Person-Centered Astrology

dane-rudhyar‘s reframing of astrology in The Astrology of Personality (1936). The chart is no longer a forecast of outer events; it is a symbolic score of the person-in-becoming. Rudhyar’s vision, in the editor’s phrase preserved in the retrieved material, is of astrology as “the algebra of life” whose goal is “the alchemy of personality” (Rudhyar 1936). The birth chart is a mandala: a bounded totality whose meaning is the self it depicts in potential, and whose function is to name the developmental arc by which that self is realized.

The significance of the move is structural. Predictive astrology treats the native as the passive recipient of planetary influences. Person-centered astrology treats the native as the agent of an individuation process that the chart symbolizes but does not determine. The chart becomes one of the great instruments of self-knowledge — continuous, in this register, with Jungian individuation, alchemical coniunctio, and the mandala as figure of psychic totality.

Rudhyar’s book is named as “the greatest step forward in Astrology since the time of Ptolemy” in the retrieved preface (Rudhyar 1936). Its influence runs through liz-greene, through james-hillman‘s archetypal reading of the planets, and into every subsequent school that refuses the predictive register.

Relationships

• archetypal-astrology
• individuation
• mandala
• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes

Primary sources

• rudhyar-astrology-of-personality (Rudhyar 1936)