Modern Psychology: C. G. Jung’s Lectures at the ETH Zürich, 1933-1941
This magic influence was attributed to the stars, it was assumed that they, as constituents of the eternal being, had magic qualities and sent out vibrations, so to speak, which influenced human destiny.
Even today astrologists superstitiously assume something of the same kind; but such ideas are illusory and cannot be proved.
There are certainly many inexplicable things in horoscopes, but they cannot possibly be explained by emanation of magic qualities from the stars or anything of that kind.
This is impossible, because the stars which appear in the horoscope are not really in that position at the moment of birth.
This is because we have an artificial reckoning of time, owing to the so-called “precession of the equinoxes.”
The spring point recedes 55 seconds every year, a problem which already teased the old Babylonians.
In order to keep the clocks right, so to speak, the astronomers (circa 100 B. C. when the sun was moving into the sign of the fishes) fixed the spring point at zero degrees Aries (in which it had already been for about 2000 years).
Since then it has remained fixed, though actually, instead of being in Aries, the sun is somewhere at the end of the fishes.
Horoscopes, therefore, are reckoned by an artificial sky, so to speak; and so the peculiar quality of the moment cannot possibly depend on the stars, but must belong to time itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Pages 197-205.
