In Cosmos Tarnas analyzes the key spiritual, cultural, scientific, biographical, and historical developments of the past 2,000 years in the light of our solar system's five outer planets' movements relative to one another.
For example, there's a remarkable correlation between alignments of Uranus and Pluto and epochs of rebellion and revolution. A look at the years 1643-1654, 1787-1798, 1845-1856, 1896-1907, and 1960-72, when Uranus and Pluto were in alignment, gives one something to think about. Just consider the period of 1960-1972 -- rebellion and upheaval everywhere you look: Cuba, Vietnam, Mississippi, Alabama, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, Woodstock, the Moon; civil rights, women's liberation, gay liberation, rock 'n' roll, soul, Pop art; the space race, Earth Day, the Pill, plate techtonics, chaos theory, the Big Bang, quarks; the Second Vatican Council, liberation theology, Zen, yoga, the Maharishi. The list is long.
In a chapter entitled "A Larger View of the Sixties," Tarnas discusses the collective and diachronic (a new vocabulary word for me) nature of these upheavals. "It is as if everyone who was born after the 1960s actually in some way lived through the 1960s," he explains, invoking the sense of a collective unconscious. "They bear within themselves the effects of that era, they know its conflicts and struggles, its truths and revelations.... They then enter new eras with all those impulses and forces existing potently within them, both the epochal resolutions from the earlier era and all that is deeply unresolved.
"[T]he planetary movements have significance," he concludes, "that is, they bear an intelligible correspondence to particular archetypal principles, and their unfolding cyclical patterns are closely associated with the unfolding cyclical patterns of human affairs." (Emphasis in the original)
Moby Dick and Nature's Depths
"[T]he planetary movements have significance," he concludes, "that is, they bear an intelligible correspondence to particular archetypal principles, and their unfolding cyclical patterns are closely associated with the unfolding cyclical patterns of human affairs." (Emphasis in the original)
Moby Dick and Nature's Depths
In the chapter on "Moby Dick," Tarnas highlights the influence of the planets Saturn, Uranus, and Pluto, on nature and in the life of Herman Melville. The themes of this planetary interaction include "awakening and eruption of nature's forces ... the unleashing of the instinctual id ... titanic defiance, titanic power and creative intensity" combined with "punitive retribution against nature and relentless obsession with projected evil."
When Melville was born, the planets Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were all in significant alignment. Eleven days after Melville was born, the Essex, a whaling ship, left Nantucket Island off the New England coast and made its way to the South Pacific, where it was attacked by an 80-foot whale and sunk. One of the survivors, first mate Owen Chase, wrote an account of the attack.
Knowing nothing about the Essex, Melville found himself, in his early twenties, on a whaling ship in the South Pacific. During that voyage, he met Owen Chase's son, who loaned Melville a copy of Owen's narrative. A few years later, when Saturn and Pluto occupied the same part of the sky as when Herman was born, he wrote and published Moby Dick. As he was completing the final chapters, he was stunned to learn that a whaling ship, the Ann Alexander, was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the South Pacific. This time, the planet Uranus was also in the same part of the sky, in a configuration known as a triple conjunction -- the only time this has occurred in the past two hundred years. And according to Tarnas, the sinkings of the Essex and the Ann Alexander are the only two well-documented cases of such an event. "Some certain significance lurks in all things," wrote Melville in Moby Dick.
"Such powerful patterning," observes Tarnas, "working at so many levels of the human and natural worlds, strongly intimates the possibility that an anima mundi, an archetypally informed depth of interiority, lies within 'all things' -- in the depths of the human psyche and in the depths of nature."
When Melville was born, the planets Saturn, Uranus and Pluto were all in significant alignment. Eleven days after Melville was born, the Essex, a whaling ship, left Nantucket Island off the New England coast and made its way to the South Pacific, where it was attacked by an 80-foot whale and sunk. One of the survivors, first mate Owen Chase, wrote an account of the attack.Knowing nothing about the Essex, Melville found himself, in his early twenties, on a whaling ship in the South Pacific. During that voyage, he met Owen Chase's son, who loaned Melville a copy of Owen's narrative. A few years later, when Saturn and Pluto occupied the same part of the sky as when Herman was born, he wrote and published Moby Dick. As he was completing the final chapters, he was stunned to learn that a whaling ship, the Ann Alexander, was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the South Pacific. This time, the planet Uranus was also in the same part of the sky, in a configuration known as a triple conjunction -- the only time this has occurred in the past two hundred years. And according to Tarnas, the sinkings of the Essex and the Ann Alexander are the only two well-documented cases of such an event. "Some certain significance lurks in all things," wrote Melville in Moby Dick.
"Such powerful patterning," observes Tarnas, "working at so many levels of the human and natural worlds, strongly intimates the possibility that an anima mundi, an archetypally informed depth of interiority, lies within 'all things' -- in the depths of the human psyche and in the depths of nature."
