In sharp contrast to the modern world view, Jung ceased to regard the outer world as merely a neutral background against which the human psyche pursued its isolated intrasubjective quest for meaning and purpose. Rather, all events, inner and outer, whether emanating from the human unconscious or from the larger matrix of the world, were recognized as sources of potential psychological and spiritual significance. From this perspective, not only the individual psyche and not only humanity’s collective unconscious but all of nature supported and moved the human psyche towards a larger consciousness of purpose and meaning.4 Each moment in time possessed a certain tangible character or quality which pervaded the various events taking place at that moment.
It seems, indeed, as though time, far from being an abstraction, is a concrete continuum which contains qualities or fundamentals which can manifest themselves in relative simultaneousness in different places and in a parallelism which cannot be explained, as in cases of simultaneous appearance of identical thoughts, symbols, or psychic conditions…. Whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.”5
Central to Jung’s understanding of such phenomena was his observation that the underlying meaning or formal factor that linked the synchronistic inner and outer events—the formal cause, in Aristotelian terms—was archetypal in nature. Building on insights from Freud, and drawing from the classical Platonic philosophical vocabulary and from esoteric traditions, Jung had long regarded and defined archetypes as the fundamental governing principles of the human psyche. On the basis of his own analyses as well as those of others, not only of a diverse range of clinical phenomena but also of the art, myths, and religions of many eras and cultures, Jung had come to view archetypes as innate symbolic forms and psychological dispositions that unconsciously structure and impel human behavior and experience at both the personal and collective level. They are “self-portraits” of the instincts and render human experience meaningful according to certain timeless universal patterns or forms: Light and Dark, Birth and Death, Rebirth, the Hero, the Great Mother, the Child, the Trickster, the Shadow, Good and Evil, Eros and Logos, Feminine and Masculine, as well as more specifically personified and culturally inflected forms such as Aphrodite, Oedipus, Dionysus, Prometheus, Saturn, Shakti, Kali, Shiva, Wotan, Isis, and Sophia. Another major category of the archetypes comprises the mathematical principles of number and geometric form, as in the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition, and traditional sacred forms such as the mandala, the circle, and the cross. All these principles were seen as possessing a primordial, mythic, and numinous character grounded in the deepest layers of the psyche and expressing a collective unconscious shared by all human beings.
For most of his career, Jung worked and wrote within the modern Cartesian-Kantian philosophical framework of a basic division between the human subject and the objective world, and thus tended to restrict archetypes to the interior world of the human psyche. His view of archetypes in the early and middle periods of his career was generally equivalent to Kant’s notion of a priori forms and categories: They were inherited psychological structures or dispositions that preceded and shaped the character of human experience but could not be said to transcend the human psyche. In his later work, however, and most explicitly in the context of his analysis of synchronicities, Jung moved towards a conception of archetypes as autonomous patterns of meaning that inform both psyche and matter, providing a bridge between inner and outer: “Synchronicity postulates a meaning which is a priori in relation to human consciousness and apparently exists outside man.” Jung’s later work thus intimated the ancient understanding of an ensouled world, of an anima mundi in which the human psyche participates and with which it shares the same ordering principles of meaning. Jung noted parallels between synchronistic phenomena and the Chinese understanding of the Tao, the ancient Greek conception of the cosmic sympathy of all things, the Hermetic doctrine of microcosm and macrocosm, the medieval and Renaissance theory of correspondences, and the medieval concept of the preexistent ultimate unity of all existence, the unus mundus (the unitary world).6
In each case of synchronicity, Jung discerned an underlying archetypal coherence that linked the otherwise unconnected events, informed the larger field of meaning, and gave to the time of the synchronicity’s occurrence a specific fundamental quality. In the first case cited above, for example, the symbolically charged image of the golden scarab expressed the archetypal principle of rebirth and renewal, visible in the Egyptian myth of the Sun-god who in the nether-world during the night sea journey changes himself into a scarab, then mounts the barge to rise again reborn into the morning sky at dawn. In Egyptian religion, the mythic journey of the Sun mediated the spiritual journey of the soul, providing the individual with a transformative symbolic pattern of descent and renewal, death and rebirth.
The case of the stopped watch, by contrast, was pervasively informed by the complex archetype of Saturn-Kronos, the senex principle, a central symbol and figure in the Western cultural tradition from the ancient Greek and Hellenistic era through the Middle Ages and Renaissance.7 In this synchronicity, the Saturn archetype was visible not only in all the concrete details involving time, but also in the intricately interrelated themes of stoppage and being stuck (in both mind and watch), of opposition and rejection, error, fault, correction, judgment and self-judgment, the superego. Each element and stage of the event suggested another dimension of the Saturn principle’s multivalent spectrum of meanings: the precise meeting time, the task at hand, the problem to be solved, the pronouncement of judgments, the strife of disagreement, the attempt to bring an end to the task, the careful checking and comparing of the time, the act of negation and criticism first directed outward towards the other and then inward towards the self, the self-correction followed by repetition, engaging the problem again and trying this time to get it right. Finally, the overarching themes, deciding the fate of the manuscript, judging the legacy of the deceased, death as the stopping of time: all characteristic expressions of Saturn and the senex discernible within the hour of the meeting.
Because synchronicities seemed to reflect and embody the same archetypal forms that Jung and many others came to see as basic underlying principles of the human psyche, the occurrence and recognition of such meaningful coincidences gave a crucial new dimension to the archetypal perspective. The empirical conformity between the event occurring in the external world and the archetypal quality of the internal state of consciousness suggested that the active archetype could not be localized as an exclusively subjective intrapsychic reality. Rather, both psyche and world, inner and outer, were informed by the archetypal pattern and thereby united by the correlation. It was specifically the experiential potency of this spontaneous archetypal resonance that seemed to act as a healing solvent on the hardened polarities—between self and world, subject and object, conscious and unconscious—of the person experiencing the synchronicity.
The collective unconscious surrounds us on all sides…. It is more like an atmosphere in which we live than something that is found in us…. Also, it does not by any means behave merely psychologically; in the cases of so-called synchronicity it proves to be a universal substrate present in the environment rather than a psychological premise. Wherever we come into contact with an archetype we enter into relationship with transconscious, metapsychic factors.
This development in Jung’s thought thus constituted a major shift in his understanding of the religious situation confronting the modern psyche. From early in his career, Jung saw both the psychological and the spiritual path of the modern self as requiring a sustained direct encounter with the archetypal unconscious. Here lay the possibility not only of deeper psychological self-awareness but also of spiritual transformation, permitting an engagement with those numinous realities that could profoundly heal the psyche and provide it with an orienting purpose and transcendent meaning. Throughout most of his writings this engagement was understood as taking place wi
thin what Jung essentially regarded as the sacred circle of the human psyche. Eventually, however, Jung’s many years of studying synchronicities moved him to recognize this engagement as something that is enacted within the larger sacred circle of nature as a whole. In this perspective, not just the interior depths of the human psyche but also the interior depths of nature itself supports the unfolding of human spirituality and each person’s struggle towards individuation.8
The recognition of synchronicities’ potential metaphysical implications not only suggested a transformation in the psychology of religion; it represented a critical step towards bridging the schism between religion and science in the modern era so long embodied in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between psyche and world. As the physicist Victor Mansfield has written, speaking for many: “I have encountered too many synchronistic experiences, both in my life and that of others, to ignore them. Yet these surprisingly common experiences pose tremendous psychological and philosophical challenges for our world view. They are especially troubling experiences for me as a physicist trained within the culture of scientific materialism.” With these implications in mind, both philosophical and psychological, Jung’s student and close associate Marie-Louise von Franz stated in an interview late in her life that “the work which has now to be done is to work out the concept of synchronicity. I don’t know the people who will continue it. They must exist, but I don’t know where they are.”
Despite synchronicities’ enigmatic and often readily dismissed character, it was with such humble clues that Jung began to open up the possibility of a fundamental redefinition of both the modern religious situation and the scientific world picture, beyond the closed universe of the spiritually aspiring psyche encompassed by a disenchanted world. Recalling the diagram illustrating the modern world view, the existence of synchronicities implied that the large outer circle representing the world could no longer be seen as a definitively meaningless void. The dynamic relationship between different dimensions of being—both between the human self and the encompassing world and between consciousness and the unconscious—had to be reconceived. It appears to have been Jung’s growing recognition of the magnitude of these implications for the modern world view that impelled him to labor so strenuously, even courageously, to bring critical awareness of the phenomenon of synchronicity into the intellectual discourse of the twentieth century.9
The psychological and spiritual quest of the modern self now extended beyond an exclusively subjective, intrapsychic horizon, for that quest took place within the matrix of a world that evidently possessed an intrinsic capacity for expressing and supporting meaning and purpose. Subtly and tenuously, the larger context within which the modern psyche pursued its search for wholeness had begun to shift.
The Archetypal Cosmos
So it comes to pass that, when we pursue an inquiry beyond a certain depth, we step out of the field of psychological categories and enter the sphere of the ultimate mysteries of life. The floorboards of the soul, to which we try to penetrate, fan open and reveal the starry firmament.
—Bruno Schulz
Over the years, many researchers have taken a special interest in the problem of coincidences, precisely because such events could be interpreted as evidence that the world possesses more underlying unity, order, and meaning than the modern mind has assumed. Not unlike the anomalous situation that confronted Newtonian physics in the late nineteenth century with the Michelson-Morley experiment that measured the speed of light, synchronicity represented a phenomenon that, simply put, should not have been occurring, at least not in a random, purposeless universe. Yet the problem has remained ambiguous, for although coincidences are often personally significant, they tend to resist objective assessment. Only if such phenomena were in some sense public and pervasive rather than private and exceptional—only if the archetypal patternings were more universally discernible and associated more widely with collective experience and the world at large rather than sporadically with isolated special cases—could the suggestion of a deeper order be effectively substantiated in a way that could influence the cultural world view.
One special, highly controversial class of synchronicities, however, did appear to resemble this description. In the course of his career Jung’s attention was increasingly drawn to the ancient cosmological perspective of astrology, which posits a systematic symbolic correspondence between planetary positions and the events of human existence. Here was the thesis, widely accepted in most other cultures as well as in earlier eras of the West, that the universe is so ordered that the movements and patterns of the heavens are synchronously correlated with the movements and patterns of human affairs in such a manner as to be both intelligible and meaningful to the human mind. Jung began to examine astrology as early as 1911, when he mentioned his inquiries in a letter to Freud. (“My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up….”) The interest gradually developed into a major focus of investigation, and in his later years Jung devoted himself with considerable passion to astrological research. “Astrology,” he stated, “represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.” Though his published writings presented varying and at times ambiguous views of the subject over the course of his life, it is evident that insights from his astrological studies influenced many of his most significant theoretical formulations in the final, extraordinarily fruitful phase of his life’s work (archetypal theory, synchronicity, philosophy of history). It is also clear from reports from his family and others close to him that in his last decades he came to employ the analysis of birth charts and transits as a regular and integral aspect of his clinical work with patients in analysis.10
Of course, astrology has not been held in high esteem during most of the modern era, for a variety of compelling reasons. Certainly its popular expressions have seldom been such as to inspire confidence in the enterprise. More fundamentally, astrology could not be reconciled with the world picture that emerged from the natural sciences of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, wherein all natural phenomena, from the motion of planets to the evolution of species, were understood in terms of material substances and mechanistic principles that functioned without purpose or design. Nor could it prevail against that tendency of the modern mind, established during the Enlightenment, to uphold its own rational autonomy and to depreciate earlier thought systems that seemed to support any form of primitive participation mystique between the human psyche and a world endowed with pregiven structures of meaning. One can appreciate Jung’s reluctance to make more public the extent of his use of astrology. In the context of twentieth-century beliefs and the dominance of scientific thinking, he had already pressed the boundaries of intellectual discourse about as far as could be sustained.
Like most products of a modern education, I myself long viewed any form of astrology with automatic skepticism. Eventually, however, influenced not only by Jung’s example but also by a number of colleagues whose intellectual judgment I had reason to trust, I came to think that some essence of the astrological thesis might be worth investigating. Several factors contributed to my interest. Once I moved past the usual disparagements of the conventional accounts, I noticed that the history of astrology contained certain remarkable features. It seemed curious to me that the historical periods during which astrology flourished in the West—classical Greek and Roman antiquity, the Hellenistic era in Alexandria, the High Middle Ages, the Italian Renaissance, the Elizabethan age in England, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Europe generally—all happened to be eras in which intellectual and cultural creativity was unusually luminous. The same could be said of astrology’s prominence during the centuries in which science and culture were at their height in the Islamic world, and so too in India. I thought it curious as well that astrology had provided the principal foundation for the earliest development of science itself,
in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, and that its intimate bond with astronomy had played a significant role in the evolution of Western cosmology for two thousand years, from its Greek origins through the pivotal period of the Copernican revolution. I was also impressed by the high intellectual caliber of those philosophers, scientists, and writers who in one form or another had supported the astrological thesis, a group that to my surprise turned out to include many of the greatest figures of Western thought: Plato and Aristotle, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, Plotinus and Proclus, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Ficino, Kepler, Goethe, Yeats, Jung.11
Beyond these several historical factors, I was also impressed by a number of commonalities between that ancient thought system and the new conception of reality currently emerging in many fields out of the postmodern matrix: the affirmation of the multidimensional nature of reality, the complex holistic understanding of part and whole in all phenomena, the recognition of an “ecology of mind” in nature, the new discernment of subtle dimensions of order in seemingly random natural processes, the openness to sources of knowledge and traditions of thought beyond those sanctioned by conventional modern rationality, the acknowledgment of the spiritual dimension of existence, the appreciation of the role of symbolic, mythic, and archetypal meaning in human experience. Unlike its mechanistic modern predecessor, the emerging paradigm provided a general conceptual framework that in many respects was not inherently incompatible with the astrological perspective.
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