This series covers events from 06/06/1983 - 10/23/1983

This is a four-class series on the natal chart of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The June classes read the chart and then set it against the day of the Trinity test. The October classes come back to it for a narrower purpose—to work out what the septile and the quintile mean, and how close an aspect must come before it counts as one at all. Oppenheimer's chart served for this because it was the first the group had found with several of these exact both by orb and by Sabian degree.

June 6 works through the chart planet by planet. The Sun, on the degree of a brilliant electrical display illuminating the heavens and the forests beneath, sets him up for a spiritual crisis. The Jupiter-Venus conjunction makes him an idealist, and Venus, on the degree of wild geese in flight overhead, makes the idealism a naive one, an attachment to the ideal in a man who understood physics far better than he understood people. Jupiter falls on the degree of a bomb that has failed to explode and is now safely hidden, which Damiani interprets as a kind of exemption. Oppenheimer could commit an evil and be spared the usual consequences of it, having been used by the World-Idea as an instrument. What he suffered instead was a moral crisis. Saturn is on the degree of a white dove circling overhead that proves to be a carrier with a message, and gives him a felt sense of cosmic guidance, by which he ordered lesser things. Mercury gives him a free and untrammeled intelligence that goes right to the point, Mars the capacity to visualize possibilities and concentrate on them, and Pluto the ability to unify other men in a common task. The Uranus-Neptune opposition is his spiritual crisis, and Damiani states both sides of it plainly: the Uranus categorical and pontifical in his dealings with others, set against the Neptune's recognition that a man's values are useless unless they are his own. Nothing in the crisis is resolved until his philosophy becomes practical. Around all this the class talks about Churchill, Stalin and the Spanish Civil War, and takes the trial Oppenheimer was put through as purificatory, the ordeal in which he was shown how immature his idealism had been.

June 13 takes up the trans-Saturnians and the Nodes. Neptune, on the degree of a hungry cat arguing earnestly with a mouse who is to be her victim, is read as the ego's surrender to something larger than itself, with the Krishna and Arjuna parallel drawn out at length: what is asked is not obedience but obedience understood. Uranus, on the degree of the Pope holding audience, is the leader's role as a vehicle of knowledge, and the two are set against each other as social conscience and the desire to guide people politically. Pluto, on the degree of a self-service cafeteria, works with the Neptune rather than against it—he is organizer and community servant among the collective, where the Uranus sets him apart and out in front. The Tail is what he came in with: a qualification to gain from the trials of life. The Head is where the gain goes: whatever little a man wins in the struggle between good and evil is deposited in a common store the race draws on long after him. The class also reads Oppenheimer's regular transits for the morning of the Trinity test. The theory being tested is that they represent the circumstances that make the arisal of knowledge possible, but are not themselves knowledge. Here they set the stage—the explosion brought on his moral crisis and put the problem of good and evil in front of him. Davis's account of Oppenheimer in the blockhouse raises the line from the Gita about becoming death, which Damiani thinks a misquotation of the situation—the fitting image would have been seeds of destruction sown in the desert, because that explosion was not an ending but the opening of something whose consequences were still to come. Oppenheimer was being initiated into philosophy, and by the end it had become clear to him that the fundamental issues in life are practical morality and ethics.

October 17 turns to the septiles and quintiles. Much of the class is about Oppenheimer's exact Jupiter-Uranus bi-septile. This aspect let the World-Idea use him to implement what was going to come to pass: Jupiter making him an agent rather than a doer, so that what he did was not charged against him, and Uranus giving him the capacity to keep his ego out of the way and let the knowing function do what it had to do. He knew precisely what to do at Los Alamos and the men there took his word as final. Oppenheimer had prepared himself to play a special role. He went through the trouble of learning physics not so that he could work in physics but so that he could lead men. What those men submitted to was not a man but a knowing function they were willing to honor. The Mars-Neptune septile and the Head are also discussed, with the Neptune allowing that reality is many-faceted and the Mars insisting on visualizing those facets. The Head is not Jung's image of God in man but the goal of a lifetime, the maturity in which a man can finally weigh what he has lived through. Oppenheimer had to be disillusioned before he could say that we have sinned. The class ends on the question it cannot yet settle: whether a quintile or a septile a degree or two off the exact angle still operates, which Damiani refuses to decide by theory and leaves to testing.

October 23 is the working session on that question, confined to the septiles. Because 51°26' spans two Sabian degrees, an aspect can fall within a degree of orb and still sit on a symbol the arithmetic does not reach, and three septiles to Oppenheimer's Saturn are tested against one another. Venus septile Saturn holds to within a degree and falls on the right symbol, and is interpreted as the anima subservient to the senex. The Moon tri-septile Saturn also holds to within a degree, and although it does not fall on the symbol the arithmetic strictly gives, the two degrees are ones some part of which is septile to some part of the other, and the aspect stands: body, speech and thought subservient to the same authority. Jupiter septile Saturn is the one that fails. It misses by 1°23', which puts it inside the two-degree orb some of the group would allow and outside the one degree Damiani is holding to, and no part of either degree is septile to any part of the other. Several readings are tried on it and none of them describes a fixed idea Oppenheimer actually lived. Had it been a real septile, he would not have felt guilty about the bomb. The same question is put to Saturn and Uranus and answered the same way: had those two been bound, he would never have gone ahead with the work at all, since his awareness of what he was doing would never have been free of his sense of what was right. But if the Jupiter exonerated him, where was the condemnation coming from? From the Uranus, which was condemning what the Jupiter was doing — two contradictory impulses in the same man, the one exempting him and the other holding him to account. Nor had the Uranus always condemned. While Hitler was a threat it gave the work its moral sanction; once Germany had fallen and the bomb had been used on Japan, the same authority turned against it.The Uranus-Neptune opposition gets its fullest reading in this session. Neptune in the first house is an identification with a feeling of oneself as undefined, there being many aspects he would consider as himself. Uranus, the moral authority, stands opposite and forces the recognition that the "I am" is a meaningless ambiguity unless it is ethically defined.

Classes and documents available in this series