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May/June 2008 Cosmic
The World Soul of Archetypal Astrology

by Richard Tarnas

The basic principle of astrology is that the planets have a fundamental, cosmically based connection to specific archetypal forces or principles that influence human existence. The patterns formed by the planets in the heavens bear a meaningful correspondence to the patterns of human affairs on the Earth.

In terms of individuals, the positions of the planets at the time and place of a person's birth are regarded as corresponding to the basic archetypal patterns of that person's life and character.

Astrology makes possible a further understanding of one's life - its cycles, its ups and downs, the crises and the breakthroughs, the periods of major change and transformation - through the study of transits. Transits occur when the planets currently in the sky form certain geometrical patterns with respect to the planetary positions at one's birth. The nature of those patterns - which planets are involved and how they are positioned - appears to correlate in a strikingly consistent way with the archetypal character of the experiences one tends to have at that time.

There are three closely interrelated issues to understand when approaching astrology. The first concerns the nature of archetypes, the second involves the question of determinism vs. free will, and the third concerns the nature of astrology's causal mechanism or why it works.

First, what is an archetype? We can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects - impels, structures, permeates - the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. One can think of them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did or as gods of the psyche as James Hillman does.

Archetypes (for example, Venus or Mars) seem to have a transcendent, mythic quality, yet they also have very specific psychological expressions - as in the desire for love and the experience of beauty (Venus), or the impulse toward forceful activity and aggression (Mars). Moreover, archetypes seem to work from both within and without, for they can express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, yet also as events and situations in the external world.

Jung thought of archetypes as the basic constituents of the human psyche, shared cross-culturally by all human beings, and he regarded them as universal expressions of a collective unconscious. Much earlier, the Platonic tradition considered archetypes to be not only psychological but also cosmic and objective, as primordial forms of a universal mind that transcended the human psyche.

Astrology would appear to support the Platonic view as well as the Jungian, since it gives evidence that Jungian archetypes are not only visible in human psychology, in human experience and behavior, but are also linked to the macrocosm itself - to the planets and their movements in the heavens. Astrology thus supports the ancient idea of an anima mundi or world soul, in which the human psyche participates. From this perspective, what Jung called the collective unconscious can be viewed as being ultimately embedded within the cosmos itself.

The issue of free will vs. determinism: It used to be believed that astrology revealed a person's destined fate, that the birth chart was rigidly deterministic. Properly understood, however, astrology can serve to greatly increase personal freedom, rather than limit it. Partly this is because awareness of the basic archetypal structures and patterns of meaning in one's birth chart allows one to bring considerably more consciousness to the task of fulfilling one's deepest potential, one's authentic nature. But astrology's emancipatory character also derives from the fact that the more deeply we understand the archetypal forces that affect our lives, the more free we can be in our dealings with them. If we are altogether unconscious of these potent forces, we are like puppets of the archetypes: we then act according to unconscious motivations without any possibility of our being intelligent agents interacting with those forces.

Related to this issue is the question of our birth, and how random is the fate by which we are assigned something as weighty as the birth chart with its specific configuration of planets. I personally believe that the circumstances of our birth are not accidental, but are in some sense a consequence of our spiritual and karmic character. Like many others, I have come to believe that we choose the circumstances of our lives, we choose the family and culture and age into which we are born, and that this choice is somehow made from a higher level of our spiritual being than that of which we are usually conscious.

Finally, the issue of causal mechanism or why astrology works: It seems unlikely to me that the planets send out some kind of physical emanations that causally influence events in human life in a mechanistic way. The range of coincidences between planetary positions and human existence is just too vast, too experientially complex, too aesthetically subtle and endlessly creative to be explained by physical factors alone.

I believe that a more plausible and comprehensive explanation is that the universe is informed and pervaded by a fundamental holistic patterning which extends through every level, so that a constant synchronicity or meaningful correlation exists between astronomical events and human events. This is represented in the basic esoteric axiom, "as above, so below," which reflects a universe all of whose parts are integrated into an intelligible whole.

From this perspective, the planets themselves are not "causing" anything to be happening in our lives, any more than the hands on a clock are now causing it to be 7:30 p.m. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state of the archetypal forces at that time. The fact that the planets constantly seem to indicate these things with such accuracy simply suggests that the cosmic order is much more profound and pervasive than our conventional beliefs have assumed. But the relationship between a specific planetary pattern and a human experience is best seen as one of meaningful correlation or correspondence, not one of simple linear causality.

There is, however, a sense in which causality does enter into the astrological perspective, and this is in the sense of archetypal causation (comparable to Aristotle's concepts of formal and final causes). While the physical planets themselves may bear only a synchronistic connection with a given human experience, that experience is nevertheless being affected or caused - influenced, patterned, impelled, drawn forth - by the relevant planetary archetypes. In this sense, it is quite appropriate to speak, for example, of Saturn (as archetype) "influencing" one in a specific way or as "governing" certain kinds of experience.

Richard Tarnas, a professor of philosophy and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies, is the author ofCosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. Visit www.cosmosandpsyche.com. Tarnas presents a lecture on synchronicity on May 9 and a workshop on planetary archetypes on May 10 at the Oregon Friends of Jung in Portland. Visit www.ofj.org.