Jung’s Studies in Astrology

Prophecy, Magic, and the Qualities of Time

Liz Greene

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351972864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the IAJS award for best authored book of 2018!

C. G. Jung had a profound interest in and involvement with astrology, which he made clear in virtually every volume of the Collected Works, as well as in many of his letters. This ancient symbolic system was of primary importance in his understanding of the nature of time, the archetypes, synchronicity, and human fate.

Jung's Studies in Astrology is an historical survey of his astrological work from the time he began to study the subject. It is based not only on his published writings, but also on the correspondence and documents found in his private archives, many of which have never previously seen the light of day. Liz Greene addresses with thoroughness and detailed scholarship the nature of Jung's involvement with astrology: the ancient, medieval, and modern sources he drew on, the individuals from whom he learned, his ideas about how and why it worked, its religious and philosophical implications, and its applications in the treatment of his patients as well as in his own self-understanding. Greene clearly demonstrates that any serious effort to understand the development of Jung's psychological theories, as well as the nature of his world-view, needs to involve a thorough exploration of his astrological work.

This thorough investigation of a central theme in Jung's work will appeal to analytical psychologists and Jungian psychotherapists, students and academics of Jungian and post-Jungian theory, the history of psychology, archetypal thought, mythology and folklore, the history of New Age movements, esotericism, and psychological astrology.

1
Jung’s Understanding of Astrology

Although I must admit the use of Astrology in foretelling the outcome of certain causes, it is not of vital moment … This consideration, of course, opens up the whole question of Fate versus Freewill, and it at once determines the difference between the ‘exoteric’ and the ‘esoteric’ astrologer. The former is a confirmed fatalist, who believes himself forever under the bane of Destiny … The esoteric astrologer has no such creed. His faith is based upon the belief that as a man sows, so he must reap; his motto is ‘Man, Know Thyself’.¹

—Alan Leo

The sun, moon and planets were the exponents, so to speak, of certain psychological or psychical constituents of the human character; and this is why astrology can give more or less valid information about character … The religious mysteries of later antiquity were all concerned with freeing man from the Heimarmene; in other words, with freeing him from the compulsive quality of the foundations of his own character.²

—C. G. Jung

Astrology in the early twentieth century

As befits its liminal nature, astrology is open to many definitions. Making sense of Jung’s astrology requires placing it in some kind of context: how was it viewed in the West at the time Jung began his studies? Patrick Curry has offered an admirably comprehensive description of astrology: it is ‘the practice of relating the heavenly bodies to lives and events on earth, and the tradition that has thus been generated’.³ Astronomy involves the observation and measurement of the heavenly bodies, but astrology assigns meaning to them in relation to human experience. Although a history of Western astrology during the years Jung worked on Liber Novus is beyond the scope of this book,⁴ nevertheless the varying approaches to astrology current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are relevant to Jung’s understanding of it.

Astrology as a method of predicting events was as ubiquitous in esoteric circles at the fin de siècle as it had been in the Middle Ages; with few exceptions, German-speaking astrologers writing at the time Jung began work on Liber Novus pursued astrology as a method of foretelling the future.⁵ There was no specific German astrological ‘movement’ until the mid-1920s,⁶ and the psychologically orientated astrology that subsequently began to develop in the German-speaking world relied heavily on Jung’s own publications. But two other types of astrology, with antecedents in late antiquity, emerged in Britain at the turn of the century and gradually began to influence astrologers in both Europe and America. These ‘new’ astrologies – although they were in fact not new at all – were largely due to the work of the Theosophical Society, founded by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in 1875, and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded by William Wynn Westcott, Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, and William Robert Woodman in 1888.⁷ Theosophical astrologers such as Alan Leo, whose work is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, were concerned with what the natal horoscope might indicate about the individual’s spiritual development, while occultist astrologers such as Frederick Hockley and MacGregor Mathers, both practicing magicians, adapted astrology to magical rituals derived from Neoplatonic texts and the Kabbalistic astral magic of the medieval period. Their application of astrology concerned the invocation of celestial potencies through the use of astrological symbols, sigils, and talismans in order to achieve individual psychological and spiritual transformation.⁸ Although astrologers involved in the Golden Dawn and other occult societies used horoscopes for characterological and divinatory purposes, particularly in assessing the suitability of a neophyte for initiation and the correct timing of a magical ritual, their focus was more interior and provided a prototype for the psychological approach to astrology that Jung himself developed.⁹

Although no evidence has yet emerged indicating that Jung was acquainted with the work of Hockley and MacGregor Mathers, he was familiar with the writings of other members of the Golden Dawn, and he had acquired a range of older magical texts with a similar emphasis during the time he worked on Liber Novus.¹⁰ Jung’s friendship with the former secretary of the Theosophical Society, G.R.S. Mead,¹¹ and his reliance on Theosophically inclined astrologers for horoscopic interpretations, suggest that it was in the British esoteric community that he found the greatest inspiration for his psychological understanding of astrology. From the outset, it seems that Jung, although not immune to the desire to speculate on the future, was not primarily interested in the literal prediction of events. Instead, he concerned himself with psychological events, and sought to understand what the horoscope as a symbolic map might reveal in terms of the individual psyche and its unfoldment over time. He maintained this position throughout his life. In a lengthy letter to the French astrologer André Barbault, written in 1954, Jung declared:

There are many instances of striking analogies between astrological constellations and psychological events … Astrology, like the collective unconscious with which psychology is concerned, consists of symbolic configurations: the ‘planets’ are the gods, symbols of the powers of the unconscious … I would say that the astrologer does not always consider his statements to be mere possibilities. The interpretation is sometimes too literal and not symbolic enough.¹²

It has always been an open secret in analytical circles that Jung was deeply involved with astrology. However, even within this knowledgeable community, considerable discomfort has been demonstrated by some analysts, and some Jungian training groups, about such an apparently questionable predilection.¹³ There were times when Jung himself felt it necessary to hide the extent of his interest in astrology, even from his own colleagues. In a letter to Michael Fordham (1905–95), who founded the Society for Analytical Psychology in London in 1946 and who assisted in the English publication of Jung’s Collected Works, Jung, defending the astrological research described in his two essays on synchronicity,¹⁴ wrote:

You really need not believe a word of astrology in order to make a horoscope or statistics. I am reasonably skeptical and yet I can make and try out all sorts of mantic experiments. I can even repeat some absurd alchemical procedures without the slightest conviction, for sheer curiosity. You can also attend a mass without believing in transsubstantiation [sic] and a communist meeting without believing in Stalin.¹⁵

This letter was dated 15 December 1954, just seven months after Jung’s letter to Barbault describing the ‘striking analogies’ between astrological configurations and psychological events. It is unlikely that Jung experienced a sudden change of heart toward astrology during those months, or that he would have attempted to gratuitously flatter a professional astrologer like Barbault. Rather, Jung seems to have found it wiser to disguise his astrological research as a ‘mantic experiment’, while attempting at the same time to explain to Fordham in further letters, as diplomatically as possible, that the various criticisms of his experiment were due to ‘a profound lack of astrological knowledge’,¹⁶ and that the statistical results were ‘most complimentary to astrology’.¹⁷ There is no indication that Fordham was ever convinced.¹⁸ Jung’s concern about keeping his astrological work under wraps is also evident in a letter written in 1953 by the American psychotherapist Ira Progoff (1921–1998), who studied with Jung in Zürich from 1952 to 1955, to Cary F. Baynes, who translated a number of Jung’s works into English:

You’ll be very interested to know that Dr. J. has advised me to study Astrology when I get back … He says that every analyst should be equipped with it because there are borderline cases where it gives a very valuable clue. I don’t think he would like it known that he holds Astrology in such respect. Altho, he did say that he doesn’t feel that he needs to be as cautious about it as he used to be.¹⁹

Progoff’s horoscope, drawn in an unknown hand, is one of the large collection of charts of patients and colleagues in Jung’s private archives.

Jung’s absorption in alchemical symbolism may be more acceptable in analytic circles because alchemy is safely separated from the modern world by a decent historical interval and can be viewed as a curious hiccup in the history of science. And in any event, Jung was not a practicing alchemist in any literal sense. But astrology, being part of the modern as well as the ancient and medieval worlds, is apparently not something with which a rationally inclined psychologist should become involved, particularly in the extremely simplistic forms in which it is presented in the popular press. Andrew Samuels, in his comprehensive work, Jung and the Post-Jungians, never mentions Jung’s preoccupation with Heimarmene, the late antique concept of astral fate,²⁰ and makes only one dismissive reference to astrology.²¹ Robert Segal, a prolific writer and lecturer on Jung’s ideas, never discusses Jung’s predilection for astral lore, even in Segal’s lengthy introduction to a selection of Jung’s discussions on Gnosticism – a religious current firmly rooted in an astral cosmology and deeply concerned with astrological fate as inner compulsion.²²

Attempting to interpret an author’s work selectively, according to the prejudices of the interpreter and the prevailing fashions of the academy, is hardly a new phenomenon in scholarship. The imposition of ‘researcher’s bias’ has been going on since the Greek allegorists argued about what Orpheus ‘really’ meant, Iamblichus and Porphyry disagreed about the ‘true’ Platonic world-view, and Christian theologians insisted they had discovered the concealed ‘signatures’ of their own truths in both the Torah and the Jewish Kabbalah.²³ Attempting to cleanse the reputation of a great scientific thinker from the taint of ‘wretched subjects’ has been consistently applied by modern scholars to such figures as Galileo, who, in addition to his acknowledged contribution to the history of science, was a committed astrologer as well as an astronomer.²⁴ However, apart from the age-old phenomenon of ‘researcher’s bias’ and its vagaries, and independent of the extensive and revealing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Images
• A note on references
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the pursuit of ‘wretched subjects’
• 1 Jung’s understanding of astrology
• 2 Jung’s astrologers
• 3 Active imagination and theurgy
• 4 Summoning the Daimon
• 5 ‘The great fate’
• 6 ‘The way of what is to come’
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index