This is for those of you, and I imagine it’s most of you, who have watched “Barbenheimer” (Barbie and Oppenheimer).
Both movies expressed the Jupiter-Uranus combination in their own ways. Despite being so vastly different on the surface, they are intricately woven together in the deep unconscious.
And this is why the concept of multivalence is so important when it comes to astrology. On the topic of multivalence, Jung has said:
“The ground principles, the archai, of the unconscious are indescribable because of their wealth of reference, although in themselves recognizable. The discriminating intellect naturally keeps on trying to establish their singleness of meaning and thus misses the essential point; for what we can above all establish as the one thing consistent with their nature is their manifold meaning, their almost limitless wealth of reference, which makes any unilateral formulation impossible.
So as an example, Jupiter can be seen through the lens of achievement and growth, but it can also be seen as excess and inflation.
One has to cultivate this multidimensional perspective in order to truly pierce through the archetypal veil.
That’s your small dose of archetypal philosophy for today.
Let’s get back to the films.
Barbie expressed the Jupiter-Uranus alignment on an aesthetic level––bringing together the Jupiterian grandeur and excess with the Uranian pop of bright colors.
The entire set was candy-like—you could eat it all up!
The director Greta Gerwig was born in 1983 during this same exact alignment of Jupiter-Uranus (goosebumps).
It is often the case that people who are born during a certain planetary alignment step onto the world stage during a similar alignment in the future.
No doubt, Gerwig has now clearly made a name for herself.
And that’s not the end.
The Barbie doll was first officially launched in 1959, and yes you guessed it, Jupiter and Uranus were in alignment during that period.
This phenomenon is called diachronic patterning.
It simply implies that there is a rhythm to history and how it unfolds.
So how about Oppenheimer? What was so Jupiter-Uranus about the film?
Well, I had mentioned in the previous newsletter that Jupiter and Uranus were in alignment when physicists, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and their colleagues sparked the quantum physics revolution by bringing Max Planck’s theory of quantum physics to a culmination in 1927.
J. Robert Oppenheimer brought the work of these physicists to America and began working on the Manhattan Project—turning theory into reality.
So of course, it was no coincidence that when the first testing of the atomic bomb was done in 1945, the planets Jupiter and Uranus were in alignment.
Despite the deep shadow, this was a massive scientific breakthrough for humanity.
And yes, Oppenheimer himself was born with a Jupiter-Uranus alignment.
The trail goes far and deep.
Another archetypal wave that was present in both movies was Uranus-Pluto—a current alignment that we are all experiencing.
Pluto is the planet of power, depth, and transformation.
When Uranus and Pluto come into alignment, we often see these recurring themes:
- Revolutionary movements
- Radical political change
- Intensified creativity
- Liberation of the masses
- Massive demographic shifts
To get a little bit technical, we are currently in a Uranus trine Pluto alignment which indicates that Uranus and Pluto are 120° apart in the sky.
Generally, when two planets are in a trine, it is considered to be a soft aspect, meaning that the relationship between the two planets is a little more harmonious.
For further context, we just came out of a Uranus square Pluto alignment that began in 2007 and ended in 2020. A square indicates that the planets are 90° apart, and is considered to be a hard aspect because it coincides with more creative tension.
The last time Uranus and Pluto were in a hard aspect was in the 1960s.
During that period we saw the feminist movement take shape.
The world went through another wave of feminism in the 2010s, and towards the end of the decade, the movement intensified radically.
During that period, some feminists became so hateful of men that the misogyny they were fighting against ironically turned into misandry.
But it seems now, we’re transitioning from the hard integration of the Uranus-Pluto square to the soft unfolding of the current Uranus-Pluto trine.
I believe Barbie captured the zeitgeist so eloquently in its portrayal of the softer side of feminism.
There was a tender understanding of the hardships of both genders.
As mentioned in the previous newsletter, the trine will be with us until May 2032, so let’s continue to keep a close eye on this topic.
As for Oppenheimer, much of the movie shed light on Oppenheimer’s political activity and his support for communist ideas.
Karl Marx himself was born with a Uranus-Pluto alignment, and we often find that his ideas resurface during similar alignments, as was the case in the mid-1930s when Oppenheimer was teaching at UC Berkeley, known then as the hotbed for communism.
