To help the reader make an informed judgment on these matters is one of the principal purposes of this book. In the following chapters, therefore, I present both the basic technical knowledge necessary to begin the exploration and illustrative examples of correlations in history and in the lives of significant cultural figures. These examples are presented as information perhaps interesting and instructive in itself but also as an aid in developing, or awakening, what Hillman has called “an archetypal eye”: that form of imaginative intelligence, implicit and potential in all of us, that is capable of recognizing and discriminating the rich multiplicity of archetypal patterns in the intimate microcosm of one’s own life as well as in the great events of history and culture. After this survey of evidence, I briefly address its implications and suggest a philosophical and cosmological framework within which it might most cogently be integrated.
III
Through the Archetypal Telescope
My guide and I entered through that hidden path to make our way back into the shining world. And with no time for rest, we climbed upward—he first, I following—until, through a round opening, I saw those things of beauty that Heaven holds. It was thence, at last, we came forth to see again the stars.
—Dante
The Divine Comedy
The Evolving Tradition
Astrology in its most general definition rests on a conception of the cosmos as a coherent embodiment of creative intelligence, purpose, and meaning expressed through a constant complex correspondence between astronomical patterns and human experience. The various celestial bodies are regarded as possessing an intrinsic association with specific universal principles. Both these principles and their astronomical correspondences are seen as ultimately grounded in the nature of the cosmos itself, thereby integrating the celestial and terrestrial, macrocosm and microcosm. As the planets move through their cycles, they form various geometrical relationships with each other relative to the Earth within the larger cosmic environment. These alignments are observed to coincide with specific archetypally patterned phenomena in human lives. From the beginning of Western astrology, such an understanding was closely associated with the original Greek conception of kosmos, a word first applied to the world as a whole by the Pythagoreans to convey a characteristically Greek synthesis of intelligent order, beauty, and structural perfection.
The astrological tradition initiated by the Greeks in Alexandria in the Hellenistic era, during the centuries immediately before and after the birth of Christ, was embedded in a classical world conception deeply influenced by Pythagorean and Platonic thought. It had earlier roots in ancient Mesopotamian celestial observations from at least the beginning of the second millennium BCE, and was shaped by ancient Babylonian, Egyptian, and Persian cultural influences. The first known natal chart, or horoscope, dates from about 400 BCE (the time of Socrates and Plato). The astrological perspective and method that emerged in the following centuries was closely associated with the scientific disciplines of Greek astronomy, mathematics, and medicine, with the esoteric streams of thought that informed the mystery religions and Hermetic literature of classical antiquity, and with major philosophical and religious movements such as Neoplatonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism. As an overarching view of the universe and the cosmic position of the human being, astrology was singularly pervasive in the classical era; it transcended the boundaries of science, religion, and philosophy.1 It subsequently influenced Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thought and played a central role in the art, literature, and cultural ethos of the European High Middle Ages and Renaissance. Because of this extraordinary diversity in its origins and the succession of its later environments, astrology was constantly being reconceived according to the different intellectual and cultural contexts in which it flourished.
Yet at the heart of all these various inflections, the implicit cosmological metastructure within which the Western astrological tradition developed can be described as essentially Pythagorean-Platonic in character: that is, the cosmos is understood to be pervasively informed and integrated through the active presence of a universal ordering principle, at once mathematical and archetypal in manifestation, whereby the celestial bodies and their cyclical patterns possess a symbolic significance that is intelligibly reflected within the human sphere. Over the centuries, diverse schools, interpretations, and frameworks arose that continually reshaped and transformed this underlying perspective, positing different views concerning the nature and extent of cosmic influence, the relative balance of celestial constraint and human freedom, the question as to whether planets are indications or causes, and, in the case of the long-influential Aristotelian-Ptolemaic model, the possibility of a more physically causal determinism produced by the celestial spheres.
From its Mesopotamian and Egyptian origins to its subsequent Hellenistic synthesis in the classical era, the history of Western astrology can, in very general terms, be seen as having moved from a more fluid astral divination (focused on intuiting the will of the celestial gods and responding to this perception through appropriate action, ritual, and supplication for divine favor) to an increasing emphasis on systematic observation of the geometric regularities of astronomical movements, the application of universal principles of interpretation, and eventually the formulation of elaborate rules for concrete prediction. This gradual process of “rationalization” (in Weber’s sense) was combined in later antiquity and the medieval period with an increasingly mechanistic view of celestial causality, which in turn became linked with a more rigid determinism.2 A similar evolution took place in India after the conquests of Alexander the Great brought Greek culture to Asia; Vedic astrology was shaped both by the Mesopotamian-Hellenistic tradition and by India’s own distinctive religious and social legacies in a manner that has continued to the present.
In Europe, in the wake of the Enlightenment of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, astrology virtually disappeared from scholarly discourse and the world view of the educated. Lingering principally in the form of popular astrological almanacs, it underwent a gradual revival during the nineteenth century with the growing European interest during the Romantic period in esoteric traditions and later in theosophy. Finally, in the course of the twentieth century, a widespread rebirth of astrology took place, beginning in England and spreading to North America and the rest of Europe. The astrology that emerged was informed by goals and theoretical assumptions that often differed from those of the ancient and medieval periods in fundamental ways. In general, its character was more individualistic and psychological—emphasizing internal reality over external, self-understanding over concrete event-prediction, symbolic interpretation over literal, and participatory engagement over passive fatalism. Accompanying this shift of character has been the gradual rise within the astrological community of a discourse of critical philosophical reflection and the questioning of many traditional astrological assumptions and tenets.
Numerous factors have played a role in this recent trend. Increased access to precise astronomical data and the discovery of the outer planets have deeply affected astrological practice and theory. So also has the enormous increase in the available data, with incomparably more individual birth charts, biographies, and historical periods having now become the basis for a collaborative development of accepted principles of interpretation. No less important have been broader cultural changes affecting general intellectual presuppositions and the modern psychological character. These changes include a larger commitment to and experience of individual autonomy, a deepened sense of interiority and the value of psychological reflection, a more complex grasp of symbolic cognition and interpretive multivalence, a more critical understanding of the mutual implication of inner and outer realities, and a deeper recognition of the participatory character of human experience. Associated with this shift is also an increased awareness of the multidimensional and multicausal nature of all phenomena, combined with an appreciation of the irreducible indeterminac
y of life’s unfolding.
The widespread emergence of a more psychologically sophisticated astrology in the second half of the twentieth century, with Jung and Dane Rudhyar the key figures, represents the dominant historical trend, but an important peripheral development at this time was a new interest from outside the field in statistical tests of astrological hypotheses. Of these, the most significant were the massive studies conducted by the French statisticians Michel and Françoise Gauquelin over a forty-year period beginning in the 1950s. The widely discussed “Mars effect” first observed by the Gauquelins and since replicated by other research groups demonstrated a highly significant statistical correlation of Mars located on either the eastern horizon or the zenith at the birth of prominent athletes. Similar correlations with planetary position were found at the birth of eminent leaders in other fields: Saturn for scientists, Jupiter for politicians, and the Moon for writers, all correctly corresponding to the traditional astrological principles and character traits associated with those particular celestial bodies.3 In 1982, after extensive examination of the Gauquelin research, Hans Eysenck, a prominent academic psychologist unsympathetic to astrology (and famous for his criticism of psychoanalysis for its lack of statistical support), published with his coauthor David Nias a summary of their conclusions:
We feel obliged to admit that there is something here that requires explanation. However much it may go against the grain, other scientists who take the trouble to examine the evidence may eventually be forced to a similar conclusion. The findings are inexplicable but they are also factual, and as such can no longer be ignored; they cannot just be wished away because they are unpalatable or not in accord with the laws of present-day science…. Perhaps the time has come to state quite unequivocally that a new science is in process of being born.
The positive results of the Gauquelin studies and their replication by others presented a robust challenge on science’s own terms to the scientific dismissal of astrology. Yet, paradoxically, statistical studies have added relatively little to the astrological understanding, and they appear to be methodologically inadequate for entering into the archetypal frame of reference central to the astrological tradition. The larger resurgence of astrology during these decades has continued to be qualitative rather than quantitative in its practice and research, reflecting its sources in the Western astrological tradition and contemporary depth psychology rather than experimental science and behaviorism. Common to the two approaches, however, has been an underlying impulse in the past half century, from both within and outside of the astrological discipline, that has moved astrology into a more direct engagement with the mainstream modern world view.4
Causality and Correlation
In the modern era, with the dominant Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm in the background of all thought and discourse on the subject, considerable confusion has been produced by the conventional scientific attempt to interpret—and thus reject the possibility of—astrological correspondences within a modern mechanistic cosmological framework. In effect, the Cartesian-Newtonian standpoint led to a single simple question that, within its framework, was regarded as decisive for the issue of astrology’s validity: How can the planets influence events on the Earth if no physical forces have been observed that could cause those events? This question was so defining for the mainstream scientific mind that even well-replicated statistical evidence that supported astrological tenets could not affect the intensity of its resistance. To a great extent the question of physical planetary influence reflected the residual strength of materialist and mechanistic assumptions in contemporary scientific thought, even after the conceptual shifts introduced by quantum physics. Physical forces represented the only kind of relationship that could be imagined to exist between celestial bodies and human life. This approach to astrology also, less obviously, reflected certain lingering literalist and mechanistic tendencies in the astrological tradition itself that made it vulnerable to a reductionist critique after the ancient Ptolemaic-Aristotelian cosmology was rejected and replaced by Newtonian science.5 Above all, however, the modern dismissal of astrology reflected the virtually universal modern conviction that the cosmos was disenchanted.
Given the nature of the evidence now known, it is difficult to imagine any physical factor that could serve as the ultimate source or medium of the observed astrological correlations. At least on the basis of the principal categories of data I have examined, it seems to me highly unlikely that the planets send out physical emanations, like electromagnetic radiation, that causally influence events in human life in a mechanistic way so as to produce the observed correlations. The range of correspondences between planetary positions and human existence is just too vast and multidimensional—too manifestly ordered by structures of meaning, too suggestive of creative intelligence, too vividly informed by aesthetic patterning, too metaphorically multivalent, too experientially complex and nuanced, and too responsive to human participatory inflection—to be explained by straightforward material factors alone. Given as well the consistent nature of correlations involving the Sun, the Moon, and all the planets of the solar system from Mercury and Venus to Neptune and Pluto, irrespective of their size or distance from Earth, any causal factor resembling gravitational influence seems to be equally improbable.
I believe that a more plausible and comprehensive explanation of the available evidence would rest on a conception of the universe as a fundamentally and irreducibly interconnected whole, informed by creative intelligence and pervaded by patterns of meaning and order that extend through every level, and that are expressed through a constant correspondence between astronomical events and human events. Such a view is concisely reflected in the Hermetic axiom “as above, so below,” which describes a universe all of whose parts and dimensions are integrated into an intelligible whole. In the perspective I am suggesting here, reflecting the dominant trend in contemporary astrological theory, the planets do not “cause” specific events any more than the hands on a clock “cause” a specific time. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state of archetypal dynamics at that time. The words of Plotinus, the most influential philosopher of later classical antiquity, speak directly to this understanding:
The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment in the sky…. Everything in the world is full of signs…. All events are coordinated…. All things depend on each other; as has been said, “Everything breathes together.”
Instead of the linear causal mechanisms of matter and force assumed in a Newtonian universe, the continuous meaningful coincidence between celestial patterns and human affairs seems rather to reflect a fundamental underlying unity and correspondence between the two realms—macrocosm and microcosm, celestial and terrestrial—and thus the intelligent coherence of a living, fully animate cosmos. The postulation of a systematic correspondence of this kind implies a universe in which mind and matter, psyche and cosmos, are more pervasively related or radically united than has been assumed in the modern world view.
As for the relevance of causality in understanding astrological correlations, it seems that a fundamentally new kind of causality must be posited to account for the observed phenomena. Rather than anything resembling the linear mechanistic causality of the conventional modern understanding, what is suggested by the evidence is an archetypal causality that in crucial respects possesses Platonic and Aristotelian characteristics, yet is far more complex, fluid, multivalent, and co-creatively participatory than previous conceptual models—whether from physics, philosophy, or astrology—have been able to accommodate.
Free Will and Determinism
Because the question of free will and determinism has long been the most existentially and spiritually critical issue in all discussions of astrology, I will offer a few preliminary remarks here.
There is no question that a substantial part of the Western astrological tradition supported a relatively deterministic interpretation of cosmic influence (a tend
ency even more marked in Indian astrology). For numerous schools and theorists of ancient and medieval astrology, the horoscope revealed a person’s destined fate, and the celestial powers governed human lives with a more or less rigid sovereignty. The widespread reemergence of Western astrology in the course of the twentieth century, however, arising in a new context and at a different stage in the West’s cultural and psychological evolution, brought with it a deeply transformed vision of both the human self and the nature of astrological prediction. The most characteristic attitude among contemporary astrologers holds astrological knowledge to be ultimately emancipatory rather than constricting, bringing a potential increase of personal freedom and fulfillment through an enlarged understanding of the self and its cosmic context.
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