Sunspots!
“As above, so below” – those four familiar words are really the heart of astrology. What happens above us in the sky is mirrored here on earth below. That’s true both in terms of events and also in terms of the seasons of our own minds and hearts. We astrologers normally apply that principle in practical terms by watching the planets dance with each other as they flow through the twelve zodiacal signs. That system works very well and has helped people navigate their lives for at least two or three millennia. But are we missing anything? Is there anything else that’s happening “above” and thus impacting us all here below? Maybe something that we’ve been ignoring?
Questions such as those are what keeps astrology from growing stale, but knowing how to ask them involves more than just keeping an open mind. Sometimes it’s about discovering something “up there” that we simply were not in a position to notice any earlier. Would it be fair to criticize 16th century master astrologer John Lilly for failing to include Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto in his interpretations? Obviously not – no one back then even knew that those three planets existed. Still, they were certainly “above” – and if our basic astrological theory holds true, then down here below, we were affected by them.
Little did he know it, but William Lilly in fact died with Uranus making a station on his natal Pluto.
One of these strangely-ignored celestial realities is the sunspot cycle. That’s an approximately eleven-year rise and fall in the intensity of the storms on the face of the Sun. In essence, the “as above, so below” dimension of it is very simple: when the solar cycle is at its stormiest, so are things down here on earth. We’ll come back to that idea in a moment.
Sunspots were first discovered, at least by Europeans, in 1610, back in the earliest days of telescopes, but there are actually Chinese records of them being observed as long ago as 800 B.C.E. For our purposes the pivotal point is that knowledge of their cyclical nature came much later. In 1844, Heinrich Schwabe, a German amateur astronomer, suggested a ten-year rise and fall in sunspot numbers. Further observations have extended that figure a bit to about eleven years. It’s important however to note that the sunspot cycle can vary between nine and fourteen years, or occasionally even a bit longer. Because of that variation, astrologers who try to make predictions based on it soon have egg on their faces. We know where it is today, but we can only guess where it will be tomorrow.
In any case, once again William Lilly is off the hook for not including the sunspot cycle in his work. He didn’t know about it any more than he knew about Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto.
But what about we modern astrologers? We’ve known about the sunspot cycle for a hundred and eighty years. Why don’t we pay more attention to it? Well, maybe it’s like asteroid 433 Eros, discovered in 1898. That asteroid is “above” too, so it ought to have some effects here “below,” right? I’ve never paid any attention to it astrologically. A problem? I doubt it. 433 Eros probably does have astrological significance, but it’s small enough to safely ignore it, along with most of the other 14,000 named asteroids. In practical astrology, we have to draw the line somewhere.
Sunspots though . . . should we ignore them? We do, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. Let me prove that to you.
First, it’s helpful to visualize the wild rise and fall of these solar storms over time. Have a look at this interesting graph. It shows the details of these observations starting in 2016 and speculatively projects them forward to 2030. Note that right under the main image, you can also see the historical patterns, starting way back in 1750. That’s what we’ll be looking at initially.
ALEKSANDR LEONIDOVICH CHIZHEVSKY
What follows is adapted from my book, The Night Speaks, which has a long chapter about the solar cycle.
Alexsandr Leonidovich Chizhevsky was a Soviet researcher, brilliant, but badly placed in history. Marxist theory prefers class struggles to solar storms as the drivers of history. Chizhevsky learned that lesson the hard way, spending twenty years exiled in the Gulag as punishment for his research correlating sunspots and patterns of events on earth. He died in 1964.
As we have seen, sunspots occur cyclically in a variable period with an average length of about eleven years. Chizhevsky divided the solar cycle into four distinct phases, each associated with a particular set of human attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. Here is a brief overview of his outline:
-
Phase One: The solar minimum. With sunspot activity at its eleven-year low, humanity is in an easygoing mood, tolerant but lazy. People are occupied with personal concerns and little inclined to organize themselves into any kind of unified, history-shaping force.
-
Phase Two: The solar increase. Social energies begin to coalesce. Exciting new ideas and charismatic spokespeople appear, planting seeds that quickly germinate into mass movements. Alliances form. According to Chizhevsky, at this point in the cycle some fundamental problem arises and demands radical solution.
-
Phase Three: The solar maximum. Energies abound. Everyone is excited, eager to respond en masse to leadership or inspiration, for better or worse. An air of enthusiastic drunkenness suffuses the polity. Emigration increases. Wars begin. Tension is high.
-
Phase Four: The solar decline. Exhausted and often disenchanted, humanity now loses steam. The seductive easy answers of the previous several years break down. Unity and collective focus drop off. Disillusionment increases. Groups disband. People go back to tending their own gardens – and gradually we descend again into the peaceful lassitude of Phase One, the sunspot minimum.
Chizhevsky divided the four solar phases into periods of three, two, three and three years respectively. Due to the varying lengths of the cycle, it is best to take those numbers as ratios. Once, two maxima were observed only seven years apart. Another time, seventeen years elapsed between maxima. For unknown reasons, hardly any sunspots were observed between 1645 and 1715 – years which, incidentally, were among the most peaceful in human history.
SO DO SUNSPOTS ACTUALLY WORK ASTROLOGICALLY?
I’m going to scream past a lot of history here at the speed of light. For a somewhat fuller treatment of these events, try The Night Speaks, from which most of what follows is taken – or even better, get your PhD in history!
By the way, if you’re not a history buff, you might want to skip ahead until you get to the heading “What about Now?” At this point, I want to follow the solar cycle for a little over two centuries, watching it leave its indelible mark on human events.
Cards on the table: my aim here is to prove to you how powerful, robust, and reliable these principles are. I can hardly imagine anyone doing full-power mundane astrology without taking the solar cycle into account.
THE TIMELINE
The year 1775 shows a rather deep minimum followed by a meteoric two-year climb to one of the most fiery peaks in the history of solar observation. The American Revolution ignited during this period. “New leaders arose and their ideas fell on receptive ears.”
The next solar minimum occurred around 1783 – and in September of that year in Paris, the Treaty of Peace with Britain was signed. The actual fighting in the American Revolution had actually ended about two years earlier, as we swung down toward Chizhevsky’s Phase Three.
The late 1780s saw another solar peak, and once again the flames of unrest were fanned. The Bastille was stormed and the French Revolution exploded.
The subsequent ascending solar cycle, culminating in a rather low peak, marked the rise of Napoleon, who was declared Emperor of the French in 1805. “A charismatic leader arose.”
The year 1830 saw another peak in sunspot activity and another revolution in France. Once again, masses of men and women took to the streets and yet another French king was deposed. That pattern was destined to be repeated a third time in the bloody French street rioting of 1848 which led to the establishment of the Second Republic. Again, revolutionary fervor coincided quite precisely with a solar maximum.
The tensions which led to the U.S. Civil War mounted on an ascending solar cycle and finally exploded as that cycle reached its peak. The war actually broke out in April 1861 when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston Bay. By 1866, the war was over – and the face of the sun was quiet again.
The twentieth century opened on a descending cycle which bottomed out in 1902. As the Wright Flyer bounced into the air at Kitty Hawk a year later, we were entering Phase Two, the solar increase – and clearly a “new idea” swept through humanity: aviation. We could fly!
The ill-fated First Russian Revolution of 1905 coincided exactly with a solar maximum, as did the successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
True to form, World War I started in Phase Two of the sunspot cycle, peaked during the stormy sunspot maximum, and its final shots were fired during the descent toward minimum.
1923 marked a solar minimum. As the fabled jitterbugging Roaring Twenties got underway in earnest, the magnetic storms on the surface of the Sun were starting to roar toward a maximum which was centered around 1928. The frenzied Stock Market Crash of 1929 occurred in the solar peak – but then solar activity plunged toward a minimum in 1933, as the world economy plunged into the Great Depression.
The road toward the Second World War waxed and waned in close synchronization with the solar cycle. The sunspot minimum of the early twenties found Adolph Hitler ignominiously defeated and locked in jail. Under the quiet Sun, the social atmosphere was not yet ripe for his inflammatory ideas. Just a few years later, around the solar maximum, we find him living in a villa, a wealthy man. As Chizhevsky put it, people were restive and “receptive to new ideas.”
On schedule, Germany’s annexation of Austria and conquest of Czechoslovakia – the real military beginning of World War II – coincided with a solar maximum.
Peace came in 1945 in the solar minimum, but was followed two or three years later by the stormiest solar maximum since the American Revolution. In 1949, the Soviets detonated their first nuclear bomb and the horror of the Cold War was in full swing. In the United States, Joseph McCarthy began his rabid witch-hunt for “communists,” and was not finally silenced until condemned by the U.S. Senate in late 1954 – during the quieter, more balanced solar minimum of that year.
The highest solar peak ever recorded occurred in 1957. Appropriately, in that year humanity experienced the beginning of perhaps its greatest adventure with the launching of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and the onset of the space age. On a cultural level, we also find the birth of rock ‘n roll coinciding with this same period of solar ascendancy. In June of 1955, Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock” hit number one. Within the next year, they were eclipsed by the rise of Elvis Presley and the decades-long musical phenomenon which he set into motion. The frenzied excitement of kids dancing to “the devil’s music” wonderfully reflects the wild, fiery excitement of the solar peak.
The year 1964 saw a quiet Sun, but the climb started quickly as “Beatlemania” caught on. The years 1968-1970 were characterized by a long plateau of peak solar turbulence. Woodstock, the sexual revolution, the counterculture, the escalation of the war in southeast Asia and the accompanying frenzy of protest at home, the first manned lunar landing – all unfolded during that extended maximum. Many of us older astrologers remember that period well. Meanwhile, in China, Mao Tse Tung instituted the great witch hunt called the “Cultural Revolution” in May 1966. It continued in its most active form until 1971. As the sunspots faded, so did the passion. Chizhevsky died in 1964, but he would certainly not have been surprised by the colorful, impassioned events of those years.
Another solar maximum occurred in 1979-1981. What happened? Once again, masses of people were excited by new leaders and new ideas, all gathering momentum in the final years of the 1970s. Ronald Reagan was elected president, riding the crest of a tidal wave of conservative reaction that roared across the country. Fundamentalist Christian fervor burst on the scene after a long period of decline. Parallel events unfolded in the Islamic world with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and the explosion of Muslim fundamentalism, not to mention the rise of terrorism.
The solar fires roared up to a powerful peak from 1989 through 1992. Right on Chizhevsky’s schedule, 1989 brought the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed into fifteen separate states. Meanwhile in 1988, as the solar cycle climbed toward its crescendo, a then-unknown Osama bin Laden formed a group called “al-Qaeda.” At the peak of the cycle, in 1992, he was banished from his native Saudi Arabia for his rabble-rousing and moved his base to Sudan. We’ll soon see his name appearing again at the next solar peak.
The second event and final event I would like to underscore during this same solar maximum is the 1992 passage of the Maastricht Treaty which created the European Union. Quoting our earlier summary of Chizhevsky’s theories about the solar maximum, “Everyone is excited, eager to respond en masse to leadership or inspiration, for better or worse.”
On April 27, 1994, as the solar cycle wound down, Nelson Mandela was elected president of South Africa. The revolution in that country was relatively bloodless. I can’t help but thank the calmer, more reasonable energies of the solar minimum. In a similarly peaceful vein, in 1997 right at the bottom of the minimum, the United Kingdom voluntarily gave Hong Kong back to China. Not everyone was happy – but all of the alternatives to that simple solution were perilous. It is interesting to compare this peaceful British turnover of Hong Kong to the 1982 Falklands War between Britain and Argentina, fought just past a solar maximum, when nine hundred people died. Hong Kong and the Falklands: two far-flung colonies. Both are vestiges of colonialism. Fairly said, they are two very different situations – and yet one situation is settled via negotiation and another with blood, death, and hatred. To say the difference was “all because of sunspots” is an over simplification – but to ignore their effects is to be blind to what is obviously emerging here as a major astrological influence on collective human behavior.
The solar minimum of the mid-1990s descended gradually, then roared upward in a remarkably explosive ascent, starting from a deep bottom in 1997. That cycle peaked in 2000-2002. Of course, any American would immediately think of September 11, 2001 when the World Trade Center was destroyed. For all its horror, that frenzied moment stands as an indelible illustration of the mad face of the solar maximum. And the human face of that nightmare is of course that of Osama bin Laden.
As the Sun flickered back to life in 2009-2010 and we entered Chizhevsky’s solar increase, his prediction is that “social energies begin to coalesce.” On December 17, 2010 Mohamed Bouazisi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest of his treatment at the hands of corrupt petty officials there. That was the trigger that sparked the series of explosive events across the Islamic world now known as “the Arab Spring,” It peaked in 2011 with initially successful popular revolutions not only in Tunisia, but also in Egypt and Libya, not to mention failed ones in Bahrain and Yemen. In a somewhat different vein, the Syrian civil war began. Meanwhile in the Western world, the “Occupy” movement, protesting the perceived injustices symbolized by Wall Street, got started in New York City. That was in September 2011. By October, Occupy protests had happened or were currently happening in nearly a thousand cities in the United States, as well as in 82 other countries.
Again, people were responding to the rising fires on the face of the sun 93,000,000 miles away.
In 2012, at the solar maximum, Israel once more invaded the Gaza strip – that beleaguered land providing such a crystalline mirror for the sunspot cycle. Witness the current situation in Gaza, once again coinciding with a solar maximum. With the Sun roaring, will the fragile peace hold?
The “Black Lives Matter” movement also got its start in 2013 after security guard George Zimmerman was acquitted for killing black teenager Trayvon Martin. The movement gained enormous momentum with police shootings and documented brutality toward African-Americans in 2014 and 2015. It is illustrative to recall the parallels with the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles back in 1992, also at a solar maximum.
WHAT ABOUT NOW?
The current solar cycle began with a minimum in December 2019. It is generally assumed to have reached maximum intensity in October 2024, although that remains to be confirmed – the Sun is still extremely active. The cycle is predicted to end sometime in 2030, with all the usual caveats about solar unpredictability. Whatever the future holds, we are certainly in the thick of a solar maximum right now. Given the current headlines, who could doubt that?
All in all, this solar cycle was surprisingly more intense than it had been predicted to be. The previous two or three cycles had been quieter than average. There had even been some talk among solar astrophysicists about how the Sun was perhaps entering a flat phase, such as the quiescent period of the second half of the 17th century.
Between the tenth and thirteenth day of May 2024, a series of powerful solar eruptions buffeted earth, producing incredible displays of aurora far further south than they are normally seen in the northern hemisphere. Michelle and I live under dark desert skies, way down at latitude 33 degrees North. During that solar storm, we went up on our star deck to see if we could see any aurora. There was perhaps a faint glow which we thought might be our imagination until Michelle snapped a photo with her spiffy new iPhone. There it was: aurora borealis way further south than it is normally visible. That’s how intense the May 2024 solar storms were.
Cutting back to Alexsandr Leonidovich Chizhevsky, his solar phase two would have ended with the solar maximum last October. According to his theory, we would have then been emerging from a period characterized by the rise of “exciting new ideas and charismatic spokespeople, planting seeds that quickly germinate into mass movements. Some fundamental problem would have arisen and that seemed to demand a radical solution.” Make your own judgments of course, but some “radical solutions” are better than others.
Exciting new ideas? Artificial Intelligence anyone? It swept into collective consciousness and collective experience right on schedule with the solar maximum.
Score another one for Chizhevsky.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Last October, we hit solar maximum. Entering phase three, Chizhevsky would predict that “energies abound. Everyone is excited, eager to respond en masse to leadership or inspiration, for better or worse. An air of enthusiastic drunkenness suffuses the polity. Emigration increases, wars begin, and tension is high.”
Again, just read the papers.
By Chizhevsky’s standard, this current “drunken mood” should start to peter out sometime in the (northern) Autumn of 2027 as we enter the final, waning phase of the solar cycle. “Exhausted and often disenchanted, humanity now loses steam. The seductive easy answers of the previous several years break down. Unity and collective focus drop off. Disillusionment increases. Groups disband. People go back to tending their own gardens – and gradually we descend again into the peaceful lassitude of Phase One, the sunspot minimum.”
I don’t know about you, but I sure am ready for that more peaceful phase.
THE BIG QUESTION
So, is this astrology? I think so – it certainly passes the “as above, so below” test. And one of the coolest things about it is how, when faced with a skeptic who knows some history, we can use the sunspot cycle to quickly prove the idea that heavenly events correlate with worldly developments. That’s the essential astrological idea, of course. It gets our foot in the door even with the most closed-minded people. With sunspots, we’ve proven the essence of astrology without pressing anyone’s defensive buttons by mentioning Gemini or Aquarius.
Go forth and use this superpower wisely.