The Astrology of the Summer of Love
Summer of Love by Peter Max
It’s hard to believe for anyone who is old enough to have lived through the summer of 1967 which was called the Summer of Love, but this marks the 50th anniversary of that fertile and creative time when traditional values of love and community were turned on its head and some of the best music ever created was born.
Astrologers have a name for what happened in the 1960s: We call it the “Uranus Pluto conjunction.” During this time Uranus, planet of revolution and radicalism, conjoined Pluto, planet of transformation through destruction and regeneration, in the conservative sign of Virgo. This cataclysmic planetary dynamic changed forever the social order (Virgo) and laid the groundwork for the recent upheaval which occurred during the period between 2010 and 2017 when Uranus formed a square (90 degree) aspect to Pluto for the second phase of that revolutionary cycle.
While the first exact conjunction of Uranus and Pluto didn’t occur until October of 1964, the two planets began to align in 1963 and beginning in the early 1960s one could hear the whispers of revolution all over the world. In 1961 Timothy Leary took his first LSD trip and began researching the effects of psychedelics on mental health. By 1965 the revolution was in full swing, with the assassination of Malcom X, the Watts riots, the formation of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane and so many other great bands, and with them the emergence of the “hippie” archetype. After the San Francisco Examiner wrote an expose of the migration of young Americans to its city, the swarms of youth increased and by 1967 the Human Be-In in San Francisco brought about all kinds of […]