Last month I was writing Daily Astrology & Adventure, describing the helpless feeling that I think most of us have when we’re considering how serious the world situation is. Some names came to mind of people who were not scared or paralyzed, but rather who viewed the future as an opportunity to do things better.
Buckminster Fuller developed and refined the geodesic dome during the summers of 1948 and 1949, when he worked at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. One man who saw what was coming and was unfazed by the looming crisis of too-rapid growth, dwindling resources, and overcrowding was Buckminster Fuller. I linked to his Wiki page, and for a couple of days I mentioned his name around my neighborhood. I could only find one or two people who had even heard of him—and neither knew who he was or what he contributed.
Imagine if a scientist from the late 21st century dropped in on our lives today, and could see our current ecological and economic problems clearly, with the wisdom and sense of perspective of the future. Imagine that he knew the solutions as if they had already been worked out, and had withstood the test of time. That was Bucky Fuller.
He was born Friday, July 12, 1895, so his 113th birth anniversary just passed last month. He shares a birth year with Dane Rudhyar, Rudolph Valentino, Jeddu Krishnamurti, and Carl Orff. Oh, and J. Edgar Hoover, the eternal boss of the FBI. The year of his birth was also the year of the first prediscovery photograph of Chiron, which not surprisingly is one of the most interesting planets in his chart: a hint at the holistic consciousness to come, when Chiron was discovered in 1977 and the acceptance of Fuller’s ideas was at its peak.
Fuller was a Cancer with the Sun conjunct Jupiter. His job, as he viewed it, was to be a pragmatic steward of the world. He had large ideas; he was the grandfather of the sustainability movement. But while he was at it, he reinvented the world, proposing and designing such concepts as tsunami-resistant floating cities.
“I am not optimistic or pessimistic,” he wrote in 1983. “I feel that optimism and pessimism are very unbalanced. I am a very hard engineer. I am a mechanic. I am a sailor. I am an air pilot. I don’t tell people I can get you across the ocean with my ship unless I know what I’m talking about.” This, to me, is his Saturn in Scorpio talking: the sober recognition that engineers hold people’s lives in their hands, but also that mind is a malleable substance.
“Bucky’s foremost concern was to find ways to ‘do more with less’ and to use resources most efficiently to serve humanity,” according to Black Mountain College, where he taught in the summers of 1948 and 1949. “He invented the term ‘Spaceship Earth’ to encourage people to see the entire world as one interdependent system. During his life and career, Fuller was awarded 25 US patents, wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorate degrees, circled the Earth 57 times consulting and lecturing, and received dozens of major architectural and design awards along with the prestigious Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in America.”
He also had the Sun conjunct asteroid Kassandra, recalling the myth about the prophetess who told the truth but nobody believed her. While he received considerable attention and appreciation for his work toward the end of his life, and even the US government experimented with his ideas, his vision for the future—the sum total of his contribution to what he called Spaceship Earth—largely goes unnoticed, unappreciated, and unutilized.
Lately, though, his ideas have been gaining attention once again. This is for one reason, as far as I can tell: We need him. And as the next decade unfolds, we will need him more every day, because he knew how to do more with less, such as less energy, less material resources, and less waste.
Everyone has seen at least one example of his engineering—the geodesic dome. They are all over the place, even in cities, drawn into the architecture of sports arenas and amusement parks, for example. There’s a huge one at Disney World (really a sphere), and you might run into one at a botanical garden somewhere.
We might be inclined to think that, like the wheel, these domes were invented too long ago to remember who created it, or they are a kitsch reference to some science fiction scenario. While the dome was not invented by
Fuller (rather, an engineer named Walther Bauersfeld at Carl Zeiss Laboratories came up with it early in the 20th century), it was named, developed, and popularized by Fuller, who received a US patent for the concept. That patent was issued in 1954 at his second Saturn return, with a simultaneous Jupiter return and Mercury retrograde in Cancer—a positively strange replay of his birth astrology.
Fuller was in kindergarten when he discovered that triangles were more stable than squares, tetrahedrons more stable than cubes. This is the basis of the geodesic dome. Fuller has the asteroid Child exactly conjunct Uranus, the planet of inventions, and apparently he started young.
“The teacher brought in toothpicks and semi dried peas and told the class to build structures. With his bad eyesight, Bucky saw bulks and had no feeling for structural lines. The other children formed cubes because they were familiar with houses and barns. Fuller relied on different senses and he discovered that the triangle (or tetrahedron) held its shape the best. Tetrahedrons were far more stable than the fragile squares that the other children made. His teacher called everyone around to see the unexpected shape. Bucky was surprised that they were surprised,” according to the classic story, told by Fuller and here stated in the words of Doug Yurchey.
Though Fuller is known mostly for the geodesic dome, his inventions reached into every area of life. He concerned himself with inventing comfortable, lightweight housing and with transportation. For example, in 1933 he invented a three-wheeled aerodynamic car that could carry 11 people, travel 130 miles per hour, and get 30 miles per gallon. An accident during a demonstration at the 1933 World’s Fair killed the driver, and the idea along with it (though banks and Chrysler were involved in nixing the idea as well). Today, an average of 41,000 people die each year in four-wheel cars in the United States alone, making this one accident seem statistically irrelevant. It’s an idea we might want to revisit, since soon we will be reminiscing about the quaint old days of $5 a gallon fuel and even the biggest, best SUV gets less than half the gas mileage and holds half the number of passengers.
“There are over two million cars standing in front of red lights with their engines going,” Fuller wrote in 1981, shortly after the famous energy crisis of the Carter administration. “Then we have over two million times approximately 100 horsepower being generated as they are idling there, so that we have something like 200 million horses jumping up and down and going nowhere. Now, we have to count that in our economy when we begin to get down to what is the efficiency of the economy.”
Let’s take a closer look at Fuller’s chart and see if we can find any clues about these ideas.
To me, the first thing that really stands out—once you get past the Sun/Jupiter/Kassandra conjunction in Cancer, and his friendly Pisces Moon, is that Bucky had Mercury retrograde. It was retrograde in Cancer, square Chiron, a setup that might make you wonder if the person can do anything other than feel; that is, whether they can even think at all. This is the image of someone who dances to the beat of his own drummer (a classical interpretation of Mercury retrograde), but it’s also the picture of someone who intuits his ideas rather than thinks them. This is a little like Einstein (another strong watery type, with Cancer rising and a Pisces Sun).
The retrograde and its position in Cancer gives us a clue as to Fuller’s well-known need to be recognized as a genius by those around him. I called up my old friend and teacher Dave Roell at the Astrology Center of America and he commented, “It’s about looking for someone to say you’re okay.” However, it speaks volumes about how environmentally sensitive he was; and why he felt that we had to change the environment rather than change ourselves, or rather, as a means to changing ourselves.
Mercury is in a close conjunction with the asteroid Niobe. In the Greek myths, Niobe is known as one who was proud of her 14 offspring, even considering herself superior to Leto, who had birthed the twins Apollo and Artemis (the Sun and Moon). Martha Lang-Wescott writes in The Orders of Light, “The essence of Niobe’s lesson can be found where there is pride and ego investment in fertility, virility, ancestry, creativity or creative products”—but she says it goes a lot further.
In Cancer, with Mercury so prominent, this is emotionally motivated. Retrograde, Mercury amounts to a need for nurturing as a child, or a calling to master the lesson of self-nourishment. We might ask, “Well, what else is new on the planet?” but Bucky seems to have turned that around into a passionate drive to take care of the world. (Ceres in the first degree of Capricorn, square the Aries Point, is another illustration of this need to nourish others with his practical concepts.)
His Mercury placement, which creates a kind of intellectual insecurity, served as a driving force, and appropriately enough, it is retrograding into a close square with Chiron. I think of Mercury-Chiron contacts as having a savant quality. You think you’re less intelligent than you are; you have an intense mind, but sometimes it feels broken, and you can’t always see past the pseudo intellectual performances of the world, or you feel like a fake. (I don’t think Fuller had quite that problem, but like many people who get a lot done and make a real contribution, he clearly doubted himself more than you would imagine.)
Barbara Hand Clow observed Mercury-square-Chiron people tend to be highly intuitive, but also express a real degree of mental exactitude. She says some of them can basically manifest things with their minds. Fuller did plenty of that, working without a corporate-sponsored laboratory, a benefit enjoyed by many modern inventors.
Opposite that, Mercury is opposite the asteroid Industria in Capricorn. He was not the darling of industry. His ideas were too efficient. Industry is about profit and waste. Fuller’s ideas centered on economy.
“Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.” He knew history. At one time, gasoline, benzene, and chlorine were all considered industrial waste products.
Fuller was born in the late 19th century, at the tail end of the Pluto-Neptune conjunction. In our era of history, there have been three notable outer planet conjunctions: Neptune conjunct Pluto in the 1890s; Uranus conjunct
Pluto in the 1960s; and Uranus conjunct Neptune in the early 1990s. It is very unusual to have so many outer planet conjunctions so close together (in this case, within one century), and it speaks of the bizarre, even insane acceleration of “progress” that humanity is making in these decades.
Pluto takes the visionary and intuitive gift of Neptune and focuses it like a laser. Notably it is in Gemini, the sign of the mind. And along with Pluto, we have an extra message from the asteroid belt—Sphinx conjunct Pluto, exact to the degree. Pluto is an evolutionary driving force; indeed, the unstoppable force. Sphinx talks about a mystery that is too old to understand. Nobody even knows how old the Sphinx is, who put it there, what it means, or what it’s for. To me, the asteroid Sphinx points us to what we really cannot understand but which is standing three steps outside our door.
So was Bucky a visitor from the past, or from the future? Or was he a sensitive guy with a great mind who, like other notable inventors (Ben Franklin comes to mind), was more interested in progress than in profits? “We are called to be architects of the future,” he once said, “not its victims.”
Additional Research: Rachel Asher, Tracy Delaney, Nick Dagan Best, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
This article appears in August 2008.
