What virtually none of its readers back then could have realized
was that Tarnas’s book had originally been intended to be a
multi-chapter historical and philosophical introduction for a
far-reaching work on astrology. Books often have a mind of their
own, however, and these chapters grew to be a full-sized
independent book on the history of the Western world view, which
Tarnas published separately as The Passion of the Western Mind:
Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View. As
soon as he finished that task, he continued work on the
astrological book, and this January it will be published by Viking.
Titled Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View,
this book is the result of 30 years of research and represents
Tarnas’s own unique contribution to the growing body of
cutting-edge astrological evidence and philosophy. What makes the
release of this volume such an anticipated event in both the
publishing and astrological communities is Tarnas’s standing in
mainstream academia. His first book, Passion, has become a standard
text used in many universities in the United States and Europe, and
Tarnas is often invited to speak at scholarly conferences around
the world in fields other than astrology.

Tarnas was born in 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland and is a graduate of
Harvard University and Saybrook Institute. For ten years (1974–84),
he lived at Esalen Institute, where he was director of programs.
Since 1993, he has been a Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at
the California Institute of Integral Studies, often co-teaching
with his colleague and long-time friend, Stanislav Grof. In 1995,
Tarnas’s short volume on the astrological Uranus, Prometheus the
Awakener, was published by Spring Books, receiving glowing
reviews from numerous astrological publications, including The
Mountain Astrologer. I spoke with him recently about his new
work.

TMA: You once referred to your first book, The Passion of
the Western Mind, as a “Trojan horse,” in terms of laying the
groundwork for your astrological writings for a general public.
What exactly did you mean by that?

Richard Tarnas: In 1978–79, I wrote a monograph entitled
Prometheus the Awakener, which by 1980 grew into a full
book. But in the course of doing a final revision of the book for
James Hillman’s Jungian press, Spring Publications, I came to the
decision that I should not publish it. That was because the book
was directed too much toward only the astrological (and
Jungian–transpersonal) community, and it focused too much on just
one planet, Uranus. I felt that what I really needed to do was
engage the whole planetary pantheon, all the planets, and write the
book in such a way that it could serve as a bridge to the much
larger world of intelligent readers who had not yet been initiated
into astrology and who could not imagine taking astrology
seriously.

Later, I did publish a shorter monograph version of Prometheus
the Awakener.
But as I took up the larger task of writing a book that could serve
as a bridge to the non-astrological public, I started writing about
the necessary concepts and the history of those concepts that I
felt readers would require to grasp the evidence I would be
presenting. I felt that people would need to understand the nature
of archetypes, starting with Plato, and then how Aristotle’s view
shifted that understanding, and then the role of Christianity, and
how the Copernican revolution shaped modern cosmology, and what
depth psychology and Jung brought into the unfolding drama, and so
forth. But as I started filling in the larger narrative to provide
that kind of a history, it eventually turned into a book in itself,
and that was The Passion of the Western Mind. In that book, I
didn’t explore or defend the astrological perspective; rather, I
included it in the narrative, just as any good intellectual history
of the West would discuss the role — the quite important role —
that astrology has played in that history. But I did not examine
the history from an explicitly astrological point of view in that
book.

When Passion was published in 1991, it was taken up by many
universities and colleges as a text. At this point it’s used in —
well, I stopped counting quite a while ago, after 80 or 90 colleges
and universities were using it. And yet many professors and
students who are using it would never guess that it was written by
someone with an astrological perspective on all these developments.
In a way I never expected when I was writing Passion, I ended up
being invited to lecture at many universities and colleges,
graduate schools and seminaries — sometimes even to give
commencement addresses. So, in that sense, the book has become a
kind of Trojan horse because it has been embraced by thousands of
people who would not regard themselves as being the least bit open
to astrology and its possible validity. But many of them have been
writing me for years, asking when the next book is coming out.
They’re really interested. So when this comes out, at least to some
extent there will be some surprises …

TMA: How did you originally get into astrology?

RT: It happened in stages, and then rather dramatically. When I was
at Harvard, a Jungian analyst who was on the faculty of the Harvard
Divinity School happened to be the therapist for my Radcliffe
girlfriend; we became friends and met once a week for conversations
about Jung and Freud and European ideas and culture. He had been
trained by Jung and was Swiss by nationality. One week, he came in
and must have asked me my birth data, because he started sharing
with me something about my chart and where my planets were. I had
no interest in what he was saying — this was just at such a
different level of intellectual conversation than what we usually
enjoyed, when we talked about what I regarded as more
intellectually sophisticated and exciting topics. So, at that
point, I steered the conversation as quickly as possible back to
the usual channels of discussion. [laughs] After that, I had no
significant exposure to astrology for several years.

My interest in astrology was really catalyzed during the years that
I was studying and living at Esalen Institute in Big Sur,
California. As I was working with Stan Grof there on my doctorate,
we discovered, to our utter astonishment, that the most reliable
indicator of the kinds of experiences that people would have when
they were undergoing major psychological transformations or
non-ordinary states of consciousness — whether through LSD therapy
(Stan’s specialization as a psychiatrist for 20 years) or other
powerful forms of experiential psychotherapy — was transits to the
natal chart. No other method of psychological testing, such as the
MMPI or the Rorschach or TAT, had proved of any value for that
purpose. So, that was what initially began my research, and after
that it just grew. From early 1976, I started studying everyone who
was at Esalen, both those who lived in the community and the people
who were coming through for seminars. I did hundreds of analyses in
the earlier years and then extended the scope of my research to
famous individuals like Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Virginia Woolf,
Simone de Beauvoir, Newton, Galileo, and so on.

Finally, I expanded my research to include a systematic examination
of correlations between the outer planetary cycles and major
historical events and cultural trends, reflecting the archetypal
dynamics of the collective psyche. To see how consistent those
correlations were was probably the most astonishing — well, it’s
hard to say what was the most astonishing — but it radically
extended the range of correlations for me and expanded the power of
the astrological perspective and its implications. It wasn’t just
an individual phenomenon; it was an extraordinarily vast
orchestration of cosmos and psyche, linking the planetary movements
with the archetypal dynamics of the collective psyche. In the
meantime, I became close friends with Charles Harvey, the president
of the British Astrological Association in England, and Rob Hand,
both of whom visited me several times at Esalen. Their friendship
and support of my work from the beginning was important for me,
still in my twenties at that point. I only wish Charles were still
alive today — he waited so long and patiently for this book.

TMA: On the surface, your book appears to be especially
concerned with that aspect of things, the astrological cycles of
history. But on closer examination, it’s clear there are actually
several different concerns unfolding simultaneously. How would you
summarize these?

RT: Well, the survey of historical correlations with the outer
planetary cycles definitely constitutes the largest set of evidence
that I present in this book, though I also discuss quite a few
natal charts and personal transits. But the book is actually
dealing with a number of things at once. On one level, it’s a
sequel to The Passion of the Western Mind, so to a certain
degree, it’s extending that analysis by looking at how our modern
understanding of the world was formed, how it developed. The new
book looks at the crisis of the modern world view in our time, and
how the disenchantment of the universe was connected with the
forging of the modern self, so that the modern cosmos and the
modern self actually arose together.

And a great price has been paid for the forging of the modern self.
A kind of spiritual crisis has been produced by the disenchantment
of the universe, and that spiritual crisis takes different forms.
One of these is the sense of existentialist desolation we see
underneath the surface of modern life, the result of living in a
random, meaningless cosmos. Another is the fundamentalist religious
antagonism to modern science and modern culture, the reactive
rigidity that we see so strongly right now, the unwillingness to
fully engage in the spiritual adventure of our time. Another
enormous consequence of this disenchantment is at the ecological
level, the global ecological crisis we see taking place, where the
entire planetary biosphere can be viewed by corporations and
policymakers as just an exploitable resource rather than something
possessing spiritual value, something that has moral value,
something to be regarded with a degree of reverence and respect,
even religious awe.

So, the book explores how the development of the disenchanted world
view and the crisis of the modern self are coming to a climax in
our moment in history, and I discuss the possibility that the
astrological evidence may have tremendous implications for that
crisis of disenchantment. For one, it would suggest that the
disenchantment of the universe is actually a temporary and local
phenomenon. It’s a paradigm that emerged at a certain time and
place in history and has had a powerful grip on the modern mind,
but it’s not absolute. It’s not the last word, science’s final
decision, the end of the story. The book sets out an analysis of
the deeper metaphysical and cosmological drama of our time, and it
seeks an understanding of our history that will make this crisis
intelligible. I don’t think this enormous historical development
has simply been an accident: It’s serving something larger in our
collective evolution. So, the book is simultaneously a look at the
metaphysical and cosmological drama of the current time, and it’s
also a look at our long, unfolding history and the evolution of
human consciousness.

TMA: You mentioned earlier about the book possibly serving as a
“bridge” to the larger, non-astrological community.

RT: I think most astrology books are written for the astrological
community, and are written with a framework of assumptions and a
language that are familiar to the astrological community and to
that community alone. What I tried to do was to write a book that I
felt could serve as a bridge between the astrological community, on
the one hand, and the larger general public of intelligent readers,
on the other — those readers who have never encountered sufficient
grounds for accepting the possibility that astrology has any value
or validity.

One other major impulse informing this book is that, as the
evidence unfolds and we explore different historical phenomena —
like the revolutionary decades of the 1960s and the French
Revolution during Uranus–Pluto alignments, or the great epochs of
spiritual awakening and births of new religions that have coincided
with Uranus–Neptune alignments, or the historical crises and
contractions of the Saturn–Pluto cycle — the book serves as a kind
of deep exploration of the human psyche itself. We see how
everything, from scientific breakthroughs and cultural creativity
to terrorism and apocalyptic beliefs, is shaped by powerful
archetypal complexes, which have both positive and shadow sides
that are enacted in history and individual lives. The existence of
these archetypal complexes points toward larger spiritual
dimensions of the human psyche and of collective human experience.
So, in some ways, the book is also a psychological and spiritual
exploration, as well as an historical analysis and a cosmological
hypothesis. It’s a work with several different levels of motivation
going on at once.

In a sense, you could say I had four overlapping goals with the
book: I wanted it to provide a helpful initiation, for as many
people as possible, first, into astrology; second, into a
spiritually informed world view and cosmology; third, into the
archetypal dynamics of the collective and individual unconscious;
and fourth, into a view of history as an evolution of consciousness
that is itself an initiatory drama.

TMA: In addition to its potential impact on our collective world
view and on more practical matters like ecology, astrology also
holds fairly profound implications for the individual, too, doesn’t
it?

RT: Yes. I think it provides the individual, first of all, with a
new level of self-understanding, as it provides a new order of
intelligibility for grasping the shape of one’s life, the major
themes of one’s personality and psychological development. All
sorts of diverse particulars in a person’s life and character are
suddenly revealed to have a coherent relationship to each other and
to the cosmos. Things that may have seemed random or arbitrary are
now seen to be part of a larger unifying pattern of meaning, which
in turn is somehow grounded in the cosmos itself. The astrological
perspective reconnects the individual to the cosmos. Many people
who have entered deeply into astrology have the unmistakable sense
that the cosmos is in some way meaningfully centered on the
individual human being — and simultaneously centered on many
individuals, on all individuals, on the Earth community. The
individual person, as well as the Earth itself, is seen as a moving
center of cosmic meaning in a much more mysterious universe than
conventional modern science had assumed. So, one is freed from the
typical alienated modern condition of being radically decentered in
a random universe; instead, one feels that he or she is a genuine
focus of unfolding cosmic purpose and meaning.

Such a perspective can be a great aid in psychological
self-understanding. For example, we can recognize tendencies to
project certain meanings onto situations or people, so we could be
more on guard against those tendencies when they get in the way of
living fully and authentically. Our capacity for critical
self-reflection can be empowered in a new way, because we have more
tools — we have the language of archetypal psychology, basically,
but an archetypal psychology that has now been given a radically
expanded context because of the archetypes’ cosmic association with
the planets.

What astrology does is to connect the findings of the depth
psychological tradition all the way from Freud and Jung right up to
archetypal psychology and transpersonal psychology — it takes that
entire tradition of insight, which is really one of the great
contributions of 20th-century culture, and connects it to the
cosmos. The result is, you can both understand your own unique
participatory inflection of these universal principles, and you can
also get a sense for the timing of them — when a particular
archetypal field will unfold in your life, the periods when they
are more problematic and challenging — like an ongoing archetypal
“weather report” on your life. It’s a kind of surfing, in a sense —
knowing your transits gives you a handle on how best to encounter
the particular set of archetypal waves that are coming, how to ride
them, when you would need to be cautious about something, when you
would want to be aware of highly creative windows of time, and so
forth.

TMA: You saw the tragedy of 9/11 as serving as a benchmark of
sorts in our collective attitude toward astrology, didn’t
you?

RT: Yes. That is something that a number of the advance readers of
my new book have mentioned to me. Generally speaking, astrologers
over the last several decades have become much more aware of the
importance of the larger outer-planet cycles as they are correlated
with the dynamics of the collective psyche, as they’re evident in
history. For example, when Saturn opposed Pluto in this most recent
alignment of the Saturn–Pluto cycle, when it coincided with 9/11
and everything that happened afterward, there was a vivid awareness
in the astrological community about the relevance of that planetary
combination to the specifics of what was happening. This was
different than in earlier years, when there was much more focus on
the individual natal chart. Often it was just the personal
horoscope, progressions, and transits that were attended to, with
relatively little focus on the larger picture except in that
subgenre of astrology called mundane astrology, which was not
generally given the same attention as was natal astrology with its
focus on the individual. I think this was part of the whole
individualistic and humanistic culture of modernity with its
overriding, and quite understandable, focus on the individual human
being.

But what has happened in the last 15 or 20 years has been a
gradually rising awareness of the relevance of the
Zeitgeist, the collective archetypal situation, and
therefore the relevance of the outer planetary cycles. This
reflects the deepening transpersonal awareness of our era. So, a
number of my readers have mentioned how they were able to look at
their own lives in terms of the major outer-planet cycles mentioned
in this book, particularly those of the last half-century, such as
in 1968–69 when there was a triple conjunction of Jupiter, Uranus,
and Pluto; these readers could see correlations that were not as
evident to them before, because they had been thinking more in
terms of the individual chart and personal transits rather than the
world transits relevant to the collective psyche.

TMA: In the past, you’ve used a phrase that I think is useful
for all astrologers to keep in mind when reading charts, or even
looking at mundane (historical) patterns: “Astrology is
archetypally predictive, not concretely predictive.” What did you
mean by that?

RT: I first used that phrase around 1980, when Rob Hand and I were
attending an NCGR conference where a speaker got up and made a
comment about how anybody who had planets at a certain degree of a
certain sign was virtually certain to experience sexual assault or
abuse of some sort in the course of their life. I was aghast at
both the astrological misconception and the psychological
harmfulness of such a statement. I watched a woman not far from me
in the audience turn pale as she heard this. I was so offended by
the speaker saying this and so concerned by the effect of her
remark that, at the break, I went up to the woman in the audience
and said that I believed that the speaker who made this statement
was fundamentally misunderstanding how astrology works, because the
nature of astrology is to be archetypally predictive, not
concretely predictive. That is, when we know what a particular
planetary alignment is, there is a wide range of ways in which that
particular transit or natal aspect can manifest in our life and
still be precisely reflecting the archetypal principles involved.
But you cannot predict exactly which way it’s going to come out in
advance on purely astrological terms.

I believe that an understanding of astrology as archetypally rather
than literally predictive is both more true to the reality of
astrology and more empowering in its support of human autonomy. It
supports the evolving capacity of the individual human being, with
her free will and reflective consciousness, to bring forth the
highest potential manifestation of a given archetypal complex,
rather than simply be a puppet of it. The beauty of the
astrological perspective and the gift it represents is that it
provides us with a capacity to know what energies are constellated
at a given time; this gives us a greater freedom to express these
energies and embody them in a more intelligent and life-enhancing
way, rather than just react or “act out” the archetypal complex in
a predetermined or fatalistic way.

The deterministic view was more characteristic of earlier eras,
though by no means was it universal even then. And to some extent,
it still influences a certain number of astrologers today.
Considerable harm is being done today by astrologers in counseling
situations when they presume more knowledge than they have, and
they issue definite, concrete predictions about what’s going to
happen, or what a person is going to be like, or what kind of
relationship they will inevitably experience. Such predictions
represent abuses of astrology, which can be quite destructive in
their consequences. I strongly urge the astrological community to
embrace an epistemological humility, to recognize that the limits
of astrological prediction are closely intertwined with the greater
richness of the archetypal understanding and the affirmation of
human freedom. This issue underlies, at a deep level, one of the
principal resistances that the modern mind has felt toward
astrology — a healthy resistance, I might add. The modern mind (and
the Christian mind before it) wanted to preserve human freedom, and
astrology seemed to deny this.

It is possible to combine purely astrological cognition with some
kind of clairvoyant or divinatory faculty to make a more concrete
prediction. This was, I believe, more characteristic of earlier
eras and of those astrologers in India (and a few in the West) who
continue to practice in that manner.
In the divinatory epistemology that Geoffrey Cornelius has
explored, using horary astrology as a basic model, we have a
helpful reflection on some aspects of this issue. But I believe
that the practice of most astrologers today in the West, and the
most influential texts of leading astrological authors, are better
described in terms of archetypal understanding rather than literal
prediction.

TMA: One of the great delights of your book was coming across
some of the fascinating synchronicities through history that I
hadn’t been aware of before, such as those centering around Herman
Melville and his book, Moby Dick, or around the story of the
mutiny on the Bounty.

RT: Yes. Well, let’s take the latter as an example. One of the
major patterns I’ve been examining over the last 30 years is the
Jupiter–Uranus cycle. It’s one that really stood out in the course
of history in an almost brilliant way: Every time Jupiter and
Uranus came into conjunction or opposition, there has been this
extraordinary wave of cultural phenomena having a quality of either
Promethean rebelliousness in society and politics or creative
breakthrough in the sciences or the arts. It’s astonishingly
consistent, and I devote several chapters to that cycle in the
book.

Many years ago, after studying the Jupiter–Uranus cycle as it
manifested throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, I thought it
would be really interesting to go back further and see what was
going on in July of 1789, when the French Revolution began with the
fall of the Bastille. Back then, in the 1970s, we didn’t have
personal computers or ephemerides that preceded 1800, so I had to
wait each time for the mail to arrive with the charts I would order
from Neil Michelsen for distant dates prior to the 19th century.
When the chart for July 14, 1789 arrived, I discovered to my
delight that there was in fact a Jupiter–Uranus conjunction within
2 degrees of exactitude. This aspect actually started late in 1788
and went through 1789, right up to September — the entire 14-month
period that commenced the French Revolution.

I then noticed that in the spring of 1789, when Jupiter and Uranus
were also closely conjunct, the mutiny on the Bounty took place,
when Fletcher Christian and the mutineers rebelled against Captain
William Bligh soon after they left Tahiti. As many people are
aware, it’s the most celebrated maritime rebellion in history. And
the fact that this would have occurred precisely under the same
Jupiter–Uranus alignment as the most celebrated political rebellion
in history (namely, the Fall of the Bastille and the beginning of
the French Revolution) seemed to me a marvelous
synchronicity.

But apart from the astrological significance of this correlation,
such a coincidence suggested something else: It pointed to the
validity of Jung’s basic conception of a “collective psyche,” in
which a particular archetypal complex can emerge in the collective
psyche simultaneously in different places within the experience of
different people, with no conventional causal connection between
them. For example, there were plenty of rebellions happening
throughout much of Europe right after the fall of the Bastille,
under the Jupiter–Uranus conjunction, but these could be seen as
having been at least indirectly set in motion by news of what had
happened in Paris. But that’s not what was happening in Tahiti in
the South Pacific, since the Bounty had set sail from England in
1787. There was of course no way then that any communication could
take place between England and the South Pacific. So, the evidence
suggests that there can be the simultaneous emergence of a powerful
archetypal complex in different places of the world, as if there
were in fact something like a collective psyche.

TMA: These correlations even continued unfolding afterward,
didn’t they?

RT: Yes. As the Jupiter–Uranus conjunction was happening, Uranus
was also moving into a long-term opposition to Pluto, which
occurred through most of the 1790s. This opposition between Uranus
and Pluto, which might be thought of as the “Full Moon” version of
what we had in the 1960s under Uranus conjunct Pluto, signaled a
time of extraordinary revolutionary upheaval, sustained empowerment
of the rebellious impulse toward freedom, artistic creativity and
intellectual innovation, overthrowing constraints of all kinds, and
so on. These things were happening right across the board in the
1790s as well as during the 1960s. And what’s quite striking is
that, following the mutiny on the Bounty situation, we saw this
other side of the Uranus–Pluto archetypal complex emerge, where you
have not just Pluto empowering and intensifying the rebellious,
emancipatory impulse of Uranus, but you have it the other way
around, with the Promethean impulse of Uranus liberating and
activating the Plutonic forces of the libido and the id and the
violent instincts.

So, the period of the French Revolution witnessed a sustained
eruption of violent impulses as well as an erotic emancipation very
much like the sexual revolution and the violently rebellious era of
the 1960s. But what happened with the mutineers after the mutiny is
that Fletcher Christian and the mutineers went with a number of
Tahitian women and men to another island, far away from Tahiti,
called Pitcairn’s Island; there, utterly isolated from the rest of
the world during that entire Uranus–Pluto opposition in the 1790s,
they went through a sustained period of intense conflict, violence,
murder, jealousy, and power struggle, which was a microcosm of what
was going on in Europe and in France, halfway across the world,
under the exact same planetary alignment. The result was a kind of
laboratory case of a continuing parallel synchronous emergence of
the relevant archetypal complexes.

TMA: In the last century, there have been some major revolutions
in astrology due to developments like modern psychology and the
advent of computers. Rather than ask you to try and predict what
sorts of developments may lie ahead for astrology — that’s a tough
one when you consider that someone in 1850 could hardly have
predicted either the advent of psychology or computers — I’ll ask
you this instead: What developments would you like to see take
place in astrology over the next 50 to 100 years, to help take it
to the next level, as it were?

RT: Well, I’d answer that on two different levels — one more
practical and the other more philosophical. On the more concrete
level, there are a couple of very promising developments that have
begun. During the Uranus–Neptune conjunction that occurred in the
1990s and that we’re really just coming out of now, we’ve seen a
rebirth of esotericism in many forms; among these can be included
the movement of astrology into higher education and the
universities. This has been happening both in England and the U.S.
During the past decade, I’ve taught many graduate seminars in
archetypal astrology for the California Institute of Integral
Studies in San Francisco and at Pacifica Graduate Institute in
Santa Barbara, both of which are accredited graduate schools. These
courses, many of which I’ve co-taught with Stan Grof, have been
extraordinarily popular with the students and have influenced the
rest of their studies in psychology, philosophy, or cosmology. Over
in England, Nick Campion and Patrick Curry have introduced
astrology into the Bath Spa University College, where they have
accredited graduate master’s and doctorate degree programs, just as
we have at CIIS — in their case, with a focus on cultural astronomy
and astrology. Liz Greene is now joining them there as well. And we
have Kepler College here in the U.S.

This is the first time that astrology has been integrated into
higher education and the university system since the end of the
Renaissance and the early Enlightenment. That’s an enormous
development, and I believe it will happen more and more because, at
its best, astrology represents an intellectually rich and rigorous
mode of inquiry that can shine a light on many aspects of our
history and culture. And the more that intelligent, educated people
find this a central part of their educational experience — in many
cases, one of the most exciting parts of their higher education —
the more it’s going to shift the cultural attitude toward
astrology. It’s not going to happen this year or next year, but I
believe there will be a real shift within the next generation or
so. Astrology’s going to have a different cultural status than we
are accustomed to now. Also, the work of Rob Hand, Robert Schmidt,
and Robert Zoller over the same period represents another important
development: recovering the classics of astrology and translating
them from the various ancient languages into modern languages. This
is a tremendous act of historical retrieval, not unlike what
happened in the Italian Renaissance when the Humanist scholars were
recovering Greek manuscripts and translating them into Latin and
Italian and so forth — basically bringing them into the
contemporary culture in such a way that it helped to catalyze the
Renaissance itself. This is an enormous enrichment that began under
this Uranus–Neptune conjunction and will undoubtedly
continue.

TMA: What would be the more philosophical level of what you’d
hope to see ahead for astrology?

RT: Well, using what we already do see emerging, what I would hope
to see would be a more profound grasp of the richness of the
archetypal perspective in relation to astrology. The archetypal
perspective in many ways empowers astrology to reach a depth of
understanding that is not possible through mere “keywords,” which
has been the tendency in the past — you know, the 6th house rules
work, health, servants, pets; Jupiter rules riches, travel,
philosophy, priests, and so forth.

In turn, astrology can empower the archetypal perspective that has
been developed in post-Jungian psychology, so this isn’t just
something you’re trying to discern only through your dreams or your
active imagination or analysis of contemporary films or whatever.
These archetypal dynamics, your dreams, contemporary films, and the
rest can all be illumined by knowing what planets are in alignment
at what time, what kinds of geometrical alignments are being formed
with respect to individual natal charts, and what similar
archetypal phenomena have been observed with the same planetary
aspects in other eras or other individuals.

I think the more that this power of the archetypal perspective
(particularly, its multivalent and multidimensional nature) can be
explored and developed within the astrological community, the more
it will go a long way toward moving astrology out of the ghetto
where it’s been imprisoned. This ghetto of isolation and scorn has
been created partly by the disenchanted modern cosmos and the
skepticism of the modern mind, but to some extent it’s also been a
self-created ghetto, sustained by some of the basic intellectual
presuppositions and methodological limitations of the way astrology
has been practiced over the years. I believe that the development
of an archetypal perspective could emancipate astrology from that
self-enclosed ghetto so that it can begin to move into the center
of culture, where it belongs.