Jung on Astrology

C. G. Jung, Safron Rossi, Keiron Le Grice, Safron Rossi, Keiron Le Grice

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315304496
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jung on Astrology brings together C. G. Jung's thoughts on astrology in a single volume for the first time, significantly adding to our understanding of Jung's work.

Jung's Collected Works, seminars, and letters contain numerous discussions of this ancient divinatory system, and Jung himself used astrological horoscopes as a diagnostic tool in his analytic practice. Understood in terms of his own psychology as a symbolic representation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung found in astrology a wealth of spiritual and psychological meaning and suggested it represents the "sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity."

The selections and editorial introductions by Safron Rossi and Keiron Le Grice address topics that were of critical importance to Jung—such as the archetypal symbolism in astrology, the precession of the equinoxes and astrological ages, astrology as a form of synchronicity and acausal correspondence, the qualitative nature of time, and the experience of astrological fate—allowing readers to assess astrology's place within the larger corpus of Jung's work and its value as a source of symbolic meaning for our time.

The book will be of great interest to analytical psychologists, Jungian psychotherapists and academics and students of depth psychology, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, as well as to astrologers and therapists of other orientations, especially transpersonal.

Part I
Contexts and opinions

Introduction

The material in Part I addresses Jung’s views of astrology – its place in the modern West, its personal and practical significance to him, and its relationship to his theory of the archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Chapter 1 situates astrology within the context of the cultural transformation of Western civilization since the late eighteenth century. Included here are passages from Jung’s stirring commentary “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (1928–1931) written almost in parallel with Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1929–1930). Jung draws attention to the ascent of reason and science in the modern West, displacing Christian faith as the primary modes of understanding the world, and on the compensatory resurgence of the seemingly irrational and unscientific fascination with psychic phenomena, evidenced by the widespread interest in Gnosticism, theosophy, anthroposophy, astrology, and more. Jung himself played no small part in this movement, of course, in that his work helped bring back into the light of day subjects excluded from the modern scientific view of the world – not least alchemy, mythology, and mysticism.

We read here too of Jung’s insistence that the modern individual yearns for direct experience of the numinous depths of the psyche rather than accepting second-hand truths inherited from the doctrines of religion, to be followed as a matter of faith. “Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it,” Jung claims, at the risk of overstatement. “He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know – to experience for himself.”¹ Astrology seems to offer a path to self-knowledge in accordance with one’s own experience, perhaps accounting in part for its popularity in our time – and perhaps accounting too for Jung’s own abiding interest in it.

For Jung, then, the recovery of ancient symbolic wisdom and occult knowledge might be viewed as a response to the profound spiritual and psychological transformation of our time – the “metamorphosis of the gods,” as he termed it, bringing a fundamental reorientation in the primary symbols by which each civilization gives expression to the numinous psychological powers that he called the archetypes of the collective unconscious.² Drawing on the power of the instincts, these formative archetypal principles, Jung believed, unconsciously animate and direct the human imagination, giving shape to the myths, religions, and cultural forms that provide a source of individual and collective life meaning.

For many in the West, the transition out of the Christian era has wrought psychological and spiritual confusion, and even psychopathology born of an unshakeable sense of meaninglessness and existential disorientation, as the old symbolic forms pass away. Indeed, Jung noted that the psychological suffering experienced by all of his patients over the age of thirty-five ultimately arose from the loss of a religious outlook on life.³ In the modern era, he observed, spirit has “fallen” from the fiery empyrean above and has become “water,” evoking the sense that the metaphysical realm of the heavenly powers of old and even of the Kingdom of God are now to be found submerged in the oceanic depths of the unconscious.⁴ The “stars have fallen from heaven,” he proclaimed in a similar vein; they have fallen into the unconscious, for neither celestial powers of astrology nor the mythic pantheon of an Olympian host have a place in the prevailing understanding of reality in the modern world.⁵

For all its seeming irrationality, astrology represents a still-vital perspective, living on in the collective unconscious, that repository of forms and archetypal patterns that is the source of our psychological and instinctual history. As an historical precursor to depth psychology, with roots in the ancient, classical, and medieval worlds, astrology preserves and carries forth other modes of interpreting reality to those pursued in science, offering a counterpoint to mechanistic determinism, atomistic reductionism, and a narrow scientific empiricism that excludes the experience of meaning. It is a perspective, Jung thought, that is based on the recognition of “meaningful coincidences” (synchronicities, as he called them) between external facts and inner experiences, in this case between planetary positions and constellated archetypal themes in human experience. In Jung’s view, astrology is an example of “synchronicity on a grand scale,” potentially providing an opening to a deeper background order of meaning.⁶ He returns to consider such matters in detail in the selections included in Part IV.

Chapter 2 contains Jung’s personal views of astrology, including observations on its value for illuminating the workings of the psyche and critical comments on its shortcomings and misconceptions. We see evidence here of Jung’s willingness to turn to astrology as an aid to analytical work with his patients. For instance, in a letter to astrologer B. V. Raman in 1947, Jung comments: “In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often found the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand.”⁷ Yet we also see Jung adopting a critical stance towards astrology, targeting especially the lack of statistical studies to provide evidence in support of it; astrologers, he notes, “prefer to swim in intuition”⁸ rather than conduct empirical research.⁹ Jung also takes issue with the prevailing approaches to astrological interpretations at the time, noting that they were “sometimes too literal and not symbolic enough, also too personal” in that astrology is to do with “impersonal, objective facts” and multi-leveled rather than singular meanings.¹⁰

Jung, as we discover in Chapter 3, “Planets and Gods: Astrology as Archetypal,” understands astrology as a symbolic representation of the archetypal dynamics of the unconscious psyche. As such, astrology pertains to universal motifs and general themes and traits rather than the specific concrete particulars of life. Accordingly, we see here Jung introduce the term planetary archetype to describe the universal principles associated with each of the planets in astrology. His “planet simile,” extracted from his alchemical writings in Mysterium Coniunctionis, strikingly portrays the symbolic relationship between the planets and archetypes, with the conscious ego standing in relation to the archetypes, as the sun does to the orbiting planets. Included here too is mention of Jung’s view that the psychology of archetypes can help account for the “inner connection between historical events” and the “general laws” underlying individual development, which are two of the primary areas of application of astrology.¹¹

Keiron Le Grice

Notes

1 Jung, “Spiritual Problem of Modern Man,” in Civilization in Transition (CW 10), p. 84, par. 171.

2 Jung, “Undiscovered Self,” in Civilization in Transition (CW 10), p. 304, par. 585.

3 Jung, “Psychotherapists or the Clergy,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East (CW 11), p. 334, par. 509.

4 Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9i), pp. 18–19, par. 40.

5 Ibid., pp. 23–24, par. 50.

6 Jung, “Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam” (1930), in Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (CW 15), p. 56, par. 81.

7 Jung to B. V. Raman, 6 September 1947, in Letters I, pp. 475–476.

8 Jung, Dream Analysis, 20 November 1929, pp. 392–393.

9 Recent studies, such as the extensive survey of astrological correlations with patterns of cultural history undertaken by Richard Tarnas, have sought to put astrology on firmer empirical ground. See Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche. See also the research in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology.

10 Jung to André Barbault, 26 May 1954, in Letters II, pp. 175–177.

11 Jung to Karl Schmid, 26 January 1957, in Letters II, p. 345.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. 1929–1930. The Standard Edition. Translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Jung, Carl Gustav. “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.” 1954. In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 3–41. 2nd Edition. Vol. 9, part I of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.

———. C. G. Jung Letters I: 1906–1950. Edited by Gerald Adler and Aniela Jaffé. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

———. C. G. Jung Letters II: 1951–1961. Edited by Gerald Adler and Aniela Jaffé. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.

———. Dream Analysis: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1928–1930. Bollingen Series XCIX. Edited by William McGuire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

———. “Psychotherapists or the Clergy.” 1932. In Psychology and Religion: West and East, 327–347. Vol. 11 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.

———. “Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam.” 1930. In The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, 53–62. Vol. 15 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966/1971.

———. “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man.” 1928/1931. In Civilization in Transition, 74–94. 2nd Edition. Vol. 10 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.

———. “The Undiscovered Self.” 1957. In Civilization in Transition. 2nd Edition. Vol. 10 of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970.

Tarnas, Richard Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. New York: Viking, 2006.

1
Astrology’s place in the modern West

From: “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934/1954) (CW 9i), par. 50

50 Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols.… Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But the “heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.

From: “The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man” (1928/1931) (CW 10), pars. 167–176

167 The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes. Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.

168 The psychological interest of the present time is an indication that modern man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man. For him the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche; they seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. No spirit not of this world vouchsafes him inner revelation; instead, he tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes.

169 Yet he is somehow fascinated by the almost pathological manifestations from the hinterland of the psyche, difficult though it is to explain how something which all previous ages have rejected should suddenly become interesting. That there is a general interest in these matters cannot be denied, however much it offends against good taste. I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology as a science, or of the still narrower interest in the psychoanalysis of Freud, but of the widespread and ever-growing interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, including spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, parapsychology, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism. There is even an “Église gnostique de la France,” and I know of two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in Hindu dress. Compared with them the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about these Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively on the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings penetrate into the dark side of life, as is clearly shown by the refurbished European version of Kundaliniyoga. The same is true of parapsychology, as everyone acquainted with this subject will agree.

170 The passionate interest in these movements undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy “spiritual science,” or when Mrs. Eddy invents a “Christian Science.” These attempts at concealment merely sh...