CHAPTER TWO
Planetary Cycles - 6

The Cycle of Neptune
Six Neptunian revolutions around the Sun last about 982.74 years; thus it enters 71 times a new sign of the zodiac. Neptune reached heliocentrically Aries 0° at the end of August 1861. The geocentric transit occurred for the first time on April 13th, 1861 exactly when the fall of Fort Sumter marked the beginning of the Civil War - quite a "coincidence"! Neptune went back briefly into Pisces and re-entered Aries on February 14, 1862 when two forts surrendered to the Union forces of General Grant (born in 1822 near the time Pluto entered Aries). The surrender of forts — i. e. of Saturnian enclosures — symbolize interestingly the beginnings of the present Neptune cycle. Neptune was then in "transforming" quintile aspect to Uranus.
      The preceding cycle began in 1697-98, with Neptune in square to Uranus entering Capricorn.(3) This was the cycle which witnessed the collapse of the old order in Europe. The Neptune-cycle beginning in 1861 will end in 2025-26; and it reached its mid-point in the fall-winter 1942-43 when the first sustained atomic reaction in Chicago was achieved, signalling the beginning of the "Atomic Age." In 1863 Baha'u'llah publicly announced that he was the expected Divine
      Manifestation for the New Age — with Saturn in Libra squaring Neptune; and the Bahai Movement began to grow and to promote an ideal, but very precise plan for a social and religious World-Order, the first religious movement ever to do so.
      The cycle of Neptune appears to deal broadly (as already stated) with mankind's attempts to conceive and utilize an ever wider and more encompassing frame of reference for his institutions. Such attempts can ultimately succeed only to the extent to which an increasing number of human beings are able to feel compassion and to develop a mentality stressing inclusiveness and wholeness (or synthesis) instead of exclusiveness and the analytical, quantitative, rational intellect. The power to use the tremendous power locked in the atom, which was demonstrated as Neptune entered Libra (in a sense, the seventh phase of its cycle) could enable man to really build a global all-encompassing society and to transform the basic relationships between individuals and between group, substituting a feeling of abundance and spiritual plenitude for the ancient sense of scarcity and the bio-psychic fears which so far have dominated the mind of man; but this nuclear power plus the horrors of chemical warfare (and at a lesser level the poisoning of the Neptunian expanses of the atmosphere and the ocean) could also destroy all life on the earth.
      The north node of Neptune is located now at about Leo 11°20'. Neptune moved back and forth around that point when the future of the League of Nations (a typical Neptunian project) was debated in the United States, and the Senate voted against ratification — when President Wilson collapsed, and the Prohibition Act went into effect with demoralizing results. The woman, suffrage amendment was also ratified. A couple of years before, the Bolshevik Revolution had changed the tide of world-history. World-Communism was also a Neptunian movement, as (especially in its first phase) it operated as a "religion of humanity," fanatic in its materialistic approach and its method.
      An earlier passage of Neptune at its north node occurred during the years 1755-57, the time of the Seven Years War in Europe with its repercussion in America. It coincided with Franklin's first unsuccessful attempt at creating a union of the American colonies under a president appointed by the crown and a council of delegates elected by the colonial assemblies. This was the time when Free Masonry, the Encyclopedists and a number of pioneering scientists were stirring up the intellectual elite of the Western world and preparing the Revolutionary Movement which was soon to follow.
      A still earlier passage of Neptune at its north node (1592-93) coincided rather fittingly, even if negatively, with the dreadful Wars of Religion, and the gradual development of the American colonies. The transits of around 1426 came at the time of the revolt of Bohemia after the murder of John Hus, of the Hundred Years War and Joan of Arc (burnt in 1431). This period can be said to mark the first appearance of the concept of "nation," at that time a broader concept of social organization than those known during the feudal Ages. Two cycles before, we reach the era of the first Crusade which opened the mind of medieval Europe to the culture of the East.
      Here, let me state again that a study of such planetary cycles should not focus on special dates marking their beginning and on precise correlations with historical events; it should rather study the entire pattern of the cycle in an attempt to discover the structuring forces at work underneath or within the historical events. What is important is the relation of any such event to the process as a whole which the cycle outlines and defines.
      What matters today, for instance, is the fact that we are past the mid-point of the Neptunian zodiacal cycle which began in 1861 (Neptune entering Aries). Neptune in Scorpio is in the eighth phase of that cycle, and we are facing the imperative need to transform and regenerate what began at that time — mainly the results of the Industrial Revolution, of colonization by Western powers, and — let us be honest — of our murderous attitude towards the American Indians and of our miscarriage of the process of "emancipation" of Negro slaves.

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3. The Peace of Ryswick between France and a Grand Alliance of England, Spain and Holland marked the slow decrease of French power and the beginning of Prussia's rise. The Mexican expedition planned by the French emperor in 1861 marked also a loss of prestige by Napoleon III, which led to the defeat of 1871 and the establishment of the German Empire.  Return