Now here's a bit of a puzzle with at least one missing piece in the 1700s. But I think it's good food for thought:
Although the definition of a historical "Age" is essentially contestable and does not have any absolute margins, generally I regard the date of Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses, as the symbolic "beginning" of the Modern Age - the (Western) historical age which, in my opinion, began to die around 1989 at the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and finally died during the first decade of the 21st century.
Here is a noon chart for October 31, 1517 (Gregorian calendar), in Wittenberg Germany, the date and place of Luther posting his 95 Theses which symbolically began the Modern Age:
Ah, but until recently, I had regarded the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, as the symbolic "end" of the Modern Age. But now I'm not so sure. Because in November 1989, the main outer-planet activity was Saturn-Neptune in Capricorn - which DOES symbolise "the (socialist) wall coming down" (and the Berlin Wall was erected during a prior Saturn-Neptune!) - but it does NOT have much major synastry with Luther's 95 Theses.
But what DOES have major synastry with the chart of Luther's 95 theses, is the current transit of Pluto opposing America's natal Jupiter (America's natal ascendant ruler) in Cancer, AND in a few years Pluto will make its return to America's natal Pluto in Capricorn!
And doesn't it make sense, after all, for the chart of the USA to be especially sensitive to transits relating to the "Modern Age", precisely because the USA was born in the middle of the Modern Age, and the USA is conventionally regarded as the World's main representative of the Modern Age?
And America, at its creation, was essentially a Protestant nation, in both good and bad ways. (Even the non-Christian founding fathers like Franklin and Jefferson, were considerably informed by the Protestant ethos.) Therefore, it would seem that as America is the nation which has represented - and (for good and ill) continues to represent the best and worst of what is now the decadent culture of Northern European Protestantism (and putative "capitalism", cf Weber), doesn't it make sense that America's current political and cultural collapse, represents the collapse of the Modern Age which was begun by Luther?
And in light of the above, isn't it elegantly (symbolically) poetic, that the current collapse of what used to be "America" has close synastry with the natal Pluto in Capricorn of the birth of the Protestant (and Capitalist) Dream in 1517?
Personally, although I'm a Catholic, I am sad to witness the end of Old Fashioned Protestantism/Capitalism, which did after all do a lot of good for the world, and did after all liberate many of the oppressed. (Almost all of America's Abolitionists who opposed slavery, were Protestants.) And Luther is my hero because he said, "Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders!" Meaning, "Here I stand, I can do no other!" But it seems to me, that THAT old kind of NOBLE Protestant spirit, is almost dead in America today, let alone in neo-Soviet Europe.
-- Edited by Reactionary_Aquarian on Monday 25th of October 2010 07:27:04 AM
PS, I will add another observation, of a recrudescence of anti-semitism in today's Europe, and I fear that it is also growing in today's America. This seems, to me, to mirror the anti-semitism of Luther (and of many Catholic authorities too) at the beginning of the Modern Age, which was repeated by Nazi Germany near the end of the Modern Age, and then went into hiding temporarily but is now coming out of the fever swamps again.
And it's not just Christians who are becoming more comfortable with anti-semitism; it's also Muslims, AND left-wing secularists who are superficially and dishonestly pro-Muslim because they stupidly believe that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Because, as the historian Huizinga observed, at the end of an age, the worst qualities of the BEGINNING of that age reappear in corrupted forms. And now in the West today, we're seeing a recrudescence of the late-medieval fever-swamps of anti-semitism. Because the fearful interregnum between Ages, always needs scapegoats.
