Because It Is the Ancient Psychology of the Objective Psyche

Below I share a passage from Jung’s Last Lectures, in which he discusses his views on astrology. Although he commented on the subject many times and in many other places, here his attitude comes across as perhaps the most immediate and direct. The format of these lectures was a dialogue with around forty people at the Psychological Club in Zurich. The year was 1958 – just two years before his death – and among the participants asking him questions were Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman.

I share this excerpt because of its distinct emotional charge. Jung describes astrology with phrases like “amazingly simple,” “truly astonishing,” “enormous shock,” “striking significance,” and “extremely interesting.” This is likely due to the fact that the passage appears at the very end of the book, and according to one of the participants: “Jung, as usual, began dryly, but then came alive, and after an hour and a half, his face flushed with enthusiasm, he brought the meeting to a close.”

From the text you will understand that this genius in the knowledge of the soul studied astrology because he “wanted to understand what actually lies behind it.” This inquiry led him to the conviction that astrology is in fact the form in which psychology existed in Antiquity – as knowledge of the regularities of the objective (supra-individual) psyche.

And so:

“Perhaps it has happened to you as well that a skilled astrologer has calmly told you your entire life from your horoscope. And it turns out to be true. This would not be possible if everything were not predetermined and if it were not in synchronicity with the position of the stars. It is amazingly simple.

If one has seen it several times, one becomes convinced. That is why I ask my patients quite without shame or embarrassment: ‘Do you have your horoscope with you?’ And then they blush and say: ‘Yes, by coincidence.’ Sometimes they think I am one of those biased fools who naturally regard such things as incredible nonsense. No – it often opens my eyes. It is truly astonishing. And sometimes very unpleasant.

I once had an assistant who later took his own life. Years before […] In astrology there is such a system. At the time I was calculating horoscopes myself, because I wanted to understand what actually lies behind it. I saw that he had a particular symbol – there are symbols for every degree of the zodiac, from the ascendant, from his birth point – a horse grazing, unsuspecting, while a tiger creeps toward it. The interpretation, which had existed for a long time, read: ‘A man who will depart prematurely through suicide. Prematurely.’ And so it happened. I went through an enormous shock when I discovered it. At the time I could not yet see at all why this should happen. But then it really did happen. Such things leave a strong impression, even when they sometimes do not prove true. But they give you an entire perspective, an interesting point of view.

This happened to me, for example, in 1911, when I first encountered these things, because at the time I was engaged in symbolic-historical research. I then saw what striking significance astrology had in Antiquity. It had exercised an enormous influence. I first wanted to understand something about it before forming a judgment.

At that time I came across a small book from 1595 or 1596 by an old colleague. He had been a professor of medicine in Würzburg, a Mr. Goclenius, at the end of the sixteenth century. He wrote a pleasant compendium, something like a handbook for the physicians of his time, on diagnostics – namely [through] chiroscopy, the lines of the hand. But there was something else there as well – what was it? Yes, above all a treatise on astrology from a medical point of view. Extremely interesting!

In it one can find the first individual horoscopes and quite amusing questions – say, about the psychological relationship between murderer and victim, and how it is expressed astrologically. Interestingly, they are in correlation: the two have related positions. In addition, I read there how he writes categorically: Mars in medio coeli semper significat casum ab alto – ‘Mars in the middle of the heavens always means a fall from on high.’ And about two weeks later I came across the horoscope of the German Kaiser, drawn up by someone. He had Mars [in medio coeli], which means he was a warlike ruler, not the ‘prince of peace’ as they called him. Whoever has Mars at the top, according to ancient tradition, is a warlike nature. And then [the question arose]: How on earth could the German Emperor fall? At the time one could not imagine such a thing at all.

But there it is – three years later it happened. I then said to myself: ‘Well, there is clearly something to this.’ After that I began to engage with it seriously and saw that this is the old psychology. This is the old psychology, which is based on the objective-psychic. The objective-psychic behaves in precisely this way: I have a certain nature, a certain particularity, and it consists of subtle, immeasurable qualities.

It is roughly like giving an excellent wine connoisseur some particular wine whose origin you know, and this expert can tell you: ‘This is such-and-such a variety, this is such-and-such a region, this must be from such-and-such a vineyard.’ That is possible. In the same way, a person is marked by the moment of his birth, by the place, the country, the environment, the entire kairos, the very instant of time. And this is expressed in the horoscope. That is why certain predispositions can already be found in the horoscope which may later play a very important role in life.

Astrology reaches its greatest flowering precisely in our time, not in the Middle Ages. There it was only in its beginnings. In our time astrology is at its peak. But if you open [a book and read]: ‘Even in 1722 such-and-such a court councillor had a horoscope drawn up for his children.’ The old fool! What superstition! And these naive people who write such things have no idea that the real astrological literature exists only today.

Scientific astrology actually exists only in our time. Never before have so many horoscopes been cast as in our time. In England I know a professor of philosophy who gave an introductory course on astrology at an English university. Voilà, such is the situation. In Switzerland we are a little behind. And I would like to note: a little behind we are.

I do not wish to make an apology for horoscopes here. But the fact that such a thing is possible and has its justification is solely because there exists an objective psyche.

The psyche is not arbitrary or accidental, but a precisely determined functional given, which in all people, taken as a whole, is the same, just as with physiological and anatomical characteristics. Just as every person has a sternocleidomastoid muscle, so too does every person have a certain archetype. And just as the body consists of different organs, so the psyche consists of different archetypes, of innate forms. These are not innate ideas, but forms of psychic process. They are instinctive forms. Instinct is not merely a dynamic that does something – instinct is specific, and therefore has its specific form…”

– C. G. Jung, Last Lectures (1958), pp. 210–215

In the last passage, the primary reason for Jung’s interest in astrology is seen most directly: the planets, signs, and houses of the horoscope – and everything else within it – are, in their essence, simply a description of the archetypes, the contents of the objective psyche of the human being. It was precisely through astrology, and above all through the books of Liz Greene – a qualified Jungian analyst and one of the founders of the psychological approach to astrology – that I myself came to understand most fully what the concept of the archetype actually means in his psychology.

Medieval Zodiac Chart

Jung’s central thesis is simple: ancient people did not “invent” astrology by observing the celestial bodies – they projected onto them the contents of the collective unconscious and perceived these inner contents through projection. In other words, the planets are not merely solid bodies moving through space, but archetypes clothed in mythological images. Mars, for example, is the archetype of aggression and action; Venus, of Eros. The horoscope, in its essence, is a “map” of the psychic structure of the individual, projected onto the celestial sphere.

Only in modernity does astrology have the chance to become a science – through the withdrawal of these projections and the recognition within them of the archetypes at work. To understand astrology is to interpret its symbols, and how central the concept of “symbol” is to analytical psychology we all know. To the charge that astrology is “unscientific,” we may respond that when it comes to the interpretation of symbols, the scientific approach is a different one – not measurement and proof, but understanding the meaning with which the symbol is charged.

Another such central concept is synchronicity, which lies at the heart of the interpretation of astrological symbolism itself. A telling example is the planet Uranus – discovered in 1781, in the midst of the American Revolution and on the eve of the French Revolution, in an era of scientific breakthrough and radical rupture with tradition. Astrology assigns to Uranus precisely these qualities: revolution, sudden change, liberation, genius, and rebellion against the established order. The planet did not “cause” these events – but its discovery and the spirit of the age form a single synchronistic whole.∗

Jung applies the same principle on a far larger scale – to entire historical epochs. His book Aion rests entirely on the astrological premise that “the aeon of Pisces represents the synchronistic phenomenon accompanying the two-thousand-year development of the Christian spirit,” and that historical speculations about the ages have always been shaped by astrological ideas. The symbol of Pisces – two fish swimming in opposite directions – he connects to the duality of Christ and Antichrist, with the transition from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius, in which we now live, being the time of “the second fish.” This is an extraordinarily difficult and at the same time deeply blessed time, in which we integrate our “shadow” and each take our own individual piece of responsibility for the condition in which humanity finds itself.

Jung also actively used astrology as a diagnostic tool. In a letter to the Indian astrologer B. V. Raman, he wrote:

“In cases of difficult psychological diagnosis, I usually get a horoscope in order to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle. I must say that I very often find that astrological data illuminate certain points which would otherwise have remained obscure.”

– C. G. Jung: Letters, Vol. I (1906–1950), p. 475

In my own experience, this is exactly so. Without astrology, I would not have found answers to things I do not understand – neither about myself nor about the people around me. It is not simply a source of clarifying and consoling knowledge. Without astrology, I would not have been able to develop the tolerance for individual human differences and limitations that I have today.

Of course, much more could be added – for instance, that the horoscope is the perfect mandala, or that the four elements (Fire, Earth, Air, Water) are the ancient equivalents of the four psychic functions (intuition, sensation, thinking, and feeling). But I believe this is enough to understand where Jung’s powerful attraction to this ancient psychology of the objective psyche originates – the human being is a microcosm, containing within itself everything that can be found in the outer world, the macrocosm – in the unified world, Unus Mundus, where we are all connected.

Kameliya

∗ In his work Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Jung describes an astrological experiment with 483 married couples (966 horoscopes in total), in which he investigated whether the traditional aspects associated with marriage (such as Sun conjunct Moon) appear more frequently in married couples.