Dear Friend and Reader:
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I promised to tell you if something real happened at UAC, and no sooner did I write that & went down to the conference and ran into my brother Fish, Richard Tarnas. I have made a point of putting Rick’s 2006 book, Cosmos and Psyche, into skywriting every time I get a chance. (Small World Stories, the 10th annual edition of Planet Waves, was dedicated to Rick for his unparalleled contribution to astrology.)
This morning, he taught a pre-conference class on the interpretation of transits. In the first 12 seconds, I was reminded again why I love him and his approach to astrology. He brings such an incredibly broad base of knowledge to the subject that you might miss the fact that he’s an astrologer; were that detail not entirely impossible to miss. Yet his approach is gentle and does not utilize the manipulation of outcomes for which mainstream astrology is so sadly infamous. Rick is a rare astrologer who teaches his students not to be predictive, but rather, what he calls archetypally predictive. And what exactly is this bit of Piscean philosophy? He is saying that we need to connect with the deeper, timeless ideas that underlie all of perception, thought and experience, which are called archetypes. This word comes from the Platonic tradition and was resurrected from obscurity and put into public awareness by Carl Jung. One of Sigmund Freud’s brightest and most successful students, Jung was himself an astrologer and by the 1940s was casting the chart of every patient.
Rick gave an easy example of an archetype. We think of beauty as a fleeting thing, something that blooms and fades. But beyond that appearance is the archetype of Beauty itself; an idea rooted deep in the psyche of which ‘transient beauty’ is just a reflection or tribute. It is possible to witness beauty and it’s also possible to connect with Beauty as a cosmic concept within one’s own psyche. To connect with an archetype is to go deep within one’s individual awareness and come out somewhere universal. It is part of what you do every day if you are a sincere astrologer.
The archetypes are often connected to gods and goddesses, as are the planets. Often, a planet will reflect several different archetypes, depending on the psychic angle of approach you take. All of this is frequently connected to myth, where the archetypes act out their drama largely as figments of consciousness or the imagination.
If it’s not already totally obvious: if you take this approach to astrology, some beautiful things can happen. You are freed from the petty details of the world and can approach the psyche and its creations with respect. And if you do this for a while, you can develop a personal relationship with the gods and goddesses within you.
Because these are universal forces, even though they are experienced a little differently by everyone, they can serve to connect people to one another and to their life process on a deep level. When we think of a person as “cut off,” this phenomenon is often precisely that which they are cut off from. And when we get connected and find a level of individual reality that brings us to deep awareness and awareness of one another, this is what we are connecting to.
He suggested that astrologers have access to the anima mundi — “access to the treasure of the interior quality of the universe that takes moral courage” in a world that often completely denies this. He said that “the night sky is invisible to the solar logos of disenchanted modern reason,” while the night world, lit by the Moon and the planets, allows us to differentiate the subtleties of existence. You could call the world of the solar logos monotheism and every other form of mono-culture. If we are monotheists, we cannot see the many expressions of the divine. If we rigidly adhere to any form of mono, we miss the many subtle expressions that come with diversity.
A healthy psyche is able to create what he called a sacred marriage of mono and poly, a coherent internal cosmic order where we allow the many possibilities to coexist. And that is what we do when we embrace the astrological viewpoint. We meet the Sun and the Moon as conscious entities; we meet the stars and the planets; we meet the world on which we stand. And behind it all, it becomes obvious that there is an underlying cohesiveness to reality, if you touch it lightly and don’t try to grasp it with both hands.
