Dane Rudhyar

French-American philosopher, composer, and astrologer whose The Astrology of Personality (1936) founded what he called humanistic and what later generations have called person-centered or psychological astrology. Rudhyar drew deeply on carl-jung — the 1936 edition explicitly frames astrology “in terms of contemporary psychology and philosophy” — and was the pivotal figure through whom analytical psychology entered twentieth-century astrology.

The retrieved preface calls the book “the greatest step forward in Astrology since the time of Ptolemy,” and reports that “the leading lights of astrology testify to the profound influence that this particular book of Rudhyar’s has had on their thinking, and this is even the case amongst Rudhyar’s critics” (Rudhyar 1936, ed. preface). The formulation is Rudhyar’s own: astrology is “the algebra of life” whose telos is “the alchemy of personality” (Rudhyar 1936).

Rudhyar’s contribution to the Lineage is the ontological shift from predictive to symbolic — from astrology-as-forecast to astrology-as-mandala, from fate-reading to self-reading. Every later psychological astrologer — liz-greene most prominently — inherits this shift.

Key concepts

• person-centered-astrology
• archetypal-astrology
• mandala

Major works

• rudhyar-astrology-of-personality