posted August 16, 2007 11:05 PM            

With his new book Prometheus the Awakener: An Essay on the Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus Richard Tarnas has created a stunning synthesis of archetypal astrology, history, and spiritual psychology. Reading this work one feels graced with expanded horizons, the sudden rediscovery of a conscious universe. I highly recommend this book to anyone looking for meaning in their lives or in the world at large.
Tarnas believes that the first seven bodies of the solar system were given archetypally accurate names, reflecting the intuitive consciousness of the ancient Greeks. However, in 1781 when Uranus was discovered, the modern scientific mind had lost its intuitive and subjective faculties and the new planet was given a name derived with conventional logic: Uranus was the next planet out from Saturn and so it was given the name of Saturn's father in Hellenic mythology, just as Saturn lay just beyond Jupiter's orbit and was Jupiter's father. In the essay's thesis, Tarnas describes his realization that the planet Uranus does not correspond with Ouranos after all, but with the rebel figure Prometheus. Ouranos has a distinctly paternal and static character, very different from the qualities of rebellion and innovation observed in individuals with Uranus strongly aspected in their charts. In contrast, Prometheus is known for outwitting and stealing fire from Zeus, and giving that fire--life, culture, and science--to humanity. These and other characteristics of Prometheus fit the nature of Uranus so completely that Tarnas concludes the new planet was misnamed.

The body of the essay consists of an impressive mosaic of cultural figures with the planet Uranus prominent in their natal charts, men and women known for their rebellion against orthodoxy or tradition, display of scientific or artistic genius, and other Uranian-Promethean qualities. Tarnas' unique background--a Jesuit education, Harvard, and then Esalen Institute where he was Director of Programs--has created an unusually rich diversity of perspective.

I was impressed by the discussion on Uranus-Pluto and the Sixties, in which the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1960-1972 is convincingly applied to comprehend that unique era. The "rebellion against established structures of all kinds, the intense intellectual adventurousness and restlessness of the era, the radical consciousness transformation, the titanic technological advances into the space age, the general atmosphere of revolution on all fronts" precisely fit what one would expect knowing the astrological natures of Uranus and Pluto.

This correlation is given more credibility by an examination of previous Uranus-Pluto aspects in history--such as the opposition of 1787-1798 which straddled the similarly radical and Promethean decade of the French Revolution, or the conjunction of 1845-1856 (immediately preceding that of 1960-72) which coincided with a wave of revolutions effecting the entire European continent. Similarly presented is the opposition of 1643-1653 (the one that immediately preceded that of the French Revolution) which was the period of England's Puritan Revolution known in its own century as the Great Rebellion--and other examples. The discovery of the Uranus-Pluto cycle with its upsurges of apparently spontaneous revolutionary energy, is an unexpected deciphering of one of history's long-puzzling questions, and he continues with several other major historical cycles.

Tarnas uses examples of both diachronic correlations, in which a sequence of events in one field occurs under successive transits--for example scientific breakthroughs under a series of Jupiter-Uranus conjunctions--as well as synchronic correlations, in which multiple events occur during a single transit. Examples of this type include the wide-ranging events of years such as 1914, 1969, or 1990. In this section is also included a representative comparison between Freud's and Jung's charts, their respective approaches to psychology, the nature of their relationship, and the timing of their historic split.

The essay concludes with a review of the potential effects of the Uranus-Neptune conjunction of the present decade (1985-2001). This combination is associated with periods in which the archetypal-"the mythic, the spiritual, the transcendent, the imaginal, the numinous--is suddenly awakened and liberated in new ways into human consciousness." After reviewing the variety of contemporary manifestations of this transit--both positive and negative--Tarnas cites a series of remarkable historical precedents.

To name several in the 172-year cycle, conjunctions of Uranus and Neptune occurred in 1815-1829 during the age of Romanticism, in the 1470's and 1480's at the heart of the Renaissance, and during the early 1300's wave of mystical fervor that saw Dante's Divine Comedy and the birth of Petrarch. They were conjunct in the 620's and 630's during the birth of Islam, and in 15-35 A.D. during Jesus' ministry, crucifixion, and the conversion of St. Paul. They were also conjunct during the last decade of the fifth century, B.C. and the first decade of the fourth, that saw the most influential teachings of Socrates, and his death in 399 B.C.--the event that initiated the birth of Platonism. Finally, during the only triple conjunction of outer planets in modern times--Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto being conjunct from the 580's to the 560's B.C.--"we find the heart of the great 'axial age' that brought forth so many of the world's principal religious and spiritual traditions: the age of Gautama Buddha in India, of Lao-Tzu in China, of Zoroaster in Persia; the age of the major prophets of ancient Israel, Jeremiah, Ezekial, and Second Isaiah, when the Hebrew Scriptures began to be compiled; the age when the oracle of Delphi was at the height of its influence in ancient Greece; the age of the earliest Greek philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras.... Thus there is reason to believe that our own experience of Uranus and Neptune in conjunction will not be without its enduring blessings."

Tarnas' intellectual labors and twenty-year collaboration with Stanislav Grof have yielded a luminous overarching vision of psyche, cosmos, and history scarcely imaginable a generation ago. This participatory world view has implications in every discipline and not insubstantial possibilities for personal and planetary healing. This is truly a promising and exciting direction for the mainstream culture, both unexpected and inevitable. The fire of the divine has again come to earth.

posted August 17, 2007 08:36 AM            

Growin' On Up
Interview with Rick Tarnas


Well, my feet they finally took root in the earth but I got me a nice little place in the stars
And I swear I found the key to the universe in the engine of an old parked car.
-- Bruce Springsteen

Richard Tarnas
In his new book, Cosmos and Psyche (Viking, Jan 2006), Richard Tarnas, Ph.D., cultural historian, best-selling author and professor of philosophy and depth psychology, describes Earth as a planet of spiritual purpose with a focus of cosmic meaning, But it's now on the verge of maturity and spiritual re-awakening to its relationship to the cosmos.


By Shelley L. Ackerman

When I heard Richard Tarnas speak in New York last spring, I was taken with his gentleness, eloquence, and his call for a deeper understanding and insight into the unconscious forces that shape human destiny and history. Both breathtaking and stilling, he offered that the universe is not at all random and distant and that the current disconnect and disenchantment is a necessary phase in our collective development.

Does the Universe have consciousness? And does the cosmos actually care about what happens to planet Earth? In Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas makes an extraordinary case for a vibrant and caring universe, one that is dramatic and Shakespearean as opposed to mechanistic in its expression and evolution. While most scientists and academics subscribe to a Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm in which faith and reason are separate, Tarnas presents a new world view. Using astrology and planetary correspondences to illustrate patterns in world history, he reminds us that the stars do, in fact, light the way for humanity on its spiritual evolution and current struggle with maturity.

Shelley Ackerman: Your first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, is widely used as a text in university courses. You've used the word "scandalous" to describe your new book, Cosmos and Psyche. Why a scandal?

Richard Tarnas: Given current assumptions about the cosmos, it is a scandal for a professor of philosophy to come out with a book that is in any way supportive of astrology. I think it's safe to say that of all perspectives, astrology is the one most subject to automatic rejection and scorn in the modern intellectual world. I myself was skeptical until I conducted my own research. But the evidence is very compelling: there is an astonishingly consistent correlation between planetary alignments and the patterns of human experience. Cosmos and Psyche sets out that evidence in a way that readers new to this perspective can examine and assess for themselves. It's a little like Galileo's telescope: Anyone could look through it to see the new universe it revealed, but it was a scandal at the time.

SA: How would you describe the astrological perspective?

RT: Most cultures, including our own prior to the modern era, had some kind of astrology as part of their world view, for they understood the cycles of the Moon, Sun, and planets as deeply meaningful. The astrological perspective sees the universe as both meaningful and unified. Instead of the modern division between the purposeful meaning-seeking human consciousness and a random meaningless universe, astrology points to a universe that is integrated at all levels: outer and inner, macrocosm and microcosm, celestial and terrestrial. As was said by the ancients, "As above, so below."

SA: What is the advantage of a worldview that is inclusive of astrology?

RT: The existence of correlations between the planetary cycles and human life makes it possible for both individuals and society as a whole to understand better what archetypal energies are at work and at what time. This can help us be more skillful and aware as we engage in the activities of life. It's like knowing the weather report before going out into the ocean to sail or surf. It helps to know where the winds and waves will be coming from.

But there is also a deeper advantage: Modern civilization pays a high price for living in a universe that it believes is random and spiritually meaningless. Nature is not honored but is instead exploited for short-term benefit. And a purposeless universe creates a sense of deep spiritual emptiness inside which people try to fill with endless consumer products, so that the industrial technology producing those products is cannibalizing the planet. But as we know, you can never get enough of what you don't really need. A new vision of nature and the universe as ensouled, as spiritually significant, would give a better ground for both moral responsibility and a sense of spiritual belonging.

SA: Our entire economic system which is driven by the West seems to have lost much of its initial moral and spiritual foundation. Many argue that in order to survive that must change: But how? The way things are now, every single company on Earth must show a profit each quarter? Nature herself dictates otherwise. For example: farmers would let a field go fallow every seven years. Shouldn't cycles in business mirror cycles of nature?

RT: Our civilization desperately needs to develop more awareness about the consequences of our activities. We need to be paying attention not just to the bottom line of the next quarterly profit report, but to what seven generations from now will experience as a result of our actions. The only way that such a fundamental change will occur would be if enough individuals become more deeply aware of our profound embeddedness within the larger Earth community and the universe itself. Our civilization basically seems to be caught in an immature period in its development, like a self-enclosed adolescent who has not yet been initiated into the deeper realities of life and who therefore continues to act from a short-sighted and often self-destructive state of consciousness. It's as if our entire civilization is undergoing an initiation in our time [see related article], into a new world view and a new way of living.

SA: How and when did astrology fall out of favor with the intellectual and scientific establishments?

RT: Historically, astrology actually has a long noble tradition that was central to Western civilization from the ancient Greeks onwards. As recently as the Renaissance it was highly regarded by most of the intellectual and cultural elite -- not only Humanists and men of letters like Shakespeare and Marsilio Ficino incorporated astrology in their world view but also the early geniuses of the Scientific Revolution like Kepler and Galileo, who regularly calculated and interpreted horoscopes and, in Kepler's case, was a major reformer of the astrological tradition.

The shift really happened in the later seventeenth century, when many factors came together -- the growing conviction that the modern mind was superior to all ancient traditions and perspectives, the new sense of the disenchantment of the cosmos, a belief that to be free the human being could not live in an astrological universe, and a gradual intellectual decline within astrology itself that made it increasingly vulnerable to criticism. Underlying all of these, a deep change of consciousness was occurring in the modern self that eclipsed the astrological vision so that something else could emerge. Astrology stopped being taught at Harvard and Oxford by the end of the seventeenth century, and it's interesting to see that it is in our own time that astrology courses are again entering higher education, this time in a form that has integrated modern and postmodern developments.

SA: Short of a complete technological-electronic meltdown, how can we go from our present state of constant distraction and addiction to technology to one that comes out of a serene relationship with nature and the cosmos, one that allows us to hear our own heartbeat? As of now, we've all but annihilated an environment in which intuition can thrive.

RT: It's an enormous challenge. On the one hand I think each individual is on a journey of her own or his own. Individuals need to be listening closely to their own hearts, their own calling to new horizons. They need to pay attention to where they feel "not right" -- perhaps unplug the television, go out into nature more often, look at the heavens and the night sky outside of the city. We all need to orient our lives more towards beauty, towards art, towards relationships, and towards interior self-exploration, whether it's meditation or more powerful forms of experience. For example, the ayahuasca rituals coming from South America are extraordinary powerful initiatory rituals that help people become aware that they are in a larger universe than they thought.

So on the one hand, there are individual paths on which each of us has to find our own way. But then there's the question of how we are to deal with the major problems of modern consciousness on the collective level -- for example, the vast collective entrancement that's happening right now through the mass media.

SA: Entrancement? As in electronically medicated and hypnotized?

RT: Exactly. Many people today are more tuned into the weekly sitcoms and "reality shows" than they are to what's going on in the planetary biosphere or even in their neighborhood community. What will wake people up from this trance? Many experts believe that some very critical events will unfold within the next decade or so. We've already seen some in these last two years: Katrina, the tsunami, the many violent hurricanes and tornadoes, the strangeness of the weather patterns, the melting of the ice caps . . . And we know from individual lives that there is nothing like a mortal crisis to profoundly reconfigure a person's life. Out of such a crisis a radical shift of values tends to emerge. The whole moral structure of a person's or an entire society's way of being is transformed. It seems to me quite possible that we as a civilization and as a species may face some kind of crisis that will serve to catalyze this awakening. The question is: How severe will the crisis have to be for this awakening to take place? This is where we come in, with our free will, our courage, our spirit.

SA: How did you come to use planetary aspects (cyclical relationships of planets to each other) instead of "signs" in your research?

RT: Over the thirty years of research, I found that the most striking correspondences involved the aspects, like conjunctions and oppositions between the planets, rather than the signs. It's more important that there is a New Moon or a Full Moon (which is formed by the conjunction and the opposition of the Sun and the Moon), than what sign the Moon is in. It's not that signs have no significance. But the most basic archetypal dynamics that we see in history and in people's biographies seem most precisely connected to the geometrical aspects between the planets. Signs color those energies, but the energies themselves are related to the planets and their cyclical alignments.

We see this, for example, in the great conjunction of Uranus and Pluto that took place from 1960 to 1972. This coincided precisely with a time of tremendous empowerment of innovative and revolutionary impulses across the world, with both great social upheaval and liberating change occurring in every country on the planet, which is just what one might expect given what astrologers have long concluded about the meanings of those two planets. Those same two planets were also in alignment during the French Revolutionary epoch, 1787-98, when there was a virtually identical upsurge of tremendous rebellious and liberating energies sweeping the world, with radical change affecting many societies. We actually are going to be getting the square aspect of these same two planets during the next fifteen years, so on the basis of the past correlations we can anticipate some profound changes and new social energies in the not too distant future.

SA: What do you hope "Cosmos and Psyche" will accomplish?

RT: I hope my book opens thoughtful readers to a new dimension of the extraordinary universe we live in, a universe that seems to be informed at all levels by a profound creative intelligence. I believe that we can participate in the evolutionary unfolding of this universe more consciously and fully if we are aware of the correspondences between the planetary movements and our lives. And we can move into a more trusting relationship to life and the cosmos when we recognize the larger patterns of meaning and purpose in which we are embedded.

An shorter version of this interview previously appeared on BeliefNet.

Author's Note: Richard Tarnas will be the keynote speaker March 8-12, 2007 at The NCGR's National Conference: Geocosmic Alchemy: Astrology for the 21st Century in Baltimore, Maryland. More than thirty World Class astrologers (including Shelley Ackerman) will present at this conference. For more information visit www.geocosmic.org.

Shelley Ackerman is an astrologer, entertainer, journalist and broadcaster.

posted August 17, 2007 01:47 PM            

quote:

---

...you can never get enough of what you don't really need.

---

Smart guy.

Thanks for the interview, Node. Good stuff. I know the Edgar Cayce readings also accord much greater significance to aspects than to signs. I actually haven't read Prometheus The Awakener yet, but I plan to. I just learned about it, and it looks very interesting, and the information given by the reviewer on Amazon, which I copy/pasted, was very cool so I wanted to share it.

Love to you,
HSC
Sun/Venus/MC/Uranus
Aquarius Moon
Aquarius Intercepted in the 1st

posted August 18, 2007 12:53 PM              

I've not given Uranus much thought in my chart, though he does sextile my sun (2 degrees Capricorn in the 5th). He's 1 degree Scorpio, and lives in my 3rd house. My focus for a while has been the north node. The article has inspired me to sit down with Uranus and get to know him better.

posted August 19, 2007 09:00 AM            

Quote I was impressed by the discussion on Uranus-Pluto and the Sixties, in which the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1960-1972 is convincingly applied to comprehend that unique era. The "rebellion against established structures of all kinds, the intense intellectual adventurousness and restlessness of the era, the radical consciousness transformation, the titanic technological advances into the space age, the general atmosphere of revolution on all fronts" precisely fit what one would expect knowing the astrological natures of Uranus and Pluto.

RT

* Tarnas= http://www.astrotheme.fr/en/portraits/su6H22eQryq7.htm Has Saturn in Leo 3H, And Venus, Merc, Jupiter, MC in Aqua 9H. Sun is in Pisces. Uranus in Cancer 1H is his dominate Planet

posted August 19, 2007 11:05 AM            

Great!
But why the ?

Have you read "Astrology For the Soul" by Jan Spiller,
with 30 pages devoted to each Nodal position?

That book hit the coffin nail on the head for me,
laying to rest any doubts I had about the significance of the Nodes.

HSC
NNode in Virgo 8th

posted August 19, 2007 12:19 PM              

Oh I love Jan Spiller. I own that book and another of hers, called Spiritual Astrology. I just meant that the NN had been my focus for a long time due to the stellium of Mars, NN and Neptune in Saggie in the 4th, which is one arm of my yod. It was a key, I felt to overcoming the limitations of my parental upbringing. This was a little nudge reminding me to not neglect the rest of my chart.

I like you too.
Peace,
GG