The Uranus-Pluto Cycle of Revolution

Cosmos and Psyche, by Richard Tarnas, is one of the most important astrology books of our times. But it’s a famously challenging nut to crack. Not only is it long, but it’s full of rich insights that take time to sink in, as well as an exhaustive amount of examples to illustrate each of his ideas.

We teach a couple of courses at AU to help students access this wonderful text. But now there’s another resource available—the 10-part docuseries “Changing of the Gods.” This inspiring series—years in the making—guides you through powerful examples that bring to life the Uranus-Pluto cycle of aspects in the collective. We highly recommend the series, especially if you’re new to Tarnas’s work.

This interview was originally published on April 26, 2015, but includes a few more angles of the Uranus-Pluto cycle from Rick Levine.

Rick Levine on the Uranus-Pluto Cycle of Revolution

Tony Howard:
I’m here with Rick Levine at NORWAC 2011. Rick is a very accomplished and wonderful astrologer in the Pacific Northwet, as he likes to call it. He has a daily horoscope column translated into several languages published on tarot.com. He does a prolific amount of work for them daily and for his own website in conjunction with Jeff Jawer on StarIQ. Rick, what are you up to these days? What are you working on?

Rick Levine:
These days, I’m writing a lot of words. I write about 1000 words a day in a daily column that is allegedly the most widely read daily column in the world. That is what they—whoever they are—say, but I have no idea about that for sure.

And on top of that, Jeff Jawer, and I are in the midst of writing our 2013 book. It’s our eighth book. These are annual books that are published by Sterling Press, which is owned by Barnes and Noble. The one we’re working on right now is Your Astrology Guide 2013. The 2011 is out already. The 2012 book will hit the stands in July, available at Barnes and Noble, BN.com, and Amazon and wherever. Between those two projects, I write a lot of words.

On top of that, I do see clients, and I’ve been doing some lecturing and teaching. Jeff and I are doing these week-long venues. We have San Miguel de Allende, Mexico coming up November 5-12, 2011, and that’s a sweep of the outer planets over the next several years. We’ll work with individual charts, talking about how people can actually embrace the changes and co-create their future, rather than feeling as if the waves are just washing over them.

Then Jeff and I will be co-facilitating another workshop. It’ll be our fourth in Bali, September of 2012. And then we’ll be doing a week-long retreat in February of 2013 in Goa, India, and information can be found on all of these workshops at heavenandearthworkshops.com.

TH:
So, Rick, I’ve talked to lots of folks about Uranus and Pluto, but nobody’s brought up Jupiter in Taurus, which you’re about to talk about in about an hour, so what are your thoughts about how Jupiter interacts with what’s going on right now in the sky?

RL:
It’s easier to talk about what Jupiter’s effect on the unfolding Uranus/Pluto square is when Jupiter is in Aries than when it’s in Taurus or Gemini.

When Jupiter was in Aries, it was feeding right into the same energy. In 2013, when Jupiter moves into Cancer, it will again be back in the mix. This time it will be opposing Pluto and squaring Uranus, so I think it’s more important when it does that. But if anything, Jupiter in Taurus, I think, will help perhaps steady the energies a little bit. At least, that’s what I’m hoping. We’re on a wild course.

Jupiter enters Taurus over the next week but hangs out there over the next year. By sign, at least, during that entire time and exact for a month or so, it will be forming a harmonious trine with Pluto. And so, theoretically, that can reduce some of the stress and tension from the impending and building Uranus-Pluto square.

Now, remember, a lot of people are talking about the Uranus-Pluto square as being something that will be with us from 2012 through 2015 because it occurs seven times from the summer of 2012 through the spring of 2015. But the fact is that this summer 2011, Uranus moves close enough that it comes within less than a degree of orb of being exact to the square to Pluto, so even though, by retrograde, it backs off before making it exact next summer, the fact is that right now we’re already on the front wave of that and arguably have been on the front wave of that since Uranus ticked on into Aries on the day of the Japanese earthquakes and the Fukushima meltdown.

TH:
I’m wondering, I saw a talk you gave at the Oregon Astrology Association about a year ago. That was probably one of the more entertaining and insightful talks on revolution. You were talking about the upcoming revolutionary energies, as Uranus was going to move into Aries and its connection with energy from the 60s, and I’m wondering how you felt when you saw images on the news of the revolutionary activity in Egypt this year?

RL:
From an astrological point of view, the revolutionary state that we’re in right now and will be for the next number of years, certainly can be partially described by Uranus’s move into Aries, and my theme song for that has been Michael Franti’s “Yell Fire.”

It’s a fire in the sky, there’s a sense of spontaneity, of release of pressure, of tension, and so on, but I don’t think it’s the Uranus in Aries that is the revolutionary energy right now, even though that’s revolutionary. I think it’s the Uranus squaring Pluto bringing up the sense of urgency around the energy that was created at the seed period when Uranus conjoined Pluto in the mid-1960s.

We have the energy that arguably began maybe as early as the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and all the way up through the early 70s that we call the 60s.

And I think now, as Uranus is already moving into the square with Pluto, and will continue to over the next several years, we’re in a decade long, or at least multi year-long revisitation of the same issues that include environmental issues, suffrage issues, voting, human rights, gender issues, political freedom, suppression.

In some ways, what’s happened over these past months already, in Tunisia, and in Bahrain and in Egypt and what’s happening in other countries around the Gulf Coast. In some ways, these are very similar to what happened in the United States in the mid-60s.

There are several differences. One of them is the political climate in which they’re happening. All these revolutions are not Egypt. Some of them are being shut down as fast as they open up. Now, what will happen with those? How violent or vicious or tense those will become over the next years remains to be seen, but I think we are missing something when we talk about the revolutions in the Mideast because we had 100,000 people on the streets in Madison, Wisconsin.

You know, this is like Middle America. Granted, Madison is one of those cities in the United States that probably include Ashland, Asheville, Santa Monica, Boulder, Austin, these are cities that are really not where they belong. They’re like People’s Republics of consciousness of some sort.

Madison may be a lesser version of one of those, but the fact is that what happened in Madison is a taste of what we’re in for in the United States. And that is that, what we call the left and what we call the right, have some very fundamental similarities in what they want. I think that we will see on the streets of the United States of America, the same kind of revolution that we saw in the 60s, but at the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the 60s, there was a sense of unconsciousness. At a new moon or any conjunction, one planet is lining up with the other, so there’s no place for awareness.

At the 90-degree angle, however, you have the ability to see the differences and be overwhelmed by them, or to engage in the conflict, or to dynamically work on creative resolution of these maximum interference patterns that are being set up by the 90-degree angle.

I think that it’s not just about what’s happening in the Mideast. I think we’ll see things in China, in Pakistan and India, certainly, in the United States. Obviously, what’s happened there is very profound and powerful and was as unexpected as some of the student revolutions that happened in the 60s, that flowering.

But I think, also, this will be fueled by the fallout. Unfortunately, I use that word, not only in the metaphorical sense but in the actual literal sense of the fallout from Fukushima, which has dropped away from the news. It was like a big deal for a week or two or three, but from what I’ve read, Fukushima is as significantly a mess today, or maybe even more so than it was when it first unfolded. When it unfolded, it was huge news, but it’s a total blackout on it, so something there has yet to follow through.

As we talked about Uranus moving into Aries or the Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions, we look at the Gulf of Mexico, the oil disaster there. We haven’t begun to see the fallout from those. As those environmental issues hit bigger and bigger, it doesn’t matter whether you are right, left or center, you don’t want to eat fish that’s radioactive, and you don’t want the radioactivity to be falling on you.

If we learned one thing during the Exxon Valdez disaster a couple of decades ago, that is that Saturn says that there are real limitations. Even Neptune’s idea of the oceans being vast and boundless, we now have this sense that we’re on a little tiny island, and what happens there is also happening here.

I think that this instantaneity of feedback that happens from the digital—whether it’s Twitter and Facebook in the Mideast revolutions, or whether it’s just news that leaks out, as the radiation story is trying to be suppressed in Fukushima—I think it’s going to be too difficult to keep the information hidden, and I think that this kind of information will fuel something that we’ve never seen before.

TH:
So earlier, Georgia Stathis was talking about this upcoming Pluto-Uranus square relative to the phase that it’s in. It’s in the opening phase of the square versus the closing end of the square. Have you taken a look at that at all? Is that something you’ve thought about?

RL:
Well, yes, and if you go back historically—I have research and notes on this. But the best example I can come up with off the top of my head, because there are many similarities, is the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1455.

Uranus-Pluto joined in 1455, as it did in 1966. One of the similarities between these two conjunctions, although removed from each other by five centuries, is that they were both very quickly followed by a Uranus-Neptune conjunction.

In other words, we had a Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the mid-60s that created this explosion of awareness, bacchanalian expression of plutonic urges in freedom, lightning-like expressions through sex, drugs and rock and roll and, of course, political unrest and upheaval. It was quickly followed in 1989 to 93—the exact was in 93—by Uranus aligning with Neptune rather than Pluto.

Interestingly, when Uranus aligned with Pluto, Pluto was the farthest planet from the sun. When Uranus aligned with Neptune in 1993, Neptune was the farthest planet from the Sun. It was outside the orbit of Pluto at that time.

So those people who experienced this incredible outer planet shock awakening in the mid-60s, experienced it again in their lifetime. These are cycles that only happen every other century. So what happened in the late 80s/early 90s, with maps being redrawn, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the fall of The Soviet Union, with environmentalism rebirthing—the Exxon Valdez being part of that event—with all that was happening in the resurgence of art, of music–Nirvana and Pearl Jam and grunge and the whole movement.

The relationship between the mid-60s and the early 90s is very similar to the relationship between 1455, when Gutenberg invented the printing press and printed the Bible, and 1479, which was a Uranus-Neptune conjunction, at which time Plato hit the printing press, translated by astrologer Marsilio Ficino from Greek into Latin. What happened was that the Church lost control, and, all of a sudden, the printing press was getting information out that was non-biblical, non-church. It was Plato. It was the Corpus Hermeticum. It was all the stuff that fed and fueled the Reformation later on.

By the same token, we have now the internet, which came at the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of 1993, give or take a few years, but it was at the Uranus-Pluto conjunction in the mid-60s that IBM introduced the first business computer, the System 36.

So we have that same analog of the Gutenberg Press, followed by freedom of expression through press, and then the IBM computer which was meant to print the book of capitalism, and then the internet, which in some ways may be the downfall—like the Reformation was for the church—of nationalism and capitalism.

Now, where this fits into the opening square, is that going back to the 1455 Uranus-Pluto conjunction, it was in the 1490s that the Uranus-Pluto square occurred just after the Uranus-Neptune conjunction in 1479. Same pattern that we have now.

The 1490s was the age of exploration. “1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

This is the mind opening up and exploring the earth in ways that was built upon the information that was printed on the printing presses—maps and tables, etc. And so, I think that the opening square is, in some ways, the age of exploration, even though—to use Rudhyar’s terms of the opening square—it’s a crisis in action because it’s outward going rather than the closing square, which is a crisis in consciousness.

And so I think here that what’s happening is so important. It’s in cardinal signs. These are beginning initiating signs. It’s the opening square. This is the first test of the thoughts and concepts that were birthed during the conjunction—or at the new moon, so to speak, in the 60s.

Now we get this greater sense of urgency, immediacy. What’s gonna work? What’s not gonna work? Which of these things is actually going to happen, and which is going to fall away? And so I think that in some ways, the square is much more dynamic—not only because it’s in cardinal signs, as opposed to the conjunction in the 60s that was in Virgo and mutable signs—but also because it’s the square, and the opening square, in particular, is dynamic.

TH:
What do you see as astrology’s rightful place in our culture? We hear this a lot, people say, “Do you believe in astrology?” And other people say, “How do you prove astrology? Is astrology science? Is it an art? Is it religion? What is it?” Where do you see its proper fit in our culture?

RL:
The question of belief in astrology is interesting, because, on the one hand, if you don’t believe in it, you’re not going to put enough energy or effort into it to gain any awareness about it.

On the other hand, as James Hillman has often said, “I don’t believe in astrology any more than I would believe in a monkey wrench.” If it’s the right tool, I’ll use it. It doesn’t require belief.

Chemistry doesn’t require belief in order for hydrogen and oxygen in the right proportions to be mixed in to create water. It doesn’t require that you know astrology in order for a Saturn transit of your natal moon to precipitate a sequence of archetypal events that may then precipitate specific changes and events in your life.

So, I think it’s not about whether we believe in it or not. It’s about whether or not we choose to utilize the base of information that astrology affords us to grow our awareness, to grow our consciousness, because as the Buddhists point out, the only thing that we really can change is our awareness.

Freud said the same thing, and he didn’t put it in those words, but the whole idea of depth psychology is to change one’s perspective or to change one’s awareness. So, if I can use astrology to get a sense of larger cycles, to see the repetitive patterns, then maybe I don’t necessarily have to be a victim to them. I don’t necessarily get to automatically change everything, but by infusing awareness, at least, I can then introduce the concept, the possibility of free choice.