Richard Tarnas is a Swiss-born, Harvard Educated, Esalen Alumni and professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute for Integral Studies, and is also the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He is also the author of the best-selling Passion of the Western Mind.
But for 30 years, Tarnas has kept a [sort of] secret. He dabbles in astrology. Now Tarnas has written a new book about astrology; Cosmos and Psyche, published earlier this year. Apparently, it took Tarnas over 10 years to write this enormous (569 pages inc. notes) book, following a fair amount of anticipation for it in the “astro-world” (where his secret wasn’t such a big secret) prior to its publication, which included a lengthy pre-publication interview in the Mountain Astrologer Magazine in late 2005.
So when I stumbled over it this past February on the Barnes and Noble new non-fiction display shelf, I immediately bought it, and began to read it with a great deal of excitement. Subtitled, Intimations of a New World View and based, Tarnas claims, upon 30 years* of research, it strives to address what he calls “the profound metaphysical disorientation and groundlessness that pervades contemporary human experience” by suggesting a “new metanarrative that transcends separate cultures and subcultures, an encompassing pattern of meaning that could give to collective human existence a nourishing coherence and intelligibility.”
That meta-narrative, as he calls it, is astrology. But it was a very strange thing to be reading through the first two chapters, knowing he was talking about astrology (as astrologers had been buzzing about Tarnas’ new “astrology” book for years!), and also knowing that he knew he was talking about astrology – and finding that, not once, does he actually write the word “astrology” until he reaches page 61, and then after that, it appears, it seems, as rarely as possible (preferring instead synonyms like “planetary correlations” and “archetypally significant.”) In fact, it is also worth noting that Tarnas appears to have taken great care to see that the word “astrology” is never mentioned on the book jacket or in the Table of Contents and as infrequently as possible in the Index.
The reviews posted on his web site and at Amazon.com have been, almost without exception, filled with ecstatic praise, particularly from astrologers with names: “a masterpiece,” “deserving of a constellation of stars,” “A Scientific Triumph,” “Revolutionary,” “Visionary” and so on. As Jeff Jawer of StarIQ enthuses:
This is the most important book about astrology in decades (maybe centuries). It’s no exaggeration to describe this as a breakthrough that will surely heighten awareness of humanity’s connection with the cosmos. Richard Tarnas’ protean intellect and lucid prose rewards the reader on every page. This is a shot across the bow of academics who have failed to include astrology in their understanding of our culture.
Most important? I gotta say, I just don’t get how he can say this. In fact, I don’t think I have ever been so profoundly disappointed in a book. Not only is it intellectually lazy and unoriginal, it is – at a deep level –profoundly dishonest. While, Tarnas is hailed in the Amazon.com reviews and on the book jacket as a rigrous scholar I was appalled to discover, early on, in the first two chapters, how phenomenally ignorant he is regarding the history of astrology itself –- and its practice — particularly considering that he is a actually a trained historian. Additionally, his astrology — that which demonstrates — is sloppy, rigid, and yes deterministic (more on that to follow).
Dave at astroamerica.com gets right at the heart of one the book’s central problems:
What this book is, or appears to be, is a rather flabby exposition of mundane astrology. The author has related seminal world events to outer planet conjunctions. Or, to be precise, his selection of world events. In this book, the Paris student uprising of 1968 – which in hindsight seems only to have led to the downfall of Charles de Gaulle – is vastly more important than the American war in Vietnam, which is hardly mentioned.
[snip]
As mundane astrology, how is the book? Only fair. If I were his teacher & I was handing out grades, Tarnas would get a C. Like many books of its sort, the footnotes make better reading than the main text. Tarnas hangs all his big events on not-so-big, not so rare aspects, for the most part. Not for nothing mundane astrologers use signs, ingress charts & much else in their work. He claims that never before has anyone used “archetypes” in mundane work, which I suppose is true, but hardly something to brag about.
Exactly, with the exception on the last point on which Dave is wrong (but then again, Dave has an ax to grind with words like archetypal which he does not like or understand). Charles Harvey, one of the 20th century’s most prominent and well-respected mundane astrologers — and with whom Tarnas corresponded for many years — used the term frequently when speaking, teaching and writing about mundane astrology. Michael Baigent uses and defines “archetype” in Mundane Astrology (pub. 1984). There are many many other documented instances.
I am not going to spend too much time, here, critiquing his approach to planetary cycles, except to make two brief points:
1) Tarnas did not “invent” or “discover” (as he seems to imply) the concept of working with the cyclic relationship of planetary pairs to understand the “archetypal significance” of historical time periods. Astrologers have always understood time from both a linear and a cyclical perspective, as well as symbolic (more on this point later). In fact, cyclic time is an very old idea that is deeply rooted in the astrological tradition, going back (at least) to Islamic astrologer Abu Mashar and perhaps originally arising in the context of a now-lost Persian tradition (see Nick Campion, Holden, Baigent/Campion/Harvey, Whifield).
2) Tarnas mentions only once the work of his close friend, the late Charles Harvey — who worked extensively with a cyclic approach to astrology. Nor does he properly cite the work of Rob Hand, Andre Barbault (who had an enormous influence on both C.G. Jung and Charles Harvey), Dane Rudyar, Charles Carter, or Nick Campion, to name just a few of the many astrologers who have done extensive work with planetary cycles and mundane astrology. In fact, this gets to the heart of one of the book’s central faults, the constant and repeated use of phrases like, “I found,” “I discerned,” and “my research shows,” when in fact there is really little — if anything which is truly original in Tarnas’ this book (with one exception, which is the use of preposterously wide orbs).
*30 years of research: In the endnotes, Tarnas provides a list of books of which he claims to have made a careful study of. These include books by Alan Leo (who only wrote about natal astrology), Dane Rudyar (The Astrology of Personality – not one of Rudyar’s books on mundane astrology), C.E.O Carter (Principles of Astrology – again, not one of Carter’s books on mundane astrology), Reinhold Ebertin (COSI – a midpoint cookbook, Tarnas does not use midpoints as a technique in his analysis), and so forth. In fact he lists only one mundane work and that is Mundane Astrology by Baigent, Campion and Harvey and it was published in 1984, closer to 20 years ago than 30. So either he is lying about the amount of time he spent studying mundane astrology or he is trying to hide the influence of people like Dane Rudyar(who worked extensively with cycles). I will have more to say about the significance of books he did not either read or admit to reading.
I first learned astrology from Rick Tarnas, in a class at CIIS. I do think he is brilliant, and that he does have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different types of manifestations corresponding with the play of two planetary archetypes.
That being said, I feel his approach is limited, in that he pays no attention to signs or houses (although angles appear important to him). Having studied the planetary archetypes first, I feel grateful that I have a firm understanding of aspects, but it took me a long time to grasp signs and houses, and integrate all three factors together.
I’ve had arguments with one of Rick’s students about this … I firmly believe that signs and houses DO provide important information, and that it is not the case that the planetary aspects alone will tell you all that you really need to know about one’s complexes.
That being said, Rick’s book (not that I’ve read all of it…) is not “intellectually lazy and unoriginal.” From my understanding, he has earned a lot of respect in the Academy with ‘Passion of the Western Mind,’ and one reason he does not mention the word “astrology” until page 61 is that he is trying to get these scholarly types to embrace astrology, and needs to first win them over with a more Hillman-esque argument. I believe he wants the intellectuals to embrace archetypal astrology, and he has written this book explicitly for them.
Thank you for your comments, Jeffrey.
However, regarding the use of other chart factors, I think you do an excellent job of making my point. It seems obvious that Tarnas has not explored them fully — and indeed, in the book he is quite dismissive of their use, saying only “I have found” they are not relevant…and offers no theory or idea as to why they are not “relevant.”
Furthermore, MANY astrologers have made (and documented) extensive studies of particular aspects with regard to both natal and mundane astrology, so there is nothing original in Tarnas’ approach. What I found particularly offensive is that he failed to credit anyone else’s work in this regard. Particularly since he is well aware of other’s work with cycles, as he says himself in the book, he has subscibed to the AA Journal since at least sometime in the 80′s and as he has also said in other contexts (but does not say in the book) corresponded with Charles Harvey beginning in the 70′s. Which is, simply put, intellectually dishonest. And will not impress the “scholars” when 2 + 2 is put together….
I think the practice of both Jeff Jawer’s hyperbolic cheer leading and the above critics’ malevolent evisceration of a strawman–one erected to represent the author as a most convenient target, are both “intellectually dishonest” and purposely misguided in spirit. At no time while reading this book did I get the idea the author set out to stake a claim of personal achievement other than hopefully succeeding at an exposition of how his intellectually guided experiences are most responsible for his philosophical stance and his current understanding our most likely relationship to the Cosmos. I see this book as an “artistic” creation, as an expression of his “Self”…it has no rigorous defensive armor, and it has no intellectual property claiming claws. Perhaps this works is best put to service as the author intends–as a means of helping any intelligent person overcome their culturally re-enforced ignorance of what “astrology believers” think about at depth, and why they seem led by reason to think about this thing called astrology. There is no Science of how we relate to a living universe, perhaps there will be one in the future, whatever it may come to be called.
Rog
(/Pedantus…:)
[...] argue with someone who doesn’t understand the purpose of or uses for archetypal mythology. Permalink| [...]
No rigorous defensive armour?
LOL. The book is almost 500 pages long!
No intellectual claiming claws?
Notes and Sources almost 150 pages long! Why the need for so many if the book was merely an “artistic creation?”
In fact of matter, throughout the 20th century (starting with Alan Leo et al & carried forward by Rudyar, Margaret Hone), the trend was to move away from concrete prediction toward using astrology to understand archetypal possibilities…to the astrological uninitiated, it would very hard not to come to the conclusion that Tarnas has somehow set a new trend in this regard.
I would point you to the following advise given by Margaret Hone’s Applied Astrology in 1953 (p 11):
For forty years I have studied traditional western tropical astrology with signs and houses, western sidereal astrology emphasizing angles and not signs or houses and Vedic sidereal astrology while living many years in Nepal. I think Tarnas was correct, at least by way of introduction, to use angular hard aspects without too much astrological jargon or talk about signs and houses etc. The scientific and scholarly community is suspicious enough as it is in regards to astrology, and these details only serve as an alienating force. Once someone has a good knowledge of astrology, he or she can explore all the other systems but if you hit them immediately with some of the stuff, it will really sound quite laughable. That doesn’t mean everything else is inaccurate; it’s just that the language is archaic and invokes the idea of superstition. It also reminds everyone of the daily horoscope on Aries! Really.
For example, I have known Vedic astrologers who were incredibly accurate, but if you read Vedic texts there will be many statements such as “the person will have many cows and be a king of his village,” or “die by fire” etc. To the contemporary, worldly scholar these things sound ludicrous because they do not understand the context or the overall picture, the process of weighing many variables and so forth that a good Vedic astrologer does.
Furthermore, in terms of science it is easier to make actual observations in nature such as the full moon (sun and moon are “opposite”), new moon (sun and moon are conjunct) than to prove that signs (which are superimposed upon the heavens by man’s imagination) actually work. Due to the precession of the equinox’s (which sidereal western and Vedic astrologers taken into account) there is that approximately 23 discrepancy going on which means many astrologers are not even agreeing on which sign a planet is in (unless it’s in the last 7 degrees of the tropical position). It is true that through observation over the years the meanings of signs in Vedic astrology and in Western astrology are a little different so some astrologers in both camps are still pretty accurate. But the fact remains, this discrepancy is often fuel for fodder when it comes to any debate about astrology with non-astrologers who have little knowledge of it. The Ebertin or Fagin schools, I forget which -it’s been years – simply decided to dispense with signs altogether and look only at actual phenomenon that occurred in the sky (conjunctions, oppositions, square relationships etc.) Signs may well work in that they point to certain vast areas in the sky that may one day be proven [or unproven] to have specific properties but they may also not work and be simply artistic or imaginative projections made by man when s/he first looked up at the sky. [Or perhaps these projections were made after observing actual events on that repeatedly occurred when planets were in these areas (ie. signs) and are valid as metaphors for true events].
A lot of superstition and extraneous information has crept into astrology simply because it is so old. Signs could be one of them. I myself sometimes stubbornly hold onto the notion of signs and rulerships (especially when it comes to Vedic charts because it seems to work so accurately) but I cannot honestly say I see any scientific reason why signs and rulerships should work. Planets conjuncting or opposing one another or hitting prominent angles, however seem to lend themselves to a more scientific observation (at least at this juncture in history) because we can actually observe these things astronomically. Some day we may be able to see things we can’t see with science right now and find some kind of scientific basis for why the signs work. [Conversely we may find out they are simply our own projections acting as self fulfilling prophesy when it comes to human behavior. We want it to be true so we make it true.]
For all of the above reasons, the signs, at least at present, are a very hard sell indeed. This is perhaps why many of the western sidereal astrologers simply dropped them. Their research on planet combinations hitting angles seemed to work more frequently and they were perhaps tired of all the arguments about which sign the planet was actually in and so forth. As you are probably aware, the sidereal signs are the positions of where the constellation actually are at present but the tropical (typical western) signs take into account the yearly equinoxes and seasons and have remained fixed in the same position they were maybe 2000 years ago (or so). [whatever. look it up.] I think you can argue the influence of seasons and equinoxes for typical tropical astrology – and you can argue the position of the actual constellations and precession of the equinoxes for sideral astrology. On a multi-dimensional level both systems might be said “to work” but the fact that they both “work” might have more to do with the fact that in both systems the same planetary aspects (for the most part) are present. The conjunctions or oppositions are there whether the signs are different or not. Planets hit or don’t hit major angles whether they are sidereally located or not.
I have no idea what Tarnas teaches or believes about all this but I am familiar with the school of astrologers and astronomers who believe hard planetary aspects (squares, conjunctions and opps) and aspects to the angles (1,4,7 and 10th house cusps)reflect the most accurate readings. Having an “angular mars jupiter” will often describe a person better than saying “he has five planets in Scorpio.” If you match the actual traits of the subject.
Various systems could be argued forever. Sometimes the most unscientific sounding people of all have made the most incredible insights or predictions, so I am not saying that something is more correct just because it “sounds” more scientific. Various systems may actually work due to multiple realities we cannot quantify with our current level of science. All I am saying is that a lot of bogus ideas have crept into astrology and it hasn’t helped its status. Again, which ones are bogus could be argued forever. The point is: If Tarnas is going to introduce astrology to Western scholars or academics in other fields, the fewer incongruities it has the better. [Class 101: Let’s argue about the signs.]
Ideally astrology is not a belief system but an inquiry, an observational skill. Perhaps its status could be raised from being called a pseudo science to a neoscience. If anybody hasn’t coined that phrase yet, please remember my name: Jennifer Lang. I stole it from the term neosoul for all the great recent soul music being played in the tradition of the great old soul singers of the sixties and seventies.
Criticizing Tarnas for not using signs or houses, and other methods, I believe is a result of not understanding many of the deeper implications of doing so. Just wanted to get that in.
correction of error: at end of second paragraph it should read:
…[Or perhaps these projections were made after observing actual events that repeatedly occurred when planets were in these areas (ie. signs) and are valid as metaphors for true events].
(Took out the word “on” after the word: events).
Hope the sentence now makes sense
And PS:
I agree with Roger above in that I do not feel Tarnas set out to “stake a claim of personal achievement” other than to express his own personal philosophical understanding of human history and events and its correlation with celestial motion. Eloquent and highly educated, Tarnas has given us a gift. He doesn’t strike me as arrogant at all.