Carl Jung on “Astrology” – Anthology

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Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols. . . . Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But the “heart glows,” and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being. Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 50

The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes. Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 167

The psychological interest of the present time is an indication that modern man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man. For him the various forms of religion no longer appear to come from within, from the psyche; they seem more like items from the inventory of the outside world. No spirit not of this world vouchsafes him inner revelation; instead, he tries on a variety of religions and beliefs as if they were Sunday attire, only to lay them aside again like worn-out clothes. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 168

Yet he is somehow fascinated by the almost pathological manifestations from the hinterland of the psyche, difficult though it is to explain how something which all previous ages have rejected should suddenly become interesting. That there is a general interest in these matters cannot be denied, however much it offends against good taste. I am not thinking merely of the interest. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 169

I am not thinking merely of the interest taken in psychology as a science, or of the still narrower interest in the psychoanalysis of Freud, but of the widespread and ever-growing interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena, including spiritualism, astrology, Theosophy, parapsychology, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of our time have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism. There is even an “Église gnostique de la France,” and I know of two schools in Germany which openly declare themselves Gnostic. The most impressive movement numerically is undoubtedly Theosophy, together with its continental sister, Anthroposophy; these are pure Gnosticism in Hindu dress.  Compared with them the interest in scientific psychology is negligible. What is striking about these Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively on the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings penetrate into the dark side of life, as is clearly shown by the refurbished European version of Kundalini yoga. The same is true of parapsychology, as everyone acquainted with this subject will agree. The passionate interest in these movements undoubtedly arises from psychic energy which can no longer be invested in obsolete religious forms. For this reason such movements have a genuinely religious character, even when they pretend to be scientific. It changes nothing when Rudolf Steiner calls his Anthroposophy “spiritual science,” or when Mrs. Eddy invents a “Christian Science.” These attempts at concealment merely show that religion has grown suspect – almost as suspect as politics and world-reform. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 170

I do not believe that I am going too far when I say that modern man, in contrast to his nineteenth-century brother, turns to the psyche with very great expectations, and does so without reference to any traditional creed but rather with a view to Gnostic experience. The fact that all the movements I have mentioned give themselves a scientific veneer is not just a grotesque caricature or a masquerade, but a positive sign that they are actually pursuing “science,” i.e., knowledge , instead of faith , which is the essence of the Western forms of religion. Modern man abhors faith and the religions based upon it. He holds them valid only so far as their knowledge-content seems to accord with his own experience of the psychic background. He wants to know – to experience for himself.  ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 171

The age of discovery has only just come to an end in our day, when no part of the earth remains unexplored; it began when men would no longer believe that the Hyperboreans were one-footed monsters, or something of that kind, but wanted to find out and see with their own eyes what existed beyond the boundaries of the known world. Our age is apparently setting out to discover what exists in the psyche beyond consciousness. The question asked in every spiritualistic circle is: What happens after the medium has lost consciousness? Every Theosophist asks: What shall I experience at the higher levels of consciousness? The question which every astrologer asks is: What are the operative forces that determine my fate despite my conscious intention? And every psychoanalyst wants to know: What are the unconscious drives behind the neurosis? ~Carl Jung CW 10, Para 172

Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself. It wants original experience and not assumptions, though it is willing to make use of all the existing assumptions as a means to this end, including those of the recognized religions and the authentic sciences. The European of yesterday will feel a slight shudder run down his spine when he gazes more deeply in to these delvings. Not only does he consider the subject of this so-called research obscure and shuddersome, but even the methods employed seem to him a shocking misuse of man’s finest intellectual attainments. What is the professional astronomer to say when he is told that at least a thousand times more horoscopes are cast today than were cast three hundred years ago? What will the educator and advocate of philosophical enlightenment say about the fact that the world has not grown poorer by a single superstition since the days of antiquity? Freud himself, the founder of psychoanalysis, has taken the greatest pains to throw as glaring a light as possible on the dirt and darkness and evil of the psychic background, and to interpret it in such a way as to make us lose all desire to look for anything behind it except refuse and smut. He did not succeed, and his attempt at deterrence has even brought about the exact opposite – an admiration for all this filth. Such a perverse phenomenon would normally be inexplicable were it not that even the scatologists are drawn by the secret fascination of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 173

There can be no doubt that from the beginning of the nineteenth century – ever since the time of the French Revolution – the psyche has moved more and more into the foreground of man’s interest, and with a steadily increasing power of attraction. The enthronement of the Goddess of Reason in Notre Dame seems to have been a symbolic gesture of great significance for the Western world – rather like the hewing down of Wotan’s oak by Christian missionaries. On both occasions no avenging bolt from heaven struck the blasphemer down. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 174

It is certainly more than an amusing freak of history that just at the time of the Revolution a Frenchman, Anquetil du Perron, should be living in India and, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, brought back with him a translation of the Oupnek’hat , a collection of fifty Upanishads, which gave the West its first deep insight into the baffling mind of the East. To the historian this is a mere coincidence independent of the historical nexus of cause and effect. My medical bias prevents me from seeing it simply as an accident. Everything happened in accordance with a psychological law which is unfailingly valid in personal affairs. If anything of importance is devalued in our conscious life, and perishes – so runs the law – there arises a compensation in the unconscious. We may see in this an analogy to the conservation of energy in the physical world, for our psychic processes also have a quantitative, energic aspect. No psychic value can disappear without being replaced by another of equivalent intensity. This is a fundamental rule which is repeatedly verified in the daily practice of the psychotherapist and never fails. The doctor in me refuses point blank to consider the life of a people as something that does not conform to psychological law. For him the psyche of a people is only a somewhat more complex structure than the psyche of an individual. Moreover, has not a poet spoken of the “nations of his soul”? And quite correctly, it seems to me, for in one of its aspects the psyche is not individual, but is derived from the nation, from the collectivity, from humanity even. In some way or other we are part of a single, all-embracing psyche, a single “greatest man,” the homo maximus , to quote Swedenborg. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 175

And so we can draw a parallel: just as in me, a single individual, the darkness calls forth a helpful light, so it does in the psychic life of a people. In the crowds that poured into Notre Dame, bent on destruction, dark and nameless forces were at work that swept the individual off his feet; these forces worked also upon Anquetil du Perron and provoked an answer which has come down in history and speaks to us through the mouths of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. For he brought the Eastern mind to the West, and its influence upon us we cannot as yet measure. Let us beware of underestimating it! So far, indeed, there is little of it to be seen on the intellectual surface: a handful of orientalists, one or two Buddhist enthusiasts, a few sombre celebrities like Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant with her Krishnamurti. These manifestations are like tiny scattered islands in the ocean of mankind; in reality they are the peaks of submarine mountain-ranges. The cultural Philistines believed until recently that astrology had been disposed of long since and was something that could safely be laughed at. But today, rising out of the social deeps, it knocks at the doors of the universities from which it was banished some three hundred years ago. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 176

No one who is concerned with psychology should blind himself to the fact that besides the relatively small number of those who pay homage to scientific principles and techniques, humanity fairly swarms with adherents of quite another principle. It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of our present-day culture that one can read in an encyclopaedia, in an article on astrology, the following remark: “One of its last adherents was I. W. Pfaff, whose Astrologie (Bamberg, 1816) and Der Stern der Drei Weisen (1821) must be called strange anachronisms. Even today, however, astrology is still highly regarded in the East, particularly in Persia, India, and China.” One must be smitten with blindness to write such a thing nowadays. The truth is that astrology flourishes as never before. There is a regular library of astrological books and magazines that sell for far better than the best scientific works. The Europeans and Americans who have horoscopes cast for them may be counted not by the hundred thousand but by the million. Astrology is a flourishing industry. Yet the encyclopaedia can say: “The poet Dryden (d. 1701) still had horoscopes cast for his children.” Christian Science, too, has swamped Europe and America. Hundreds and thousands of people on both sides of the Atlantic swear by theosophy and anthroposophy, and anyone who believes that the Rosicrucians are a legend of the dim bygone has only to open his eyes to see them as much alive today as they ever were. Folk magic and secret lore have by no means died out. Nor should it be imagined that only the dregs of the populace fall for such superstitions. We have, as we know, to climb very high on the social scale to find the champions of this other principle. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 494

For if such a large percentage of the population has an insatiable need for this counterpole to the scientific spirit, we can be sure that the collective psyche in every individual – be he never so scientific – has this psychological requirement in equally high degree. A certain kind of “scientific” scepticism and criticism in our time is nothing but a misplaced compensation of the powerful and deep-rooted superstitious impulses of the collective psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 495

. . .The heyday of astrology was not in the benighted Middle Ages but is in the middle of the twentieth century, when even the newspapers do not hesitate to publish the week’s horoscope. A thin layer of rootless rationalists read with satisfaction in an encyclopaedia that in the year 1723 Mr. So-and-so had horoscopes cast for his children, and yet do not know that nowadays the horoscope has attained the rank of a visiting card. Those who have even a nodding acquaintance with this background and are in any way affected by it obey the unwritten but strictly observed convention: “One does not speak of such things.” They are only whispered about, no one admits them, for no one wants to be considered all that stupid. In reality, however, it is very different. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 700

The psyche is still a foreign, barely explored country of which we have only indirect knowledge, mediated by conscious functions that are open to almost endless possibilities of deception. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 916

This being so, it seems safer to proceed from outside inwards, from the known to the unknown, from the body to the psyche. Thus all attempts at characterology have started from the outside world; astrology, in ancient times, even started from interstellar space in order to arrive at those lines of fate whose beginnings lie in the human heart. To the same class of interpretations from outward signs belong palmistry, Gall’s phrenology, Lavater’s physiognomy, and – more recently – graphology, Kretschmer’s physiological types, and Rorschach’s klexographic method. As we can see, there are any number of paths leading from outside inwards, from the physical to the psychic, and it is necessary that research should follow this direction until the elementary psychic facts are established with sufficient certainty. But once having established these facts, we can reverse the procedure. We can then put the question: What are the bodily correlatives of a given psychic condition? Unfortunately we are not yet far enough advanced to give even an approximate answer. The first requirement is to establish the primary facts of psychic life, and this is far from having been accomplished. Indeed, we have only just begun the work of compiling an inventory of the psyche, not always with great success. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 917

This historical retrospect may serve to assure us that our modern attempts to formulate a theory of types are by no means new and unprecedented, even though our scientific conscience does not permit us to revert to these old, intuitive ways of thinking. We must find our own answer to this problem, an answer which satisfies the need of science. And here we meet the chief difficulty of the problem of types – that is, the question of standards or criteria. The astrological criterion was simple and objective: it was given by the constellations at birth. As to the way characterological qualities could be correlated with the zodiacal signs and the planets, this is a question which reaches back into the grey mists of prehistory and remains unanswerable. The Greek classification according to the four physiological temperaments took as its criteria the appearance and behaviour of the individual, exactly as we do today in the case of physiological typology. But where shall we seek our criterion for a psychological theory of types? ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 934

The idea of synchronicity and of a self-subsistent meaning, which forms the basis of classical Chinese thinking and of the naïve views of the Middle Ages, seems to us an archaic assumption that ought at all costs to be avoided. Though the West has done everything possible to discard this antiquated hypothesis, it has not quite succeeded. Certain mantic procedures seem to have died out, but astrology, which in our own day has attained an eminence never known before, remains very much alive. Nor has the determinism of a scientific epoch been able to extinguish altogether the persuasive power of the synchronicity principle. For in the last resort it is not so much a question of superstition as of a truth which remained hidden for so long only because it had less to do with the physical side of events than with their psychic aspects. It was modern psychology and parapsychology which proved that causality does not explain a certain class of events and that in this case we have to consider a formal factor, namely synchronicity, as a principle of explanation. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 944

Astrology and other methods of divination may certainly be called the science of antiquity. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 121

Its [Antiquity] value is obvious enough to the psychologist, since astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 81

. . Astrology was the first form of psychology, which is an extremely young science, dating from the end of the nineteenth century only. Of course, there was a beginning of psychological technique at about the time of the decay of Christianity and the period of the French enlightenment. Voltaire would be one of the first psychologists, and La Rochefoucauld, and Fénelon. But it was not yet science. It consisted more of intellectual aphorisms. It was essentially a critique. One might say that Nietzsche had a psychological approach to his material. But inasmuch as the human soul has always existed, there must have been at all times an equivalent of psychology. Philosophy would be such an equivalent, but it is merely intellectual, or a metaphysical projection. Religion would be an equivalent also, one could say, yet it is metaphysical concretism. Then there was astrology, which was legitimate up to the seventeenth century and was used by doctors in universities, together with dreams, as aids in diagnosing disease. Palmistry also was so used. I have a little text-book of medicine written by a famous Würzburg professor towards the end of the sixteenth century. It deals with astrology, phrenology, palmistry, and physiognomy, and was especially for the use of doctors. The author was practically the last of the official professors of astrology, which was a sort of psychology but with the qualities and peculiar character of projection. It was our psychology in its oldest form. Our modern science began with astronomy. Instead of saying that a man was led by psychological motives, they formerly said he was led by his stars. In Schiller’s Wallenstein there is a conversation between Wallenstein and the astrologer in which the latter says, “In thy heart are the stars of thy fate.”  That is a translation of astrological into psychological terms. But this was very late, in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Until then, people assumed that it was not psychological motivation but the movement of the stars which caused the personal reactions, as if the direction of their lives was created by the vibrations of the planets. The puzzling thing is that there is really a curious coincidence between astrological and psychological facts, so that one can isolate time from the characteristics of an individual, and also, one can deduce characteristics from a certain time. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 414

“The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast,” says Seni to Wallenstein – a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 9

You are quite right in supposing that I reckon astrology among those movements which, like theosophy, etc., seek to assuage an irrational thirst for knowledge but actually lead it into a sidetrack. Astrology is knocking at the gates of our universities: a Tübingen professor has switched over to astrology and a course on astrology was given at Cardiff University last year. Astrology is not mere superstition but contains some psychological facts (like theosophy) which are of considerable importance. Astrology has actually nothing to do with the stars but is the 5000-year-old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Unfortunately I cannot explain or prove this to you in a letter. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 56

Occultism is another field we shall have to conquer  – with the aid of the libido theory, it seems to me. At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology. There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness. Please don’t worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche. For a while longer I must intoxicate myself on magic perfumes in order to fathom the secrets that lie hidden in the abysses of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Freud/Jung Letters, Page 254J

On the idea that the moment of creation, whether a work of art or person, carries the uniqueness of the moment in its character: This is substantiated in a way by the very awkward fact that the uniqueness of the particular moment in time in which a thing is created is characterized by certain qualities, as is proved by the fact that the horoscope can give the character of an individual. If it were impossible to deduce a human character from a horoscope, then of course that whole idea of the identity of the uniqueness of the self with the uniqueness of the moment when a thing comes into existence would not be valid; but as a matter of fact you can deduce from a horoscope, you can show the character of an individual to an amazing extent. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 75

My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you. In the case of one lady, the calculation of the positions of the stars at her nativity produced a quite definite character picture, with several biographical details which did not belong to her but to her mother – and the characteristics fitted the mother to a T. The lady suffers from an extraordinary mother complex. I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 23-24

. . . The three main components of the horoscope . . . [are] the ascendent, or rising degree of a zodiacal sign, which characterizes the moment, the moon, which characterizes the day, and the sun, which characterizes the month of birth. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 904

Astrology is a naïvely projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations. While studying astrology I have applied it to concrete cases many times. There are remarkable coincidences, e.g., the position of Mars in the zenith in the famous horoscope of Wilhelm II, the so-called “Friedenskaiser.” This position is said already in a medieval treatise to mean always a casus ab alto , a fall from the height. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol II, Pages 463-463

Since you want to know my opinion about astrology I can tell you that I’ve been interested in this particular activity of the human mind for more than 30 years. As I am a psychologist I’m chiefly interested in the particular light the horoscope sheds on certain complications in the character. In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often found that the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand. From such experiences I formed the opinion that astrology is of particular interest to the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call “projected” – this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations. This originally gave rise to the idea that these factors derive from the stars, whereas they are merely in a relation of synchronicity with them. I admit that this is a very curious fact which throws a peculiar light on the structure of the human mind. What I miss in astrological literature is chiefly the statistical method by which certain fundamental facts could be scientifically established. ~Carl Jung,  Letters Vol. I, Page 475

2. The connections between astrology and psychology. There are many instances of striking analogies between astrological constellations and psychological events or between the horoscope .and the characterological disposition. It is even possible to predict to a certain extent the psychic effect of a transit. For example [ .. .].1 One may expect with a fair degree of probability that a given well-defined· psychological situation will be accompanied by an analogous astrological configuration. Astrology, like the collective unconscious with which psychology is concerned, consists of symbolic configurations: the “planets” are the gods, symbols of the powers of the unconscious.
3. The modus operandi of astrological constellations. It seems to me that it is primarily a question of that parallelism or “sympathy” which I call synchronicity, an acausal connection expressing relation ships that cannot be formulated in terms of causality, such as precognition, premonition, psychokinesis (PK), and also what we call telepathy. Since causality is a statistical truth, there are exceptions of an acausal nature bordering on the category of synchronistic ( not synchronous) events. They have to do with “qualitative time.”

What is your attitude to the positions taken by astrologers who admit the existence of a psychological field from birth on, and by psychoanalysts who explain the aetiology of neuroses in terms of the earliest life experiences?

3. Attitude to positions taken by astrologers [etc.]. The first experiences in life owe their specific (pathogenic) effect to environmental influences on the one hand, and on the other to the psychic predisposition, i.e., to heredity, which seems to be expressed in a recognizable way in the horoscope. The latter apparently corresponds to a definite moment in the colloquy of the gods, that is to say the psychic archetypes.

In response to the following question: In the course of analytical treatment, have you observed typical phases of either resistance or progress which would coincide with certain astrological constellations, e.g., transits?

4, Qualitative time. This is a notion I used formerly8 but I have replaced it with the idea of synchronicity, which is analogous to sympathy or correspondentia ( the uvμ:rralhia of antiquity), or to Leibniz’s pre-established harmony. Time in itself consists of nothing. It is only a modus cogitandi that is used to express and formulate the flux of things and events, just as space is nothing but a way of describing the existence of a body. When nothing occurs in time and when there is no body in space, there is neither time nor space. Time is always and exclusively “qualified” by events as space is by the extension of bodies. But “qualitative time” is a tautology and means nothing, whereas synchronicity ( not synchronism) expresses the parallelism and analogy between events in so far as they are noncausal. In contrast, “qualitative time” is an hypothesis that attempts to explain the parallelism of events in terms .of causa et effectus. But since qualitative time is nothing but the flux of things, and is moreover just as much “nothing” as space, this hypothesis does not establish anything except the tautology: the flux of things and events is the cause of the flux of things, etc. Synchronicity does not admit causality in the analogy ,between terrestrial events and astrological constellations ( except for the deflection of solar protons and their possible effect on terrestrial events ), and denies it particularly in all cases of nonsensory perception (ESP) , especially precognition, since it is inconceivable that one could observe the effect of a nonexistent cause, or of a cause that does not yet exist. “What astrology can establish are the analogous events, but not that either series is the cause or the effect of the other. (For instance, the same constellation may at one time signify a catastrophe and at another time, in the same case, a cold in the head.) Nevertheless, astrology is not- an entirely simple matter. There is that deflection of solar protons caused on the one hand by the conjunctions, oppositions, and quartile aspects, and on the other hand by the trine and sextile aspects, and their influence on the radio and on many other things. I am not competent to judge how much importance should be attributed to this possible influence. In I any case, astrology occupies a unique and special position among the intuitive methods, and in explaining it there is reason to be dubious of both a causal theory and the exclusive validity of the synchronistic hypothesis. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 176-177

6. I have observed many cases where a well-defined psychological phase, or an analogous event, was accompanied by a transit (particularly when Saturn and Uranus were affected).
7. My main criticisms of astrologers.

If I were to venture an opinion in a domain with which I am only very superficially acquainted, I would say that the astrologer does not always consider his statements to be mere possibilities. The interpretation is sometimes too literal and not symbolic enough, also too personal. What the zodiac and the planets represent are not personal traits; they are impersonal and objective facts. Moreover, several “layers of meaning” should be taken into account in interpreting the Houses. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 177

The ruler of my birth, old Saturnus, slowed down my maturation process to such an extent that I became aware of my own ideas only at the beginning of the second half of my life, i.e., exactly with 36 years. I beg your pardon for using old astrological metaphors. “Astrology” is another of those “random phenomena” wiped off the desk by the idol of the average, which everybody believes to be reality itself while it is a mere abstract. Soon a little book of mine which I have published with the physicist Prof. W. Pauli will come out in English. It is even more shocking than Job , but this time to the scientist, not the theologian. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 232-233

The [astrological] experiment [included in “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle”] is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as intuitive methods always are. If intelligently used the experiment is useful in cases where it is a matter of an opaque structure. It often provides surprising insights. The most definite limit of the experiment is lack of intelligence and literal-mindedness of the observer. It is an intelligent aperçu like the shape of the hand or the expression of the face –things of which a stupid and unimaginative mind can make nothing and from which a superstitious mind draws the wrong conclusions. Astrological “truths” as statistical results are questionable or even unlikely . . .The superstitious use (prediction of the future or statement of facts beyond psychological possibilities) is false. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-364

Astrology differs very much from alchemy, as its historical literature consists merely of different methods of casting a horoscope and of interpretation, and not of philosophical texts as is the case in alchemy. There is no psychological explanation of astrology yet, on account of the fact that the empirical foundation in the sense of a science has not yet been laid. The reason for this is that astrology does not follow the principle of causality, but depends, like all intuitive methods, on acausality. Undoubtedly astrology today is flourishing as never before in the past, but it is still most unsatisfactorily explored despite very frequent use. It is an apt tool only when used intelligently. It is not at all foolproof and when used by a rationalistic and narrow mind it is a definite nuisance. ~Carl Jung, Letters Volume II, Pages 463-464

Astrology . . . presents amazing suggestions which would be important if verified, but that has never been done. They ought to work out their researches statistically. A Frenchman, Paul Flambart, made an attempt to verify certain irrational statements. He has done some scientific research work in connection with the so-called aerial trigon: If the whole zodiac is designed in sections of a circle, then the three points, the months represented by Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, form the aerial trigon. These are air-signs and air means mind or spirit. The old saying was that one born under these signs was apt to be spiritual or intellectual; that quality was given him at birth. So Flambart took one hundred nativities of men remarkable for their intelligence, and found that, though the birth-dates were everywhere on the circle, there was an extraordinary accumulation on each point of the trigon, so one could say that the majority of such nativities were associated with the corners of the aerial trigon, with intelligence. This is of the nature of a scientific truth, but astrologers are proverbially reluctant to make such researches. They prefer to swim in intuition. To work scientifically is too much trouble; each horoscope would take three hours and one would need thousands of them. Astrology is a dark science, a Hecate science. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 421

Now we cannot scientifically prove that our functioning is coincidental with the functioning of the sun and the moon. We observe the similarity between the periodicity of woman and the moon, but they do not coincide, it is merely the same rhythm. So also, metaphorically, we could say that the active principle in man is like the sun. In astrology we have another consideration, a bit uncanny and therefore particularly hated by scientists. You remember my telling you that birthdates of important men tended to accumulate around the three points of the aerial trigon. If this were confirmed, we might go further and make statistics about suicides, lunacy, epilepsy, etc. That might lead to tangible results, and then astrology would be a very serious consideration. I have suggested to astrologers that we should have more scientific statements. Sometimes people without knowing one’s birthdate can make remarkable guesses as to where one’s signs are. Twice it has happened to me, once in England and once in America. I was told that my sun was in Leo and my moon in Taurus, Aquarius rising. This made a great impression on me. How the devil did they know? Did they see it in my face? But when one once knows a little about these things, they do not appear so mysterious, and one can easily discover certain characteristics – anatomical, for instance. Or sometimes things come out in a negative way. For instance, I think a certain man is quite certainly not Scorpio, and then I find that he is just that. So I have often heard someone say, “Surely I will not marry that one!” – and then he does. Or a patient will say, “All that you say is true, but this is not true,” and then I find it to be the closest truth. Now that is where astrology is today. It enables certain people to make verifiable diagnoses; and sometimes certain guesses, intuitive shots, are peculiarly adequate, quite astonishing. For instance, I was in touch with an astrologer who knew my birth-date but nothing about my personal life, and I got reports from him occasionally – “on such and such a day you must have felt so and so” – but always in the past, so that I could verify the truth of it. Upon one of these occasions he wrote that on the 31st of March, let us say, two years ago, I must have had the feeling of being reborn, for such and such a planet passed over such and such a place in my nativity. At that time I had in my psychological diary accurate records of everything that happened. So I looked up that date and I had written, “Today I have a is confronted with the terribly serious question, what have we to do with the stars? Is there any connection between our miserable little everyday condition and these stars, great Jupiter and Saturn travelling through incredible cosmic distances? Moreover, the moment of birth is so accidental, the doctor is late, the midwife is clumsy, the mother is a little too impetuous. How could one assume such a connection? If you put it like that, it remains unanswerable. Astrologers are influenced by theosophy, so they say, “That is very simple, it is just vibration!” One astrologer after reading Psychology of the Unconscious wrote me, “Why do you bother about developing a libido concept? It is only vibration.” But what is vibration? They say it is light energy, perhaps electricity, they are not quite informed. At all events the vibrations that could influence us have never been seen, so it remains just a word. Now I will give you another wrinkle which is quite horrible. I hope you will be able to follow. You see, the astrologer says one was born when the sun was in such and such a degree of Libra, and the moon in such and such a degree of Scorpio, etc., and he bases the reading of one’s horoscope entirely upon that position of the planets. For instance, he says, “Today Jupiter is passing over its own place in your nativity, therefore it is in the same degree in which it was at the moment of your birth.” You take your telescope and you find the zodiacal constellation and Jupiter is not there at all! Then again the astrologer will inform you that the spring equinox is in zero degrees Aries and you naturally expect the sun to be rising at six o’clock in the morning, precisely at zero degrees Aries. But you find something entirely different, it is perhaps at 28 degrees Pisces. In the spring equinox the sun doesn’t rise in Aries. You look it up in history and find that in 100 B.C. the sun 15 left the constellation of Aries and went into Pisces. Then the astrologer royal of Ptolemy said, “Now, we can’t let that happen, we will fi x that fact for always as it was in 2000 B.C. when the sun did the same thing – left Taurus and crossed over into Aries.” You see, the spring-point moves back, there is a regression. That is the so-called precession of the equinoxes, moving 55 seconds each year, going back from the spring signs into the winter signs. Now this astronomer stopped that. He simply made it consistent. Otherwise the clocks would all go wrong each year by 55 seconds. So since 100 B.C. (Academy of Alexandria) we call the spring-point zero degrees Aries. We have kept our astronomical faith, but the heavens have moved on and we are simply out of time with the universe. If a man in 2000 B.C. said one was born in 25 degrees Sagittarius, it was true, but a hundred years later it was not quite true for it has already moved on 100 x 55 seconds and the horoscope is no longer exact. An astrologer perhaps says, “No wonder you have such a temperament, or such a royal gesture, because your sun is in the beginning of Leo; when the sun looked at you out of its own house at the moment of your nativity, naturally you were made into a little lion.” But it didn’t look out at you from its own house, for in reality it was in Gemini. Nevertheless you can prove that the man whose sun is said to be in Taurus gets the bull neck, or the woman in Libra gets the qualities of the sun from the heights of Libra, or the one whose sun is in Sagittarius has intuition, and you are quite right. Yet the sun was not in those positions. So that destroys any hope of vibration! I told you of the statistics connected with the aerial trigon, and yet those men of superior mentality were not born when the sun was in those signs. It is an extraordinary puzzle, and there are astrologers who don’t even know it; they are theosophists and they say, “It is quite easy, it is just vibrations.” But, you see, when it comes to our Western mind, we must think. How then do we account for the fact that our peculiar characteristics can be explained by our planets? One says, “Venus is very clearly your sign.” How do you explain that as if when it is not? ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 406-407

I found your differential definition of the historical and psychological approach [of Jung’s work, treated in Schmid’s rectoral address of 1957, entitled “Recent Aspects of Spiritual History”] most illuminating, and I can only agree with what you say. I must add, however, that this applies only to a psychology which is still exclusively concerned with culture-promoting personalities and is therefore restricted to the sphere of individual phenomena. This is an aspect of psychology which affords us the greatest insight and is at the same time the unavoidable path leading down to the deeper levels from which those biological masterpieces we call personalities are produced. At these greater depths more general laws become discernible and more comprehensive figures stand out which eliminate the divisive factor of individual development and give psychology a homogeneity or inner coherence which raises it to the rank of a biological science. By these deeper levels I mean the determining archetypes which are supradordinate to, or underlie, individual development and presumably are responsible for the supreme meaning of individual life. Seen from this level, not only is psychological experience a continuum, but the psychological approach also enables us to gain some knowledge of the inner connection between historical events. The archetypes have a life of their own which extends through the centuries and gives the aeons their peculiar stamp. Perhaps I might draw your attention to my historical contribution in Aion , where I have attempted to outline the evolutionary history of the Anthropos, which begins with the earliest Egyptian records. The material I have presented there may serve to illustrate these remarks of mine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 345

The starting point for our explanation is that the king is essentially synonymous with the sun and that the sun represents the daylight of the psyche, consciousness, which as the faithful companion of the sun’s journey rises daily from the ocean of sleep and dream, and sinks into it again at evening. Just as in the round-dance of the planets, and in the star-strewn spaces of the sky, the sun journeys along as a solitary figure, like any other one of the planetary archons, so consciousness, which refers everything to its own ego as the centre of the universe, is only one among the archetypes of the unconscious. . . . This is what the complex of consciousness would look like if it could be viewed from one of the other planets, as we view the sun from the earth. The subjective ego-personality, i.e., consciousness and its contents, is indeed seen in its various aspects by an unconscious observer, or rather by an observer placed in the “outer space” of the unconscious. That this is so is proved by dreams, in which the conscious personality, the ego of the dreamer, is seen from a standpoint that is “toto coelo” different from that of the conscious mind. Such a phenomenon could not occur at all unless there were in the unconscious other standpoints opposing or competing with ego-consciousness. These relationships are aptly expressed by the planet simile. The king represents ego-consciousness, the subject of all subjects, as an object. His fate in mythology portrays the rising and setting of this most glorious and most divine of all the phenomena of creation, without which the world would not exist as an object. For everything that is only is because it is directly or indirectly known, and moreover this “known-ness” is sometimes represented in a way which the subject himself does not know, just as if he were being observed from another planet, now with benevolent and now with sardonic gaze. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 501

This far from simple situation derives partly from the fact that the ego has the paradoxical quality of being both the subject and the object of its own knowledge, and partly from the fact that the psyche is not a unity but a “constellation” consisting of other luminaries besides the sun. The ego-complex is not the only complex in the psyche. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 502

Pitilessly it is seen from another planet that the king is growing old, even before he sees it himself: ruling ideas, the “dominants,” change, and the change, undetected by consciousness, is mirrored only in dreams. King Sol, as the archetype of consciousness, voyages through the world of the unconscious, one of its multitudinous figures which may one day be capable of consciousness too. These lesser lights are, on the old view, identical with the planetary correspondences in the psyche which were postulated by astrology. When, therefore, an alchemist conjured up the spirit of Saturn as his familiar, this was an attempt to bring to consciousness a standpoint outside the ego, involving a relativization of the ego and its contents. The intervention of the planetary spirit was besought as an aid. When the king grows old and needs renewing, a kind of planetary bath is instituted – a bath into which all the planets pour their “influences.” This expresses the idea that the dominant, grown feeble with age, needs the support and influence of those subsidiary lights to fortify and renew it. It is, as it were, dissolved in the substance of the other planetary archetypes and then put together again. Through this process of melting and recasting there is formed a new amalgam of a more comprehensive nature, which has taken into itself the influences of the other planets or metals. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 504

If you simply destroy it, you create a ghost of the old value and you are possessed by that thing. So when we destroyed Christianity – of course it just happened that it was destroyed, to a great extent it destroyed itself – the ghost of Christianity was left, and we are now possessed. The Christian sacrifice is now produced in actuality, in the flesh. And so it was when the people threw away the old gods. They then had the conflict of their emotions in themselves, and had to assume an attitude which would rescue them from those battles and intrigues the gods were always having. Therefore, these savior religions arose, which saved the people from the gods in themselves. They were then planetary gods; it was the astrological influence, the continuous fear of heimarmene , 5 all that compulsion of the bad stars. The soul was burdened with the influence of the bad stars; that was the so-called handwriting which was imprinted on the soul when it descended to earth through the spheres of the planets. And that had to be washed off by a savior; people had to be saved from the inexorable law of the old gods. The old gods were not exactly destroyed by Christianity: they died before Christ came. Therefore Augustus was obliged to regress to old Latin rites and ceremonies in order to do something toward restoring the old religion which was already giving out. It simply became obsolete, and then already people were filled with what the gods had been before. The gods became integrated in them. For as soon as you cannot call an affect by a certain name – for instance, Cupid – it is in yourself. If you cannot say it is somewhere in space, in the planet Mars perhaps, it must be in yourself, and cannot be anywhere else. That causes a psychological disorder. We are apparently pretty far from these old facts because we don’t realize the power of the archetypes; and we don’t realize the mentality of a time when there were many gods, don’t know what it would be like to be surrounded by divine, superior, demoniacal powers. We have the poetic conception, but that is nothing like the reality. So we don’t know what it means to have lived in a time when these old gods descended upon man, when they became subjective factors, immediate magic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 1519

That individual relationship to the stars is a thought as old as mankind. The primitives believed that the falling stars were really souls descending from heaven to embody themselves in human bodies. They also believed that man was a fiery park. Even those much quoted central Australian aborigines believe that. They are like paleolithic men, they have not yet invented clothes, they never hunt animals for their furs because they never thought of it, in spite of the fact that at times, towards morning, the temperature descends below zero; then they stand round fi res and wait until the sun comes back to life. Now these people believe that the soul of man consists of a little fiery spark, and when such a spark – they are very swift and cunning – is flying about and happens to enter the womb of a woman, she immediately becomes pregnant. These fiery sparks, which they called by the Swiss-sounding expression maiaurli , are supposed to be the souls of ancestors and to live in particular rocks or trees, and any woman who passes must use special charms in order to ward off the maiaurli that jump out to impregnate her – they are always looking for a womb to enter. There was a similar idea in certain Gnostic systems: they thought that the soul was a fiery spark which fell down into the sea, or the creative womb, and then became a human soul, building a body round itself. It is a very interesting idea. Later on, the stars were identified with the gods, who were supposed to be  like human beings although at the same time they were stars; the planets Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, and so on were gods but they were also planets. That they could be both comes from the fact that those old gods were temperaments or constituents in the character of human beings. For instance, Mars personifies rage, a martial temperament is the warlike temperament, and in a horoscope Mars means a martial constituent. And a jovial temperament is like an exceedingly blue sky, like Jove benevolently smiling, and Jove – or Jupiter – in an important position in a horoscope indicates a jovial character. Venus means love or certain aspects of sex.

Mercury is intellect. And Saturn personifies gloom and all those manifestations which originate in the state of gloom or cause gloom; the Tempter and the Purifier are two of Saturn’s titles. Now these character constituents in fairly primitive man are very often autonomous – a person’s temperament may be autonomous, for instance. He may be pathologically jovial, jovial to such an extent that it is no longer a virtue but a vice. Or he may be good in a most vicious way, so good that he destroys himself and everyone round him; being a little too good is most dangerous for one’s surroundings. And it is the same with the so-called malefic planets, Mars and Saturn. You see, the personification of those planets comes from the projection of such autonomous complexes and therefore they have been called gods. When a woman says: “But I feel so and so about the matter,” it is most decisive, as you know, so one could call it a god. As a man says: “It is not according to my principle.” I say: “Damn your principle, the situation is so-and-so.” But his principle is a god to him, he would die rather than give up his most foolish principle, and this is simply based upon a fact of temperament, a deep-rooted emotional factor. Those temperamental qualities were quite rightly called gods and therefore projected. So here also is a link between man and the stars, his laws are found to be identical with the stars. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 734

The zodia are important determinants in the horoscope, modifying the influence of the planets that have moved into them, or, even if there are no planets, giving the individual houses a special character. In the present instance the Fishes would characterize the ascendent, the moment of the world’s birth. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 230

. . . The way of the individual . . . is symbolized by the serpentine way of the sun through the Zodiac, and the Zodiacal serpent is Christ, who said “I am the way.” He is the serpent, so in the early Christian church he is the sun, and the signs of the Zodiac, the apostles, are the twelve months of the year. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 307

Christ is represented as a great serpent who carries twelve signs on his back, meaning the twelve signs of the zodiac and also the twelve apostles. He says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.” He is the zodiacal serpent and they are the manifestations of the months. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 434

This is the way the signs go: Aquarius Five thousand years ago, 3000 B.C. when the sun was in winter, there were floods of rain. Aquarius walked about pouring his water out right and left.

Pisces Then the fish swam in the floods. Aries The little ram, the time of little shoots and buds.

Taurus The Bull, the great push of nature.

Gemini The fertility of man. One seldom does better than twins.

Cancer A drawback, the summer solstice. The crab walking backward when the sun descends again.

Leo After the first inkling of solstice it dawns on man that the sun will really be going, from the 22nd of July till the 21st of August, just when all is most glowing.

Virgo When man is roaring like a lion there is nothing better to tame him than a virgin. She will cut the hair of the lion and make it short, like Samson and Delilah. It is not nice, the whole symbolism is somewhat obscene. But at that time of the year, the 15th of September in the Egyptian calendar, the left eye of the goddess is prepared to receive the god Ra, who is to walk into it. 4 The eye is a womb symbol. The female element takes the lead. The god enters the womb of darkness, Yang is under Yin. Woman is on top.

Libra The balance after the virgin has done her job.

Scorpion The fatal self-sacrifice of the sun. The sun gets cornered by the virgin and when the forces are equal (Libra), the sun commits suicide, and then comes a clear descent into the mother. There is a legend that when the scorpion is surrounded by fire it kills itself.

Sagittarius The death of the sun. Death is a sort of river or gap. There is a life beyond, but one is here on this bank of the river and cannot get there. Then comes the legend of the centaur, a good archer, who with his bow can send an arrow across. It is a means of communication. The archer Sagittarius with the arrow of intuition foresees new birth out of the unconscious. This is the advent season, when ghosts begin to walk again, when the unconscious begins to manifest itself.

Capricorn The goat-fish. (This was the imperial sign on the coat-of-arms of Augustus Caesar.) After the dead man contained in the sea, the next sign is this goat-fi sh. He is half fish and half goat, meaning that at first, as the fish, he is deep down in the sea, out of sight in the unconscious. Then he rises to the surface and climbs to the highest peaks and valleys. This is the sun, the promise of the new year, so some astrologers call the time after Christmas the “Promise of the Year.” It is the time of the birth of Mithras, the birth of Christ, the birth of the new light, the whole hope of the coming year. People born then have strong hearts. They are ambitious, but they have to work hard to achieve their ends.

But the new year has to be generated. The sun generates the year in Aquarius. Aquarius pours out the waters of fecundity. He is also shown as a phallic god like Priapus. After the generating water the Fishes come again, and so on around. This is how the Zodiac came into existence. It is really a seasonal cycle with particular qualities of climate – winter, spring, summer, autumn, qualified by the fantasies and metaphorical imagination of the human mind. And so man has called the stars that are synchronous with the seasons by names expressing the qualities of each particular season. The active principle is obviously the time and not at all the stars, they are merely incidental. If, at the time when astrology came into conscious existence, other constellations had been in the heavens, we would have had different groups of stars but they would have been called a lion or a man carrying a water-jug just the same. They are not at all like their names, even the most striking constellations. It is a tremendous strain for the imagination. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 408-409

In Picture 10, begun in Zurich but only completed when Miss X again visited her motherland, we find the same division as before into above and below. The “soul-flower” in the centre is the same, but it is surrounded on all sides by a dark blue night sky, in which we see the four phases of the moon, the new moon coinciding with the world of darkness below. The three birds have become two. Their plumage has darkened, but on the other hand the goat has turned into two semi-human creatures with horns and light faces, and only two of the four snakes remain. A notable innovation is the appearance of two crabs in the lower, chthonic hemisphere that also represents the body. The crab has essentially the same meaning as the astrological sign Cancer. Unfortunately Miss X gave no context here. In such cases it is usually worth investigating what use has been made in the past of the object in question. In earlier, prescientific ages hardly any distinction was drawn between long-tailed crabs ( Macrura , crayfish) and short-tailed crabs ( Brachyura ). As a zodiacal sign Cancer signifies resurrection , because the crab sheds its shell. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 604

The ancients had in mind chiefly Pagurus bernhardus , the hermit crab. It hides in its shell and cannot be attacked. Therefore it signifies caution and foresight , knowledge of coming events. 8 It “depends on the moon, and waxes with it.” 9 It is worth noting that the crab appears just in the mandala in which we see the phases of the moon for the first time. Astrologically, Cancer is the house of the moon. Because of its backwards and sideways movement, it plays the role of an unlucky animal in superstition and colloquial speech (“crabbed,” “catch a crab,” etc.). Since ancient times cancer ( καρκίνος ) has been the name for a malignant tumour of the glands. Cancer is the zodiacal sign in which the sun begins to retreat, when the days grow shorter. Pseudo-Kallisthenes relates that crabs dragged Alexander’s ships down into the sea.  “Karkinos” was the name of the crab that bit Heracles in the foot in his fight with the Lernaean monster. In gratitude, Hera set her accomplice among the stars. In astrology, Cancer is a feminine and watery sign, and the summer solstice takes place in it. In the melothesiae  it is correlated with the breast . It rules over the Western sea. In Propertius it makes a sinister appearance: “OctipedisCancri terga sinistra time” (Fear thou the ill-omened back of the eight-footed crab). De Gubernatis says: “The crab . . . causes now the death of the solar hero and now that of the monster.” The Panchatantra (V, 2) relates how a crab, which the mother gave to her son as apotropaic magic, saved his life by killing a black snake. As De Gubernatis thinks, the crab stands now for the sun and now for the moon, according to whether it goes forwards or backwards. ~Carl Jung CW 9i, Para 605

Miss X was born in the first degrees of Cancer (actually about 3°). She knew her horoscope and was well aware of the significance of the moment of birth; that is, she realized that the degree of the rising sign (the ascendent) conditions the individuality of the horoscope. Since she obviously guessed the horoscope’s affinity with the mandala, she introduced her individual sign into the painting that was meant to express her psychic self.  ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 606

The essential conclusion to be drawn from Picture 10 is that the dualities which run through it are always inwardly balanced, so that they lose their sharpness and incompatibility. As Multatuli says: “Nothing is quite true, and even that is not quite true.” But this loss of strength is counterbalanced by the unity of the centre, where the lamp shines, sending out coloured rays to the eight points of the compass.  ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 607

Dr. Jung: That story exactly expresses what the primitives think about hair, so here it would be a symbol which contains a lot of mana. The same meaning is also to be found in the story of Samson and Delilah: when she cuts his hair, he loses all his strength. The name Samson comes from Shemsh which means sun-man or little sun, after the old Canaanite god Shemsh; so curtailing the rays of the sun means weakening the sun. There is an astrological interpretation of Delilah as the sign of Virgo, in which the sun loses its power, Virgo being followed by the autumnal equinox when the sun is definitely becoming weaker; the sun then loses its hair, its rays. So the hair is understood to be an emanation of the head, having to do with the mind and the most spiritual as well as magical forces. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 198

Dr. Jung: Ah, you mean the taurabolia . Yes, that is right. And there is an old astrological connection between the bull and the mother. The syncretistic cults of that era were based very largely upon astrological facts. On the Mithraic altar-stones, for instance, are the sun and the moon and the signs of the zodiac, it is evident that they are meant as astrological symbols. In the Christian cult it was more hidden, but the philosophical systems of the time were filled with astrological connotations. The bull in astrology is an earthly sign, it is the domicilium Veneris . ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 486

The cult of Attis belongs to the great group of mother cults, Attis is very much the son of the Great Mother; so the bull is very much connected with the cult of the Magna Mater.  ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 486

Our loveliest mountain, which dominates Switzerland far and wide, is called the Jungfrau – the “Virgin.” The Virgin Mary is the female patron saint of the Swiss. Of her Tertullian says: “. . . that virgin earth, not yet watered by the rains,” and Augustine: “Truth has arisen from the earth, because Christ is born of a virgin.” These are living reminders that the virgin mother is the earth. From olden times the astrological sign for Switzerland was either Virgo or Taurus; both are earth-signs, a sure indication that the earthy character of the Swiss had not escaped the old astrologers. From the earth-boundness of the Swiss come all their bad as well as their good qualities: their down-to-earthness, their limited outlook, their non-spirituality, their parsimony, stolidity, stubbornness, dislike of foreigners, mistrustfulness, as well as that awful Schwizerdütsch and their refusal to be bothered, or to put it in political terms, their neutrality. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 914

Sitting in the central mussel-shell, we [the Swiss] are the “sons of the mother.” Hence the old astrological tradition says that our zodiacal sign is Virgo. However, there is no unanimity on this score, since the other version says that our sign is Taurus. It is a virile, creative sign, but earthly like Virgo. This ancient psychological insight expresses the fact that what is enclosed in the mother is a germinating seed that will one day burst through. . . . The stolidity, inaccessibility, obstinacy, and whatever else of the kind the Swiss are accused of are all marks of the feminine element Virgo. The union of and alludes to the principium individuationis as a supreme union of opposites . . . ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, 25, Page 419

I would hazard that we have to do here with a tetrameria (as in Greek alchemy), a transformation process divided into four stages of three parts each, analogous to the twelve transformations of the zodiac and its division into four. As not infrequently happens, the number 12 would then have a not merely individual significance (as the patient’s birth number, for instance), but a time-conditioned one too, since the present aeon of the Fishes is drawing to its end and is at the same time the twelfth house of the zodiac.  ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 552

Horses also signify fi re and light, like the fiery horses of Helios. Hector’s horses were called Xanthos (yellow, glaring), Podargos (swift-footed), Lampos (shining), and Aithon (burning). Siegfried leaps over the wall of fi re on the thunder-horse Grani, who was sired by Sleipnir and was the only one capable of taking the fiery hedge. There is a distinct fi re symbolism in the mysticquadriga mentioned by Dio Chrysostom: the highest god always drives his chariot round in a circle. The chariot is drawn by four horses, and the outside horse moves very quickly. He has a shining coat, bearing on it the signs of the zodiac and the constellations. The second horse goes more slowly and is illuminated on one side only. The third horse is slower still, and the fourth horse runs round himself. Once, however, the outside horse set the mane of the second horse on fi re with his fiery breath, and the third horse drenched the fourth with streams of sweat. Then the horses dissolve and merge with the substance of the strongest and most fiery, which now becomes the charioteer. The horses represent the four elements. The catastrophe signifies world conflagration and the deluge, after which the division of God into Many ceases, and the divine One is restored. 27 There can be no doubt that the quadriga is meant as an astronomical symbol of Time. We saw in Part I that the Stoic conception of fate is a fire-symbol, so it is a logical continuation of this idea when the closely related conception of time exhibits the same libido symbolism. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 423

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says: Dawn is the head of the sacrificial horse, the sun his eye, the wind his breath, the universal fire his open mouth. The year is the body of the sacrificial horse. The sky is his back, the air his belly, the earth the underpart of his belly. The poles are his flanks, the intermediate poles his ribs, the seasons his limbs, the months and half-months his joints, days and nights his feet, the stars his bones, the clouds his flesh. Sand is the food in his stomach, rivers are his entrails. His liver and lungs are the mountains; plants and trees, his hair. The rising sun is his forepart, the setting sun his hindpart. . . . The ocean is his kinsman, the sea his cradle. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 424

Here the horse is undoubtedly conceived as a time-symbol, besides being the whole world. In the Mithraic religion we meet with a strange god, Aion (pl. XLIV), also called Chronos or deus leontocephalus because he is conventionally represented as a lion-headed human figure. He stands in a rigid attitude, wrapped in the coils of a serpent whose head juts forward over the head of the lion. In each hand he holds a key, on his breast is a thunderbolt, on his back are the four wings of the wind, and on his body are the signs of the zodiac. His attributes are a cock and implements. In the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter, which was based on classical models, Aion is shown as a naked man bearing in his hand a snake. As the name indicates, he is a time-symbol, and is composed entirely of libido-images. The lion, the zodiacal sign for the torrid heat of summer, is the symbol of concupiscentia effrenata , “frenzied desire.” (“My soul roars with the voice of a hungry lion,” says Mechthild of Magdeburg.) In the Mithraic mysteries the snake is often shown as the antagonist of the lion, in accordance with the myth of the sun’s fight with the dragon. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tum is addressed as a tom-cat, because in that form he fought the Apophis-serpent. To be “entwined” or embraced is the same as to be “devoured,” which as we saw means entering into the mother’s womb. Time is thus defined by the rising and setting sun, by the death and renewal of libido, the dawning and extinction of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 425

The attribute of the cock again points to time, and the implements to creation through time (Bergson’s “durée créatrice”). Oazdes (Ahura-Mazda) and Ahriman came into being through Zrwan akarana , “infinitely long duration.” So time, this empty and purely formal concept, is expressed in the mysteries through transformations of the creative force, libido, just as time in physics is identical with the flow of the energic process. Macrobius remarks: “By the lion’s head the present time is indicated . . . because its condition is strong and fervent.” 31 Philo Judaeus evidently knows better: Time is regarded as a god by evil men who wish to hide the Essential Being. . . . Vicious men think that Time is the cause of the world, but the wise and good think it is God. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para  ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 425

There is a similar instinct-sacrificing symbolism in the Mithraic religion, where the essential portions of the mystery consisted in the catching and subduing of the bull. A parallel figure to Mithras is the Original Man, Gayomart. He was created together with his ox, and the two lived in a state of bliss for six thousand years. But when the world entered the aeon of Libra (the seventh zodiacal sign), the evil principle broke loose. In astrology, Libra is known as the “Positive House” of Venus, so the evil principle came under the dominion of the goddess of love, who personifies the erotic aspect of the mother. Since this aspect, as we have seen, is psychologically extremely dangerous, the classical catastrophe threatened to overtake the son. As a result of this constellation, Gayomart and his ox died only thirty years later. (The trials of Zarathustra also lasted for thirty years.) Fifty-five species of grain and twelve kinds of healing plants came from the dead ox. His seed entered into the moon for purification, but the seed of Gayomart entered into the sun. This seems to suggest that the bull has a hidden feminine significance. Gosh or Drvashpa was the bull’s soul and it was worshipped as a female divinity. At first she was so faint-hearted that she refused to become the goddess of cattle until, as a consolation, the coming of Zarathustra was announced to her. This has its parallel in the Purana where the earth received the promise of Krishna’s coming. 33 Like Ardvisura, the goddess of love, Gosh rides in a chariot. So the bull-anima appears to be decidedly feminine. In astrology Taurus, too, is a House of Venus. The myth of Gayomart repeats in modified form the primitive “closed circle” of a self-reproducing masculine and feminine divinity. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 662

“A great heat went through me and when I lifted my foot I saw marked upon the sole, a Chinese dragon twined upon a cross, and above the cross the head of a lion.” ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1037

1. JUNG: Yes, the bristling mane of the lion symbolizes the rays of the sun, like the hair of Samson. And the lion astrologically is the domicilium solis , 34 it is the sign between the 21st of July and the 24th of August, when the sun is at its greatest power. So this lion can stand for this sun but in the particular aspect of the lion. For the sun, or whatever the sun means, can be symbolized in many different ways; if by the lion, it would mean power of a special kind, in the form of a powerful animal, not of a powerful man. The sun is also symbolized by the face of Moses, with the horns meaning radiation, therefore they would be the horns of power. And his face radiated such light when he came down from Sinai that only when it was veiled could the people gaze upon it; that would be the sun in the form of enlightened man. Also the sun is symbolized by the crown of Helios, the sun god, the radiation or the crown of sun rays which the old Caesars used to wear; one sees it chiefly on Roman coins. There the sun would express the human mind or understanding, or the human spirit, it would be a specifically human quality. But here the sun is in the form of the animal. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1028
2. JUNG: Yes, those of you who have been in Luxor remember that great statue of the goddess Sekhmet. It is made of the most beautiful black basalt, and she has the head of a lioness. She personified the terrible destructive power of Ra, or the sun at its height, at the hottest time of the year.

Symeon, the “New Theologian” (970–1040), says: My tongue lacks words, and what happens in me my spirit sees clearly but does not explain. It sees the Invisible, that emptiness of all forms, simple throughout, not complex, and in extent infinite. For it sees no beginning, and it sees no end, and is entirely unconscious of any middle, and does not know what to call that which it sees. Something complete appears, it seems to me, not indeed with the thing itself, but through a kind of participation . For you enkindle fi re from fi re, and you receive the whole fi re; but this thing remains undiminished and undivided as before. Similarly, that which is imparted separates itself from the first, and spreads like something corporeal into many lights. But this is something spiritual, immeasurable, indivisible, and inexhaustible. For it is not separated when it becomes many, but remains undivided, and is in me, and rises in my poor heart like a sun or circular disc of the sun, like light, for it is a light. 35 ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1028

That the thing perceived as an inner light, as the sun of the other world, is an emotional component of the psyche, is clear from Symeon’s words:

And questing after it, my spirit sought to comprehend the splendour it had seen, but found it not as a creature and could not get away from created things, that it might embrace that uncreated and uncomprehended splendour. Nevertheless it wandered everywhere and strove to behold it. It searched through the air, it wandered over the heavens, it crossed the abysses, it searched, so it seemed, to the ends of the world. 36 But in all that it found nothing, for all was created. And I lamented and was sorrowful, and my heart burned, and I lived as one distraught in mind. But it came as it was wont, and descending like a luminous cloud, seemed to envelop my whole head, so that I cried out dismayed. But flying away again it left me alone. And when I wearily sought it, I realized suddenly that it was within me, and in the midst of my heart it shone like the light of a spherical sun. 37 ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 141

Amenophis IV achieved, by his reforms, a psychologically valuable work of interpretation. He united all the bull, ram, crocodile, and pile-dwelling  gods into the sun-disc, and made it clear that their various attributes were compatible with those of the sun. A similar fate overtook Hellenic and Roman polytheism as a result of the syncretistic strivings of later centuries. An excellent illustration of this is in the beautiful prayer of Lucius to the Queen of Heaven (the moon): Queen of heaven, whether thou be named Ceres, bountiful mother of earthly fruits, or heavenly Venus, or Phoebus’ sister, or Proserpina, who strikest terror with midnight ululations . . . . thou that with soft feminine brightness dost illume the walls of all cities . . .  ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 138

Not a few traces of sun-worship are preserved in ecclesiastical art, for instance the nimbus round the head of Christ, and the haloes of the saints. Numerous fire- and light-symbols are attributed to the saints in Christian legend.  The twelve apostles, for example, were likened to the twelve signs of the zodiac and were therefore represented each with a star over his head.  No wonder the heathen, as Tertullian reports, took the sun for the God of the Christians! “Some, in a more human and probable way, believe the Sun to be our god.”  Among the Manichees the sun actually was God. One of the most remarkable records of this period, an amalgam of pagan-Asiatic, Hellenistic, and Christian beliefs, is the, ‘Εξηϒησις περι τϖν εν ΙΙερσιδι πραχθεντων ,  a book of fables which affords deep insight into syncretistic symbolism. There we find the following magical dedication: Διι ‘Ηλιω θεϖ μεϒαλω βασιλει ‘Ιησον. In certain parts of Armenia, Christians still pray to the rising sun, that it may “let its foot rest on the face of the worshipper.”  ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 163

Before I enter upon the contents of this second part, it seems necessary to cast a backward glance over the singular train of thought which the analysis of the poem “The Moth to the Sun” has revealed. Although this poem is very different from the preceding “Hymn of Creation,” closer investigation of the longing for the sun has led us into a realm of mythological ideas that are closely related to those considered in the first poem: the Creator God, whose dual nature was plainly apparent in the case of Job, has now taken on an astromythological, or rather an astrological, character. He has become the sun, and thus finds a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and his counterpart the devil. The sun, as Renan has observed, is the only truly “rational” image of God, whether we adopt the standpoint of the primitive savage or of modern science. In either case the sun is the father-god from whom all living things draw life; he is the fructifier and creator, the source of energy for our world. The discord into which the human soul has fallen can be harmoniously resolved through the sun as a natural object which knows no inner conflict. The sun is not only beneficial, but also destructive; hence the zodiacal sign for August heat is the ravaging lion which Samson  slew in order to rid the parched earth of its torment. Yet it is in the nature of the sun to scorch, and its scorching power seems natural to man. It shines equally on the just and the unjust, and allows useful creatures to flourish as well as the harmful. Therefore the sun is perfectly suited to represent the visible God of this world, i.e., the creative power of our own soul, which we call libido, and whose nature it is to bring forth the useful and the harmful, the good and the bad. That this comparison is not just a matter of words can be seen from the teachings of the mystics: when they descend into the depths of their own being they find “in their heart” the image of the sun, they find their own life-force which they call the “sun” for a legitimate and, I would say, a physical reason, because our source of energy and life actually is the sun. Our physiological life, regarded as an energy process, is entirely solar. The peculiar nature of this solar energy as inwardly perceived by the mystic is made clear in Indian mythology. The following passages, referring to Rudra, are taken from the Shvetashvatara Upanishad: There is one Rudra only, they do not allow a second, who rules all the worlds by his powers. Behind all creatures he stands, the Protector; having  treated them, he gathers all beings together at the end of time. He has eyes on all sides, faces on all sides, arms on all sides, feet on all sides. He is the one God who created heaven and earth, forging all things together with his hands and wings. You who are the source and origin of the gods, the ruler of all, Rudra, the great seer, who of old gave birth to the Golden Seed – give us enlightenment! ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 176

The symbol for that portion of the zodiac in which the sun re-enters the yearly cycle at the time of the winter solstice is Capricorn, originally known as the “Goat-Fish” (αίγόχερως, “goat-horned”): the sun mounts like a goat to the tops of the highest mountains, and then plunges into the depths of the sea like a fish. The fish in dreams occasionally signifies the unborn child, because the child before its birth lives in the water like a fish; similarly, when the sun sinks into the sea, it becomes child and fish at once. The fish is therefore a symbol of renewal and rebirth. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para  290

The journey of Moses with his servant Joshua is a life-journey (it lasted eighty years). They grow old together and lose the life-force, i.e., the fish, which “in wondrous wise took its way to the sea” (setting of the sun). When the two notice their loss, they discover at the place where the source life is found (where the dead fish revived and sprang into the sea) Khidr wrapped in his mantle, sitting on the ground. In another version he was sitting on an island in sea, “in the wettest place on earth,” which means that he had just been born from the maternal depths. Where the fish vanished Khidr, the Verdant One, was born as a “son of the watery deep,” his head veiled, proclaiming divine wisdom, like the Babylonian Oannes-Ea, who was represented in fish form and daily came out of the sea as a fish to teach the people wisdom. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 291

Oannes’ name was brought into connection with John’s. With the rising of the reborn sun the fish that dwelt in darkness, surrounded by all the terrors of night and death, becomes the shining, fiery day-star. This gives the words f John the Baptist a special significance (Matthew 3:11): I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance; but he that cometh after me is mightier than I . . . he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 292

Following Vollers, we may compare Khidr and Elias (or Moses and his servant Joshua) with Gilgamesh and his brother Eabani (Enkidu). Gilgamesh wanders through the world, driven by fear and longing, to find immortality. His journey takes him across the sea to the wise Utnapishtim (Noah), who knows how to cross the waters of death. There Gilgamesh has to dive down to the bottom of the sea for the magical herb that is to lead him back to the land of men. On the return journey he is accompanied by an immortal mariner, who, banished by the curse of Utnapishtim, has been forbidden to return to the land of the blessed. But when Gilgamesh arrives home, a serpent steals the magic herb from him (i.e., the  fish slips back into the sea). Because of the loss of the magic herb, Gilgamesh’s journey has been in vain; instead he comes back in the company of an immortal, whose fate we cannot learn from the fragments of the epic. Jensen  believes that this banished immortal is the prototype of Ahasuerus. Once again we meet the motif of the Dioscuri: mortal and immortal, the setting and rising sun. The Mithraic bull-sacrifice is often represented as flanked by the two dadophors, Gautes and Cautopates, one with a raised and the other with a lowered torch. They form a pair of brothers whose characters are revealed by the symbolic position of the torches. Cumont not unjustly connects them with the sepulchral Erotes, who as genies with inverted torches have a traditional meaning. One would stand for death, the other for life. There are certain points of resemblance between the Mithraic sacrifice (where the bull in the centre is flanked on either side by dadophors and the Christian  sacrifice of the lamb (or ram). The Crucified is traditionally flanked by two thieves, one of whom ascends to paradise while the other descends to hell. The Semitic gods were often flanked by two paredroi ; for instance, the Baal of Edessa was accompanied by Aziz and Monimos (Baal being astrologically interpreted as the sun, and Aziz and Monimos as Mars and Mercury). According to the Babylonian view, the gods are grouped into triads. Thus the two thieves somehow go together with Christ. The two dadophors are, as Cumont has shown, offshoots 61 from the main figure of Mithras, who was supposed to have a secret triadic character. Dionysius the Areopagite reports that the magicians held a feast in honour of τοϋ τρι-πλασίου Μίθρον (the threefold Mithras). ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 293

As Cumont observes, Cautes and Cautopates sometimes carry in their hands the head of a bull and of a scorpion respectively. Taurus and Scorpio are equinoctial signs, and this is a clear indication that the sacrifice was primarily connected with the sun cycle: the rising sun that sacrifices itself at the summer solstice, and the setting sun. Since it was not easy to represent sunrise and sunset in the sacrificial drama, this idea had to be shown outside it. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 295

We have already pointed out that the Dioscuri represent a similar idea in somewhat different form: one sun is mortal, the other immortal. As this whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal. Man is mortal, yet there are exceptions who are immortal, or there is something immortal in us. Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de Saint-Germain, are our immortal part which continues intangibly to exist. The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of all life. 66 The life of the psyche is the life of mankind. Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race, since the individual is, biologically speaking, only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 296

The psychic life-force, the libido, symbolizes itself in the sun or personifies itself in figures of heroes with solar attributes. At the same time it expresses itself through phallic symbols. Both possibilities are found on a late Babylonian gem from Lajard’s collection. In the middle stands an androgynous deity. On the masculine side there is a snake with a sun halo round its head; on the feminine side another snake with a sickle moon above it. This picture has a symbolic sexual nuance: on the masculine side there is a lozenge, a favourite symbol of the female genitals, and on the feminine side a wheel without its rim. The spokes are thickened at the ends into knobs, which, like the fingers we mentioned earlier, have a phallic meaning. It seems to be a phallic wheel such as was not unknown in antiquity. There are obscene gems on which Cupid is shown turning a wheel consisting entirely of phalli. As to what the sun signifies, I discovered in the collection of antiquities at Verona a late Roman inscription with the following symbols. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 297

The symbolism is plain: sun = phallus, moon = vessel (uterus). This interpretation is confirmed by another monument from the same collection. The symbols are the same, except that the vessel has been replaced by the figure of a woman. Certain symbols on coins can probably be interpreted in a similar manner. In Lajards Recherches sur la culte de Vénus there is a coin from Perga, showing Artemis as a conical stone flanked by a masculine figure (alleged to be the deity Men) and a female figure (alleged to be Artemis). Men (otherwise called Lunus) appears on an Attic bas-relief with a spear, flanked by Pan with  a club, and a female figure. From this it is clear that sexuality as well as the sun can be used to symbolize the libido. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 298

One further point deserves mention here. The dadophor Cautopates is often represented with a cock and pine-cones. These are the attributes of the Phrygian god Men, whose cult was very widespread. He was shown with the pileus (or “Phrygian cap”) and pine-cones, riding on the cock, and also in the form of a boy, just as the dadophors were boyish figures. (This latter characteristic relates both them and Men to the Cabiri and Dactyls.) Now Men has affinities with Attis, the son and lover of Cybele. In Imperial times Men and Attis merged into one. Attis also wears the pileus like Men, Mithras, and the dadophors. As the son and lover of his mother he raises the incest problem. Incest leads logically to ritual castration in the Attis-Cybele cult; for according to legend the hero, driven mad by his mother, mutilates himself. I must refrain from going into this question more deeply at present, as I would prefer to discuss the incest problem at the end of this book. Here I would only point out that the incest motif is bound to arise, because when the regressing libido is introverted for internal or external reasons it always reactivates the parental imagos and thus apparently re-establishes the infantile relationship. But this relationship cannot be re-established, because the libido is an adult libido which is already bound to sexuality and inevitably imports an incompatible, incestuous character into the reactivated relationship to the parents. It is this sexual character that now gives rise to the incest symbolism. Since incest must be avoided at all costs, the result is either the death of the son lover or his self-castration as punishment for the incest he has committed, or else the sacrifice of instinctuality, and especially of sexuality, as a means of preventing or expiating the incestuous longing. Sex being one of the most obvious examples of instinctuality, it is sex which is liable to be most affected by these sacrificial measures, i.e., through abstinence. The heroes are usually wanderers, and wandering is a symbol of longing, of the restless urge which never finds its object, of nostalgia for the lost mother. The sun comparison can easily be taken in this sense: the heroes are like the wandering sun, from which it is concluded that the myth of the hero is a solar myth. It seems to us, rather, that he is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 299

. . . The relation of Mars to Venus can reveal a love relation, but a marriage is not always a love relation and a love relation is not always a marriage. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 879

A remarkable contribution to the role of feminine psychology in alchemy is furnished by the letter which the English theologian and alchemist, John Pordage, wrote to his soror mystica Jane Leade. In it he gives her spiritual instruction concerning the opus. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 506

This sacred furnace, this Balneum Mariae , this glass phial, this secret furnace, is the place, the matrix or womb, and the centre from which the divine Tincture flows forth from its source and origin. Of the place or abode where the Tincture has its home and dwelling I need not remind you, nor name its name, but I exhort you only to knock at the foundation. Solomon tells us in his Song that its inner dwelling is not far from the navel, which resembles a round goblet filled with the sacred liquor of the pure Tincture. You know the fire of the philosophers, it was the key they kept concealed. . . . The fi re is the love-fi re, the life that flows forth from the Divine Venus, or the Love of God; the fire of Mars is too choleric, too sharp, and too fierce, so that it would dry up and burn the materia : wherefore the love-fi re of Venus alone has the qualities of the right true fire. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 507

This true philosophy will teach you how you should know yourself, and if you know yourself rightly, you will also know the pure nature; for the pure nature is in yourself. And when you know the pure nature which is your true selfhood, freed from all wicked, sinful selfishness, then also you will know God, for the Godhead is concealed and wrapped in the pure nature like a kernel in the nutshell. . . . The true philosophy will teach you who is the father and who is the mother of this magical child. . . . The father of this child is Mars, he is the fiery life which proceeds from Mars as the father’s quality. His mother is Venus, who is the gentle love-fire proceeding from the son’s quality. Here then, in the qualities and forms of nature, you see male and female, man and wife, bride and bridegroom, the first marriage or wedding of Galilee, which is celebrated between Mars and Venus when they return from their fallen state. Mars, or the husband, must become a godly man, otherwise the pure Venus will take him neither into the conjugal nor into the sacred marriage bed. Venus must become a pure virgin, a virginal wife, otherwise the wrathful jealous Mars in his wrath-fi re will not wed with her nor live with her in union; but instead of agreement and harmony, there will be naught but strife, jealousy, discord, and enmity among the qualities of nature. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 508

Accordingly, if you think to become a learned artist, look with earnestness to the union of your own Mars and Venus, that the nuptial knot be rightly tied and the marriage between them well and truly consummated. You must see to it that they lie together in the bed of their union and live in sweet harmony; then the virgin Venus will bring forth her pearl, her water-spirit, in you, to soften the fiery spirit of Mars, and the wrathful fire of Mars will sink quite willingly, in mildness and love, into the love-fire of Venus, and thus both qualities, as fi re and water , will mingle together, agree, and flow into one another; and from their agreement and union there will proceed the fist conception of the magical birth which we call Tincture, the love-fi re Tincture. Now although the Tincture is conceived in the womb of your humanity and is awakened to life, yet there is still a great danger, and it is to be feared that, because it is still in the body or womb, it may yet be spoiled by neglect before it be brought in due season into the light. On this account you must look round for a good nurse, who will watch it in its childhood and will tend it properly: and such must be your own pure heart and your own virginal will. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 509

This child, this tincturing life, must be assayed, proved, and tried in the qualities of nature; and here again great anxiety and danger will arise, seeing that it must suffer the damage of temptation in the body and womb, and you may thus lose the birth. For the delicate Tincture, this tender child of life, must descend into the forms and qualities of nature, that it may suffer and endure temptation and overcome it; it must needs descend into the Divine Darkness, into the darkness of Saturn, wherein no light of life is to be seen: there it must be held captive, and be bound with the chains of darkness, and must live from the food which the prickly Mercurius will give it to eat, which to the Divine Tincture of life is naught but dust and ashes, poison and gall, fire and brimstone. It must enter into the fierce wrathful Mars, by whom (as happened to Jonah in the belly of hell) it is Astrological symbolism swallowed, and must experience the curse of God’s wrath; also it must be tempted by Lucifer and the million devils who dwell in the quality of the wrathful fire. And here the divine artist in this philosophical work will see the first colour, where the Tincture appears in its blackness, and it is the blackest black; the learned philosophers call it their black crow, or their black raven, or again their blessed and blissful black; for in the darkness of this black is hidden the light of lights in the quality of Saturn; and in this poison and gall there is hidden in Mercurius the most precious medicament against the poison, namely the life of life. And the blessed Tincture is hidden in the fury or wrath and curse of Mars. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 510

Now it seems to the artist that all his work is lost. What has become of the Tincture? Here is nothing that is apparent, that can be perceived, recognized, or tasted, but darkness, most painful death, a hellish fearful fi re, nothing but the wrath and curse of God; yet he does not see that the Tincture of Life is in this putrefaction or dissolution and destruction, that there is light in this darkness, life in this death, love in this fury and wrath, and in this poison the highest and most precious Tincture and medicament against all poison and sickness. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 511

The old philosophers named this work or labour their descension, their cineration, their pulverization, their death, their putrefaction of the materia of the stone, their corruption, their caput mortuum . You must not despise this blackness, or black colour, but persevere in it in patience, in suffering, and in silence, until its forty days of temptation are over, until the days of its tribulations are completed, when the seed of life shall waken to life, shall rise up, sublimate or glorify itself, transform itself into whiteness, purify and sanctify itself, give itself the redness, in other words, transfigure and fix its shape. When the work is brought thus far, it is an easy work: for the learned philosophers have said that the making of the stone is then woman’s work and child’s play. Therefore, if the human will is given over and left, and becomes patient and still and as a dead nothing, the Tincture will do and effect everything in us and for us, if we can keep our thoughts, movements, and  imaginations still, or can leave off and rest. But how difficult, hard, and bitter this work appears to the human will, before it can be brought to this shape, so that it remains still and calm even though all the fi re be let loose in its sight, and all manner of temptations assail it! ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 512

Here, as you see, there is great danger, and the Tincture of life can easily be spoiled and the fruit wasted in the womb, when it is thus surrounded on all sides and assailed by so many devils and so many tempting essences. But if it can withstand and overcome this fiery trial and sore temptation, and win the victory: then you will see the beginning of its resurrection from hell, death, and the mortal grave, appearing first in the quality of Venus; and then the Tincture of life will itself burst forth mightily from the prison of the dark Saturn, through the hell of the poisonous Mercurius, and through the curse and direful death of God’s wrath that burns and flames in Mars, and the gentle love-fi re of the Venus quality will gain the upper hand, and the love-fire Tincture will be preferred in the government and have supreme command. And then the gentleness and love-fire of Divine Venus will reign as lord and king in and over all qualities. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 513

Nevertheless there is still another danger that the work of the stone may yet miscarry. Therefore the artist must wait until he sees the Tincture covered over with its other colour, as with the whitest white, which he may expect to see after long patience and stillness, and which truly appears when the Tincture rises up in the lunar quality: illustrious Luna imparts a beautiful white to the Tincture, the most perfect white hue and a brilliant splendour. And thus is the darkness transformed into light, and death into life. And this brilliant whiteness awakens joy and hope in the heart of the artist, that the work has gone so well and fallen out so happily. For now the white colour reveals to the enlightened eye of the soul cleanliness, innocence, holiness, simplicity, heavenly-mindedness, and righteousness, and with these the Tincture is henceforth clothed over and over as with a garment. She is radiant as the moon, beautiful as the dawn. Now the divine virginity of the tincturing life shines forth, and no spot or wrinkle nor any other blemish is to be seen. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 514

The old masters were wont to call this work their white swan, their albification, or making white, their sublimation, their distillation, their circulation, their purification, their separation, their sanctification, and their resurrection, because the Tincture is made white like a shining silver. It is sublimed or exalted and transfigured by reason of its many descents into Saturn, Mercurius, and Mars, and by its many ascents into Venus and Luna. This is the distillation, the Balneum Mariae: because the Tincture is purified in the qualities of nature through the many distillations of the water, blood, and heavenly dew of the Divine Virgin Sophia, and, through the manifold circulation in and out of the forms and qualities of nature, is made white and pure, like brilliantly polished silver. And all uncleanliness of the blackness, all death, hell, curse, wrath, and all poison which rise up out of the qualities of Saturn, Mercury, and Mars are separated and depart, wherefore they call it their separation, and when the Tincture attains its whiteness and brilliance in Venus and Luna they call it their sanctification, their purification and making white. They call it their resurrection, because the white rises up out of the black, and the divine virginity and purity out of the poison of Mercurius and out of the red fiery rage and wrath of Mars. . . . ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 515

Now is the stone shaped, the elixir of life prepared, the lovechild or the child of love born, the new birth completed, and the work made whole and perfect. Farewell! fall, hell, curse, death, dragon, beast, and serpent! Good night! mortality, fear, sorrow, and misery! For now redemption, salvation, and recovery of everything that was lost will again come to pass within and without, for now you have the great secret and mystery of the whole world; you have the Pearl of Love; you have the unchangeable eternal essence of Divine Joy from which all healing virtue and all multiplying power come, from which there actively proceeds the active power of the Holy Ghost. You have the seed of the woman who has trampled on the head of the serpent. You have the seed of the virgin and the blood of the virgin in one essence and quality. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 516

O wonder of wonders! You have the tincturing Tincture, the pearl of the virgin, which has three essences or qualities in one; it has body, soul, and spirit, it has fire, light, and joy, it has the Father’s quality, it has the Son’s quality, and has also the Holy Ghost’s quality, even all these three, in one fixed and eternal essence and being. This is the Son of the Virgin, this is her first-born, this is the noble hero, the trampler of the serpent, and he who casts the dragon under his feet and tramples upon him. . . . For now the Man of Paradise is become clear as a transparent glass, in which the Divine Sun shines through and through, like gold that is wholly bright, pure, and clear, without blemish or spot. The soul is henceforth a most substantial seraphic angel, she can make herself doctor, theologian, astrologer, divine magician, she can make herself whatsoever she will, and do and have whatsoever she will: for all qualities have but one will in agreement and harmony. And this same one will is God’s eternal infallible will; and from henceforth the Divine Man is in his own nature become one with God. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 517

This hymn-like myth of love, virgin, mother, and child sounds extremely feminine, but in reality it is an archetypal conception sprung from the masculine unconscious, where the Virgin Sophia corresponds to the anima (in the psychological sense). 81 As is shown by the symbolism and by the not very clear distinction between her and the son, she is also the “paradisal” or “divine” being, i.e., the self. The fact that these ideas and figures were still mystical for Pordage and more or less undifferentiated is explained by the emotional nature of the experiences which he himself describes. 82 Experiences of this kind leave little room for critical understanding. They do, however, throw light on the processes hidden behind the alchemical symbolism and pave the way for the discoveries of modern medical psychology. Unfortunately we possess no original treatises that can with any certainty be ascribed to a woman author. Consequently we do not know what kind of alchemical symbolism a woman’s view would have produced. Nevertheless, modern medical practice tells us that the feminine unconscious produces a symbolism which, by and large, is compensatory to the masculine. In that case, to use Pordage’s terms, the leitmotiv would not be gentle Venus but fiery Mars, not Sophia but Hecate, Demeter, and Persephone, or the matriarchal Kali of southern India in her brighter and darker aspects. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 518

As to the interpretation [of a mandala] based on comparative historical material, we are in a more favourable position, at least as regards the general aspects of this figure. We have at our disposal, firstly, the whole mandala symbolism of three continents, and secondly, the specific time symbolism of the mandala as this developed under the influence of astrology, particularly in the West. The Planetary and zodiacal symbolism horoscope [see Figure 4.6 ] is itself a mandala (a clock) with a dark centre, and leftward circumambulatio with “houses” and planetary phases. The mandalas of ecclesiastical art, particularly those on the floor before the high altar or beneath the transept, make frequent use of zodiacal beasts or the yearly seasons. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 314

Jung noted: “Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting point you select, falls between AD 2000 and 2200” (CW 9ii, Para149, note 88). ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 274.

So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1496.

Synchronous events are widely accepted in Chinese philosophy and are the basis of astrology. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.

the Creator God [takes] on an astromythological, or rather an astrological, character. He has become the sun, and thus finds a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and his counterpart the devil. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, Para 176.

And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. The ancient science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world, is a kind of psychology and alchemy is another unconscious form. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, Page 11.

His [Jung’s] impatience was due not only to his temperament – astrologically he was a Leo – but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

Astrology is not a mantic method but appears to be based on proton radiation (from the sun). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 22-23.

All the grapes of the same site produce about the same wine. This is the truth stated by astrology and experience since time immemorial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 353-355.

The fact, however, is that our whole astrological determination of time does not correspond to any actual constellation in the heavens because the vernal equinox has long since moved out of Aries into Pisces and from the time of Hipparchus has been artificially set at 0° Aries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Consequently the correlations with the planetary houses are purely fictitious, and this rules out the possibility of a causal connection with the actual positions of the stars, so that the astrological determination of time is purely symbolic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

There is no psychological exposition of astrology yet, on account of the fact that the empirical foundation in the sense of a science has not yet been laid. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 195, Para 392.

The great astrological periods do exist. Taurus and Gemini were prehistoric periods, we don’t know much about them. But Aries the Ram is closer; Alexander the Great was one of its manifestations. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

At breakfast he [Jung] spoke of astrology (one of his daughters is interested in it), and of a German book in which he is criticised for giving support to horoscopes. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 91

This man also asked C.G. if he believed in astrology because he had mentioned it; but, said C.G., it is not necessary to ‘believe’ in such concepts – he simply observes that they are sometimes relevant. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 102

And now we are coming to the end of the Pisces era, as was foretold nearly two thousand years ago by the Arabian astrologer Albumasar. The pre-Christian time was Aries. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 302

The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 138-139