An Unconvincing Case
A critique of
Richard Tarnas'
Cosmos and Psyche, New York: Viking, 2006
John Heron
Of the several drafts
written between September 2007 and February 2008, this one of 11,600 words is the full and definitive version of
my commentary. It gives a more comprehensive and
radical account of my views than the 5,000 words I extracted from it
- to meet editorial restriction on length - to publish in
Network Review: Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network,
No. 95, Winter 2007, pp. 11-16.
A: Astrology and psychoastronomy
A.1 My background
A.2 Psychoastronomy
A.3 Psychocosmic
co-creativity
B: World transit correlations with cultural
data
B.1 A personal response
B.2 Doubts about world
transit reliability
B.3 The problem of
Eurocentrism
C: Implications for the future
C.1 The issue of upcoming
transits
C.2 A troubling instability
C.3 The issue of
indeterminacy and unpredictability
D: Issues of methodology
D.1 The absence of rigorous
curiosity
D.2 The issue of permissive
latitude
D.3 The lure of holonomic
meaning and its occasional transformation
D.4 The issue of supporting
evidence
D.5 Lack of adequate
rationale
E: The issue of planetary aspects
E.1 The absence of validation
E.2 What about microcosmic
aspects?
E.3 The challenge from a
pan-planetary perspective
F: The issue of planetary archetypes
F.1 Uneasy composite
F.2 Uneasy linkage
F.3 Planetary principles
galore
F.4 Earth archetype
in absentia
References
A: Astrology and
psychoastronomy
A.1 My background
My background in this
matter is as follows. As a young man for some 15 years I cast
horoscopes for myself, my family, my friends and their families.
My readings were valued and I prided myself on my insights. At
the peak of the Uranus-Pluto conjunction through 1965-6, I
suddenly decided it would be healthy to undertake a radical
review of the basic assumptions and working methods of
astrology. After many months of work I found so many anomalies
and arbitrary notions that I decided it was irresponsible to
impose them on others, and since then I have not cast another
horoscope. My work imploded its correlation with the transit.
A.2 Psychoastronomy
I have however for many
years sought to live awarely and intentionally within the solar
system and its galactic setting, opening myself somatically,
aesthetically, intuitively and spiritually to its entities and
changing patterns. I have called this practice psychoastronomy
simply to differentiate it from astrology. At my Centre in
Tuscany I had in the grounds several planetary sites for this
practice. And when running workshops or launching inquiries I
simply have a chart of the current dispositions of the solar
system and invite people to be aware of it as a pattern of
significant entities, without providing any interpretation. I
mention all this so that you, the reader, will understand that I
come to Cosmos and Psyche with a belief in some kind of
fundamental resonance between human beings and their cosmic
setting.
At mid-summer in the
southern hemisphere, I find the relationship between myself, the
earth, the sun and the galactic centre empowering. I think this
empowerment is to do with my creative participatory enaction. I
believe that I (and any human being) can choose an idiosyncratic
mutual engagement between self and earth and a unique pattern
of two or more heavenly bodies (including planets, stars and
deep space entities and locations), and find in that engagement
a distinctive qualitative transformation of being. It is an
existential mutual dialogue of co-creative participative
resonance. For me the significance of celestial bodies and their
patterning includes some rough appreciation of the relative
distances of the bodies concerned from the earth, and some
appreciation of their relative size, motion, moons and other
physical attributes, so I need some modicum of astronomical
knowledge. I find that for this practice of psychoastronomy to
work I need to be mentally free of traditional notions of
aspects and planetary attributes, and let the presence of each
celestial entity, the astronomical pattern and planetary data
co-create their significance with me. Instead of applying
ancient rules, I discover liberation in active imagination
engaging with the living chorus of entities in space. The
practice also requires good astronomical (not
astrological) software, which provides a window in microcosmic
space to prepare my mind for co-creative engagement with bodies
and patterns in macrocosmic space. For some years I used
RedShift on a PC. Currently I am using Voyager 4 for the Mac and
find it better in its presentation of data.
A.3 Psychocosmic
co-creativity
As I see it, the only
relevance, within the ancient rules of astrology, of working out
correlations between planetary aspects and historical events in
the past, is the pragmatic implication of this practice for the
present and the future. And the implication of traditional
astrology for the future is clear: we sit around and wait for
the rule-bound alignments (personal transits or world transits)
to occur and for our psyches to be in synchrony with them, and
then we can start co-creatively to engage with the predefined
archetypal dynamics associated with the alignments. Our cosmic
co-creativity is bound by ephemeris watching on the one hand and
traditional textbooks on astrological interpretation on the
other. I find this - both experientially and theoretically - a
limiting and constrained account of co-creative participatory
engagement with our cosmos. By contrast with this, I believe
such co-creativity to be capable, in awakened humans, of a rich,
dynamic, diversity of idiosyncratic empowering enactments in
which the unique creative choice of a human being finds its
synchronous correlate in a unique macrocosmic pattern, which is
not rule-bound, but liberated by unpredictable personal
engagement with awe and beauty and cosmic drama. There are many
new psychocosmic transfigurations awaiting to be enacted, by an
empowering bio-spiritual engagement of the somatic being in
co-creative resonance with any one of an unlimited range of
unique cosmic configurations of self, earth, solar system
entities, galactic and deep space entities and locations.
This psychocosmic
co-creativity is one way of engaging, through their physical
manifestations, with powers and presences that have their
primary home in the subtle universe. But it is not the only way
or even the main way, just one way. It is also possible, I
believe, to engage with powers and presences directly in their
primary home. By powers I mean archetypal formative principles
of creation; and by presences I mean elevated sublime
superpersons who refract and mediate powers.
I realize that this
practice, even in the dawn of its infancy, is more potent,
transforming and relevant to contemporary spirituality and a
participatory worldview, than anything I got out of traditional
astrology 40 years ago.
B: World transit
correlations with cultural data
The greater bulk of
Cosmos and Psyche is devoted to making correlations between
each of four kinds of world transit on the one hand, and human
events in diverse fields in the history of the Western cultural
tradition on the other. A world transit is a temporary
alignment, also called an aspect (angular relation), of two
planets with the earth, such that, according to Tarnas, the
distinctive archetypal principles linked to those planets have a
potent interactive influence within the human psyche throughout
the world for the duration of the alignment. The four planetary
alignments Tarnas considers are Uranus-Pluto, Saturn-Pluto,
Jupiter-Uranus and Uranus-Neptune. With each of these world
transits Tarnas correlates a large amount of data drawn from the
Western historical tradition, as illustrative of the special
archetypal dynamics involved. Here are my reasons for finding
this ambitious undertaking of questionable soundness.
B.1 A personal
response
I find something
progressively oppressive about a large number of human creators
and creations - of great range, richness, depth and complexity
– being subsumed under just two archetypes, selected from a
pool of five, however multivalent they may be. Over and over
again the particular archetypal dyad being applied both
dominates, and reduces the complexity of, the cultural data it
is supposed to illuminate. This relentless two-category
subsumption of diverse aspects of Western civilization, carried
through over several centuries, comes over to me as an
intellectual obsession that has got quite out of hand. I notice
a strange effect: the more ostensibly profound the author’s
reading of events in terms of two planetary archetypes appears
to be, the less plausible I find it, and the more my soul
discreetly suggests caution. The participants in an entire
civilization, with their products and deeds, are repeatedly
seduced and constrained by an exotic pair of planetary
principles, in order to uphold a moot, ancient geocentric theory
about a psychophysical cosmic process. A whole culture is
beguiled, in truncated piecemeal fashion, to placate the
archetypal gods. As a reader I long to be free of the
restrictive interpretative enthusiasms that intoxicate the
author’s mind. I yearn to have my extraordinary tradition
honoured by a much more imaginatively rich, fully contemporary
and liberated grasp of its cosmic context. Then I realize that
this personal response needs to be translated into a careful
analysis of a wide range of relevant issues. So the rest of this
commentary addresses these issues.
B.2
Doubts about world transit reliability
Tarnas
states (137) that even a thousand compelling examples of people
with the same natal aspect or personal transit, and who have the
same pattern of human experience, “would only be a drop in the
ocean of the larger class” of all the countless other people in
the world who also have the same natal aspect or personal
transit. What applies within the drop is not enough to validate
a belief that the same will apply within the ocean. He is, in
effect, saying here that natal aspects and personal transits are
statistically unreliable. Notwithstanding this, he then argues
(137) that world transits, because they relate to whole cultural
epochs and the experience of many different people, will enable
more critically reliable correspondences to be made. If this
claim of critical reliability turns out to be dubious, then both
personal and world transits are in trouble. I will mention here
three main sources of doubt.
A tubful in the ocean
The same
argument that Tarnas makes about the unreliability of personal
transits applies to world transits. No matter how many
compelling examples you get of correlations between world
transits and events in the history of one cultural tradition
this is only a tubful in the ocean of the larger class of all
the numerous civilizations and cultures that have risen and
fallen around the world over many thousands of years. In order
to secure any kind of validity for the world transit theory, you
would need to apply the same world transits to a large number of
different historical traditions at different periods in
different parts of the planet. It only takes the history of one
of these substantially to ignore the transits for the theory to
be in trouble. This need for data from other historical
traditions is especially acute when both the archetypal
principles and the method used for making correlations are
themselves rooted in the only historical tradition so far
considered (see section A.2).
Tarnas
says he has “focused principally on the history and figures of
the Western cultural tradition” (137). And he is only one person
looking at only parts of it: the four world transits are applied
from the following starting dates - 584 BC, 1489 AD, 1775 AD and
1913 AD. Prodigious though his scholarship is, he is inevitably
selective within these limited periods, with limited access to
all the data in all the different Western cultural strands he
examines. Furthermore, the historical record is itself
selective, for no recorded history covers everything that
happened in any epoch. And Tarnas never cites even one other
astrologer to support any of his innumerable interpretations.
For one man, without any quoted agreement with anyone else, to
correlate a limited number of dissociated world transits with
limited data from limited parts of just one (vast) tradition,
and to go public with this as evidence of a cosmic archetypal
dynamic, with worldwide all-inclusive transcultural impact, is
question-begging of a high degree. This is compounded by the
problem of Eurocentrism discussed in section A.2.
One combination at a time
Then
there is the issue of dissociation, which is central to this
critique. Tarnas describes the influence of an aspect within
each of his chosen four transit cycles in a dissociated manner,
as if it operates independently of all other concurrent aspects.
These simultaneous alignments will involve several of the
following: the outer planets with each other; the outer planets
with the Sun, Moon and inner planets; and the Sun, Moon and
inner planets with each other. To ignore a multiplicity of these
contemporaneous influences is, in astrological terms, to
simplify, distort and misrepresent the interpretation of the
aspect. World transits of different sorts overlap each other
yielding complex and intricate patterns of archetypal
interaction.
Tarnas
acknowledges this point: “For the sake of simplicity and clarity
I have focused the discussion on one planetary combination at a
time. But a more adequate analysis must engage the larger
complex of archetypal relationships that are always at work in
every person’s life, every event and every cultural epoch”
(341). A person’s natal chart can only be understood, he says,
if one takes into account the entire multiplicity of natal
aspects. So too - and perhaps more so we might think - with the
world: all concurrent transits need to be considered in their
intersecting entirety. Yet for 300 pages of world transit
correlations, Tarnas opts for simplicity and clarity rather than
more adequacy: one combination at a time, and any mention of a
concurrent transit is the exception rather than the rule. This
sustained preference for clarity over greater adequacy raises
the spectre of unreliability.
Once
Tarnas has stated that “a more adequate analysis” involves not
just one aspect but all concurrent aspects, then I think he
should have given several examples which show the difference
between an analysis derived from one aspect only and the more
adequate analysis derived from that same aspect interacting with
all the other overlapping ones.
Without such examples, we cannot see what the
real story looks like. We cannot judge, without a comparison
with the multiple aspect method, how much the single aspect
method leads to pseudo-correlations.
Thus an
astrologer’s review also asks for
one, two or three detailed examples of a full
astrological analysis, and states that there are times when it
seems that Tarnas is stretching the single aspect symbolism “to
breaking point and beyond” (Phillipson, 2006)
Take two
quite different aspects which overlap. Each of them on their own
may correlate with quite different historical events; and the
two considered interacting with each other may correlate with
yet a third quite different event. If you consider only one
aspect at a time and stretch the multivalent meanings of the two
associated archetypes to breaking point, unqualified by any
other planetary pairs (which are always active), then you enter
the domain of pseudo-correlations. This possibility raises
doubts about the validity of the single pair correlations which
Tarnas makes; and the fact that he never
systematically
addresses this issue
increases those doubts.
Let us
take a brief look in a bit more detail at the extent of the
problem. In the hundred years 1913-2013, for his four world
transits Tarnas lists 33 “hard” aspects (conjunctions and
oppositions), and 25 of these are concurrent with one or more of
the others. As well as these, there will be many other
concurrences involving squares, sextiles and trines among the
same planets, and concurrent aspects of all kinds involving the
outer planets and the rest of the solar system. But the great
majority of world transit correlations which Tarnas makes
throughout the book simply ignore all this complex simultaneous
multiplicity. Only occasionally in the text or a footnote does
he discuss one world transit in relation to one or two other
concurrent world transits: he goes for clarity rather than “a
more adequate analysis”.
Tarnas
clearly implies that this more adequate analysis will be at the
expense of clarity. And this is indeed the unacknowledged and
unexamined problem: if all the many concurrent planetary aspects
are taken into account then identifying correlations with
historical events becomes more obscure and problematic. The
reason there is so little agreement among astrologers about the
interpretation of astrological configurations (Carlson, 1985;
Kelly at al., 1990; McGrew and McFall, 1990) is precisely
because of the intricate interweaving patterns of different
kinds of multivalent categories of meaning. So if you go for
clarity, and focus on just one aspect, you may make a
pseudo-correlation; but if you go for adequacy, with multiple
overlapping aspects, it is more difficult to make a sound
correlation. For a further critical development of this central
issue see section B.1 below, where it is clear that, when it
comes to the future, Tarnas veers strongly away from single
aspect analysis, and emphasizes the great difficulty of
assessing “intricately
complicated archetypal interactions and multiple influences”
(479).
We
should also note Tarnas simplifies his transit interpretations
even more, by deliberately excluding the influence of the
zodiacal signs in which the two planets are situated (506). This
is in order to avoid the huge problem of which of the two
zodiacs to use, the sidereal or the tropical (Heron, 2006).
Eminence as evidence
Finally,
there are doubts about using eminence as evidence. Tarnas cites
a very large number of events in the lives of eminent
individuals as examples of a world transit at work. There are
two issues here. One is the assumption that eminent people are
paradigmatic of the archetypal configuration of an alignment. “Such
individuals”, Tarnas writes, “are more conspicuous embodiments
of archetypal tendencies that are present in varying degrees
in everyone” (136).
This suggests that the less eminent you are,
the weaker the astrological effect – a curious elitist doctrine.
Since the vast majority of people on the planet are very
non-eminent, they will pretty much drop off the astrological
radar screen, so there is not a lot of point in them bothering
about astrology. This also means that a world transit is, with
respect to individuals, misnamed: it is in fact an
Occidentocentric transit for the eminent. In any event, the
reliability of the transit as anything to do with the worldwide
human community is seriously compromised by the Tarnas notion of
an eminence effect.
There is
a second issue about the way Tarnas cites events in the lives of
the eminent as evidence of a world transit. In some places he
does so without any mention of whether or not the events
correlate with the
personal
transits of these people. In some places he makes a link of some
sort between a personal transit and a world transit. What I find
missing is any systematic account of widespread supporting
evidence that the personal transits of people correlate with the
world transits in which those same people are included. In the
absence of any thoroughgoing analysis of the matter, doubts
linger about the reliability of both kinds of transit.
B.3
The problem of Eurocentrism
A basic ambiguity
As I
have said, the great bulk of the book is taken up with applying
four kinds of world transit, four pairings chosen from the outer
planets from Saturn to Pluto, to data from the Western cultural
tradition. But this tradition is still to this day soaked in
Greek mythology, whose gods and goddesses were the original
source for the archetypal characterizations of the planets. Even
the outermost planets discovered in modern times were given
names chosen from Greek mythology; and the modern archetypal
attributions overlap to some degree with the ancient
attributions. So how do you differentiate between a cultural
trend being in synchrony with a world transit and planetary
archetypes, as against being due to morphic resonance among
people putting forth yet another creative or convulsive or
limiting process grounded in their cultural origins and mythic
traditions?
Because
of this basic ambiguity – and this is only one factor in the
need for multiple samples - it is essential to study
correlations of the same transit with events in several other
cultures, such as the Chinese tradition, the Indian tradition,
the Persian tradition, the ancient Egyptian tradition, North and
South American Indian traditions, and so on. And Tarnas does
very little of this. Until it is done, doubt hangs over the
whole claim that world transits are planet-wide and correspond
with distinctive kinds of cultural happenings in any and every
tradition. And unless, for a given tradition, there is a lot of
detailed and reliable historical data covering several
centuries, such cross-cultural validation cannot be done
Eurocentric archetypal hegemony
But if
we suppose it can be done, within some traditions, then we have
another big issue. Should it be done with archetypal categories
rooted in Eurocentric mythology and its ancient geocentricity?
Even Western anthropologists have nowadays acknowledged the
importance of abandoning Eurocentric constructs in their
inquiries into other cultures. To avoid Eurocentric archetypal
hegemony, Tarnas needs to develop, in dialogue with scholars and
luminaries in other great historical traditions, the first draft
of cross-culturally acceptable archetypal principles; and to
invite a host of competent astrologers from within a number of
different historical traditions to work out an agreed
methodology, then set about exploring all the relevant
correlations between events and world transits.
Then, of
course, if they did so using the complex and intricate
archetypal interactions of all the main concurrent aspects,
would they reach any degree of significant agreement? The
available evidence suggests that this is unlikely (Carlson,
1985; Kelly at al., 1990; McGrew and McFall, 1990).
C: Implications for the future
C.1
The issue of upcoming transits
A plethora ahead
I now
return to the issue of multiple concurrent aspects discussed in
A.1 above. At the end of his book, in his chapter on the future,
Tarnas gives dates for the “hard” alignments of the five outer
planets from 2004 to 2045 (467-8). Tarnas does not extract the
overlapping alignments from these dates, but it is important to
do so to grasp the specifics of what his astrology really
entails. These dates reveal that, through 2007 and 2008, the
following world transit “hard” alignments overlap, which means
on the Tarnas view, that the associated archetypal principles
are all in dynamic interaction within the human psyche at the
same time: Uranus square Pluto, Pluto conjunction Jupiter,
Uranus opposition Saturn, and Saturn opposition Neptune. And
that only covers the five planets from Jupiter to Pluto. There
will be several other concurrent conjunctions, oppositions,
squares, sextiles and trines throughout the solar system as a
whole. In short, during 2007 and 2008, the human psyche will be
influenced by a veritable plethora of archetypal dyadic
interactions which are interacting with each other.
The disappearance of single aspect analysis
Tarnas then considers a simultaneous pair of
aspects at work at the present time, specifically the
Uranus-Pluto square and the Saturn-Neptune opposition. He says
(479) that the qualities associated with these two aspects
“could scarcely be more different…..Only a complexity theory
adequate to such intricately complicated archetypal interactions
and multiple influences would be of use in assessing the
unfolding continuum of history” (and Tarnas is only talking of
two of the four alignments of outer planets at work in 2007 and
2008). This clearly indicates that single aspect analysis is
very wide of the mark for making historical assessments about
the present and the future (and surely, we may also infer, of
the past).
If
concurrent alignments are always present and are complicated to
assess, then there are some critical questions to answer. Who is
developing a theory adequate to assess intricate interactions?
Without it, how can reliable assessments (about natal aspects,
personal transits and world transits) be made of the many
simultaneous alignments of the outer and the inner planets, the
Sun and the Moon, which are always occurring? How can it empower
human beings to become acquainted with present and future
archetypal interactions which are too “intricately complicated”
to assess without advanced theoretical support? How can
correlations between historical events and aspects in just one
dissociated world transit be reliable, when aspects in different
transits always overlap each other in a difficult-to-assess
intricate and complicated dance of archetypal meanings? How is
it that Tarnas, who has just told us that multiple interactions
make assessment of unfolding history extremely difficult,
immediately launches into four pages (479-82) of presumably
unreliable prediction about the nature of outer planet transits
in our future?
C.2
A troubling instability
My
provisional opinion is that the sweep of this book is troubled
by a deep instability. For 300 pages Tarnas looks into the past
with one planetary pair at a time in order to make the business
of astrological assessment appear to be clear and simple, when
by his own admission a more adequate analysis would include
multiple concurrent pairs (341). At the end of the book, looking
into the present and the future with its multiplicity of
concurrent pairs, he says that only complex theoretical support
could make an adequate astrological assessment of them. The
whole book wobbles between these two positions with an unsteady
stance. “Intricately complicated archetypal interactions and
multiple influences” can be ignored when simplifying the past
with a less than adequate analysis, and yet are indispensable
and require great theoretical competence when assessing the
present and the future (479). It is difficult not to draw the
conclusion that whether you deal with one pair at a time in the
past, or with multiple pairs in the present and the future,
making astrological assessments - whether for the past, the
present or the future - is an unreliable business. One outcome
is likely: professional astrologers will be waiting to tell us
what the full story of multiple concurrent alignments really
means; and category addiction (Needham, 1956; Heron, 2006) will
be given a new lease of life.
C.3
The issue of indeterminacy and unpredictability
A synchronous archetypal mechanism
Tarnas
makes a categorical assertion that “a fundamental recognition of
indeterminacy and unpredictability is the bedrock of the entire
perspective articulated here” (479). This is a misleading
assertion. What Tarnas has firmly installed as the bedrock of
his worldview is the very reliable predictability of human
psyches synchronizing with all the transits of all the planets
and their associated archetypes over and over again into the
very remote future, for the solar system is a remarkable example
of accurate cosmic clockwork. There is now one simple basic
question: is our primary co-creative access to archetypal
patterns restricted to synchronicity with the natal aspects and
endless multiple transits of the solar system clock? If the
answer is affirmative, then this primary access of ours is
predetermined and predictable to a very high degree indeed. The
only thing that is indeterminate is the concrete outworking of
the predetermined psychocosmic synchronicity. This is still a
fundamentally mechanistic account of human functioning: a
synchronous archetypal mechanism, not a causal concrete one, but
nonetheless a mechanism.
Tarnas
rejects any idea that his synchronous cosmic mechanism means
that the basic outlines of history are determined (480). Quite
so, but this misses the crucial point, which is – and it is
worth repeating again - that human co-creative access to
certain patterns of archetypes is quite clearly determined.
There is no getting round the inescapable fact that, within the
Tarnas worldview, an ephemeris, together with an astrological
handbook on aspects and planetary principles, will tell you very
precisely for the rest of your life when and for how long you
are called upon to engage your creativity with this, that or the
other predetermined configuration of archetypes. I find this
worldview intrinsically implausible, not least because of recent
expanding astronomical knowledge of the composition of the solar
system; but there are also deeper reasons, to do with the
potential range of human co-creativity, as we shall see below.
Horns of a dilemma
Tarnas
says that knowing about an upcoming transit makes possible a
more informed response. Unfortunately this assertion sits
closely alongside a whole raft of other assertions about the
numerous unpredictable factors at work in constituting events,
how unpredictability is the bedrock of his perspective, how
intricately complicated multiple archetypal interactions are to
interpret, and so on. He is dancing uneasily between the horns
of a dilemma. If he can interpret an upcoming transit
sufficiently to make an informed response, this takes him too
close for comfort to archetypal predetermination. If he pushes
the unpredictability and intricate complexity of archetypal
influence too hard, then informed response to a transit becomes
impossible. But certainly, if his astrology is to have any
pragmatic value, he has to resolve the dilemma in favour of
informed response to a transit, plus archetypal
predetermination. But he does not do so clearly, and in no way
does he develop the practical details of informed response to
upcoming transits as a tool for creative living. Instead he
leaves the reader in a state of pragmatic uncertainty. What is
supposed to be empowering erodes into the disempowering.
The bottom line
We have
now reached the bottom line of the Tarnas worldview. The basic
question for his astrology remains: Is the access of human
co-creativity to various patterns of psychocosmic influence
determined by the timed synchronicities of solar system
clockwork? Or does human co-creativity in principle and in
potential have unlimited access to any enacted psychocosmic
configuration, independent of such clockwork? Since Tarnas does
not address this question, I am left assuming that his text
implicitly entails the view that access is set to the timing of
the solar system clock and its predetermined programme of
psychocosmic synchronicities. Indeed if this key notion that
access is tied to predetermined timing were removed from his
theory, the whole apparatus of aspects and transits would
become, at some deep level of human creativity and freedom,
redundant and irrelevant.
The implications of co-creativity
The most
basic feature of the Tarnas revival of astrology is that its
multidimensional and multivalent account of archetypes opens up
“ontological space” for the “the widest diversity of creative
human enaction” of (84), “full co-creative participation” of
humans in, the psychocosmic process (87). This co-creative
participation in archetypal dynamics means that the human being
is “recognized as itself a potentially autonomous embodiment of
the cosmos and its creative power and intelligence” (86).
However,
Tarnas does not offer full human co-creative
participation in the psychocosmic process, he offers a very
partial and constrained kind of co-creative participation in
a psychocosmic process which he has predefined in terms of a
highly questionable theory of aspects and planetary attributions
derived from an astrology grounded on geocentric astronomy. This
predefinition binds
our cosmic co-creativity by ephemeris
watching on the one hand and traditional textbooks on
astrological interpretation on the other. To repeat my views
from A.3 above, I believe full co-creativity to be
capable, in awakened humans, of a rich, dynamic, diversity of
idiosyncratic empowering enactments in which the unique nature
of a human being finds its synchronous correlate in a unique
macrocosmic pattern, which is not rule-bound, but liberated by
unpredictable personal engagement with awe and beauty and cosmic
drama. There are many new psychocosmic transfigurations awaiting
to be enacted, by an empowering bio-spiritual dance of the
somatic being in co-creative resonance with an unlimited
diversity of cosmic configurations of self, earth and solar
system entities, galactic and deep space entities and locations.
5131
D: Issues of
methodology
D.1
The absence of rigorous curiosity
Attachment to the glasses
I cannot
find any passage in the whole book where Tarnas shows that he
has a rigorous curiosity in the possibility of counter-evidence.
He never seems to want to take off the aspect glasses that
enable him to see correlations, and then to have a look around
for events that fit the archetypal qualities of an aspect but
fall outside its range of influence; or see if he can spy events
that fall within range of an aspect but entirely contradict its
archetypal configuration.
Archetypal intoxication
Instead,
Tarnas goes in for continuous confirmation, without the rigour
of falsifying curiosity. He piles up correlations, as if the
accumulation makes a persuasive difference. Thus he lists a
small number of massacres coinciding with Saturn-Pluto
alignments. But even if he could produce two hundred massacres
coinciding with one sort of planetary dyad, this is a bucketful
in the ocean given the worldwide propensity, evident over
thousands of years in every part of the world, for human beings
to slaughter each other. Many small heaps of correlations, based
on the astrologically dubious and stretched use of only two
planetary principles – with no evident heretical curiosity about
XY-type data outside an XY alignment, or about non-XY-type data
within an XY alignment - is indicative of archetypal
intoxication.
Keeping within the faith
Thus his
preferred way of dealing with difficult data is as follows:
“When I encountered an event or cultural phenomenon for which
convincing planetary correlations were not immediately apparent,
I continued to pursue the inquiry, staying open to the
possibility that a significant correlative pattern might well
emerge over time as I learned more” (458). This makes it clear
that the function of anomalous data is simply to alert Tarnas to
his deficient astrological know-how. I get no sense, either on
the lines or between them, that Tarnas will ever allow anomalous
data to call in question the basic geocentric astrological
principles themselves – the major aspects, the forms of
correspondence, the planetary archetypes. In other words, his
tacit working assumption is that there cannot be any data that
are not – as an astrologer who keeps the faith will sooner or
later find out - defined by these principles.
The
rigour that Tarnas does exercise is to steer a middle path
between the conventional modern assumption that the cosmic
processes are basically random and meaningless, and the
arbitrary nature of some conventional astrological doctrines
(459). Thus there are some features of astrological theory that
Tarnas does not seem, in this book at any rate, to bother with –
such as the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve diurnal
houses – but he holds firmly to the central core, mentioned just
above, without which astrology could not function. In abandoning
the assumption of randomness, he cleaves too earnestly not
simply to the assumption of an underlying order, but to the
assumption of an underlying core of geocentric astrological
order.
The temptation of self-rescue
There
is, indeed, a temptation always to remain within the assumptions
of astrology, rather than radically question them. This is
because its complexities make it so rich in persuasive forms of
self-rescue and self-protection. Thus, for any transit involving
planets A and B, there are many safety nets that underlie it. So
if you find some event that looks like it manifests an A-B
aspect, but falls entirely outside the range of one, then with a
bit of imaginal and multivalent tweaking, it can be reconstrued
as falling within an aspect of one or more of the many other
transit cycles. Thus you may discover that while the A-B aspect
is not at work, either A on its own, or B on its own, is aligned
with some other planet; or that two other planets are in aspect
in some way that echoes the A-B archetypal interaction; and
there are regularly world transits of all sorts to choose from.
D.2
The issue of permissive latitude
Beyond the breaking point
With
sufficient imaginative flexibility it is possible, I suggest, to
read a very broad multivalent category into almost any complex
cultural event or any complex and richly endowed human being.
The more multivalent and multidimensional the category the more
permissive the latitude in applying it, and the more the person
applying it invokes artistic, intuitive and imaginal kinds of
validation, as indeed Tarnas does. This is all very well as far
as it goes. The problem is it can readily go too far. While
Tarnas is sensitive to this danger, I do not think he avoids
falling foul of it. I have already mentioned an astrologer’s
review, which
says there are times when it seems that
Tarnas is stretching the single aspect symbolism to breaking
point and beyond (Phillipson, 2006).
Given
the widely multivalent description Tarnas gives of the
interaction of any two planetary archetypes, given the special
kind of flexible and nuanced imaginal vision which Tarnas says
is needed to apply this double multivalency, given the rich and
complex data that it is being applied to, given that up to an
outside limit of 20 degrees of arc around the exact alignment of
two planets with Earth is the latitude allowed for the alignment
to be in synchrony with the human psyche, and given that he has
four “hard” aspects to consider in any one transit cycle, then
it is not surprising that this generous combination claims to
identify relevant correlations. But the surfeit of data with all
its unexplored diversity, richness and complexity simply starts
to overflow the two-category bowl into which it is being poured.
Indeed, the integrity of western culture is compromised by the
relentless subsumption of diverse aspects of it under just two
categories at a time, pair after pair.
Latitude with the eminent
Tarnas
gives himself great latitude in choosing what stage of human
creativity by the eminent is claimed as evidence of correlation
with a world transit: sometimes it is the occasion of the
original inspiration, sometimes it is the period of creating the
work, sometimes it is the occasion of the work being published
or performed. These stages, for any one eminent person, may
cover several years, so it will not be too difficult to find at
least one of them that occurs within the 15-20 degree active
period of, say, a conjunction or an opposition within a
Jupiter-Uranus cycle. And in several cases he makes his choice
of stage with no cross-reference to the personal transits of the
individual involved.
Filling the gap
As we
saw in section A.3, inactive gaps in one world transit cycle may
be covered by active alignments in another, and if one of the
planets is the same in each cycle, then an archetypally
configured event that runs over from an active alignment into an
inactive gap in the first cycle, can be transferred with some
multivalent adaptation into an active alignment in the second.
Tarnas applies this shift to data about Aurobindo (364). This is
another addition to interpretative latitude.
D.3
The lure of holonomic meaning and its occasional transformation
The holonomic principle
The
issue of permissive latitude, explored briefly above, rests upon
a deeper issue: the lure of holonomic meaning. The holonomic
principle, to which I subscribe, asserts that the whole is
represented, encoded, enfolded in some way in the part. This is
the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand, the
microcosm-reflecting-the-macrocosm, principle. Thus the whole
body is genetically coded into every cell of it.
The lure of holonomic meaning
This is
a degenerate offshoot of the holonomic principle. The lure
asserts that if you take any set of a relatively small number of
basic and varied categories of meaning and interpretation, which
are broad and comprehensive in their scope, and which can be
applied to the human condition, then anyone can to some degree
identify with any combination of them, whether applied as
interpretation of personality structure, or as an interpretation
of life situations and events. The converse of this, of course,
is that any practitioner can take any combination and read it
into any person or any event. The outcomes of experimental
studies of astrology cited in section A.4 above provide some
evidence of the lure of holonomic meaning at work. Joseph
Needham in his classic work on the history of Chinese
civilization shows how the development of empirical science was
held back by a prolonged cultural addiction to interpreting
everything in terms of the five element theory (Needham, 1956).
The zodiac experiment
The lure
of holonomic meaning is also well illustrated by one of the most
intractable anomalies in astrology. The zodiac is the basic
platform of traditional astrology, but which do you choose to
use, the sidereal zodiac of the actual twelve fixed
constellations named Aries, Taurus, etc., or the tropical zodiac
of twelve 30 degree segments marked round the ecliptic from the
point of the vernal equinox? Owing to the slow conical rotation
of the earth’s axis, and the resultant precession of the
equinoxes, the two zodiacs are now displaced by some 25 degrees,
so with the exception of the 5 degrees of overlap, your sun sign
in one zodiac changes into an adjacent sun sign in the other
zodiac. I once gave a talk to a group of friends all of whom
believed in their tropical sun signs, and convinced them – by
ostensibly plausible but spurious arguments in which I did not
really believe – that it was better to use the sidereal zodiac.
Once they were persuaded, I went round the room and announced to
them their new sun signs. In every case, they embraced the new
sign with a sense of liberating insight. I must say here that I
have, as yet, found no good reasons for using either zodiac. It
is important to add that Tarnas himself makes no reference to
either zodiac in his many correlations.
The arbitrary divination experiment
Instead
of using the five outer planets, choose five symbols taken at
random from a Tarot pack, and combine them in four different
pairs, then make up four different and quite arbitrary temporal
cycles, each cycle consisting of a period when the pair is
inactive and a period when it is active, with its influence
peaking in the middle of the active period. Make an arbitrary
choice of four different years from which you start your four
cycles moving forward and backward in time. Now use this
divination system to interpret the story of your life. Then try
it out on the history of the country you live in, or on any
major chunk of history you know well or are interested to do
research on. Be prepared to find a surprising amount of
plausibility apparently adhering to the outcomes. And if your
come across any anomalous data, go deeper into the imaginal
overtones of your symbol pairs, until your subtler insight
resolves the anomalous into the revelatory. What we have in this
experiment is a quite arbitrary divination procedure. And the
implication is that astrology itself may be such a procedure.
But we must also take into account the following possibility
The paradox of the arbitrary
Many
times such an arbitrary procedure will simply indulge the lure
of holonomic meaning, reading anything into anything. But it is
paradoxically possible that on occasion such an arbitrary
procedure can be the vehicle for some kind of direct intuitive
process, in which case the arbitrary pattern of symbols or tea
leaves or astrological features does two things.
First, it distracts the rational, practical mind, disarms and
deposes it, so that an intuitive, even extrasensory faculty, can
tune in directly to the person, the event, or the cultural epoch
that is being divined. Secondly, it provides a systematically
ambiguous framework, capable of receiving innumerable different
interpretations, on which this faculty can project its findings.
The real function of the elaborate system of symbols and rules
is to occupy the distracted mind, which thinks it is engaging
with some ancient wisdom that portrays the world as it really is
at a deep level, without realizing that the system is
fundamentally incoherent. And the while the rational mind is
thus busily deluded, the divinatory faculty can get to the heart
of the matter quite outside the constraints of the system. Once
the direct divination has done its work, it is not too difficult
to fit its findings into the symbols and rules. This analysis
applies particularly well to astrology, which has so many
interacting elements to interpret (Heron, 2006).
If there is anything at all in this theory,
it would mean, of course, that you could radically rearrange and
redefine all the components parts of astrology, and it would
still from time to time work as a vehicle for a direct intuitive
process - a process which must be distinguished from the process
of simply making astrology appear to work by selective
simplification and stretching, which is what Tarnas seems to be
doing.
D.4 The issue of
supporting evidence
Calling on
colleagues
Tucked into section B.2
above I mentioned that Tarnas never cites other astrologers to
support any of his innumerable interpretations. It is odd to be
so scholarly about the historical data, but not about how other
astrologers have interpreted it. There is a vast astrological
literature out there. Is there nothing in it at all about
historical correlations with world transits? Or is what is there
too inconsistent and confusing to be of any help? If the
literature is no support, would it not perhaps have been prudent
to invite astrologers Tarnas respects to formulate -
independently and without conferring - their own views on the
relation between world transits and events in the western
cultural tradition?
Systemic
unreliability
One of the big problems in
the whole field is its unreliability. Well over a hundred
experimental studies have been conducted on general astrology
(Kelly at al., 1990; McGrew and McFall, 1990). Among the
findings are the following: (1) subjects of astrological
readings are just as likely to think that someone else’s reading
is as accurate a description of them as their own; (2) there is
no agreement among different astrologers’ interpretations of the
same birth chart; (3) over 3,000 predictions made by astrologers
were no better than if they were the result of chance or
guessing. If indeed Tarnas had cited or hired other astrologers,
the results might well have upset the world transit apple cart.
Is this why they were not asked to help?
Tarnas dismisses
statistical and experimental research on astrology on the
grounds that it has “added relatively little to the astrological
understanding” (76, also 462-3). Exactly so, for it exposes the
unreliable nature of astrological understanding. What
statistical research has unmistakably revealed is that respected
professional astrologers do not agree about the interpretation
of the same astrological configuration. Tarnas makes no mention
at all of this consistently reliable finding, and I think he is
unwise to ignore it.
For a further example, see
Shawn Carlson's research involving 30
American and European astrologers considered by their peers to
be among the best practitioners of their art (Carlson, 1985).
Misrepresenting the
Gauquelin studies
Tarnas argues that the
well-known Gauquelin studies – replicated by others - support
astrology, but the findings (about the correlations between the
birth of eminent professionals in various fields and certain
positions of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars) show that the effect is
very weak. The results reveal that 22% of top athletes, as
against a base rate of 17% for the general population, have Mars
in position. So top athletes are only 5% more likely then the
rest of us to show the “Mars effect”; and the vast majority of
top athletes show no “Mars effect” at all. Moreover, the effect
does not apply to those who are not eminent (Ertel and Irving,
1996). And Gauquelin himself was clear that his findings did not
fit traditional astrological patterns. There is certainly some
minimal something going on here – as even Hans Eysenck
acknowledged – but it is of no use to the case for traditional
astrology.
Tarnas misrepresents the
Gauquelin studies, and inflates their support for astrology
(75-6). The way he writes about “a highly significant
statistical correlation” of the position of Mars and the birth
of top athletes, is clearly meant to imply that the effect is
very strong. He makes no mention at all of the fact that the
effect is very weak, and that the replicating studies show the
same very weak effect. The correlations, in reality, account
for less than 1% of variability, which means as we have seen
that top athletes are only 5% more likely to have Mars in
position.
Tarnas asserts that the
Gauquelin findings correspond with traditional astrological
principles. Other astrologers, as well as Gauquelin, do not
agree with him. Here is a current view from a web site that
fosters astrology research: “It must be stated that even if one
accepts the Gauquelin plus zone results, they fly in the face of
traditional astrological understanding of the weakness of cadent
houses and have no practical value for consulting astrologers.
The effect only works with eminent subjects and predicts
eminence only marginally by increasing the likelihood that a
planet is found in a plus zone from 17.8% to 22%. That leaves
78% of subjects with Mars outside of the Gauquelin plus zone.
Hardly something a consulting astrologer could use” (McDonough,
2006).
Tarnas also says that “The
positive results of the Gauquelin studies and their replication
by others presented a robust challenge on science’s own terms to
the scientific dismissal of astrology” (76). This is a
misleading piece of propaganda. What the strange, weak,
baffling, human-planet correlations actually do is to confront
traditional astrologers as much as, if not more than,
conventional scientists. Hans Eysenck, a formidable conventional
scientist, had the integrity fully to acknowledge the
uncomfortable nature of the confrontation for science. What
frustrated Gauquelin was that traditional astrologers could not
cope with the confrontation, and refused to see that his work
was the first glimmer of dawn for new era for a new astrology
solidly based on empirical data. Thus Tarnas avoids the
confrontation by falsely appropriating Gauquelin’s work as
supportive of traditional astrology, then dismisses the work and
its methodology as adding nothing new, so that he can advance
his own kind of neo-Jungian intuitive elaboration of the
geocentric tradition as a better way forward.
D.5 Lack of adequate
rationale
What is the point and
purpose of Tarnas promoting his world transit correlations? He
suggests two reasons. The first is that their superior
reliability may encourage people to look into their own birth
charts and personal transits. I have put forward a range of
considerations as to why I think the claim of any reliability is
questionable. The second reason is to make unconscious
archetypal dynamics more conscious, so that people can be
empowered to participate in these dynamics, exercising their
autonomy in a co-creative manner. Here again the composite
unreliability of one man’s single-tradition and selective
single-transit-pair correlations, divorced from concurrent
multiple-pair correlations, and unsupported either by anyone
else’s correlations, or by his own or anyone else’s
cross-tradition correlations, provides no adequate warrant for
empowering anyone. I think it is unwise to suggest that people
orientate their creativity to take account of world transits in
the exclusive light of his solitary version of the dissociated
influence of only four of them in one limited corner of world
history. This opinion is powerfully underlined by the problems
that attach to some of the basic features of the astrological
worldview to which Tarnas subscribes; and to these I now turn.
E: The issue of
planetary aspects
There is a very simple
geometric basis to the archetypal connection between cosmos and
psyche in the Tarnas worldview. It is that any two or more
archetypes interact dynamically within the human psyche when the
planets with which they are associated make certain angles with
Earth – which is at the vertex of the angles. These angles are
called aspects and the main ones are (their names are in
brackets): 0 degrees (conjunction), 60 degrees (sextile), 90
degrees (square), 120 degrees (trine), 180 degrees (opposition).
A few degrees of arc either side of the exact angle is the
latitude given for each aspect to manifest its synchronous
relation with the human mind. Tarnas holds that conjunctions,
squares and oppositions signify “hard” stressful archetypal
interactions within the psyche, while sextiles and trines
indicate “soft” harmonious ones. All this has its origins in the
geocentric astrology of the Hellenistic age, and its development
into the Ptolemaic worldview.
E.1 The absence of
validation
The aspect theory seems to
be derived from the numerological vagaries of the Pythagorean
brotherhood of the 5th century BC, and elaborated by
geocentric Hellenistic astrologers: thus two, an even number, is
feminine and evil, so the division of the 360 degree circle of
the heavens by two or a multiple of two yields the maleficent
“hard” aspects; while three is an odd number and therefore
masculine and good, so the heavenly circle divided by three or a
multiple of three gives us the beneficent “soft” aspects. A
related derivation is from the way the four elements were
allocated to the zodiacal signs: signs with the same element are
compatible with each other, and they stand in 120 degree
relations, hence the origin of trine aspects being “soft”. Signs
with differing and conflicting elements are opposite each other
or at right angles to each other, and this is the source of the
“hard” opposition and square aspects.
Both these sources involve
arbitrary and dogmatic correlations between different sorts of
categories; and if you follow them through in a systematic way
they yield disabling inconsistencies and anomalies. Tarnas
certainly does not put them forward as in any way validating his
aspect theory. The trouble is he does not put forward any
kind of validating argument for it at all, other than to assert
that it “was for Kepler the most fundamental and empirically
validated principle in astrology” (105). Now Kepler
undoubtedly claimed that his own experience “gives credibility
to the effectiveness of aspects”. We must remember, however,
that Kepler was very much under the spell of Pythagorean and
Platonic geometric mysticism, and it was remarkable that he
broke out of it enough to establish, on the basis of
astronomical data, the elliptical nature of planetary orbits.
And one man’s experience does not constitute adequate
validation.
E.2 What about
microcosmic aspects?
Tarnas, following Jung,
holds that “principles of number and geometric form” are a major
type of archetype (57). This means that the aspect angles are
associated with dynamic archetypes, which are in fact potent
superordinate archetypes, since they control and determine how
the planetary principles swing into interaction. And since, as
Tarnas holds, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm, then we can
properly ask for evidence that these powerful angular archetypes
have an influence within our earthly experience.
Aspects in human
society
Thus we can ask whether
there is any evidence that the ease or difficulty
of members of small groups of people working, talking, playing,
dancing, acting together in the same area of space bears any
relation to the angular patterns formed between them in
that space. If person B is in negotiation with persons A and C
while standing or being seated at an angle of 90 degrees with
them, is the process going to be stressful for B, as against
being harmonious if the angle is one of 60 or, better still, 120
degrees? In composition and design in the plastic arts -
architecture, sculpture, painting, the graphic arts - do 90 and
45 degree angles appear to be in any aesthetic sense more
difficult than 60 and 120 degree angles? In the diverse symbols
of religious traditions and schools worldwide, is there any
evidence that more often than not 60 and 120 degree angles are
used to represent the harmonious, while right angles, squares
and crosses are used to represent the stressful? If E, D and F
are three capital cities (centres of government) of three
sovereign nations, and if they are all in a straight line with D
in the middle, does government D find itself caught up in
stressful interactions between governments E and F? And are
there harmonious relations between any three other sovereign
nations whose capital cities are the vertices of an equilateral
triangle? And so on and so forth.
Go microcosmic
first
There is an endless array
of possible experiments and inquiries that could be set up to
see whether the aspect theory holds up in human, and in animal,
interactions of many different kinds. Is it responsible to go
macrocosmic with this theory without putting forward a shred of
evidence that it holds microcosmically? Is it not wiser to seek
for evidence on the accessible and manageable microcosmic scale,
than (as Tarnas strives to do) in macrocosmic planetary transits
in relation to the vast multitudinous sweep of human history on
Earth – an unmanageable scale in which issues of interpretation
and its validation become, as we have already seen,
problematic? And if they were any evidence of a microcosmic
effect, could it not be harnessed to make a significant
contribution to the quality of everyday life? Has anyone ever
looked into this matter? There is no evidence in this book that
Tarnas has any awareness of the immediate microcosmic
implications of his theory of aspects.
E.3 The challenge from
a pan-planetary perspective
Astrologers are
geocentric: they only take into account earth-centred aspects.
If the earth is in aspect with Mars and Venus, they ignore the
concurrent Mars-centred aspects and Venus-centred aspects and
how these qualify the earth-centred aspect.
What happens to the aspect
theory if you try to generalise it throughout the solar system?
Does a theory created within a geocentric context survive its
translation into a heliocentric context? If we swing the theory
out in the solar system as whole and adopt a pan-planetary view,
then all the planets, including Earth, are in a continuous
intricately complex ever-changing web of planetary aspects, and
thus of multiple changing archetypal interactions. If you are on
planet A, and A is in aspect with B and C, then you need to know
all the other aspects both B and C are busy with in order
properly to evaluate the nature of the ABC interaction. If for
A, B and C are in opposition, while B is in trine with D and E,
then the impact for A is somewhat different than B being square
with D and E. And then what else is going on for D and E?
My guess is that, for any
particular moment of time, if you worked out all the “hard” and
“soft” aspects for every single planet in relation to the other
planets, the whole system would break down in intricate
confusion and contradiction. I very much doubt whether the
arbitrary geometric simplicities of the geocentric era would
survive for long in the swirling orbital patterns of
heliocentric sophistication.
The issues raised by a
pan-planetary approach are important for astrologers. Within the
next two thousand years, we will very likely have human colonies
and space stations on the surface of, or hovering in the gases
of, several planets in the solar system. When children are born
in these planetary outposts, how will astrologers construct and
construe their natal charts? Among the many issues that arise,
there is the problem of moons. Our moon is astrologically
associated with an archetypal principle, so do we therefore
assume that each of the twelve moons of Jupiter has a
distinctive archetypal principle linked to it? If so, then a
child born in a human space station hovering in the gaseous
vapours of Jupiter, will have a natal chart which includes all
the aspects the twelve Jupiterian moons have with each other,
with the sun and with all the other planets, and all this
combined with the all the other nonlunar aspects. Perhaps
pan-planetary heliocentric astrologers will sensibly agree to
forget about the moons of a multi-mooned planet they are based
on.
There is no evidence in
this book that Tarnas has ever asked – in order to prepare for
our future in the solar system - whether his geocentric
astrology is compatible with pan-planetary heliocentric
astrology.
F: The issue of
planetary archetypes
The other main platform of
the Tarnas astrological worldview is that sun and moon and
planet are each associated with a distinctive archetypal
principle.
F.1 Uneasy composite
The Tarnas account of a
planetary archetype has three origins: the Jungian concept of
innate psychological dispositions in the collective unconscious
of human beings, the Platonic notion of a transcendent Idea
which gives its empirical correlate form and meaning, and the
geocentric view of different subordinate gods or spirits
associated with the moon, the sun and planets. Tarnas develops
these three into an uneasy composite, on the edge of a muddle,
as the next point brings out.
F.2 Uneasy linkage
There is a big problem
about the nature of the relationship between an archetype and a
physical planet. Tarnas says nothing more than that an
archetypal principle is “linked to” or “associated with” a
planet, and that “archetypes possess a reality that is both
objective and subjective, one that informs both outer cosmos and
inner human psyche” (86), and leaves it at that. There is a huge
aesthetic gap here, a glaring imaginal discontinuity between the
physical reality of the planet and the archetype that is
inexplicably linked to it and objectively informs it. Read the
account Tarnas gives of the multivalent attributes of the Pluto
archetype (“elemental power, depth and intensity…primordial
instincts, libidinal and aggressive…violent purgatorial
discharge of pent-up energies…etc.” (99)) and then contemplate
the physical Pluto on the outermost reaches of the solar system,
an extremely cold, small, remote icy body, only two thirds the
size of the moon, a body which astronomers have recently
downgraded and designated as a dwarf planet. There is, prima
facie, something crazy about this claimed “association”;
about that archetype, as defined, objectively informing that
planet, as described. Another way of putting this is to ask how
such a psychological archetype could possibly have
anything to do with a Platonic Idea of the spatio-temporal
form of the planet. Incidentally, since Pluto was only
discovered in 1930, we need a lot more detail about how
astrologers have so quickly established the identity of its
associated archetype.
Note that the ancient
geocentric astrologers, whose planetary attributions are still
in use today, did not have this aesthetic gap. In the total
absence of any knowledge of the physical nature of each planet
they could make an imaginative leap from its simple sensory
appearance - as a moving light in the sky - to a
characterization of the god involved: Mercury speeding round the
earth is the messenger; Venus appears as the evening star or the
morning star, when people are making love; Mars is tinted red,
the colour of blood; Jupiter is magnanimous in its great
unwavering brightness; Saturn plods very slowly across the sky
as if carrying an onerous load. But once we know all we now know
about the physical properties of the planets, it seems to me
that astrologers should at the very least close the aesthetic
gap in the light of contemporary astronomical knowledge, and
totally revamp their description of the planetary archetypes.
What qualities one wonders would the Hellenistic astrologers
have attributed to Jupiter if they had known it has a large
inner core of ice surrounded by an ocean of compressed and
liquefied gases, merging into an outer atmosphere of hydrogen
containing clouds of methane and ammonia?
Put all this together with
aspect theory and there is surely something arbitrary,
simplistic, naïve – and plain imaginatively unconvincing - about
inexplicable linkages being stirred into interactive activity by
rudimentary bits of geometry. Is this really how our local bit
of the cosmos is dynamically ensouled?
A viable astrology would
need to divine afresh whatever, if anything, the planets
symbolize, represent - whatever qualities, if any, they stand
for or refract - by attending in full to their physical
properties, moons and movements, by attuning to their subtle
realms, energies and presences, and by building on the work of
Gauquelin in doing – unencumbered by traditional astrological
dogma - a lot of original systematic empirical work on
correlating their location in space with people and events here
on earth. Rather than a revival of its ancient core of
geocentric principles, astrology – renamed psychoastronomy -
needs a combination of modern astronomical knowledge, original
and bold contemporary methodology, and modern seership.
F.3 Planetary principles galore
As well as the dwarf planet Pluto discovered
in 1930, there is now another dwarf planet also in the Kuiper
belt like Pluto but much further out. This is Eris, slightly
larger than Pluto. As well as Pluto (1430 miles diameter) and
Eris (discovered in 2003, and 1491 miles diameter), more than a
thousand other icy, rocky bodies have been seen in the Kuiper
belt including Quaoar, (745 miles diameter), Ixion (660 miles
diameter),Varuna (560 miles diameter). Researchers estimate
there are 500,000 bodies with diameters greater than 20
miles in the belt, and that some of these are almost certainly
the size of Pluto—if not larger. Then way beyond the Kuiper belt
is Sedna (1000 miles diameter), discovered also in 2003, and
which may be in some inner part of the Oort cloud of icy bodies
which orbit the sun at a distance of 2 to 19 trillion miles.
Astrologers have already gone out on a limb
linking a potent psychological archetype to Pluto. How many
times can this process my repeated with bodies of similar size
within the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud without it becoming
seriously questionable? And if it cannot sensibly be repeated
with all the objects similar to Pluto, then the grounds for
applying it to Pluto are also in question.
F.4 Earth archetype
in absentia
Tarnas nowhere in his book
attributes a distinctive archetypal principle to planet Earth.
In his chapter on the planets he gives a fulsome account of the
archetypal attributes associated with the Sun, the Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and
Pluto; but not a word about Earth. He writes the whole book as
if Earth is archetypally vacuous. So when two planets are in
aspect with Earth, this is synchronous only with dyadic
interaction between the archetypes of the other two planets,
which impacts directly on human experience. And human experience
is not itself an archetype, but only part of the empirical world
in which archetypes manifest. There is no triadic interaction
between an Earth archetype and any other two planetary
archetypes with which Earth is aligned.
This archetypal emptiness
of Earth is inherited from the origins of astrology at a time
when the ancient geocentric universe of Aristotelian physics and
Ptolemaic astronomy prevailed. In that universe the earth is at
the centre where all heavy elements collect: it is a lowly
passive coagulum subject to the influence of the sun, moon and
planets, which revolve around it in transparent spheres moved by
subordinate gods or spirits, and beyond them is the sphere of
the fixed stars, directly moved by God.
But if you have gone
beyond geocentric astrology, and are a pan-planetary astrologer
in a human colony on Mars at a time when Earth and the Uranus
are in opposition, to make sense of this aspect you will need to
ascribe an archetypal principle to Earth. And if a human is born
on Mars at the time of the opposition, you will interpret the
aspect in terms of three archetypes – those of Earth, Uranus and
home planet Mars - dynamically interacting in his or her psyche.
This would be a great improvement, you might believe, compared
to current restricted astrological practice on this planet.
A good way to ascribe an
archetypal principle to Earth is to appropriate a lot of the
attributes which Tarnas allocates to the Moon, such as “the
matrix of being, the psychosomatic foundation of the self, the
womb and ground of life…the impulse and capacity to gestate and
bring forth…the immanent, the centripetal, the home, the fertile
source and ground…etc., etc.” (90). Indeed, it seems to me that
Tarnas disempowers Earth by projecting many of its symbolic
attributes on to the bleak, barren and lifeless Moon.
For Tarnas to exclude an
Earth archetype in this way from his ensouled cosmos is
theoretically incoherent. A pan-planetary astrologer (who still
believes in Tarnas-type astrology) would: (1) have a
comprehensive grasp of the multivalent, multidimensional
archetypal attributes associated with Earth; (2) thoroughly
revise the interpretation, here on Earth, of each natal
horoscope, personal transit and world transit, by including in
the archetypal interactions the dynamic power of the archetypal
principle of Earth as well as the principles of the other
planets involved; (2) bring out what it means to be born on the
manifest home of the Earth archetype, to be embodied in intimate
conjunction with it; (4) bring out what it means for human
beings to engage in a fully intentional co-creative,
participatory relationship with the Earth archetype.
Tarnas says his theory
liberates humans from subservience to the archetypes of other
planets, via his notion of autonomous, participatory
co-creativity in their multivalent influence. Even within its
own terms of reference, I am not convinced. His geocentricity
has not liberated the Earth from subservience because his Earth
has no archetype to join in the planetary party, and thus humans
have no archetypal intermediary through which they can influence
the cosmic dance. On his account, neither an Earth archetype,
nor humans participating in it, plays any part at the
archetypal level in the dynamic of interacting planetary
archetypes. It is because of the archetypal passivity and
vacuity of Earth in the Tarnas view that his theory, seen from
within it, lacks Promethean fire. But seen from without, where
he does attribute archetypes to other celestial bodies we have
the two problems identified above as “uneasy composite” and
“uneasy linkage”, not to mention all the difficulties with
aspects. Unfortunately a pan-planetary astrologer is still
lumbered with all these anomalies.
John Heron, September,
2007
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