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Synchronicity as Astrological Mechanism

Synchronicity as Astrological Mechanism

The depth tradition’s answer to the question how does astrology work. The planets do not act upon the native by radiation or causal influence; they signify, through an acausal correspondence between psychic state and celestial configuration. carl-jung named this principle synchronicity — “a concrete continuum” of time whose “qualities or basic conditions” manifest simultaneously in different places by “acausal parallelism” (Jung 1966, CW 15). Astrology, he wrote, “would be an example of synchronicity on a grand scale if only there were enough thoroughly tested findings” (Jung 1966).

The distinction is classical. plotinus refused causal astrology while affirming the stars as signs: “All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another. All things must be enchained; and the sympathy and correspondence obtaining in any one closely knit organism must exist, first, and most intensely, in the All” (Enneads). The cosmos signifies because it is one living organism, not because its parts bombard one another.

Jung made the distinction his own in a 1934 letter on the precession argument: the objection that the stars no longer occupy their named zodiacal positions is no objection to astrology but “to the primitive theory that the stars themselves radiate certain effects” (Jung 1973, Letters I). Archetypal astrology is astrology emancipated from that primitive theory. The chart is not a transmission; it is a script the cosmos and the soul are writing simultaneously.

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