By age 16 Nadal already was ranked among the world’s Top 50 professional tennis players. In nominating him for the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (ESPY) award, the sponsoring ESPN cable sports television network noted that last year he became the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to win the French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open in the same year.

He’s only the seventh player in history to win the career Grand Slam (Wimbledon, and the Australian, French, and U.S. Opens). And he returned to Paris to win his sixth tournament title on the clay courts of Roland Garros earlier this year, cementing his reputation as the “King of clay.”

Nadal’s intensity, fierce competitiveness and punishing ground strokes have all been cited as reasons for his rise to the top of his profession. But the sudden and meteoric nature of his ascent may have another explanation.

In the current issue of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, Keiron Le Grice, co-editor of the journal and author of The Archetypal Cosmos, reports that Nadal started putting together the impressive string of victories that lifted him to the top of the Association of Professional Tennis (ATP) rankings while a once-in-a-lifetime planetary combination was lighting up his astrological birth chart (horoscope).

Le Grice says researchers studying archetypal principles associated with the Sun, Moon and planets in astrology have consistently shown that angular relationships formed between the planets accurately anticipate major historical themes unfolding globally. And the same archetypal patterns show up tellingly in personal biographies as well.

He describes a breakout 15-month period between January 2008 and May 2009 when the 22-year-old Mallorcan embarked on a winning streak that saw him emerge from the shadow of Swiss tennis legend Roger Federer. Nadal won the French Open in Paris, the Wimbledon title, a Gold Medal at the Beijing Olympics, the Australian Open and enough points from other ATP tournaments to overtake Federer as the No. 1 player in the world.

According to Le Grice, Nadal’s tennis fortunes dramatically improved when transiting Uranus, which orbits the sun every 84 years, was observed closing in on the same zodiacal degree occupied by Jupiter at the time of Nadal’s birth—a powerful alignment known as a conjunction.

Le Grice says Jupiter is associated with themes such as opportunity, growth, abundance, confidence, expansion, elevation and the experience of success. Uranus is related to revolutionary change and unexpected breakthrough experiences, but also to the sudden, the new, the flash of genius, the impulse to experiment.

When combined with Jupiter during this conjunction, themes such as successful leaps forward to new levels of achievement or sudden opportunities for success are among the possibilities. For Nadal, both outcomes were apparent during his remarkable run of victories in 2008.

Under less auspicious planetary alignments Nadal endured a barren period without a tournament victory during the last half of 2009. But the “tennis gods” smiled on him once again in 2010.

Early in the year Rafa received a fresh infusion of Jupiter/Uranus energy—this time as the orbiting Jupiter came into alignment with the position of Uranus in his natal chart. This was a flip-flop of the earlier pattern but likewise coincided with another period in which Nadal was able to fully capitalize on his tennis genius and produce another string of victories resulting in the EPSY award.

Le Grice’s article, Game, Set, Match …Nadal! Can be read at the http://www.archaijournal.org website.

But despite his more exaggerated claims and unsubstantiated theories, Freud’s psychoanalytic method — and its many offshoots in the wider field of depth psychology — is currently viewed by Western scholars as “a necessary corrective to the values and world view of the nineteenth century.”

Writing in Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology, a new online publication, Editor Keiron Le Grice places Freud in a unique category of visionaries who serve as emissaries for emerging truths that become a lightning rod for dismissive skeptical criticism and contempt.

In Freud’s day, the “shockingly wicked” notion that humans might be the unwitting instrument of unconscious impulses and complexes was met with derision and scorn. In the current century, Le Grice sees a parallel in the response that has greeted the emergence of a controversial new academic discipline that is based on the methodology, interpretive principles and cosmological perspective of astrology, the “most controversial subject of all.”

The new discipline draws upon an understanding of archetypal patterns described in psychology, history, art and culture by Carl Jung, James Hillman, Joseph Campbell and others, he noted.

“Although many are quick to reject the truth claims of astrology, striking evidence of correlations between planetary cycles and the major patterns of world history has given archetypal astrology a new, unexpected credibility. There is compelling evidence that astrology is once again worthy of serious consideration,” he maintains.

Le Grice says the new academic discipline is based on research begun at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., in the 1970s. A detailed account is provided by cultural historian and philosopher Richard Tarnas in his award-winning book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View.

Like Vienna, Le Grice says the San Francisco Bay Area has become a hotbed for challenging embedded establishment views on why humans behave the way they do. The movement currently involves a group of about 70 researchers, practitioners and scholars who have come together to form the Archetypal Research Collective.
The group seeks to understand, in philosophical and scientific terms, the basis for astrological correlations. And it hopes to bring the work of Tarnas and like-minded academics to the attention of a wider audience, he said.

Tarnas studied cultural history and depth psychology at Harvard, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, and worked and lived for more than 10 years at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., at one point serving as the Institute’s director of programs and education. He is founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, where he currently teaches, and also is on the faculty at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, Calif.

The Passion of the Western Mind, his best-selling history of Western thought, is currently used as a textbook by more than 100 universities around the world.
The scholarly academic began to develop a rigorous way to test the planetary themes and qualities described by traditional astrology while working at Esalen with psychologist Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology. The pair was studying the timing and character of transformational experiences when it was suggested they should check out astrology.

After getting beyond initial skepticism, the pair examined hundreds and eventually thousands of individual astrological charts, concluding that the archetypal principles astrologers associate with the sun, moon and planets — and the correlations between planetary motion and events on earth they uncovered — were “undeniable and uncanny in their subtlety and specificity.”

According to Le Grice, the central supposition informing archetypal astrology is that one can gain a deep insight into the archetypal dynamics underlying human experience by interpreting the meaning of the positions of the planets in relationship to each other. Importantly, Tarnas and Grof were able to demonstrate that the angular relationships formed between transiting planets affected not only the personal biographies of individuals but the changing patterns of collective human experience as well.

In Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas describes how astrology illuminated key moments in the lives of pivotal historical figures in the West. For example, when Galileo wrote the Starry Messenger, a defining moment in the birth of the modern era, the transiting planet Uranus, which is archetypically associated with revolutionary breakthroughs and awakenings, was forming a particularly powerful one-time configuration in his birth chart.

The same type of configuration or “aspect” was influencing the birth chart of Rene Descartes in 1637 when he published his epoch-defining Discourse on Methods, and was prominent in the birth chart of Isaac Newton in 1687 when he published the Principia, which is widely regarded as the foundational work of modern science. Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of natural selection also emerged in coincidence with the same planetary cycle.

Le Grice believes Tarnas and Grof succeeded in presenting the astrological perspective in a radically different light, finding in the long-discredited ancient symbolic system “something of great value to the postmodern mind.”

Potentially, he thinks that something could “radically transform our understanding of the nature of the universe itself.”

The main difference between the natal chart and the astronomical reality it portrays is that the natal chart has two dimensions rather than three, and it does not reflect the varying distances of the planets from the Earth. What the birth chart does convey is the exact pattern of angular relationships existing between the planets and the Earth at the time and place of one’s birth. The basic principle of astrology is that the planets have a fundamental, cosmically based connection to specific archetypal forces or principles which influence human existence, and that the patterns formed by the planets in the heavens bear a meaningful correspondence to the patterns of human affairs on the Earth. In terms of individuals, the positions of the planets at the time and place of a person’s birth are regarded as corresponding to the basic archetypal patterns of that person’s life and character.

Astrology makes possible a further understanding of one’s life – its cycles, its ups and downs, the crises and the breakthroughs, the periods of major change and transformation – through the study of transits. Transits occur when the planets currently in the sky form certain geometrical patterns with respect to the planetary positions at one’s birth. The nature of those patterns – which planets are involved and how they are positioned – appears to correlate in a strikingly consistent way with the archetypal character of the experiences one tends to have at that time.

Three Primary Issues

To begin, I would like to address three important matters that people usually need discussed when approaching astrology. The first concerns the nature of archetypes, the second involves the question of determinism vs. free will, and the third concerns the nature of astrology’s causal mechanism, or why it works. These three issues are closely interrelated.

First, what is an archetype? Archetypes can be understood and described in many ways, and in fact much of the history of Western thought from Plato and Aristotle onward has been concerned with this very question. But for our present purposes, we can define an archetype as a universal principle or force that affects – impels, structures, permeates – the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. One can think of them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as James Hillman does.

Archetypes (for example Venus or Mars) seem to have a transcendent mythic quality, yet they also have very specific psychological expressions – as in the desire for love and the experience of beauty (Venus) or the impulse towards forceful activity and aggression (Mars). Moreover, archetypes seem to work from both within and without, for they can express themselves as impulses and images from the interior psyche, yet also as events and situations in the external world.

Jung thought of archetypes as the basic constituents of the human psyche, shared cross-culturally by all human beings, and he regarded them as universal expressions of the collective unconscious. Much earlier, the Platonic tradition considered archetypes to be not only psychological but also cosmic and objective, as primordial forms of a Universal Mind that transcended the human psyche. Astrology would appear to support the Platonic view as well as the Jungian, since it gives evidence that Jungian archetypes are not only visible in human psychology, in human experience and behavior, but are also linked to the macrocosm itself – to the planets and their movements in the heavens. Astrology thus supports the ancient idea of an anima mundi, or world soul, in which the human psyche participates. From this perspective, what Jung called the collective unconscious can be viewed as being ultimately embedded within the cosmos itself.

The issue of free will vs. determinism: It used to be believed that astrology revealed a person’s destined fate, that the birth chart was rigidly deterministic. Properly understood, however, astrology can serve to greatly increase personal freedom, rather than limit it. Partly this is because awareness of the basic archetypal structures and patterns of meaning in one’s birth chart allows one to bring considerably more consciousness to the task of fulfilling one’s deepest potential, one’s authentic nature.
But astrology’s emancipatory character also derives from the fact that the more deeply we understand the archetypal forces that affect our lives, the more free we can be in our dealings with them. If we are altogether unconscious of these potent forces, we are like puppets of the archetypes: we then act according to unconscious motivations without any possibility of our being intelligent agents interacting with those forces. To the exact extent that we are conscious of the archetypes, we can respond with greater autonomy and self-awareness. This is of course the whole rationale for depth psychology, from Freud and Jung onward – to become conscious of the unconscious, to release ourselves from the bondage of blind action, to explore and experience the hidden forces in the human psyche. Astrology’s great merit is that it seems to reveal very precisely which archetypes are especially important to each person, how they interact with each other, and when and how they are most likely to be expressed in the course of each life.
Related to this issue is the question of our birth, and how random is the fate by which we are assigned something as weighty as the birth chart with its specific configuration of planets. I personally believe that the circumstances of our birth are not accidental, but are in some sense a consequence of our spiritual and karmic character. Like many others, I have come to believe that we choose the circumstances of our lives, we choose the family and culture and age into which we are born, and that this choice is somehow made from a higher level of our spiritual being than that of which we are usually conscious.

From this point of view, the birth chart is not the randomly allotted prison structure of our inexorable fate, but can be seen rather as defining the basic structure of our potential unfolding – suggesting the personal gifts and trials that we have chosen for this lifetime to work with and evolve through. Astrology illuminates the fundamental archetypal dynamics that profoundly condition our lives, which is not to say they absolutely determine our lives. Because our personal response to life always contains an element of unpredictability and potential freedom, and because astrology gives a greater understanding of our basic archetypal complexes and their timing, then a knowledge of our birth chart and transits can significantly increase the range of options, flexibility and intelligence with which we approach life. The study of astrology can be extraordinarily liberating.

Finally, the issue of a causal mechanism, or why astrology works: It seems unlikely to me that the planets send out some kind of physical emanations that causally influence events in human life in a mechanistic way. The range of coincidences between planetary positions and human existence is just too vast, too experimentally complex, too aesthetically subtle and endlessly creative to be explained by physical factors alone. I believe that a more plausible and comprehensive explanation is that the universe is informed and pervaded by a fundamental holistic patterning which extends through ever level, so that a constant synchronicity or meaningful correlations exists between astronomical events and human events. This is represented in the basic esoteric axiom, “as above, so below,” which reflects a universe all of whose parts are integrated into an intelligible whole.

From this perspective, the planets themselves are not “causing” anything to be happening in our lives, any more than the hands on a clock are now causing it to be 7:30 PM. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state of the archetypal forces at that time. The fact that the planets constantly seem to indicate these things with such accuracy simply suggests that the cosmic order is much more profound and pervasive than our conventional beliefs have assumed. But the relationship between a specific planetary pattern and a human experience is best seen as one of meaningful correlation or correspondence, not one of simple linear causality.

There is, however, a sense in which causality does enter into the astrological perspective, and this is the sense of archetypal causation (comparable to Aristotle’s concepts of formal and final causes). While the physical planets themselves may bear only a synchronistic connection with a given human experienced, that experience is nevertheless being affected or caused – influenced, patterned, impelled, drawn forth – by the relevant planetary archetypes, and in this sense it is quite appropriate to speak, for example, of Saturn (as archetype) “influencing” one in a specific way, or as “governing” certain kinds of experience.

But why should the cosmos have established a systematic correspondence between planetary patterns and archetypally patterned phenomena in human lives? There are many possible answers to this questions, not the least of which might point toward a kind of intrinsic aesthetic splendor in the universe, an overflow of cosmic intelligence and delight that reveals itself in this continuous marriage of mathematical astronomy and mythic poetry. But in more pragmatic human terms, my sense of astrology is that the constant coincidence between planetary positions and human lives exists as a kind of universal code for the human mind to unravel, so that we can better understand ourselves and our world, rediscover our deep connection to the cosmos, and be more complete human beings.