Uranus In Aries - Surprise, Surprise

“Your ancestors called it magic, and you call it science.  I come from a place where they are one and the same.”—Thor

In the spring of 2010, the planet Uranus moved into Aries for a brief time before stepping out in retrograde fashion until the spring of 2011.  On March 11, 2011, Uranus moved into Aries for its full seven year engagement.  

In astrology, the planet Uranus symbolizes all things non-traditional, progressive, unconventional, unpredictable, rebellious and revolutionary.  Its impulse is toward freedom from the constraints, restraints, shackles and limits of the past.  If you’re really into the established world, with its impeccable resume hard-earned over centuries and written in history books as-if-definitive, the world in which dues are paid and hard work rewarded above and beyond anything else, Uranus is an upset, a sudden shock to that system, a ghost in its tried-and-true, superbly reliable machinery.

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED

Uranus was discovered in 1781 and can be connected with the Enlightenment period of western history—the Age of Reason—a time when rationality and scientific knowledge fascinated minds while philosophy expanded them, leading to unprecedented revolution in the world.  Just over a century after Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am,” reason and order took hold, thinking became intertwined with being, and intellectual pursuits to know and illuminate everything dominated western culture.

It’s important to note that Uranus is the first of the “invisible” planets to be discovered.  To the naked eye, there is no such thing as Uranus.  Uranus forced the invention of the telescope in order to be seen, to make its presence known.  William Herschel invented his telescope and, poof!—like magic—an invisible world became visible.  What was previously unseen became seen.  This new visibility in our midst—a new way of seeing, a new consciousness—echoed the pursuit of the times.  Uranus is often called the Awakener, a sentiment expressed in the words of Ben Franklin:  “There will be sleeping enough in the grave.”

AS THE WORLD TURNS

The nature of revolution is to turn, and the discovery of Uranus occurred amidst other major turning points of world history as well—notably the American Revolution, and later the French Revolution, both of which fought to turn imaginings of a better world into a reality, again turning something invisible into something visible.  Out with the old order; in with the new.  In this manner, the United States formed and declared its independence from England and from the past.

Uranus’ discovery is linked to the discovery of electricity a couple of decades earlier, which allowed for the harnessing of new energy and light more brilliant and more sustainable than candle-light.  (Less shadowy, too, which is more preferable for—ahem—Enlightenment.)  This discovery was a revolution in itself, both literally:  a re-volt of our ability to harness energy voltage; and figuratively:  over time the literal power of horses that drove us became the metaphorical horsepower voltage of modern engines.  Like a bolt of lightning that illuminates a dark sky in a flash, Uranus unites and connects everything together all at once.  In that one instant you can see it all.  “A-ha!”  With the onset of the Industrial Age, the pace of life began to pick up, the rate of change began to increase, and rarely have things slowed down since.

ORIGINALITY

Clay Figure

One of Uranus’ myths is Prometheus, the rebel Titan most famous for his theft of fire from Zeus.  Less known from the Prometheus myth is that he fashioned the human race out of clay.

Where water is the origin of all life as we know it, Prometheus might be seen representing something more specific to the human race in particular.  If water is our origin, then Prometheus represents our originality.  Humans are original, collectively, and each of us is an original, individually.  What is the mysterious quality that distinguishes us from other life on earth?  Some say it’s our type of consciousness.  I don’t know.  Do badgers have “A-ha!” moments?  Can snakes play chess?  Prometheus taught mankind the arts of writing, medicine and science, from which have come remarkable innovations—another trademark of Uranus, particularly relevant while Uranus is in Aries, the sign of the Pioneer.  Innovation is in the air, even if it's in the invisible stages.

With all of this brilliance, Enlightenment, "a-ha!"-ing, originality and innovation going on, we seem to have the ingredients for a really amazingly smart person.  Perhaps even a genius!

THE GENIUS ARCHETYPE

Genius of Liberty

One of the archetypes of Uranus (and Aquarius) is the Genius.  While astrologers talk about really smart people like Einstein, surely a genius, the original definition of “genius” in the dictionary to this day is “a guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth.”  This is a bit unusual if you’re hearing it for the first time, but it wasn’t unusual back in ancient Rome, where winged, invisible spirits thrived in a way that can boggle the enlightened and reasoned modern mind.  Each person had his own genius, his own invisible spirit that contained the image of that person’s life as a whole—the image of his soul—and guided that person along the mysterious path of life which satisfied his own soul most.  In Greece, they called this same spirit the daimon.  The Arab culture called it the genie (what are your three wishes?).

See, there’ something—a talent, a way of seeing or thinking, for example—that seems to distinguish our lives as ours.  Something that connects you to your soul, and me to mine.  What exactly drew Stephen King into the world of horror fiction, full of the mysteries of the invisible world, where his genius was revealed?  What connected Julia Child with cooking, Mrs. Field with her cookies, Mr. Rogers with his Neighborhood, or Rubik with his Cube?  How did Thomas Jefferson manage to write the Declaration of Independence?  What inspired Brad Bird to pursue animation at age eleven, eventually bringing him to Walt Disney and Pixar to win Academy Awards for movies like Ratatouille?

Gusteau

Ratatouille is a terrific example of this Genius, as Remy the rat follows his own guardian Genius—the invisible spirit of the late Chef Gusteaux, who guides him along.  As Remy follows his genius (his heightened senses and his passion for cooking), he somehow manages to find himself at the right place in the right time, sometimes against all odds.  In doing so, he upset the old order and inspired profound change.  Perhaps there’s something here of the fire stolen by Prometheus on behalf of humanity.  Perhaps the invisible sparks of inspiration and passion that guide us into the unknown are the intuitions from our invisible Genius, if we dare listen.  With Uranus in Aries the fiery spark is strong, and it requires action.  This fire can infuse the lifeless clay matters of your life with the spark of inspiration or innovation.

With this approach to the Genius, the archetype takes on a much deeper meaning and becomes far more inclusive, as it now applies to every human being—each and every one of us—instead of just the really smart ones.  Instead of, “Are you a genius?” the question becomes, “What is your genius?”

In the spirit of coming full circle, making a complete turn, a revolution, one definition of “angel” from the dictionary is “an attendant spirit or guardian.”   Sound familiar?  What the Romans called Genius, the Arabs called Genie, and the Greeks called Daimon, the Christian tradition calls a Guardian Angel.  They are all one and the same.  And it’s interesting to note that the origin of the Enlightenment is arguably the 17th-century cafés and coffeehouses that cropped up as gathering places for philosophical discussion, debate, and as general forums for the exchange of ideas.  The earliest of these, founded in 1650, was a coffeehouse named, simply, “Angel.”

AWAKENING

Genie

This particular Uranus in Aries is a powerful one, continuing a cycle of technological progress that started precisely two Uranus cycles ago, and has seen us move from the telegraph to the SmartPhone in only 168 years.  Today’s world is profoundly more aware of its inter-connection than ever before, thanks to this technology.

Norse god Thor says to humans in the upcoming movie bearing his name, “Your ancestors called it magic, and you call it science.  I come from a place where they are one and the same.”  Truly, the genius behind our modern scientific and technological innovations may very well be the magical Genius of antiquity.  Perhaps an invisible spirit led Herschel to his telescope, or guided Newton to sit under the particular apple that needed to fall at that particular moment on that particular day onto that particular head, or more recently directed the actions of Mark Zuckerberg that defied Newton’s gravity and allowed him to leap tall corporate buildings in a single bound to launch Facebook in the air above all of them.

In a scientific age such as ours, founded on the Age of Reason, to even consider the possibility of a Genius we must not let Uranus’ super-conscious flashes blind us to the fact that while everything may become illuminated, illumination isn’t everything.  How many times have you done something completely unconsciously—inspired by who knows what—and the result was life-changing in the most magical and unpredictable way?  Surprise!  And how many times has your enlightened self undertaken the most conscious of tasks, only to see them crash on the floor like shattered glass?  Surprise, surprise!  See, of everything that Uranus awakens, your soul might just be the most reasonable to befriend, not because it provides you any guarantees in life (it doesn’t), but rather because it will ensure that you never quite know what’s going to happen next.  Perhaps your Genius knows what’s most important for you and your place in the world, and with Uranus in Aries we can upset the old order by playing a brand new version of “follow the leader”:  follow your Genius! - you might just be surprised.

Neptune In Pisces - Home I'll Be

“That which is imagined need never be lost.”—Clive Barker Neptune recently moved into its own sign of the zodiac, watery Pisces.  In its own sign, Neptune comes home and is in the sign most closely connected to its own nature.  What is that nature?

BOUNDLESS LONGING

Neptune is typically associated with dreams and illusions and mystical longing.  If the practical world is your home base and you strive to manage that world with ease, Neptune is challenging.  Neptune provides dissolving and softening, like a muscle relaxant to the worked-out rigidities of the practical world.  When it comes to the practical world, Neptune dutifully achieves its escapist reputation via fantasies, guilty pleasures, down-time, and countless other time-wasters that lure you away from “reality.”  If reality is about being grounded, getting work done and being responsible, Neptune is more about having a deep, relaxing massage that never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ends.

Neptune’s discovery in 1846 occurred during the Romantic period of western history.  The power of the imagination contained within the Romantic vision is also contained within Neptune’s boundless waters, oceans, fogs, mysteries and yearnings.  While Neptune’s longings may get in the way of fulfilling your real-world responsibilities, the great Romantics saw (and see) the world from a different perspective.  Says James Hillman:

“To be filled with longing—that is fulfillment. Tell me what you long for, said the German Romantics, and I will tell you who you are.”

Fundamentally, Neptune is a longing.  Longing for what, though?  William Wordsworth, one of the great Romantic poets, writes, “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star / Hath had elsewhere its setting.”  The Neptunian part of you is the soul, longing for its home—its real home, elsewhere—a home you can barely remember but can never forget, a home you can only glimpse through imagination.  While this longing for home feels intensely intimate and deeply personal, it’s a longing shared by every human, and from it emerges great art, great music, great movies, and great poetry.  Within the essence of our imagination and artistic expression resides the source of who we are, as individuals and as a collective.  The longing for that source is particularly strong when Neptune is in Pisces.

When Neptune was last in Pisces, the California Gold Rush brought countless people galloping over the rugged American terrain (imagine Neptune’s horses) longing for gold from the waters of California, establishing what has become the modern American Dream.  Not surprisingly, popular culture (a strong carrier of Neptune) is currently envisioning the American West again:  “Rango” features Johnny Depp as a heroic lizard cowboy who saves the water reserves of a dried-up town, and in the process meets the mystical Spirit of the West itself; the lead character in the television series "Justified" is a cowboy detective; British sci-fi show “Doctor Who” heads to America for the first time with the centuries-old time-traveling Doctor donning a Stetson; CW hit “Supernatural” brings the Winchester brothers into the Wild Wild West, cowboy hats and all; and this summer Harrison Ford stars in “Cowboys and Aliens.”

ORIGINS & MEMORIES

Water is the source of all life as we know it, according to science and according to most creation mythologies of cultures worldwide.  The emergence of great art from the imagination shows more of Neptune’s nature as a womb-like source of creation.

With these Neptunian connotations of the womb and birth, it’s not surprising that shortly before Neptune entered Pisces this year, Lady GaGa took the music world in her monster arms again and rocked it (to sleep?) with “Born This Way.”  For the song’s premiere live performance, she arrived at the Grammy Awards in an egg, having incubated in it for three days prior so she could emerge from it to perform the song.

Again:  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.”

In addition to its connection to life, water is also associated with memory.  If Wordsworth is correct that when we are born we forget our true origins, Neptune’s longing reminds us with its subtle IV drip of memory that seeps into every moment of every life.  We have glimpses of the eternal self we dream of being “if only....”  It can be very difficult to hang on to that whiff of a memory, despite its enormous appeal, especially if it makes the world around us look all the more dreary, ordinary and dull.  This leads to one of the most challenging components of both Neptune and Pisces: addictions.

THE ADDICT ARCHETYPE

One of the dangers of Neptune in Pisces, particularly relevant in today’s culture, is addiction.  It’s hard to track cycles of addiction historically, because not only has addiction saturated our modern world, but the modern world—still rushing for gold—includes addiction to the modern world itself (shutting out the past, living “in the now”).

Neptune’s longing for home is also a longing for eternity, to be outside of the tight, restrictive bounds of time and space with its limits and walls and separation and aloneness.  These longings can be so powerful and overwhelming (oceanic) that we may try desperately grabbing on to something—anything!—in the world around us to make them go away.  We grab onto the illusion that eating enough chocolate bars or cookies will make them go away.  See, addictions aren’t just a desperate attempt to escape the dull, drab, ordinary world of limits, or to escape from the emotional wreckage of a troubled childhood.  That is one component.  Addictions are also—from the other direction—an attempt to shut out eternity, to occlude the memory of eternity we each carry.  This is why, in the throes of addiction, the one particular thing in the one particular moment of “now” becomes so vitally important.

See, with Neptune we always have a paradox, and with Pisces we always have two fish.  From whichever direction we approach addiction—as an escape from this world or as an escape from the memory of eternity—the question still remains of how to deal with the paradox of addiction.  Apparently, eating the chocolate bars, drinking the alcohol, smoking the joint, spending the money, or working overtime-and-then-some, never really works.  Working never works, and escaping is no escape, so what’s left?

THE MYSTIC ARCHETYPE

If the Addict archetype is one of the two fish, the other is the Mystic archetype. They work together: little fish, big fish. The Addict is a Mystic, trapped in illusion.  Trying to escape from confining limits, the Addict only finds himself more confined (to twelve steps, one at a time, for example); running from eternity, he only finds himself closer to it (addiction takes its toll on the body)—no wonder Neptune has a reputation for confusion!

While the Addict is devoted to the ego, the Mystic is devoted to the soul. While the Addict shuts out memories of eternity and of the past to live in an isolated moment of “now,” the Mystic embraces it all, now, and celebrates with an exuberant dance of life. Neptune’s longing for the soul—a bane for the Addict of earth—is the Mystic’s key to unlocking the paradise of life on earth.  Where the Addict sacrifices life for the sake of the addiction, the Mystic makes all of life sacred (the true meaning of “sacrifice”).

When the ordinary world is too dull and uninteresting—or way too distressed—think like a Mystic. Through the eyes of the Mystic, what is “ordinary” (regular) becomes “ordained” (holy)—the two words have the same etymological roots. This transformation from something plain to something sacred is what Neptune is all about. Everything seems to stay the same, yet everything has changed. It’s what happens when reading a poem, and why so much of poetry consists of seemingly “normal” images which somehow become magical through the vehicle of poetry. When we operate from the imagination, the whole world becomes sacred. Rather than trying to feed the insatiable ego, we can satisfy the soul.

When Clive Barker wrote in his book Weaveworld, “That which is imagined need never be lost,” he hit on the Neptunian connection between memory and imagination, and how the imagination can return soul (eternity) to the world around us.  The world needs our imagining, not our escape into literalism.  The world needs our participation, because how we image things makes all the difference in the world, in what we create and how we create.  While Neptune is in Pisces, we have the opportunity to weave eternity into the world around us—our home away from Home—with threads of the imagination, one end tied to the true source of who we are and the other end open to sacred connection.  Eternity is real, it’s right in front of us, and it’s only a fantasy away.

What is an archetype?

I use the word "archetype" a lot in this blog, and most if not all of the posts will be tagged with the word.  So I thought I'd spend a post talking about what an archetype actually is. To put it simply, an archetype is a pattern.  It's a structure, or a form.  And it’s invisible.

How does this work?

If you take out a blank sheet of paper and draw a circle, you have drawn a pattern or a form we call "circle".  We all recognize circles.  We see them all over the place if we stop and look around the world.  We see circles in the shape of the Sun, in the shape of coins, the wheels on cars, the top of most drinking glasses, the shape of CDs or record albums, the shape of the pupil in your eye, or in a merry-go-round.  We recognize circles when we see them.  Before we even draw a circle, we automatically know what a circle is.  The same can be said for squares, triangles and rectangles.  The main difference between those shapes that you see, and an archetype, is that the archetype is invisible.  Wherever in your imagination you pulled the foundational image from which you drew your "circle" is the same place where all sorts of invisible patterns and shapes and forms reside.  Archetypes are the foundational patterns of everything.  If something exists, it originates in an archetypal form first.  From the archetype of "circle" come all other circles.  

Looking at this another way, to connect it more to our lives,  just like a blueprint consists of rectangles and squares and other shapes that combine to form the structure of a building, archetypes are the invisible structures of your life and of your soul.  Archetypes are the invisible architecture of your soul.  And these archetypes carry names that we resonate with in the same way we know what a circle is.  Common archetypes include the Mother, the Father and the Child.  When you hear those words you instantly recognize what they are.  Similarly, it's easy to recognize the Teacher, the Artist, the Storyteller or the Clown.  These are all archetypes.  And in the way that many buildings together create a city, a combination of different archetypes create your life.  You may be an Artist and a Teacher and a Mother.  Or you may be a Student and a Prince and a Hero.  If you are a Rebel and a Princess and a Hero (as seen, for example, in the movie “Whip It”), life gets very interesting and alive.  See, when we embody a particular archetype we personalize it.  If you are a Mother, you likely have a very nurturing nature, yet no two mothers nurture in exactly the same way.  You mother the way you mother.  Likewise, some teachers teach history, some teach math, and some teach theatre--and no two theatre teachers will teach theatre in the same way.  

An important piece in understanding archetypes is that they are not literal.  They are first and foremost invisible, which means you don’t need to dress in big shoes, a giant colorful curly wig and a round red nose in order to be a Clown.  You don’t need to stand up in front of a literal classroom to be a Teacher.  And you don’t need to be a particular age to be a Child.  You don’t need to have literal children to be a Mother, and not all mothers carry within them a strong sense of the Mother archetype.

In an even more complex way, archetypes combine to form larger patterns.  Together, the Mother and Father and Child form the archetype of Family.  A Teacher and Students combine to form the archetype of a Classroom, and Classrooms form a School.  A School and a City Hall and a Post Office, a Grocery Store, other Businesses and some Homes might form the archetype of a City.  A King and a Queen, a Prince and a Princess, a Knight, a Damsel, and a Fool create the archetype of the Court. 

In whichever manner you approach archetypes (on a personal level, a cultural level, or a historical level), essentially archetypes are recognizable because they are common to human experience.  They are timeless.  If you’ve ever learned something, you recognize the Teacher as well as the Student.  If you've ever saved somone, you know the Rescuer.  If you've ever birthed something, you know the Mother.  If you’ve ever had your heart swell with passion, you know the Lover archetype. 

To “see” archetypes is to see what is invisible within the visible, to see its essential makeup.  And to see yourself and the rest of the world this way is to see symbolically rather than literally.  Sometimes it can be like an upside-down reversal of how you typically see life, if you take the world in front of you literally.  Yet, the advantage of learning to de-literalize and see the archetypal nature contained within anything (including yourself) is to bring a sense of soul back into life--into your life--and to see the enchanting and magical and eternal essence at the heart and soul of life itself.