This paper discusses the Western culture and philosophy. Western culture, for the past four thousand years, has been dominated by the paradigm of a male creator god, separate from his creation; a paradigm which naturally generates assumptions about the nature of reality. These assumptions tend to be expressed in oppositional language, such as mind and body, divinity and nature, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, science and religion; with our highly developed capacity for conceptual thinking, 'reason' has become divorced from symbolic thought. However, there have always been periods in history when the imbalance of logos and mythos has sought to right itself, when the heterodox counter-currents have surged forward into a period of intense fertility, seeking to unite with their opposites. Richard Tarnas has pointed out that the conjunction of Uranus and Neptune in the heavens coincides with such periods of synthesis, when mythical and numinous themes emerge into an arena of outworn secularism, initiating a new, deepened religious consciousness. For example, the conjunction occurred at the time of Socrates and the formation of Platonic philosophy, and similarly in the 1470s and 80s, the heart of the Renaissance, when academic scholasticism gave way to a resurgence of magical thought and to an assimilation of the esoteric arts into a celebration of divinity on earth.
