"When I was young I asked my history teacher whether there were such things as cycles in history. He told me to get on with my work, since questions like that would not help me pass my exams. Hmmph! From that moment on, something in me resolved to find out the answer to this question. Little was I to know that I was to become an astrologer seven years later, and that, twelve years after that, I would start studying astrological cycles in history. What a fine way to advance a career! Historians won't touch it because it's ideologically way-out, and astrologers hardly touch it because of a lack of knowledge of history - and also because of a fixation on birth charts and specific events.
So here, in this short series on astro-history, I shall be examining some of the major cycles of history - focusing not on events but on trends and timespans. Now, here, it's dead easy to pluck events out of history to prove one's point and, hopefully, I'm not going to do that. Nevertheless, some remarkable perspectives on history arise.
In this article, I want to look simply at the conjunctions of Neptune and Pluto, the slowest simple cycle of time (unless one wants to get esoteric or precessional about it). Before starting, however, here are some initial observations."