Astrology and Birth
“We are born at a given moment, in a given place, and like vintage years of wine, we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born.” Note a citation is needed to verify that Dr. Jung actually said this.
Carl Jung on “Astrology” – Anthology
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Carl Jung on “Astrology” – Anthology
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,
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.
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
- 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.
- 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?
- 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
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