Richard Tarnas

American cultural historian and philosopher, founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Tarnas studied at Harvard under Stanley Hoffmann and at Saybrook with Stanislav Grof, whose psychedelic research informed the archetypal synchronistic correlations Tarnas later documented in Cosmos and Psyche.

His The Passion of the Western Mind (1991) traced the intellectual arc from the pre-Socratics through postmodernism and established him as a major historian of Western consciousness. Cosmos and Psyche (2006) — the work most load-bearing for the Seba KG — articulated the empirical and theoretical case for archetypal astrology: planetary alignments correlate with world-historical patterns, and this correlation implies an archetypal-synchronistic structure of reality that Cartesian-Kantian metaphysics cannot accommodate. Prometheus the Awakener (1995) is the working monograph on Uranus as the archetype of rebellion, liberation, and unexpected breakthroughs.

Tarnas stands to archetypal astrology as Jung stood to depth psychology — the figure who gave the field its theoretical charter. His position relative to Greene and Sasportas is complementary: they built psychological astrology as clinical practice; Tarnas supplied the philosophical frame that makes the practice answerable to contemporary physics and philosophy of consciousness. The lineage runs from Rudhyar through Jung through Grof to Tarnas.

Key concepts

• planetary-gods-as-archetypal-complexes
• outer-planets-as-transpersonal
• synchronicity-as-astrological-mechanism

Major works

• tarnas-cosmos-and-psyche
• tarnas-prometheus-awakener