The Astrology of Fate

Liz Greene occupies a position that few scholars can claim without qualification: she is both a trained Jungian analyst, having completed her studies at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, and a practicing professional astrologer with decades of clinical and consultative work. The Astrology of Fate is the book in which those two vocations converge most fully, producing a synthesis that neither discipline could have reached alone.

Fate as Psychic Necessity

The central argument is deceptively simple. The natal chart, Greene contends, does not describe what will happen to a person. It describes the archetypal patterns that the psyche is predisposed to constellate — the complexes that will shape perception, drive repetition, and generate the particular quality of suffering and meaning that belongs to a given life. Fate, in this reading, is not determinism imposed from outside but necessity emerging from within. Greene draws on the Greek concept of moira to ground this distinction, arguing that the ancients understood fate not as the arbitrary decree of the gods but as the allotment that belongs to each soul by virtue of its nature (Greene, 1984). What one cannot choose is not the same as what one cannot transform.

The Moirai as Psychological Forces

Greene devotes sustained attention to the three Moirai: Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis, who measures its length; and Atropos, who cuts it. These are not merely mythological curiosities. In Greene’s hands they become psychological operators, representing the unconscious processes that initiate a complex, sustain its hold on consciousness, and eventually bring it to crisis. The thread metaphor captures something that purely clinical language often misses: the sense that certain patterns in a life have a continuity and an intentionality that the ego did not author and cannot simply override (Greene, 1984).

Pluto and the Shadow

The most clinically potent sections of the book concern Pluto transits. Greene reads Pluto as the astrological correlate of the Jungian shadow, and its transits across the natal chart as periods in which the psyche forces confrontation with what has been refused. These are not gentle invitations to self-reflection. They are encounters with compulsion, loss, and the destruction of structures that the ego had mistaken for permanent. Greene’s case material illustrates how Pluto transits correspond to periods of breakdown that, when met consciously, become the ground of genuine transformation.

What Cannot Be Chosen Must Be Lived

The lasting contribution of this book is its insistence that depth psychology and astrology are asking the same question from different angles: what does it mean to have a fate? Not a fortune, not a prediction, but a pattern of necessity that the conscious personality must eventually reckon with. Greene demonstrates that the natal chart, read with psychological sophistication, offers a symbolic language for precisely the material that Jungian analysis seeks to make conscious.