Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

Jung's Astrological Experiment

Jung’s Astrological Experiment

Jung’s statistical investigation of classical astrological aspects in marriage horoscopes, reported in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8) and revisited in Collected Works 18. Jung gathered three batches — 180, 220, and 83 pairs — and tested each against fifty classical aspects (Jung 1960, CW 8). The first batch produced a 10% maximum for sun-moon conjunction (probability ≈ 1:10,000); the second a 10.9% maximum for moon-moon conjunction (≈ 1:10,000); the third a 9.6% maximum for ascendant-moon (≈ 1:3,000) (Jung 1960). Each maximum corresponded to a “classical prediction” of the astrological tradition.

Jung’s conclusion was not that astrology is statistically true. As his batches grew the maxima diminished; with enough data the effect would wash out. The point was the opposite: the material had, as it came in, arranged itself to confirm the oldest tradition, with probabilities too high to be accidental and too small a sample to be lawful. “What seems in fact to have happened… is that we got a result which has presumably turned up many times before in history” (Jung 1960, CW 8). A “secret, mutual connivance… between the material and the psychic state of the astrologer” is the signature of a synchronistic event (Jung 1960). The experiment did not prove astrology. It exhibited astrology as a privileged site of synchronistic constellation.

Jung added the theoretical link in CW 18: synchronistic phenomena “nearly always occur in the region of archetypal constellations” — and the horoscope, being a “numinous assemblage of gods,” is archetypal by constitution (Jung 1976, CW 18).

Relationships

Primary sources