CHAPTER EIGHT:
Prospects for the Last Quarter Century - 5
It seems unnecessary to add any more dates here. What is important, however, is to bear in mind that significant as a century cycle is, it is only a part of larger cycles — especially the five-hundred-year period defined by successive conjunctions of Neptune and Pluto, and the much larger cycle of the precession of the equinoxes that I discussed in Chapter 2. The entire twentieth century constitutes the first phase of the Neptune-Pluto cycle — thus the initial working-out of the potentialities for human and planetary transformations inherent in the 1891-1892 conjunction of these two planets. It should be regarded as an "initial" phase, especially because the great celestial symbol of Pluto entered the collective consciousness of mankind only in 1930.
The most striking thing about this phase is the long sextile of the two planets which began around 1942 as Neptune entered Libra. Because a sextile relationship normally produces a constructive and concretely workable cooperation between the functions or forces represented by the two planets so aspected, this long sextile presumably is the most, hopeful indication of the possibility of a truly constructive reconstruction of mankind on a broad global basis — but remember that reconstruction may mean first tearing down old structures and obsolete concepts or types of personal and national motivation. This seems to be what mankind is now experiencing and may experience even more radically before this century ends and a new one begins, stressing during its first year a strong massing of planets in Taurus.
A similar kind of prognosis can be deduced from a consideration of the precessional cycle. As I have said, if my historical analysis is correct, we find ourselves in the period of transition between two precessional — Ages, usually identified as Piscean and Aquarian, though these names may be confusing as they would be valid only in terms of constellations, and most modern astrologers use the tropical zodiac of "signs" and not the sidereal zodiac of "constellations." Such a period of transition or "seed-period," which began in 1846, will last about 216 years and cover three degrees of precessions (one-tenth of the Age), each degree lasting about 72 years.
The first phase of this seed-period ended in 1918 and the second, marked by the rise of the Soviet Union and the vast increase in power of the counterbalancing United States of America, will last until 1990 — a date that constantly recurs in our calculation. The third one, concluding the Piscean Age, will end in about 2062.
The sequence of these three 72-year periods (each including six complete revolutions of Jupiter) can be seen as a kind of dialectical process — a sequence of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. The period ending with the start of World War I has been called la grande époque of our modern Western, and especially European, civilization. The second period, beginning with the triumph of Russian Communism, is actually one of "religious" (or if one prefers, ideological) wars, hot or cold. It may be witnessing in its third subperiod (1966-1990) the prenatal and as yet unclear manifestation of ideals and states of consciousness that eventually will be actualized in a concrete manner during the coming Aquarian Age. This may be accompanied by a gradual process of disintegration — a process which some kind of de facto dictatorship might be called upon to arrest.
Lest anyone react fearfully to such a prospect for the immediate future, I should stress that any formulation and overt manifestation of a radically new ideal, or even an idea, must have a cathartic effect, and call for a negative response from institutions rooted in a rigid tradition. The only questions are how smooth or rough the transition will be, how vital and essential the ideals which long and self-adaptive the minds and egos of the men and women who overtly or subtly control these institutions still are. Moreover, it is difficult to gauge what the response of the masses of the population will be, if the challenge to the obsolescent Piscean past becomes more widespread and formulated in more constructive and essentially valid terms, instead of being dismissed as the activity of a somewhat lunatic fringe or of a small minority made up of long-suffering groups of people outside the mainstream of our national history.
The men who insist on a literal construction and interpretation of the Constitution fail to accept, or do not wish to accept, the fact that the United States of 1789 and the United States of 1974 are utterly different types of societies. And this Constitution, as we have seen, was actually based on compromises. If compromises are necessary between the ideal and the reality, then let new compromises be worked out to adjust to new realities. What is needed, first, is a vivid and convincing restatement of the ideas; then a calm objective assessment of the new situation unprejudiced by an emotional or compulsive attachment to formulations. Only naive people think that either need can be faced and rationally fulfilled without good deal of trouble.
By permission of Leyla Rudhyar Hill
Copyright © 1974 by Dane Rudhyar
and Copyright © 2001 by Leyla Rudhyar Hill All Rights Reserved.
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