale.

      

And on March 2, 1933, one of Hollywood’s most enduring monster movies, King Kong, premiered exactly as Pluto and Uranus were within only minutes of arc from an exact square (a 90-degree angle). That planetary conflict was reflected in the symbolism of the final battle between Kong (Pluto) and the fighter planes (Uranus). It’s worth noting that, in Germany, this same month saw full dictatorial powers being acquired by Adolf Hitler (due to passage of the Enabling Act), whose army was eventually taken down, in large part by enemy planes.

      

As of this writing (summer 2013), the world is in the midst of another series of squares between Uranus and Pluto. A number of “monsters” populate the global landscape now, from the political tyrants of nations like Syria and North Korea to corporate tyrants like Monsanto and the Bank of America. In cinema, the summer of 2013 has seen the release of Guillermo del Toro’s big-budget film, Pacific Rim, which revolves around a gigantic, scientifically engineered robot doing battle with a monstrous beast from the underworld. Could there be a more fitting expression of Uranus in conflict with Pluto, I wonder? Symbolically viewed, there's a close correspondence between the film’s narrative and what has been unfolding on the global stage: on the one hand, the film’s Uranian hi-tech robot aptly signifies the rise of progressive, even futuristic attitudes, while the film’s primeval beast symbolizes comparatively regressive, reptile-brain forces in the world seeking to control others or maintain the status quo — or both.

      

The battle between these titanic figures reflects the struggle taking place now between new and old, between future and past, as the emerging Aquarian paradigm struggles to overcome resistance from traditional institutions and entrenched values. Think of Occupy Wall Street vs. Wall Street, the Arab Spring vs. Middle Eastern dictators, the Syrian rebels vs. President Assad, conflicts like the Tea Party vs. the U.S. federal government, or the “New Atheists” vs. traditional religion. One way or another, these all reflect the underlying conflict in our each of psyches throughout this planetary phase.1

 

Final Thoughts

As we’ve seen, when the outer planets interact and the portal to the collective unconscious opens up, powerful energies flow into manifestation in ways that can affect the course of history for years to come, giving rise not only to creative achievements but horrific forces as well. Yet, precisely because these energies can be channeled in either positive or negative ways, the very magnitude of the monsters appearing during these periods speaks to the magnitude of the creative and spiritual possibilities available during these times, too. The poet Ogden Nash once wrote, “Where there is a monster, there is a miracle.” Look back to any of the eras recounted above, for instance, and you’ll see a striking symmetry between the “good” and “bad” developments taking shape at each turn of the wheel.

      

Just think back to the 20th century’s most iconic real-life "monster," Adolf Hitler, who was born just as the epic Neptune–Pluto conjunction was gaining momentum during the late 1880s. That very same week also saw the birth of one of history’s great comedic and artistic geniuses, Charlie Chaplin (who looked virtually identical to his German counterpart). Examples like this remind me of what physicists describe, using their own language — that one can’t create matter without also creating its opposite in antimatter. In a sense, angels and demons come in pairs, never alone.

      

Holding that in mind, it’s worth reflecting on what the monsters of our own time could be telling us about the possibilities available to us now. While it’s far too early to know the full impact of the current Uranus–Pluto square, we already see signs of important shifts taking place in areas like gay rights, ‘60s-style “people power,” environmental awareness, and science in general. Physicists have announced that they’ve finally discovered the long-theorized Higgs boson, or “God particle,” and in recent months some researchers have even claimed to have found evidence for the existence of universes besides our own!

      

Remember, too, that the spectrum of extremes we see manifesting on the collective level during such configurations applies to us as individuals, too. In other words, the enormous potentials for good or ill associated with strong aspects between Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto are every bit as present in the lives of personalities born under these aspects. I already mentioned how Chaplin and Hitler reflected the highs and lows of the Neptune–Pluto influence, at one point during the late 19th century, but we could also add some of the figures born under the Uranus–Pluto square of the early 1930s to this list. True, this period gave birth to sociopaths like Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and Marshall Applewhite, but it also ushered in creative spirits like Leonard Cohen, Carl Sagan, and Elvis Presley!

      

That’s worth keeping in mind when attempting to fathom the meaning and impact of the Uranus–Pluto square we’re again experiencing right now. What will be the final legacy of this current period and its wildly turbulent energies? The truth is, we may not know the answer until the children born now have grown up and made their own mark on the world — for better or worse!

 

Note

1. My thanks to Dave Gunning for his feedback on this section.

 

 

 

Reprinted from The Mountain Astrologer, Feb/March 2014