We’re still in the first week of the Year of the Green Wood Horse.  Around the world, Chinese people are still celebrating.  And just as the Horse arrives, the Big Re-think is about to begin. Day after tomorrow, Mercury will turn retrograde.  The timing should tell us something.  Bottom line? This one looks like a game changer.

The last time we saw the Wood Horse, it was 1954.  In the U.S., that was a year when Americans’ very sense of who we are changed forever.  The new technologies, experiences, and products that arrived in that Year of the Horse quickly came to define us.  Until 1954, the country didn’t even have a Census Bureau.

Most  U.S. towns didn’t have TV stations When the Green Wood Horse showed up in February 1954.  That changed rapidly.  There were no shopping malls, no fast food, and no interstate highways.  The Pledge of Allegiance did not contain the words “under God.” The Wood Horse changed it all.  

It’s startling to see how many of the dominant tropes in our culture, politics, and infrastructure showed up with the Wood Horse. It’s even more startling to see how the world the Horse created has, in many ways, run its course.  As we greet the Horse of 2014, we’re  a new 60-year cycle of cultural and economic change.

The  Path of the Wood Horse in  1954

Here’s what a quick look back tell us the Wood Horse was up to 60 years ago:

• Pop culture. 1954 was a banner year for popular culture.  TV stations spread like wildfire  across the U.S. The “Miss America” pageant aired for the first time and television shows capturing the zeitgeist premiered.  “The Millionaire” and “Father Knows Best.”
• Technology. Texas Instruments announced the first transistor radio and IBM announced the first vacuum tube “electronic brain.”
• Consumer culture. The first shopping mall opened, and so and the first Burger King.  Construction began on Disneyworld.
• Transportation. The interstate highway system was planned and the first commercial jet in the U.S. was tested by Boeing.
• Power relationships.  The demographic we now think of as “the 1%” held its first annual Bilderberg Conference was held. and a CIA-led coup overthrew the Guatemalan government.  The nascent Civil Rights Movement began to heat up, as school systems in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. integrated — and the White Citizens Council formed in Indianola, MS.  1954 was also the year when the McCarthy hearings took place,and by the end of the year, the U.S. Senate censured Senator Joe McCarthy for his slander campaigns.
• The French surrendered in Vietnam and the country was partitioned into North and South Vietnam were created.

Then and Now:  The Outer Planets, Stirring the Pot

In 1954, just as in 2014, Uranus, the Cosmic Liberator, was at the center of an energetic dust-up that was changing the world.  Now, of course, it’s Pluto that Uranus is squaring.  Sixty years ago, it was Neptune.  Pluto was sextiling Neptune.

When the outer planets make contact, the world changes.  Lives change.  The nonlinear, fluid, quantum powers of the Universe touch our lives and they are never the same.

Uranus and Neptune have a cycle that’s as world-changing as the one between Uranus and Pluto.  The quantum awakening of Uranus’ vibration complements the energies of  Neptune and Pluto in different ways. Uranus awakens the divine spark of genius — which originally meant a person’s “tutelary spirit” —  within us all.  Neptune, on the other hand, carries the energy of the Oneness we perceive in moments of mystic awareness.

And while Uranus is an energy associated with the vast regions of the Cosmos, Pluto is a force of the depths.

Whole eras begin and end when Uranus and Neptune merge their vibrations. The last time this happened was in  February 1993.  On the surface, not much that was earth-shattering appeared to happen.  Deep beneath, however, the very foundations of our reality began to dissolve.  If you think back, you might recall sensing that a great and far-reaching shift in reality was taking place.

The 1993 Uranus-Neptune conjunction was the first one that’s taken place since Neptune was discovered in 1850 — which makes it the first one we’ve been able to take part in consciously.  It’s fascinating to look at the changes that unfolded before and after the two previous conjunctions, in 1650 and 1821.

The 1650 conjunction essentially ended the medieval era.  Oliver Cromwell’s dictatorship in 17t-century London — and the 1666 London fire opened the way for a wave of change.  By 1821, the Industrial Revolution was underway in the West.  The era that spanned the death of Napoleon I, the U. S. Civil War, the Indian Removals, the two World Wars, ended in 1993, the year the Gulf War was declared.

1954, the last Year of the Wood Horse, appeared to be a moment of triumphal power — but it actually ushered in the final act in the 171-year cycle that began in 1821 and ended 21 years ago.  Closing squares begin a process of dissolution.  Nothing seemed less likely than dissolution amid the flurry of new developments on the technological, cultural, and economic landscapes that occurred in 1954.  Yet just 60 years later, nothing seems clearer.

It’s a great lesson in the power of the invisible realms. Even while it appeared that the American Empire was surging, Uranus and Neptune were dissolving and dismantling its very foundations from deep beneath the surface..