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The Outer Planets and Their Cycles: The Astrology of the Collective
This volume is one of a series compiled from the talks and workshops of some of the most innovative and articulate contributors to modern astrology. Through this medium of edited transcripts, some of the most vital and incisive of today's astrological thought-which heretofore has been communicated only to small groups and then passes into oblivion-can be given a permanent form and wider availability. This volume comprises lectures given by Liz Greene at a weekend program in England and is the most complete treatment of the "astrology of the collective" ever done. It explains significant historical and generational trends that correspond to vast planetary cycles, and it also discusses the individual's attunement to the outer planets and the collective psychlogical forces they represent. Among the subjects discussed -Generational aspects such as Saturn conjunct Pluto, Saturn conjunct Neptune, Uranus conjunct Pluto, Saturn-Uranus aspects, etc. -The aspects between the outer planets and the personal planets, and the corresponding ability to tap into collective energies. -Transits of the outer plants to individuals' natal planets. -Example charts of people who were especially attuned to collective Marx, Hitler, Lenin, Jung and Freud. -The birth-charts of America and Russia. At a time when "mass psychology" is virtually no better understood than on hundred years ago, in spite of innumrable historical, sociological, and psychological studis of the subject, this book provides convincing evidence that astrology may indeed be the most accurate and useful framework for studying, predicting, and understanding the hidden forces which motivate human beings.
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First published January 1, 1983
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About the author
Liz Greene
74 books445 followersLiz Greene is held in high esteem by astrologers all over the world, professional and non-professional alike. She is a prolific author of books and various publications and has been instrumental in shaping modern psychological astrology.
She holds doctorate degrees in psychology and (as of 2010) in history and is a qualified Jungian analyst. She also holds a diploma in counselling from the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London, and a diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, of which she is a lifetime Patron.
She holds doctorate degrees in psychology and (as of 2010) in history and is a qualified Jungian analyst. She also holds a diploma in counselling from the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London, and a diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, of which she is a lifetime Patron.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 21, 2021
This Liz Greene book is particularly fascinating because we get to watch the author comment in 2005 on things she said and believed 22 years earlier in 1983. It’s eye-opening to watch the evolution of her thinking about astrology and life. I give her a lot of credit for doing this. Also after reading most of her other books, you can see her tone, pride and sharpness are much more stringent in this book. Like all of us, she has matured and mellowed over 22 years. It’s still fascinating to see and hear her back then compared to her later books.
The following are some of my favorite excerpts:
“This book, long out of print, is also of interest because it contains what is probably the first published prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, based on transits occurring in the national chart and completely accurate in terms of what actually happened a decade after the seminars were given.” – Page 1
After two decades of working with Chiron, I have no doubt that it is indeed an integral and deeply important component of the horoscope, individual or national. – Page 33
There are classic crisis situations that are popular with the outer planets. One is that relationships or marriages threaten to break apart. Another is the change in vocation or direction, whether it’s voluntary or forced from without. I already mentioned illness. Spiritual or religious crises are common, and so are the deaths of parents. These events are usually what we consider to be the causes for inner change… - Page 39
Relationships will force you to deepen and become aware of darker and more powerful currents in yourself and in life. All relationships become a gateway to Pluto. So every time you allow anyone close to you, you invoke Pluto, and expose yourself to the darker and less conscious emotional needs and drives. There is no way that can be avoided if you have Venus-Pluto, except to avoid intimate relationships, which is what many Venus-Pluto people tend to do. – Page 42
The Sun conjuncting Neptune suggests that the issue of individuality, of becoming oneself, gets bound up with the longing for the mystical union and the dissolving of individual boundaries. To put it in the form of truism, the person must lose themselves in order to find themselves.
…The alcoholic father described by Sun-Neptune is not just an alcoholic. He is a distorted symbol of someone thirsting for the spirit, and I did mean that as a pun. – Page 44-45
What this woman did is what most of us habitually do with outer planet aspects. We tend to project them into rather distorted forms. Neptune materializes as the alcoholic or the deceitful partner, and Uranus dresses as the partner who leaves you, and Pluto disguises himself as the partner who has power over you or has some pretty complicated sexual and emotional patterns. – Page 46
Very often Saturn gets cast as the arch-conservative, and Pluto as the fascist. Uranus will wear the face of the revolutionary, and Neptune the peace-loving utopian dreamer. – Page 84
Uranus together with Pluto suggests to me a political vision coupled with an urgent need to destroy old forms and attitudes. It’s obviously rather obsessive and potentially violent. The keynote with Neptune is salvation for divine ends. But the keynote with Uranus is freedom from constraint, and if you put this with Pluto’s urgent emotional necessity, then the seeking of that freedom isn’t likely to be particularly gentle. – Page 85
I once met a rather peculiar lady who said she was an “esoteric astrologer”. And she told me that only people with the Sun in aspect to Neptune were capable of spiritual evolution. I am afraid I think this is rather idiotic, since I once did the chart of a pedigree poodle who has the Sun in aspect to Neptune, and he was a very obnoxious dog. - Page 93
The matrix or sea of life is there at the bottom, the sea of the unconscious without form or definition. I think the twelfth house is far more than hospitals and confinement. It is the root from which myths spring, the sea of the imagination and the most ancient past.
If you find several planets in the twelfth house in a chart, then I think the individual must learn something about the imaginal realm. If they don’t come to terms with it, then it dismembers them. The twelfth house is a mediumistic house, because it contains the entire history of human experience. This is of course similar to having strong contacts to Neptune, or having a strong emphasis in Pisces. – Page 96
Retrograde planets have a very hard time telling you about themselves. For example, a retrograde Venus is just as oriented toward relationship, but it’s very often a relationship with an idealized inner image of the person, and the actual partner often doesn’t know very much about what is really going on. – Page 103
You can see that if a person has Venus strongly aspected to Uranus or Neptune or Pluto then the experience of love and relationship gets colored by these more mythic images. The ordinary happy married life that our society upholds is often just not enough for the person, because they are chasing some transpersonal or mythic experience through love. Archetypal images always seem more glamourous than actual people. Of course the fact that they don’t exist in embodied form causes some problems, but the pursuit continues. – Page 113
There is always a struggle with the Sun, and it doesn’t get moving until the thirties. – Page 162
I think that if Mercury is in a sign different from the Sun-sign, what the individual says and what is really motivating them are often very different. – Page 163
Pluto-Saturn. Powerful urges and images come up from the depths and they are stopped at the barrier of the ego by Saturn. Where Pluto is concerned, the urges are those of the uncivilized, primordial human being. In an individual’s chart where Saturn and Pluto are conjuncting, those primitive desires and emotions will frighten the individual, and they’re likely to try to control them. Eventually they will break through the barrier, and the worse the control that has been imposed on them, the worse the impact. There is a furiously controlled feeling about Saturn-Pluto unless they are willing to take the challenge of accepting and integrating that wild, raging, passionate instinctual creature that is the core of their animal self. The same principle applies when the contacts occurs between two charts (synastry) – Page 165
I think that Venus-Uranus squares in general suggest a strong conflict between the need for others and the compulsion to pursue one’s own vision, chasing after those wonderful ideas about how to change the world. Venus-Uranus in square can really interfere with your dealings with other people, and perhaps part of the reason why you can’t follow things through is that you alienate the people you need to help you.
Venus in the Ascendant gives a certain quality to the personality, a very agreeable and reasonable and pleasant demeanor. It will always try to mediate and keep peace and please others. But Uranus in the Midheaven is of course not in the least concerned with pleasing others. …I always get the feeling when Uranus describes the mother that she was pretty unhappy about being a mother in the first place. – Page 169
You can think of a square as two characters in a play. They are scripted to quarrel with each other, even if they don’t like it, because that is the script. So they begin to haggle, and each side becomes very uncompromising. Uranus is desperately afraid of being human, and Venus is desperately afraid of being alone and inhuman. You can see the same dynamic with Venus in square to Pluto or Neptune. Venus wants lovely, nice, peaceful, happy relationships and Pluto insists that love is worth nothing without hate, conflict, battle and reconciliation. Or Venus wants a solid, safe, secure, physically real relationship, but Neptune insists that only the things of the spirit are of any value and sexuality is definitely not the way to find G-d. One must find room in one’s life for both. – Pages 170-171
I think minor aspects such as the semi-square and semi-sextile and sesqui-quadrate operate within relationships just as much as major ones do. In progressions, you learn very quickly that minor aspects are very important. It’s a mistake to overlook them. Progressed minor aspects trigger off major natal aspects.
…I do work with composite charts, despite the fact that they irritate me in principle because they ought not to work. But they are uncannily truthful about describing the main areas of focus and conflict in a relationship, and they are even sensitive to transits. – Page 187
No individual becomes conscious of themselves instantaneously and without suffering, and no collective does either. The psyche just doesn’t work like that. If something must die, then it’s going to raise a hell of a fuss in the process, and if something is being born, it’s going to cause pain to the thing giving birth. You can give a woman an anesthetic when she is giving birth to a baby, but you can’t anaesthetize the soul, not without paying an awful price.
I’m afraid I’m a little jaundiced about all these hopes for the age of love and brotherhood arriving next month. It’s a bit like getting married in a beautiful dress with a wonderful bouquet of flowers and then believing that because you have just married, you will now understand marriage and be able to live the symbol immediately. No marriage works like that, and I don’t think the Aquarian Age does either. – Page 203
Charles’ Sun-Chiron in Scorpio also squares the Queen’s Neptune. It is not in the least surprising that Charles has sought to pursue his own development, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually, in ways which must seem directly threatening to his mother’s Neptunian dream. – Page 227
The following are some of my favorite excerpts:
“This book, long out of print, is also of interest because it contains what is probably the first published prediction of the fall of the Soviet Union, based on transits occurring in the national chart and completely accurate in terms of what actually happened a decade after the seminars were given.” – Page 1
After two decades of working with Chiron, I have no doubt that it is indeed an integral and deeply important component of the horoscope, individual or national. – Page 33
There are classic crisis situations that are popular with the outer planets. One is that relationships or marriages threaten to break apart. Another is the change in vocation or direction, whether it’s voluntary or forced from without. I already mentioned illness. Spiritual or religious crises are common, and so are the deaths of parents. These events are usually what we consider to be the causes for inner change… - Page 39
Relationships will force you to deepen and become aware of darker and more powerful currents in yourself and in life. All relationships become a gateway to Pluto. So every time you allow anyone close to you, you invoke Pluto, and expose yourself to the darker and less conscious emotional needs and drives. There is no way that can be avoided if you have Venus-Pluto, except to avoid intimate relationships, which is what many Venus-Pluto people tend to do. – Page 42
The Sun conjuncting Neptune suggests that the issue of individuality, of becoming oneself, gets bound up with the longing for the mystical union and the dissolving of individual boundaries. To put it in the form of truism, the person must lose themselves in order to find themselves.
…The alcoholic father described by Sun-Neptune is not just an alcoholic. He is a distorted symbol of someone thirsting for the spirit, and I did mean that as a pun. – Page 44-45
What this woman did is what most of us habitually do with outer planet aspects. We tend to project them into rather distorted forms. Neptune materializes as the alcoholic or the deceitful partner, and Uranus dresses as the partner who leaves you, and Pluto disguises himself as the partner who has power over you or has some pretty complicated sexual and emotional patterns. – Page 46
Very often Saturn gets cast as the arch-conservative, and Pluto as the fascist. Uranus will wear the face of the revolutionary, and Neptune the peace-loving utopian dreamer. – Page 84
Uranus together with Pluto suggests to me a political vision coupled with an urgent need to destroy old forms and attitudes. It’s obviously rather obsessive and potentially violent. The keynote with Neptune is salvation for divine ends. But the keynote with Uranus is freedom from constraint, and if you put this with Pluto’s urgent emotional necessity, then the seeking of that freedom isn’t likely to be particularly gentle. – Page 85
I once met a rather peculiar lady who said she was an “esoteric astrologer”. And she told me that only people with the Sun in aspect to Neptune were capable of spiritual evolution. I am afraid I think this is rather idiotic, since I once did the chart of a pedigree poodle who has the Sun in aspect to Neptune, and he was a very obnoxious dog. - Page 93
The matrix or sea of life is there at the bottom, the sea of the unconscious without form or definition. I think the twelfth house is far more than hospitals and confinement. It is the root from which myths spring, the sea of the imagination and the most ancient past.
If you find several planets in the twelfth house in a chart, then I think the individual must learn something about the imaginal realm. If they don’t come to terms with it, then it dismembers them. The twelfth house is a mediumistic house, because it contains the entire history of human experience. This is of course similar to having strong contacts to Neptune, or having a strong emphasis in Pisces. – Page 96
Retrograde planets have a very hard time telling you about themselves. For example, a retrograde Venus is just as oriented toward relationship, but it’s very often a relationship with an idealized inner image of the person, and the actual partner often doesn’t know very much about what is really going on. – Page 103
You can see that if a person has Venus strongly aspected to Uranus or Neptune or Pluto then the experience of love and relationship gets colored by these more mythic images. The ordinary happy married life that our society upholds is often just not enough for the person, because they are chasing some transpersonal or mythic experience through love. Archetypal images always seem more glamourous than actual people. Of course the fact that they don’t exist in embodied form causes some problems, but the pursuit continues. – Page 113
There is always a struggle with the Sun, and it doesn’t get moving until the thirties. – Page 162
I think that if Mercury is in a sign different from the Sun-sign, what the individual says and what is really motivating them are often very different. – Page 163
Pluto-Saturn. Powerful urges and images come up from the depths and they are stopped at the barrier of the ego by Saturn. Where Pluto is concerned, the urges are those of the uncivilized, primordial human being. In an individual’s chart where Saturn and Pluto are conjuncting, those primitive desires and emotions will frighten the individual, and they’re likely to try to control them. Eventually they will break through the barrier, and the worse the control that has been imposed on them, the worse the impact. There is a furiously controlled feeling about Saturn-Pluto unless they are willing to take the challenge of accepting and integrating that wild, raging, passionate instinctual creature that is the core of their animal self. The same principle applies when the contacts occurs between two charts (synastry) – Page 165
I think that Venus-Uranus squares in general suggest a strong conflict between the need for others and the compulsion to pursue one’s own vision, chasing after those wonderful ideas about how to change the world. Venus-Uranus in square can really interfere with your dealings with other people, and perhaps part of the reason why you can’t follow things through is that you alienate the people you need to help you.
Venus in the Ascendant gives a certain quality to the personality, a very agreeable and reasonable and pleasant demeanor. It will always try to mediate and keep peace and please others. But Uranus in the Midheaven is of course not in the least concerned with pleasing others. …I always get the feeling when Uranus describes the mother that she was pretty unhappy about being a mother in the first place. – Page 169
You can think of a square as two characters in a play. They are scripted to quarrel with each other, even if they don’t like it, because that is the script. So they begin to haggle, and each side becomes very uncompromising. Uranus is desperately afraid of being human, and Venus is desperately afraid of being alone and inhuman. You can see the same dynamic with Venus in square to Pluto or Neptune. Venus wants lovely, nice, peaceful, happy relationships and Pluto insists that love is worth nothing without hate, conflict, battle and reconciliation. Or Venus wants a solid, safe, secure, physically real relationship, but Neptune insists that only the things of the spirit are of any value and sexuality is definitely not the way to find G-d. One must find room in one’s life for both. – Pages 170-171
I think minor aspects such as the semi-square and semi-sextile and sesqui-quadrate operate within relationships just as much as major ones do. In progressions, you learn very quickly that minor aspects are very important. It’s a mistake to overlook them. Progressed minor aspects trigger off major natal aspects.
…I do work with composite charts, despite the fact that they irritate me in principle because they ought not to work. But they are uncannily truthful about describing the main areas of focus and conflict in a relationship, and they are even sensitive to transits. – Page 187
No individual becomes conscious of themselves instantaneously and without suffering, and no collective does either. The psyche just doesn’t work like that. If something must die, then it’s going to raise a hell of a fuss in the process, and if something is being born, it’s going to cause pain to the thing giving birth. You can give a woman an anesthetic when she is giving birth to a baby, but you can’t anaesthetize the soul, not without paying an awful price.
I’m afraid I’m a little jaundiced about all these hopes for the age of love and brotherhood arriving next month. It’s a bit like getting married in a beautiful dress with a wonderful bouquet of flowers and then believing that because you have just married, you will now understand marriage and be able to live the symbol immediately. No marriage works like that, and I don’t think the Aquarian Age does either. – Page 203
Charles’ Sun-Chiron in Scorpio also squares the Queen’s Neptune. It is not in the least surprising that Charles has sought to pursue his own development, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually, in ways which must seem directly threatening to his mother’s Neptunian dream. – Page 227
July 18, 2019
Very uneven set of talks. She insists that Pluto is female and the Furies; her reasoning is dodgy at best. The first few chapters are the best and it slowly becomes repetitive and a struggle to get through. Some of her insights, as her audience points out, conflict with her other works. She does not address that either.
April 6, 2019
This is less an actual book, and more like bite sized bits of astrology scattered here and there. She makes interesting elaborations on squares and oppositions, the outer planets, the effects of Saturn coming into conjunction with them, and the 'fated' paths of people who possess strong outer planet contacts to their inner ones.
Some predictions are also made here (by both the audience and Liz herself) with the national charts of the UK, USA and Russia which is fascinating, especially when viewed in the light of recent global and political events.
Some predictions are also made here (by both the audience and Liz herself) with the national charts of the UK, USA and Russia which is fascinating, especially when viewed in the light of recent global and political events.
December 15, 2023
From all the books I read of Liz Greene this one is the least well orderened. Again it is not really a book but are transcripts of several presentations. This time the books is going so all-over-the-place that I am not able to summarise and not able to explain the kernel of the book. Sofar I would recommend any other book of Liz over this one.
February 6, 2022
read quickly, flipping pages backwards from end to beginning, hovering on bits of interest.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews