As Goethe recognized, it is often the case that the very faculties we require for our knowledge can be developed only through our receptive engagement with what we wish to comprehend, which transforms us in the very process of our inquiry. Thus the study of archetypal forms opens the archetypal eye. And thus the open encounter with the potential reality of an anima mundi makes possible its actual discernment. In this view, only by opening ourselves to being changed and expanded by that which we seek to understand will we be able to understand at all. Such a shift involves gradually opening our awareness to a dimension of reality that, though potentially of deep significance, may at first seem scarcely perceptible, the subtle “patterns which connect”—patterns of meaning within and without, the delicate and elusive, the repressed and denied, that which is obscured by our certainties, that which suggests and intimates rather than commands and proves. Such a transformation in our approach to life requires, as Jung saw, a new openness to our own “other,” our interior other: our unconscious, in all its plenitude of forms. For here, perhaps, we begin to encounter the interior mystery of the cosmos itself.
Sources of the World Order
In every field of inquiry, an adequate paradigm reveals patterns of coherent relations in what are otherwise inexplicable random coincidences. A good theory makes observed patterns intelligible. As the physicist and philosopher of science P. W. Bridgman famously observed, “coincidences” are what are left over after one has applied a bad theory. In the course of the three decades during which I have examined correlations between planetary movements and the patterns of human affairs, I found there were simply too many such “coincidences” evident in the data, which were too consistently coherent with the corresponding archetypal principles, and too strongly suggestive of the workings of some form of complex creative intelligence, to assume that they were all meaningless chance anomalies. Plato’s words from his final dialogue, the Laws, when he criticized the disenchanted mechanistic cosmology of the physicists and Sophist philosophers of the preceding century, now seemed to me uncannily prophetic.
The truth is just the opposite of the opinion which once prevailed among men, that the sun and stars are without soul…. For in that shortsighted view, the entire moving contents of the heavens seemed to them only stones, earth, and other soulless bodies, though these furnish the sources of the world order.
Yet the data that has now emerged suggests that what Plato called the “world order” is of a special kind. The evidence points to a cosmic ordering principle whose combination of participatory co-creativity, multivalent complexity, and dynamic indeterminacy was not entirely comprehensible to the ancient vision, even a vision as intricate and penetrating as Plato’s. The relationship between the unfolding realities of human life and a dynamic archetypal order reflected in the planetary movements appears to be more fluid and complex, more creatively unpredictable, and more responsive to human intention and quality of consciousness or unconsciousness than was articulated in the classical tradition. One important task before us, therefore, is to understand the long development that separates Plato’s vision of an archetypal participatory cosmos from our own. Another is to grasp how the nearly pervasive astrological cosmology of classical antiquity, after deeply influencing the medieval and Renaissance imagination, gradually receded in cultural significance and intellectual legitimacy until it came to appear utterly untenable to the modern mind. Yet another task is to seek insight into why it has reemerged in our own time, radically transfigured. Running through all these questions, I believe, is the great mystery of the unfolding Copernican revolution, which seems to have played the role of cosmological vessel and mediator of a vast initiatory process in the evolution of the modern self.
Beyond these, the survey we have now completed in the present book has brought up a multitude of other issues and questions that require careful attention and response—historical, philosophical, psychological, methodological. Significant cultural figures and events not yet discussed, complicating factors in those that have been discussed, and larger metaphysical and cosmological issues that now loom before us all call for discussion. Moreover, other significant categories of evidence, some of which will shine a new light on what we have seen in the preceding chapters, still remain to be presented. But I believe that we have examined a sufficient range and quantity of data at this point to consider, at least provisionally, their larger implications. Taking into account both the evidence set forth here and the larger body of research that I have so far completed, plus the findings of many fellow researchers in this field, I would briefly summarize my own tentative conclusions in the following way.
The current body of accumulated data makes it difficult to sustain the modern assumption that the universe as a whole is best understood as a blind, mechanistic phenomenon of ultimately random processes with which human consciousness is fundamentally incoherent, and in which the Earth and human beings are ultimately peripheral and insignificant. The evidence suggests rather that the cosmos is intrinsically meaningful to and coherent with human consciousness; that the Earth is a significant focal point of this meaning, a moving center of cosmic meaning in an evolving universe, as is each individual human being; that time is not only quantitative but qualitative in character, and that different periods of time are informed by tangibly different archetypal dynamics; and, finally, that the cosmos as a living whole appears to be informed by some kind of pervasive creative intelligence—an intelligence, judging by the data, of scarcely conceivable power, complexity, and aesthetic subtlety, yet one with which human intelligence is intimately connected, and in which it can consciously participate. I believe that a widespread understanding of the potent but usually unconscious archetypal dynamics that coincide with planetary cycles and alignments, both in individual lives and in the historical process, can play a crucial role in the positive unfolding of our collective future.
As I can attest from my own initial encounter with this evidence, there are many reasons why a person with a twentieth-century education and the usual background of modern cosmological assumptions would find it difficult to accept even the remotest possibility of meaningful correspondences between the movements of the planets and the patterns of human experience. I believe that historically some of those reasons have indeed been justified, and I have sought to address these. Yet I also believe that the evidence now available, when examined and explored with an open mind and an open heart, speaks for itself better than any defense I could attempt to provide. I have found the archetypal astrological perspective, properly understood, to be uniquely capable of illuminating the inner dynamics of both cultural history and personal biography. It provides extraordinary insight into the deeper shifting patterns of the human psyche, both individual and collective, and into the complexly participatory nature of human reality. It places the modern mind and the modern self in an altogether new light, radically recontextualizing the modern project. Perhaps most important, it promises to contribute to the emergence of a new, genuinely integral world view, one that, while sustaining the irreplaceable insights and achievements of the modern and postmodern development, can reunite the human and the cosmic, and restore transcendent meaning to both.
Epilogue
It is returning, at last it is coming home to me—my own Self and those parts of it that have long been abroad and scattered among all things and accidents.
—Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
The modern mind has long assumed that there are few things more categorically distant from each other than “cosmos” and “psyche.” What could be more outer than cosmos? What more inner than psyche? But today we are obliged to recognize that, of all categories, psyche and cosmos are perhaps the most consequentially intertwined, the most deeply mutually implicated. Our understanding of the universe affects every aspect of our interior life from our highest spiritual convictions to the most minuscule details of our daily experience. Conversely, the deep dispositions and character
of our interior life fully permeate and configure our understanding of the entire cosmos. The relation of psyche and cosmos is a mysterious marriage, one that is still unfolding—at once a mutual interpenetration and a fertile tension of opposites.
It seems we have a choice. There are many possible worlds, many possible meanings, living within us in potentia, moving through us, awaiting enactment. We are not just solitary separate subjects in a meaningless universe of objects upon which we can and must impose our egocentric will. Nor are we blank slates, empty vessels, condemned to playing out passively the implacable processes of the universe—or of God—or of our environment, our genes, our race, our class, our gender, our social-linguistic community, our unconscious, our stage in evolution. Rather, we are miraculously self-reflective and autonomous yet embedded participants in a larger cosmic drama, each of us a creative nexus of action and imagination. Each is a self-responsible microcosm of the creative macrocosm, enacting a richly, complexly co-evolutionary unfolding of reality. To a crucial extent, the nature of the universe depends on us.
Yet it is no less certain that our own marvelously complex nature depends upon and is embedded in the universe. Must we not regard the interpenetration of human and cosmic nature as fundamental, radical, “all the way down”? It seems to me highly improbable that everything we identify within ourselves as specifically human—the human imagination, human spirituality, the full range of human emotions, moral aspiration, aesthetic intelligence, the discernment and creation of narrative significance and meaningful coherence, the quest for beauty, truth, and the good—suddenly appeared ex nihilo in the human being as an accidental and more or less absurd ontological singularity in the cosmos. Is not this assumption, which in one form or another still implicitly pervades most modern and postmodern thought, nothing other than the unexamined residue of the Cartesian monotheistic ego? Is it not much more plausible that human nature, in all its creative multidimensional depths and heights, emerges from the very essence of the cosmos, and that the human spirit is the spirit of the cosmos itself as inflected through us and enacted by us? Is it not more likely that the human intelligence in all its creative brilliance is ultimately the cosmos’s intelligence expressing its creative brilliance? And that the human imagination is ultimately grounded in the cosmic imagination? And, finally, that this larger spirit, intelligence, and imagination all live within and act through the self-reflective human being who serves as a unique vessel and embodiment of the cosmos—creative, unpredictable, fallible, self-transcending, unfolding the whole, integral to the whole, perhaps even essential to the whole?
If so, perhaps the approach of the second suitor to the mystery of the universe will ultimately be a more fruitful and appropriate strategy than one that presumes the universe’s fundamentally meaningless and purposeless nature as the very starting point of legitimate knowledge. Let us recall those remarkable words of Sir James Frazer a century ago at the end of his twelve-volume magnum opus, The Golden Bough:
In the last analysis magic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has supplanted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis…. Brighter stars will rise on some voyager of the future—some great Ulysses of the realms of thought—than shine on us. The dreams of magic may one day be the waking realities of science.
Yet perhaps those stars will have been there all along, hidden by the bright dawn of our modernity. And our Ulysses will be but awakening to a very ancient cosmos whose vast intelligence, beauty, and mystery we have been slowly preparing ourselves to know.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Notes
Part I: The Transformation of the Cosmos
1. I explore many of these complexities in The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Shaped Our World View (New York: Harmony, 1991; Ballantine, 1993). Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) presents an especially comprehensive and nuanced account of the complex historical roots and development of the modern self. Robert Bellah’s 1964 paper “Religious Evolution,” in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), provides an invaluable historical analysis of the evolving relationship between religious world view, human self-image, and social-political developments in which various forms of world rejection (from the Axial Period) and disenchantment (from the Reformation and modernity) play a pivotal role. This compact and still essential essay will be considerably expanded and developed in Bellah’s forthcoming Religious Evolution.
Part II: In Search of a Deeper Order
1. The primary texts by Jung are the 1951 Eranos conference lecture “On Synchronicity” and the longer 1952 monograph Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, both in Collected Works of Carl Gustav Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, ed. H. Read, M. Fordham, G. Adler, W. McGuire, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1953–79), vol. 8. While invaluable and seminal, these works by Jung are marked by many conceptual incoherencies and confusions, perhaps inevitable in the first presentation of a new principle of understanding that so radically challenged existing assumptions. Moreover, as discussed in note 5 below, Jung’s lecture and monograph focused on categories of phenomena, such as paranormal events and experimental data from physics, that obscured the human, psychologically transformative dimension of synchronistic phenomena, though the latter was in fact far more central in Jung’s own life experience and clinical observations.
Other relevant texts by Jung can be found in Jung on Synchronicity and the Paranormal, edited and with an introduction by Roderick Main (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1997). For synchronicity’s implications for the psychology of religion, see Robert Aziz, C. G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990): “The synchronicity concept is, arguably, the single theory with the most far-reaching implications for Jung’s psychology as a whole, particularly for his psychology of religion” (p. 1). Jung’s acute alertness to synchronistic phenomena in his life and their possible implications is emphasized through Aziz’s analysis (see especially pp. 84–90, 159–166). For synchronicity’s relevance to physics and the scientific world view, see Victor Mansfield, Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making (Chicago: Open Court, 1995). Other significant writings on synchronicity include books or essays by Arthur Koestler, Antony Flew, Michael Fordham, Ira Progoff, Marie-Louise von Franz, Aniela Jaffé, Allan Combs, Mark Holland, Michael Conforti, Jean Shinoda Bolen, David Peat, Sean Kelly, and Ray Grasse.
2. Hillman’s discussion of Petrarch’s ascent of Mont Ventoux in Re-Visioning Psychology is important to our concerns on two further counts beyond its exemplification of a synchronicity that was both personally and culturally consequential: first, Hillman’s understanding of soul—psyche, the locus of meaning and purpose—as something existing not only within but beyond “man”; and second, his analysis of the Renaissance as marking the emergence of a new kind of inner vision, tied to a new sense of self and a new vision of the world. Thus Hillman continues:
If one looks again at the passage Petrarch was reading which so stunned him, one finds that Augustine was discussing memoria. Book X, 8 of the Confessions is important to the art of memory. It is about the soul’s imaginative faculty. “Great is this force of memory[imagination] excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! who ever sounded the bottom thereof? yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature, nor do I myself comprehend all that I am. Therefore is the mind too strait to contain itself.”
These sentences immediately precede the passage Petrarch opened on the mountain. In them Augustine is wrestling with the classical problems, beginning with Heraclitus, concerning the m
easureless depth of the soul, the place, size, ownership, and origin of the images of memoria (the archetypal unconscious, if you prefer). It was the wonder of this train of thought that struck Petrarch, the wonder of the interior personality, which is both inside man and yet far greater than man…. The revelation on Mont Ventou xopened Petrarch’s eyes to the complexity and mystery of the man-psyche relationship and moved him to write of the marvel of the soul…. Renaissance psychology begins with a revelation of the independent reality of soul…. It is not the return from nature to man that starts the Renaissance going but the return to soul. (Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, pp. 196–97 [bracketed and parenthetical interpolations in Hillman]; Augustine, Confessions, X, 8, 15, trans. E. B. Pusey [New York: Dutton Everyman, 1966], pp. 212–13)
Hillman is seeking here to correct the “humanistic fallacy” of Renaissance scholarship, in which Petrarch’s “commentators and translators interpret the ‘soul’ and the ‘self’ in his writing as ‘man’: to them the event on Mont Ventoux signifies the return from God’s world or nature to man…. It cannot hold the Augustinian paradox that keeps psyche and human as two factors ‘in’ each other by virtue of imagination. Therefore the humanistic fallacy fails to acknowledge what Petrarch actually wrote: Soul is the marvel” (pp. 196–97).
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