Cosmos and Psyche

Tarnas’s decades-in-the-making theoretical charter for archetypal astrology. The book argues, across some seven hundred pages, that the planetary archetypes correspond to empirically observable correlations between world-historical events and major planetary alignments — and that this correspondence, properly understood, requires the revision of the Cartesian-Kantian inheritance of modern Western thought.

The book’s central contribution to psychological astrology is the Taxonomy of the Ten Archetypes. Saturn’s cluster, representative of the style: “the concern with consensus reality, factual concreteness, conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods” (Tarnas 2006). Each planet is rendered not as a fixed meaning but as a family of resonances; astrology becomes archetypal precisely in that it maps planetary resonances onto the same archetypal field that depth psychology works.

The book’s second contribution is the philosophical reception of synchronicity. Tarnas threads relativity, quantum mechanics, and the collapse of strict linear causality into an argument for synchronistic correlation as a fundamental principle — “the archetypal meaning that informs and connects the synchronistic events serves as a fundamental explanatory principle” (Tarnas 2006). The move gives synchronicity-as-astrological-mechanism its contemporary physics warrant.

Concepts introduced or developed

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

Cited by

• richard-tarnas
• liz-greene