It’s the big guy’s 200th birthday tomorrow. And coincidentally, the birthday of Charles Darwin, born the same year:
As historical facts go, it amounts to little more than a footnote. Still, while it’s just a coincidence, it’s a coincidence that’s guaranteed to make you do a double take the first time you run across it. Everybody knows Darwin and Lincoln were near-mythic figures in the 19th century. But who ever thinks of them in tandem? Who puts the theory of evolution and the Civil War in the same sentence? Why would you, unless you’re writing your dissertation on epochal events in the 19th century? But instinctively, we want to say that they belong together. It’s not just because they were both great men, and not because they happen to be exact coevals. Rather, it’s because the scientist and the politician each touched off a revolution that changed the world.
Read the full article at Newsweek.com
Of course, astrologers would quib
ble over that coincidence bit, nodding sagely at the Sun in Aquarius and Uranus conjunct the North Node (both signatures of revolution) – not to mention to titantic clash of Saturn/Neptune and Pluto/Jupiter – on February 12, 1809. It was a tricky moment in history on which to make one’s debut, but regardless of your thoughts about their ideas or politics, you must admit they made their mark.
Their bicentennial birthday kicks off with a Sun/Neptune conjunction (4:41 am PST). Neptune leads us into temptation – to idealize the man who was perhaps our greatest president, and (for agnostic rebels like me) to raise a lusty cheer for the man whose research into the origin of the species still makes fundamentalists froth at the mouth 200 years later. But as always with Neptune, there’s sure to be more to the story. We’ll see how the legacy of these birthmates unfolds in the year ahead.
