The Sublimity of the Great Conjunction

The Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn through film, art, poetry, historical cycles and English New Wave.

“The Edge of the Firmament,” Woodcut by Flammarion

I’ve been finding it difficult to put to words how I feel about The Great Conjunction, and its threshold into a 200-year-cycle of Jupiter and Saturn drafting their societal blueprints in air signs. Appropriately, snowfall tonight means that the conjunction will happen beyond the veil, and I will probably spend the night in the bathtub reading War and Peace (my performative plague exile continues apace!).

Though there have been flashes of a new, joyful opening of the aperture of my pin-hole Covid life, I woke up this morning with a heavy heart. The accumulative loss of this past year broke the sluices and locks of my grad school compartmentalization: Barcelona, a twelve-year relationship, and the simple delight of watching the flight-patterns of humans in a busy Spanish plaza.

There’s so much pressure in the spiritual community, (especially within the aesthetic panopticon of Instagram), to herald every profound planetary shift with fanfare and ‘high vibes’. Except this conjunction has inspired, at least for me, a bewildered, and wordless awe. I am reminded of the philosopher Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, insofar as instances of aesthetic greatness provoke a vertiginous dance of terror and attraction:

“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

Needless to say, I am with Austin Coppock who expressed his hesitation, on The Astrology Podcast, around creating talismans over the alignment. He sees The Great Conjunction as something to observe with reverence, and perhaps humility, rather than being channeled into ritual. Indeed, there have moments this past week when I have found myself on my knees in front of my altar, utterly broken by profound isolation and Mr. Rona’s Wild Ride—overcome by the simple desire to empty myself, and surrender to spirit. It should come as no surprise that the conjunction is lighting up my 9th house of spiritual seeking., and The Smith's’ ‘light that never goes out’.

One Jupiter cycle ago, I graduated with a BA in Creative Writing, and moved back to my hometown of Kimberley to save money for a move to Prague (very ninth house themes!). Though I only ever intended to stay for the duration of my six-week Tefl course, this kicked off a decade of restless expatriatism, my 7th house Saturn in Sag delivering me a long relationship with an older man in Barcelona. In 2009, however, I was reading Anna Karenina in the office of the Kimberley Riverside Campground, and life was very quiet until suddenly it was changed forever.

Now here I am, exiled in Kimberley by Plague, returning to the fount of Tolstoy, and finishing the last two month of my PhD in poetry. Aren’t Jupiter cycles beautiful in their rhythmic symmetry? Vaccination this spring will hopefully open the door to further ninth house peregrinations. First South America with a friend, then maybe a move to Lisbon?

Two Jupiter cycles ago, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time, which I hold in my mind as an initiation into mysteries beyond the cloistered garden of childhood. Apparently having a Scorpio father means being indoctrinated into the occultist world of Kubrick at a tender age, but it was the monolith that really broke my brain. There was something about that unearthly, keening plinth that adjusted critical levers in my psyche. It hinted at an alien indifference beyond the more immediate nuisances of scuffed knees, or turf wars in the green belt.

Kubrick intended the appearance of the monolith as a catalyst for quantum leaps in the evolution of humanity. His iconic cut from a Neanderthal’s flung bone (signifying man’s first use of tools), to a gracile, white space station drifting to The Blue Danube, is still cited as a triumph of the poetic potential of the film medium.

The recent sporing of monoliths, around the world this December, may be something as banal as a performance art prank funded by Banksy, or a viral ad campaign hashed out by millennial interns. Nevertheless, their provoking a sense of mystery and awe, among the collective, is very much a Jupiter-Saturn moment.

Consider the year 2000 when the sky daddies conjoined in Taurus: the collective was swept up into a state of hysteria around the Y2K bug exploding our computers (the anxiety was centered around clocks—very Saturn). Somehow this technical glitch was expanded, by Jupiter no doubt, into a harbinger of the actual end of the world. How quaint this reckoning feels when we compare it to plague, but it illustrates the point that Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions tend to send psychic riptides through the collective, as we gaze into the void of a new age with mingled terror and awe.

To understand the importance of Jupiter and Saturn meeting to consecrate a new twenty year era (or, extraordinarily, a new airy 200 year age!), we must go back to ancient astrology, and its seven traditional planets. The two sky daddies were the furthest celestial objects that could still be seen by the naked eye, hence their importance in demarcating eras and historical cycles.

Saturn, as the furthest visible planet, therefore conjures liminality, (something that pop astrology glides over), and the mysterious substance of time itself. Like Janus, the God of thresholds, Saturn is not so much a sturdy wall, as a series of diaphanous screens lifting to reveal mysteries beyond the limits of human knowledge.

Jupiter’s providence over the revelation of spring, after the decay of the Saturnian winter, ushers in a renaissance of creativity and an architecting of a brave new age. Old desiccated forms are swept away, while fertile new ideas are seeded. Their entanglement brings to mind patterns of expansion and retraction, the Platonic dance of light and dark, and the cyclical struggle between ignorance and enlightenment.

T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”, a central modernist work, was published in 1922, a few months after Saturn and Jupiter conjoined to open the gates to the wild optimism of the roaring twenties. Aside from the alien androgyny of columnar sheath dresses, this decade also saw the seeding of quantum mechanics, which would rupture the frontiers of science irrevocably.  

Modernism itself was very much a Jupiter-Saturn art movement, as its practitioners sought to bridge the past and the future. They looked back to poets of other periods and cultures, while reigning in the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry with fierce Saturnian formalism and cutglass diction.

We see in T.S. Eliots’ “The Wasteland” the historical fragments of a brave new age, after the trauma of the First World War, which are held up to the light, and permitted to strike notes of dissonance: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, /You cannot say, or guess, for you know only /A heap of broken images, where the sun beats…”

The synodic cycle of Jupiter and Saturn itself conjures that astonishment in the face of sublime beauty, or the Pythagorean dance of the spheres. In 1606, Johannes Kepler discovered that three successive conjunctions form a near-perfect triangle when plotted on the zodiacal circle:

Jessica Adams unpacks the cycle further: “Each conjunction takes place slightly later and progresses forward over 200 years until they shift into the next triplicity. This forms a pattern of repeating triangles, as drawn by Kepler in his De Stella Nova. When the conjunctions shift into a new element this is called the Great Mutation and it marks the end of one era and the start of a new one, each lasting roughly 200 years. The Mutations follow the elements around the zodiac, shifting from fire to earth to air to water, in a continuous cycle.”[1]

Eventually these overlapping triangles create a mandala—Jupiter and Saturn’s dance tracing a holding vessel for the collective. Steffen Thorsen and Graham Jones, of the Astronomy Society, widened the temporal aperture even further: “For fun, we created an algorithm to run through a mathematical model of Jupiter's and Saturn's movements over a 16,000-year period, starting from the year AD 1.” [2]

Though I don’t feign to understand the math underlying their thesis, what they discovered was a wave-like pattern, which they plotted on a graph, the overlapping cycles creating a helix. Therefore we see in Jupiter and Saturn’s entanglement a blueprint for human life itself.

It’s also a reminder of history’s ever-breaking surf (our current moment of contraction is reminder that exponential human progress is a delusion). Percy Bysshe Shelley said that "history is a cyclic poem written by time," echoed by W.B. Yeats’ vision of cycles of history “turning and turning in the widening gyre.” His theory of historical gyres is both stunningly complex and capacious, but his drawings of the phenomena bear an uncanny likeness to the Jupiter-Saturn wave pattern.

Yeat’s apocalyptic poem, “The Second Coming”, brings the chaotic, swirling detritus of history into a miraculous moment of suspension. Instead of ending on complete disintegration, the poem offers a pinprick of hope, and a path forward into the future, however slender (a very Jupiter-Saturn moment indeed): “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”  

The star of Bethlehem, which led the wise men to Jesus Christ, was theorized by Kepler to be a 7th century conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Interestingly, the Disney film Pinocchio, which popularized the song “When You Wish Upon a Star,” was released during the Great Conjunction of 1940 just as the world was being plunged into the abyss of mechanized warfare.

Just as the Second World War unearthed combat from the mud-slaked intimacy of trench warfare, to the loftier heights of aerial warfare and blitzkrieg, there’s something about a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction that turns the eye skyward. The veil thins between the visible and the invisible, as Saturnian form dissolves into Jupiter’s host of seraphim, and clarion call to spirit.

On that note, I wasn’t surprised to discovered that one of my favorite pieces of art, The Assumption of the Virgin (1524-30), by Correggio, was started around the time of a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction. The painted dome’s vortex of entangled limbs is regarded as a jewel of the High Renaissance period, commissioned to mark the emancipation of Parma from the French army of occupation. Its innovative use of extreme foreshortening creates an illusion of Jupiterian boundlessness and weightlessness, as if the dome were melting into the firmament of heaven above. [3]

Finally, this miraculous shift from Saturn’s dragging entropy, and leaden darkness to the elastic transcendence of Jupiter, can be felt in the re-birthing of Joy Division into New Order, from the void of Ian Curtis’ suicide. The band reformed under guitarist and vocalist, Bernard Sumner, releasing their first album, Movement, in 1980. New Order’s euphoric pop was a revelation after the gothic dirges of Joy Division, and Curtis’ Saturnian baritone (I love them both).

In keeping with the liminality of Jupiter-Saturn, New Order would convey the tension of baroque emotion set against immense formal constraint. Somner’s voice explodes with an irrepressible joy, but never quite ruptures the band’s precise and pointillist soundscapes.  

“Ceremony,” written by Ian Curtis shortly before his suicide, is the song that best encapsulates the tumultuous, and chaotic birthing of New Order from profound grief. Remarkably, the single’s release exactly lines up with the March 6th 1981 conjunction of Jupiter-Saturn in Libra, and the liminality is captured in the band’s grasping at the ghostly filaments of a song Curtis was still working through:  “New Order still sounds manic and unpolished, yet airy and dreamlike, caught between the fierce post-punk of Joy Division and something waiting just around the bend.” [4]

Just as an aside, I met Peter Hook’s son, Jack Bates, in 2019. He materialized mysteriously on a frigid night out in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, psychopomping us through a network of last calls and increasingly cthonic Manchester clubs. He didn’t introduce himself until the scraped dawn, when I realized he was the bassist in Peter Hook and The Lights!

What’s waiting beyond this event horizon is anyone’s guess, but I must return to the idea that The Great Conjunction is something to be observed, with reverence, in all its mutative mystery, rather than understood. Perfecting in the fixed sign of Aquarius, the fruits of this trans-personal seeding may not be immediately apparent; fixed signs take their time with change, but the fruits are long-lasting. The airy drafts of new utopias, and the dismantling of hierarchical power-structures in favor of the rhizome, will be a story that unfolds for years, and even decades to come.

For now we observe, with awe, humanity’s quantum leap in beginning to vaccinate the collective only a year after the first stirrings of Covid 19 (Joe Biden, was vaccinated on the day of the conjunction!). The Great Conjunction’s cavalry has come, but is humanity ready to accept Jupiter’s largess on good faith?  

[1] https://jessicadavidson.co.uk/2020/11/02/the-jupiter-saturn-cycle-and-the-great-mutation/

[2] https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-400-year-rhythm-of-great-conjunctions/

[3] http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/assumption-correggio.htm

[4] https://music.avclub.com/ceremony-bridges-the-gap-between-joy-division-s-end-a-1798268173