"Jung's advice is to 'be what you have always been', and this is the real path to inner integration and to relating with others. One of the greatest assets of the [astrology] chart with its interwoven patterns, especially if taken in conjunction with typology, is that it can provide a richer, more comprehensive picture of what one has always been – which is also what one can potentially be."
-Liz Greene
“The Archetype is a formal element, empty in itself, which is nothing more than a facultas praeformandi, an a priori possibility of the form in which the idea appears. It is not our ideas themselves that are inherited but merely their forms, which, in this respect, are the exact equivalents of the equally formally determined instincts. Nor can the Archetypes, any more than the instincts be shown to be present as such, until they are brought to concrete manifestation.” (C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)
Astrology utilizes Archetypes as a language for understanding the basic psychological drives of human beings. The whole astrological world of ideas can be interpreted as a meaningfully ordered assembly of symbols, necessarily resting on an archetypal foundation of which the collective unconscious of humankind is composed and thus they can be rediscovered in everybody’s psyche after they have assumed definite forms.
“Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology without further restrictions because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”(Commentary C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower)
More than anyone else, Jung showed that the primary life-motivating agents in the individual psyche and the overall psychological patterns in entire cultures are manifestations of “archetypal” factors in the human psyche. They are inherent in the psychological layer of life, which he calls the “collective unconscious” and are psychoid, shaping matter as well as mind. Like Plato’s Forms, an Archetype is both subjective and objective; and is evident in the innate ideas of human consciousness as well as in the fundamental processes of nature.
“The distinction between mind and body is an artificial dichotomy, a discrimination which is unquestionable based far more on the peculiarity of intellectual understanding than on the nature of things. In fact, so intimate is the intermingling of bodily and psychic traits that not only can we draw far-reaching inferences as to the constitution of the psyche from the constitution of the body, but we can also infer from psychic peculiarities the corresponding bodily characteristics.” (C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search for a Soul)
“It is characteristic of the Westerner that, for purpose of knowledge, he has split apart the physical and the spiritual sides of life; but these opposites lie together in the psyche, and psychology must recognize the fact. The ‘psychic’ is both physical and mental.” (C.G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower)
It was exactly this dual nature of the Archetype that enabled the astrological chart to bridge inner character with the outer events that reflected that character. Jung recognized that the unique and unparalleled ability of astrology to disclose correlations between planetary motion and human experience also made it an accurate way of timing life-crises. This observance contributed to the formulation of his theory of synchronicity.
He defined synchronicity as “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state.” (C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An A-Causal Connecting Principle)
This theory of correspondences is at the very core of astrology and the famous axioms “as above, so below”, “as within so without”, which have survived through the centuries, are an expression of the interrelationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm.
In addition, his notion of two attitude-types – extrovert and introvert – is readily recognizable in astrology as the bi-polar division of the zodiac into yang and yin signs. Likewise, his four functional types – intuition, sensation, thinking and feeling – show affinities with the four elements of astrology (fire, earth, air and water).
“Personality, in the largest sense, is the organic whole in which the physiological and the psycho-mental natures of man are progressively integrated. Therefore, it represents the wholeness of the human being as a microcosm; man as a whole solar system operating on the background of, and in constant relationship to the zodiac or the galaxy. Astrology….is an art of life interpretation and provides us with a technique for the development and fulfillment of ‘personality’. …The goal of astrology is the alchemy of personality. It is to transform chaos into cosmos; collective human nature into individual and creative personality.” (Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality)
“Astrology always represented the primordial search of human beings for measurable order and basic meaning of their existence and the search is never ended. The future of astrology depends on its capacity to balance and complement scientific technological thinking by upholding a holistic search for ever more universalistic pattern of order revealing an ever deeper and inclusive realization of the meaning and rhythm of existence in an ever-widening world of human experience.” (Dane Rudhyar)
Art: Cosmik Culture Prints: Available Here
