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Until our times, that which we call mundane astrology has mainly been confined to the limited field of political astrology, being orientated above all, towards short term predictions, such as annualpredictions concerning a specific nation with some bolder attempts dealing pre-eminently with questions of war and peace on a continental or world scale. However, during the 19th and 20th centuries, the coming together of a number of circumstances of a diverse nature have resulted in the possibility, today, of a significant enlargement in the field of study of mundane astrology, and in particular, of an approach to the general history of civilisation in correlation with the great planetary cycles. We can group together these new conditions under four headings astrological, historical, geographical, and instrumental.
Astrologically, the major event was the discovery of the trans-Saturnian planets (Uranus in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930). According to the traditional model, the Jupiter-Saturn cycle, which recurs every twenty years, constitutes the only long cycle (stretched out in time to about two centuries by the movement of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in the triplicities), mundane astrology, since the integration of Pluto into the system, uses six cycles of the outer planets, of which the long Neptune-Pluto cycle, lasting five centuries, provides, as we will see, a particularly welcome tool for the study of the history of civilisations. The eventual integration into this system of a trans-plutonian planet could open still larger prospects but applicable, perhaps, to the geological history of the planet and to pre-historic times rather than to a history of civilisation. At another level, the discovery of Chiron, in 1977, with a cycle of 50 years, opens an attractive prospect to mundane practice, as testified by the work (not yet published) of our Belgian friend and colleague Benoît de Meester. At the same time that the integration of the trans-Saturnian planets widens the cyclic field to temporal multi-secular dimensions, the integration of Chiron and probably also various other planetoids, is likely to open more subtle lines of research.
However the mundane practitioner must take account not only of the stars but equally of the possibilities opened up by the evolution of history itself. Here again, the field of history has been extended in time as well as in space. As the great historian of civilisation, Arnold J Toynbee, has noted, the oikoumene, that’s to say the habitable part of our earth now stretches over the whole planet, even including the Arctic and Antarctic polar regions. And since the first decades of the twentieth century there has been more and more research by historians which is not just applied to the history of a single nation or to a group within a continent, but to the general history of civilisation. After the well-known work of Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (which came out in the early 1920’s) the major work in this field is that of Arnold J Toynbee, whose twelve volumes titled A Study of History appeared between 1934 and 1961, the six last volumes bearing witness to the evolution of the history of civilisations, as we know it, towards a history of religions.
The sixties marked the development of these studies across the world. In the United States, one can cite the work of Philip Bagby in Los Angeles (continued today by David Wilkinson) and that of Caroll Quigley at the university of Georgetown, as well as the writings of the well-known Harvard political scientist, Samuel Huntington, whose The Clash of Civilisations came out in 1996, raising some very lively debate. Equally, in Russia, interest in the general study of civilisation developed, from the second half of the nineteenth century, with the work of Nikolaï Danilevski, founder of geopolitics in Russia ; In the twentieth century one can cite the names of Sorokin, a big name in sociology, and the Lithuanian Vytautas Kavolis, co-editor of the Comparative Civilizations Review and president, from 1977 to 1983, of the International Society for the Comparitive Study of Civilisations. For France and French speaking countries, we have the work of Fernand Braudel, who is linked to the recognised Ecole des Annales as well as the bulky entirety of Jacques Pirenne’s Great Trends in World History (which came out between 1945 and 1956). It’s appropriate that the astrologer, desirous of having the study of world history in his or her remit is aware of the various works which have a bearing on the general history of civilisation and on the problems of methodology that relate to them.
Finally, another factor to take into account, and one which helps considerably in carrying out global research : is the computer revolution born at the time of the Uranus/Pluto conjunction in 1965 and which took on a new dimension starting from the transit of Jupiter to the Uranus/Neptune conjunction in1997, with the development of personal computers and of the internet - the computer revolution mentioned by André Barbault in his lecture on the Uranus/Neptune cycle and internationalisation. The astrologer can today indulge in research that was unthinkable until a short time ago: for example, it is possible for us, albeit with a lot of patience, to state the planetary positions for several millennia and thus to calculate the cyclical index which covers the whole of the time of the history of civilisation, from the creation of a united kingdom in Egypt around 3200 B.C., until today. Our software also permits the undertaking of very promising research, not yet systematically explored, in the field of astrocartography.
All these developments in many fields, contribute, from now on, to orientate mundane astrological research towards an area which, until now, has been, as it were, inaccessible: a probing study of the general history of civilisation in the light of the unrolling cycles of the outer planets. Now we can see more clearly how the astrologer is positioned in relation to history.
One of the promising elements of this type of research is the fact that there exists a certain parallel between the typology of historical time periods and their connection with the hierarchy of planetary cycles. Indeed, following the judicious reflections of Fernand Braudel, historians now distinguish between phenomena of long duration, which can stretch over many centuries, phenomena of medium duration which stretch over some decades and phenomena of short duration (the short time span of the news, of journalism)
Astrologers, themselves, also work with cycles of long duration (the cycles of the trans-Saturnian planets, which have a duration of 110 or 140 years for Uranus-Pluto, of 170 years for Uranus-Neptune and of 500 years for Neptune-Pluto); cycles of medium duration (the Saturnian cycles, which last a little less than forty years for Saturn-Uranus, Saturn-Neptune and Saturn-Pluto, and which last twenty years for Jupiter-Saturn); and cycles of short duration, i.e. all the cycles of the inner planets (Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars), not to mention the lunar cycles inscribed in a monthly framework. A hierarchical approach to planetary cycles seems to us to be one of the fundamental methodological keys in the practice of the mundane. You have to correspond the appropriate cycle to the historical phenomena that you are dealing with, and the first element of suitability resides in a certain conformity of time scale recognition.
In addition, we need agreement on the adaptation of astrological analysis to the nature of historical events. One could say that history is woven by a weft of singular events, intermittent in nature but it is also made up of continuities which extend over variable lengths of time. If the study of a chart erected for a precise moment can throw light on the significance of a particular event, history in its continuity requires other instruments of analysis. You could, no doubt, compare a traditional chart to a photograph of a precise moment, while the diagram of a graphic ephemeris is like a cinematic sequence made up of varying lengths, some a few days and some many decades. Graphic ephemerides are, with tables of cyclic indexes, indispensable tools with which to grasp the continuous unrolling of history. With reference to the study of about five millennia of civilisation it has become essential to use tables of cyclic indexes covering the whole of this period.
After these preliminary considerations, we come to the very heart of our deliberations on the capabilities and limitations of mundane astrology to study the history of civilisation over a very long period. The basis of our approach, as much to history as to astrology, is the notion of cycle. That astrology results from a cyclical approach, seems obvious : We just have to contemplate the zodiac and imbue the cycle of the lunations, which is the prototype of all the planetary cycles. But a cyclic approach to history appears to be more problematical, because throughout the unfolding of history a linear tendency comes to light, that you think of as being progressive (in accordance with a concept which arose in the era known as the ‘Enlightenment’ or that you think of, as many societies do traditionally, as involutive, going from a Golden Age towards a Dark Age which precedes a cataclysmic renewal, tipping the world into another great era. As David Williams states in his work Financial Astrology, it is in the field of economic history that the notion of cycle seems to come to the fore. He points to a treaty by the Swiss historian Sismondi, which appeared in 1819, in which the author draws attention to the importance of the study of financial crises as being the first hint of a theory of economic cycles. The next step was the creation of Juglar cycles, which last about nine years, named after the French economist Clement Juglar, whose discourse on these questions appeared in 1860. In 1923 an American economist, Joseph Kitchin, discovered a cycle of 40 to 42 months, while in 1926 the Russian economist Kondratieff discovered the cycle of 47 to 60 years which bares his name. But for David Williams, it is undoubtedly the English businessman, John Mills, whom he attributes with being the first to attempt to establish a complete theory of economic cycles, laid out in an article dating from December 1867.
But if the notion of cycle seems to sit well in the domain of economic history, can you apply this kind of approach to general history, and in particular to the general history of civilisation? It is in the great work of Jacques Pirenne – The Great Universal Currents of History, started in Geneva during the second world war and continued up to the mid 1950’s that we find, in relation to ancient history, an explicitly cyclic approach which is of great interest. In the foreword to the second volume of his great work, Jacques Pirenne poses the question of knowing if history has meaning or if it is only chaos. He leans towards the recognition of laws governing the history of man, comparable to those which govern the stars : ‘ the lives of people seem dominated by great forces, the laws of which escape us, and have been long neglected by mankind, those that govern the movements of the universe.’ For him the general movement of history seems to be marked by a spiritual progress, which is not continuous, but which develops through the alternation of highs and lows, periods of culmination and periods of decline. The history of ancient Egypt seems to him particularly relevant to this subject,because its development was not hindered by external causes, and it carried on, according to him, through three successive cycles, which he assesses were parallel in their inner evolution. The remarkable thing is that these cycles are all multiples of the fundamental cycle of mundane astrology –the Neptune-Pluto cycle, a duration of five centuries: The first Egyptian cycle stretched, according to Jacques Pirenne, from 3,500 to 2,500 B.C. and corresponds to a period when Egypt was able to be self-sustaining. The second cycle, from 2,500 to 1000 B.C., saw Egypt become part of an international organisation, whereas in the third cycle from 1000 B.C. to 500 A.D. integrated it in the Roman Empire which encompassed all the Mediterranean countries. In addition, Jacques Pirenne strongly emphasizes the parallels between the history of the Mediterranean countries and that of the great civilised countries of Asia – India and China – in the course of the first three centuries of this era, showing how the same problems hit Rome and China. Naturally, the cycles outlined by Pirenne and the chosen dates are the subject of discussion among historians ; but with this monumental work, an impulse is given to a cyclic approach to historical phenomena.
It was in the same era that mundane astrology underwent a new foundation based on the planetary cycles. In the nineteen thirties, the way was opened, by our Belgian colleague Gustave-Lambert Brahy, who published ‘The key to world events and economic and stock market fluctuations’. With this work, we find ourselves at the meeting point of financial and mundane astrology. The cyclic approach of Brahy is characterised by the fact that he relies not on the longitudinal planetary aspects, but on the parallels of declination. He is thus the first to provide a diagram illustrating the history of the 20th century, which leads him to formulate, in later editions, an interesting analysis of the course of the second world war and on the heavy configurations at the end of the century. Because of his attribution of Pluto to the USSR (It seemed to him that this planet played a role in triggering the Russian revolution), he concluded that, ‘The USSR must impose itself eventually upon the United States, if not economically then at least diplomatically or scientifically’.
Diagram showing the declination of the slow planets during the 20th century.
The discovery of Pluto in 1930 profoundly transformed the capability of mundane astrology to explore long time periods, the history of civilisation. Indeed, from this date the five centuries long, Neptune-Pluto cycle, becomes the keynote of the whole cyclic system of the slow planets. Since having this cycle at his disposal, our colleague Robert Doolaard has, for many years now, started to explore these long periods of historical time. For our part, we have followed the same route and it seems to us that a significant peculiarity of the cycles of Neptune-Pluto constitutes a phenomenon of the greatest importance in the field of cyclic development. In fact we have picked up on the fact that, at the time of each evolutionary phase (going from the conjunction to the opposition), as well as at the time of each involutive phase (going from opposition to the next conjunction), there exists a gap of many dozens of years (around a century each time) during which the Neptune-Pluto cycle stabilises itself around a particular aspect. In antiquity the stases of the Neptune – Pluto cycle are of a rather dissonant nature, whereas in recent cycles these stases occur under harmonious aspects. The diagrambelow allows us to get an idea of this phenomenon.
Table of A and B NE-PL cycles
We have taken as the starting point of our cyclical slice of time the triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in 575 B.C., which was noted as being a portentious moment in the history of civilisation, first by Karl Jaspers, then by Arnold Toynbee. This pivotal epoch is in fact marked by the appearance, in the space of 120 years, of five great prophets : Zarathustra, Deutero-Isaiah, Buddha, Confucius and Pythagoras. Upstream of this Neptune-Pluto conjunction of 575 B.C. a cycle of about 4000 years (that we have called cycle A) stretches out, and downstream, cycle B, in which our time is situated and which will be completed towards 3,500 A.D.
The recognition of the four inter-cyclic phases leads us to take a look along the length of each period of five centuries. We have a long evolving stasis, the period of culmination, a long contracting stasis and the time of the cyclic shift (which goes at the end of an contracting stasis at the start of the following evolving stasis in passing by a new conjunction). The matching up of this quaternary rhythm with the history of civilisation perhaps allows us to establish in our ongoing research, meaningful correlations between this history of long duration and the Neptune-Pluto cycle. Anyway, we have to understand that the history of humanity does not fit within the scope of too rigid a system” whatever governs the cyclic unfolding is not such and such a cycle in particular, but constant cyclic interaction.
Conjonctions NE-PL – 4515 et 515
Table of « green zones » and « red zones » for A and B NE-PLL cycles
In remaining in the biggest ambit, that of the trans-Saturnian planets, we were interested to follow as a line of research the alternation of ‘red zones’ and ‘green zones’: we have given these names to the periods during which the three fundemental cycles – Neptune-Pluto, Uranus-Neptune and Uranus-Pluto, occur at the same timein the evolving phase (‘green zone’) or in the involuting phase (‘red zone’). What we are revealing here is a program of research that has yet to be done; for the results - positive or negative – you will have to wait a little longer, until the next international astrological conference.
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