But where to go? I’d been thinking for some time about a historical site in South Dakota I’d read about years before, called Bear Butte. Of all the sites revered by the Native American Plains Indians, this one seems to hold a special importance — a 1,200-foot hill where 60-plus tribes from the United States and Canada still come to conduct vision quests and spiritual retreats. For some reason, something was calling me to this spot more than any other right now. So, late that following Friday afternoon after work, I headed out on the highway toward the northern Great Plains, the Black Hills fixed firmly in my sights.

Driving on just a little sleep, I managed to make it across the border of South Dakota sometime the next day, and eventually reached my destination. This whole area is rich in history, I came to learn, having played host to such iconic figures as Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Red Cloud. After climbing to the top of the hill and spending some time by myself, I made my way back down and spent the next couple of days exploring the area around Bear Butte, including Mount Rushmore and the nearby city of Sturgis. After two whirlwind days, I got into my car and drove on back to Chicago, feeling noticeably rejuvenated.

It was just a few days later, after settling back in at work, that an odd thing happened. While conversing with a few individuals, both in person and over the phone, I discovered that at least three other people beside myself had made the long trek to Bear Butte the same weekend I did, all completely independent of one another! That four different people would all be drawn to the same remote spot on the exact same weekend, and not even cross paths with one another, was startling, almost as though we were all pulled there by some unseen force. There’s even some small irony in the fact that Bear Butte is a proverbial stone’s throw from Devil’s Tower — the site where Spielberg filmed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a movie about individuals mysteriously drawn to the same geographical spot by some unknown force. Irony, synchronicity — call it whatever you like.

I’ve had a number of experiences like this over the years, where I found myself attracted to a place or subject around the same time as others, in ways that were difficult to explain. Not impossible, just difficult. And every one of these times, I’ve been reminded of the “subterranean links” that synchronicity always seems to hint at, as though our lives have been choreographed in ways we can scarcely begin to imagine, with subtle connections drawing together seemingly disparate events and people.

Whose Thoughts Are These, Anyway?

And among other things, this has prompted me to wonder about the true nature of thoughts. What are they, really? And where do they come from? Are they simply generated by our brains, as most scientists claim? Or do we pick them up out of the ethers, almost like radio waves captured by a receiver? While still a teenager, I came across this intriguing quote attributed to anomalist Charles Fort (though its exact source is debated); it resonated with me then, and still does now:

“… ours is an organic existence, and … our thoughts are the phenomena of its eras, quite as its rocks and trees and forms of life are.”

That crystallized my own view precisely, since I’d already wondered even by that young age if my ideas might somehow be a product of my time and place, rather than something strictly personal to me. In that same spirit, I now had to wonder whether it was possible I’d simply tuned into the same “Bear Butte” wavelength those other three people had tuned into that weekend back in 1992. At the very least, it was food for thought.

Philosophers have a word for this sort of thing — zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age.” Throughout my life, I’ve noticed how different periods seem to exude distinctly different qualities or moods, and how certain ideas or achievements seem appropriate to their times. A shift in the group consciousness takes place, and suddenly a particular subject becomes all the rage or certain themes start popping up in different places independent from one another. Historians have long mused over the curious way parallel developments arise simultaneously in independent fields, like inventions appearing at the same time or theoretical breakthroughs being conceived by different people simultaneously, such as Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin both coming up with evolutionary theory, or Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton both conceiving of calculus.

This happens in the arts, too, possibly because creative types possess especially sensitive antennae for picking up on subtle trends streaming through the collective consciousness. I once read an interview with songwriter Paul Simon where he marveled at the coincidental way Paul McCartney composed “Let It Be” around the same time that Simon composed “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” since the two songs were so similar in tone and completely different from everything else being played on the radio at the time — yet neither he nor Paul was aware of what each other was writing then.

Astrologers Have Something of an Edge

Fortunately, astrologers have something of an edge in studying the zeitgeist, since they’re able to chart its various waves and shifting currents with some degree of precision. More often than not, that changing mental–emotional atmosphere seems especially connected with the interactions of the slower-moving planets — in particular, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, though Saturn and Jupiter are sometimes involved, too.

For instance, in his book Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas points out that the famed mutiny on the Bounty took place exactly as the French Revolution was erupting in France thousands of miles away. These two events were uniquely parallel to one another in significance, involving nearly unprecedented rebellions against authority, yet there was no way the disgruntled sailors could have known about the French uprising unfolding far away; it’s as if both groups were responding to the same revolutionary impulse streaming through the air at the time. But what was that, astrologically? Most likely, the result of a powerful opposition taking place between Uranus and Pluto, two planets traditionally associated with revolutionary energies whenever they join forces.

On that occasion, there was an opposition at work, stirring up turbulent feelings among people, but for many astrologers an even more profound agent of historical change is the conjunction between slow-moving bodies. During my own life, I’ve been lucky enough to witness two such exact pairings of the outer planets: the alignment of Uranus with Pluto during the mid 1960s and the conjunction of Uranus with Neptune during the early ‘90s. (And lest we take astronomical events like this for granted, keep in mind that there won’t be another such conjunction of these three outer planets during the rest of this entire century!)

Anyone who’s lived through these two periods will probably recognize what extraordinary times they really were in some ways — politically, scientifically, culturally. For instance, the ‘60s were a time of revolutionary fervor, when people around the world were exploring new ways of thinking about their lives and values. Men finally walked on the Moon, women and minorities were demanding their rights, and new artistic forms were breaking into consciousness. In popular music, Bob Dylan and the Beatles composed arguably their greatest work precisely as Uranus and Pluto joined forces in 1965 and 1966. Dylan came out with three of his greatest albums (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61, and Blonde on Blonde) within the span of those two years, while the Beatles produced Help!, Rubber Soul, and Revolver during those same years, with Sergeant Pepper following shortly afterward the next year. This was a period when many other musicians and songwriters were hitting their stride, too.

The Conclusion Seems Inescapable

The conclusion seems inescapable to me: The zeitgeist is especially rich and creatively potent at some times more than others. During such periods, emotions run stronger, inspiration flows freely, and powerful ideas present themselves like low-hanging fruit ripe for the picking. But once these periods have run their course, it’s as if a phantom spigot has mysteriously been turned off and those brilliant feelings and ideas are suddenly harder to come by. I once heard a yogi remark that the “truly great souls” choose to incarnate onto the Earth at powerful times in history, like the Italian Renaissance or Sophocles’ Athens, because of the opportunities those times present. Difficult as that may be to prove, it makes a certain reincarnational sense, when you stop to think about it. By analogy, would a budding world-class gymnast want to attend a strictly average athletic school or prefer to enroll in the best institution available? Likewise, would an Albert Einstein be more likely to incarnate into a period that’s totally out of sync with his abilities and skills or one that offers the optimal circumstances for developing his brilliant ideas?

Consider that the hugely successful author, J. K. Rowling, was born precisely as Uranus was conjoining Pluto in 1965 and penned works that spoke to millions of readers. (Note, too, that the Harry Potter character sports a Uranian lightning bolt–like birthmark on his forehead!) Likewise, Larry and Andy Wachowski, directors of the successful Matrix franchise, were born in 1965 and 1967, respectively, and created a film that reached audiences the world over. Going back further, consider how both Ludwig von Beethoven and Napoleon Bonaparte were born during the rare grand trine in the 1700s between the three outer planets — Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

In all of these cases, it’s as though these individuals’ relationship with the transpersonal planets provided them with a finger on the pulse of those generational streams that defined their era, for better (Beethoven) or worse (Napoleon).

Although some periods may indeed be more energetic or truly revolutionary than others, it’s important to point out that all periods have their own unique qualities and set of possibilities. Every era witnesses the rise of individuals who are preternaturally attuned to the potentials of their time, whether constructively or destructively, with one decade witnessing the rise of Michael Jackson and Mikhail Gorbachev, and another one seeing the ascent of Lady Gaga and Barack Obama — and on it goes.

But in more modest ways, even the most obscure individual is a creature of their particular zeitgeist, their thoughts and drives reflecting the necessities of their era. Is there any way to tell more precisely how someone is aligned to the zeitgeist? One method is to look at whether you were born close in time to any configuration involving the outer planets. Did you arrive in the midst of Uranus square Saturn? If so, then take a moment to reflect on how your life has been concerned with reconciling traditional versus unconventional values. Or were you born when Saturn was conjoining Jupiter? If so, then how has your life been involved in grappling with systems of religion, law, or morality?

Having said this, it’s important to realize that though we’re all shaped by our times, we’re not necessarily confined by them. That’s because in a certain sense the zeitgeist is whatever we make of it, in terms of utilizing its resources for either constructive or destructive ends. You can hand some people the most expensive art materials and they’ll still manage to create inferior art, while others working with the most meager of materials will still manage to concoct masterpieces. Likewise, a great soul can do wondrous things with the planetary potentials offered by their era, just as a less balanced mind can abuse or squander them. The famed yogi Paramahansa Yogananda once implored students to “rise above the age in which you are born.” I’d suggest a slightly different variation: As long as we’re here and now, why not make the most of it?

Adapted and abridged from a longer article in The Mountain Astrologer magazine; reprinted by permission.

Tarnas is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He studied intellectual and cultural history and depth psychology at Harvard, earned a PhD in psychology from the Saybrook Institute in San Francisco, and worked and lived for more than 10 years at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, Calif., eventually serving as the institute’s director of programs and education.

His work is controversial because he’s one of the few educators in the country doing serious social research involving planetary cycles. At Esalen with psychologist Stanislav Grof and others he began the qualitative study that eventually examined thousands of individual astrological charts.

“It was astonishing how the planetary alignments consistently and precisely correlated with human experience. The archetypal principles associated with the planets and the correlations uncovered were undeniable and uncanny in their subtlety and specificity,” he said.

These patterns have permeated and shaped history over time, he suggests.

For example, at the time of its publication five years ago, Cosmos and Psyche offered a heads-up on an approaching alignment of the slow-moving planets Uranus and Pluto that has only now begun to form in the heavens. The planets will remain “in aspect” through the year 2020.

Tarnas said the years 2007 – 2020 would likely bring a new infusion of the cultural impulses and archetypal dynamics that emerged during the 1960s, which is the last time these planetary energies were in major alignment.

He points out that archetypal Uranus represents the principle of change, freedom, rebellion and revolution and is associated with unexpected phenomena of all kinds. Pluto, recently reduced by astronomers to dwarf planet status, is in fact a celestial heavyweight and the archetype for power itself.

“Pluto is the archetype of primordial energy and the universal life force that impels all evolution and transformation. It compels, empowers, overwhelms, transforms, destroys and resurrects. And, at its deepest level, it involves the mystery of death and rebirth,” he explained.

Tarnas points out that characteristic themes observed for this cycle in past centuries include heightened impulses for radical social change and cultural creativity, accelerated technological and scientific advancement, the empowerment of progressive and reformist political movements, intensified feminist, civil rights and countercultural activity, an increased drive for freedom and autonomy at both the individual and collective level, and pressure towards radicalization in many spheres of action and ideas.

Also identified with the cycle is intensified ecological activism, large demographic shifts and the activation of mass energies and mass movements of various kinds.

“Generally speaking, Uranus-Pluto eras have tended to bring forth the catalyzing of powerful forces in many forms, the awakening of a will to power than can be both creative and destructive, and a tangible intensification and acceleration of human experience,” he said.

In Cosmos and Psyche, Tarnas noted that while all of these specific themes have been strongly in evidence during past Uranus-Pluto alignments, precisely what will happen during the current 15-year cycle can’t be known in advance. But an intensified striving for equality and self-sovereignty could be on the immediate horizon, he predicted.

He said a more detailed analysis of the 2000 – 2020 time period is published in the current issue of the Archai Journal of Archetypal Cosmology.

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.