In retrospect, by the time Jung wrote his principal analysis on synchronicity in the early 1950s, his increasing focus on parapsychology and physics had in a sense partly colonized the original concept and thus obscured the reality of how he had integrated his experience of meaningful coincidences into his life and clinical practice. Jung’s original and most familiar examples of synchronicities emerged in psychological, therapeutic, religious, divinatory, and esoteric contexts (as compared with experimentally tested extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, out-of-body and near-death experiences and other paranormal phenomena, and the discontinuities of physics, for all of which alternative explanations have been given that are arguably more apt than synchronicity). For the more characteristic original categories of meaningful coincidences, such as the golden scarab and stopped watch examples cited in the text, the idea of qualitative time (i.e., time as possessing a qualitative dimension), along with the elements of simultaneity and meaning, clearly remains relevant as part of a larger theoretical conception in which the archetypal meaning that informs and connects the synchronistic events serves as a fundamental explanatory principle.
Many aspects of relativity and quantum mechanics are indeed relevant to synchronistic phenomena: a relativized space-time continuum, the collapse of strict linear causality and of a fully independent objective world, complementarity, probabilistic indeterminacy, nonlocality, and the interconnected and interdependent nature of reality. Other essential elements of synchronicities, however, have no parallels in physics—above all, the fundamental presence of meaning as the structuring factor, and the apparent teleological or purposive aspect of such events.
In traditional philosophical terms, these two basic elements of synchronicities—meaning and purpose—represent straightforward expressions of what Aristotle called formal and final causes, respectively. Compared with the simpler (or simplistic) modern view of causality, which is entirely linear-mechanistic in nature, Aristotle’s more nuanced and capacious formulation defined “cause” as that which is a necessary, though not in itself sufficient, condition for the existence of something. Such conditions included formal and final (teleological) factors, in addition to the material and efficient factors stressed by mainstream modern science. When Jung originally employed the term “acausality” and emphasized that synchronicities were fundamentally acausal in nature, he provided a helpful and probably necessary counterpoint to the narrow conventional scientific understanding of linear-mechanistic causality that was then (the first half of the twentieth century) nearly ubiquitous. But the clear applicability of Aristotle’s richer classical formulation of causality for understanding synchronicities within a Jungian archetypal and teleological perspective places in question the continued usefulness or appropriateness of the term “acausality” in this context.
6. Marie-Louise von Franz: “The most essential and certainly the most impressive thing about synchronistic occurrences, the thing which really constitutes their numinosity, is the fact that in them the duality of soul and matter seems to be eliminated. They are therefore an empirical indication of the ultimate unity of all existence, which Jung, using the terminology of medieval natural philosophy, called the unus mundus. In medieval philosophy this concept designates the potential preexistent model of creation in the mind of God in accordance with which God later produced the creation. It is, according to John Scotus Erigena, ‘God’s vital or seminal power which changes from a Nothing, which is beyond all existence and non-existence, into countless forms’” (M.-L. von Franz, C. G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time [Toronto: Inner City Books, 1998], p. 247).
7. Senex, from the Latin: old man, elder, age, as in senescence, senator, senility. Reflecting the complex and ambiguous constellation of qualities, positive and problematic, characteristic of old age—from narrowness, rigidity, and pessimism, and the concern with order, control, and death, to gravitas, experience, and wisdom—the senex is closely associated with the Saturn archetype. The senex is the polar complement to the puer or puer eternus (eternal child), with which it is mutually implicated. For a richly perceptive exploration of the senex, see two early papers by James Hillman, “On Senex Consciousness,” Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1970), pp. 146– 65; and his 1967 Eranos paper, “Senex and Puer: An Aspect of the Historical and Psychological Present,” in J. Hillman, ed., Puer Papers (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1991), pp. 3–53.
8. This understanding of Jung’s evolution is at the center of Aziz’s analysis: “In 1937 when Jung exhorted his Yale audience to move beyond the confines of established religion and accept the challenge of ‘immediate religious experience,’ what Jung had in mind was for them to enter consciously into a direct encounter with the unconscious. For those for whom the rituals of conventional religion had lost their efficacy, what Jung offered as an alternative was an intrapsychic ritual which, properly followed, would lead to the emergence of a highly personalized spiritual wholeness. What Jung had in mind in 1937, then, was a ritual to be enacted within the sacred circle of the psyche…. [H]ow-ever, this earlier Jungian notion of religious ritual has been dramatically transformed by the synchronicity concept, indeed, so much so that we can now say that Jung’s notion of ‘immediate religious experience’ may be taken to refer not simply to an intrapsychic encounter, but to a direct encounter with nature in its entirety. The Jungian ritual, to put it simply, is now a ritual which is to be enacted within the sacred circle of nature as a whole…. [F]or Jung the ‘holy’ is encountered as much outwardly, in the synchronistic patterning of events, as it is inwardly. Accordingly, the individual in search of ‘immediate religious experience’ is now required to attend to the compensatory images with which nature presents one outwardly with the same religious seriousness with which one attends to the ‘images of wholeness offered by the unconscious.’…The religious need, as Jung puts it, longs for wholeness, and here the wholeness to which one must open oneself is a wholeness that is not only transmitted intrapsychically, but transmitted to the individual through the synchronistic patterning of events in one’s environment (Aziz, pp. 167–68).
9. Cf. R. Main, “Religion, Science, and Synchronicity,” Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies 46, no. 2(2000), pp. 89–107. “In a 1955 letter to R. F. C. Hull, Jung reported: ‘The latest comment about “Synchronicity” is that it cannot be accepted because it shakes the security of our scientific foundations, as if this were not exactly the goal I am aiming at….’ On the same day he wrote to Michael Fordham of ‘the impact of synchronicity upon the fanatical one-sidedness of scientific philosophy.’ Specifically, Jung thought that his work on synchronicity demonstrated the need to expand the current conception of science in order to include, in addition to the classical concepts of time, space, and causality, a principle of acausal connection through meaning. This, he concluded, would introduce the psychic factor of meaning into our scientific picture of the world, help get rid of ‘the incommensurability between the observed and the observer’, and make possible a ‘whole judgement’—that is, a judgement that takes into consideration psychological as well as physical factors. Because for Jung the psychological mediates between the physical and the spiritual, to link the physical and psychological in this way entails setting up a potential bridge between the physical and the spiritual, hence between science and religion. These bold conclusions and implications from Jung’s work on synchronicity resonate with many subsequent attempts to develop more holistic models of science—some directly exploring Jung’s suggestions, for instance those of David Peat and Victor Mansfield, others working independently but aware of Jung’s contribution and possibly influenced or inspired by it, for instance those of David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake.”
10. See, for example, the lecture given by Jung’s daughter, Gret Baumann-Jung, “Some Reflections on the Horoscope of C. G. Jung,” trans. F. J. Hopman, in Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1975), pp. 35–55. See also Jung’s letter to B. V. Raman, Septembe
r 6, 1947: “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 found that the astrological data elucidated certain points which I otherwise would have been unable to understand” (Jung, Letters 1, p. 475).
11. To this list could be added Galileo and Francis Bacon. Galileo’s long practice of astrology, not only for patrons, such as the Medici, the grand dukes of Tuscany, but also for his own family, is documented by N. Kollerstrom et al. in an issue of Culture and Cosmos devoted entirely to this subject (Galileo’s Astrology, vol. 7, no. 1, 2003), and by H. Darrel Rutkin in “Galileo Astrologer: Astrology and Mathematical Practice in the Late-Sixteenth and Early-Seventeenth Centuries,” Galilaeana 2 (2005), pp. 107–43. Bacon set out a detailed argument for a reform of astrology on empirical principles in his De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum, the expanded Latinized 1623 reworking of his The Advancement of Learning (1605). See Rutkin, “Astrology, Natural Philosophy and the History of Science, c. 1250–1700: Studies toward an Interpretation of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Disputationes Adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem,” Ph.D. thesis, Indiana University, 2002.
Concerning the Greek origins of Western astrology, modern historians generally either disregarded them or considered astrology an inexplicable aberration of the Greek mind, an uncharacteristic succumbing to irrational non-Greek influences. But as S. J. Tester remarked in his survey A History of Western Astrology (Suffolk, England: Boydell, 1987):
Those who have admired the Greeks for their clear rationalism (and who have always ignored anything they saw as contrary to it as un-Hellenic, no matter whether the author was a Greek and the language Greek and the time Classical) have so pre-conditioned their own thinking as to misunderstand both astrology and its appeal to the Greek mind…. It was not the uneducated and superstitious who accepted and developed it. It was the philosophers, like Plato, who prepared the ground, and the Stoics—who were among the greatest logicians and physicists of their times—who most fully worked it into their system. It was the doctors and the scientists like [Aristotle’s student and successor] Theophrastus who accepted it and developed its associations with medicine…. The point, and it is a very important point indeed, is that astrology appealed to the educated Greeks precisely because they were rational…. It is not an accident that the two greatest of the Greek astronomers, Hipparchus and Ptolemy, were both also astrologers, the latter the author of the most influential ancient textbook of astrology. Nor were the Greeks necessarily wrong about this; but right or wrong, they accepted astrology, and its acceptance as a learned and scientific study was the common, if not the normal, attitude to it down to the eighteenth century, and it is impossible to understand men like Kepler and Newton unless astrology is seen for what the Greeks made it, a rational attempt to map the state of the heavens and to interpret that map in the context of that “cosmic sympathy” which makes man an integral part of the universe. (pp. 17–18)
See also George Sarton, A History of Science: Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries B.C. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 165; and Otto Neugebauer’s comment that, “compared with the background of religion, magic, and mysticism, the fundamental doctrines of astrology are pure science” (The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 2nd ed. [Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1957], p. 171). In her study of the Christian cardinal, philosopher, and astrologer Pierre d’Ailly, whose astrological writings played a significant role in inspiring Columbus to make his transatlantic voyage, Laura Ackerman Smoller cites the works of prominent scholars working in this area such as Thorndike, Neugebauer, Pingree, and North, and adds, “No one can read these works without an appreciation of what a sophisticated and demanding science was practiced by the medieval astrologers” (History, Prophecy, and the Stars: The Christian Astrology of Pierre d’Ailly, 1350–1420 [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994], p. 5).
12. Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, trans. J. M. Ashmand (Symbols and Signs, 1976); Johannes Kepler, “On the More Certain Fundamentals of Astrology,” foreword and notes by J. B. Brackenridge, trans. M. A. Rossi, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 123, 2 (1979): pp. 85–116; Kepler’s Astrology: Excerpts, trans. and ed. K. Negus (Princeton, N.J.: Eucopia, 1987); Alan Leo, Art of Synthesis (London: Fowler, 1968); How to Judge a Nativity (London: Fowler, 1969); Dane Rudhyar, Astrology of Personality (1936; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970); Charles E. O. Carter, Principles of Astrology (London: Fowler, 1970); Astrological Aspects (London: Fowler, 1971); Reinhold Ebertin, Combinations of Stellar Influence (Aalen, Germany: Ebertin-Verlag, 1972); John Addey, Astrology Reborn (London: Faculty of Astrologers, 1972); Harmonics in Astrology (1976); Robert Hand, Planets in Transit (Gloucester, Mass.: Para Research, 1976); Horoscope Symbols (Rockport, Mass.: Para Research, 1981); Liz Greene, Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil (York Beach, Maine: Weiser, 1976); Stephen Arroyo, Astrology, Karma, and Transformation (Davis, Calif.: CRCS Publications, 1978); Charles Harvey, Michael Baigent, Nicholas Campion, Mundane Astrology (London: HarperCollins, 1984). Among many other works, I also consulted the widely used texts by Frances Sakoian and Louis Acker, The Astrologer’s Handbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), and Predictive Astrology (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and also, from 1976, the bimonthly issues of the British Journal of the Astrological Association, and the biannual Correlation Journal of Research into Astrology.
13. An important exception to this general statement is the continued practice of traditional horary astrology, essentially a form of divination that employs elaborate rules of astrological interpretation in combination with an active intuitive role by the practitioner to arrive at highly specific predictions about particular issues of concern to the inquirer. An insightful epistemological analysis of this practice is developed by Geoffrey Cornelius in The Moment of Astrology: Origins in Divination (New York: Penguin, 1994). Historically, most traditional astrological practice before the twentieth century shared much in common with the divinatory methodology of horary, and indeed the earliest forms of astrology that emerged from Mesopotamia seem to have been largely divinatory. This has become considerably less true in the major texts and practices of leading figures in contemporary Western astrology, whose principles and purposes I believe are better described in terms of archetypal understanding rather than literal prediction. The unexamined (and often problematic) conflation of these two very different methodological goals—archetypal insight and concrete prediction—is no doubt the result of the absence throughout the history of astrology until fairly recently of a sustained tradition of epistemological analysis and critical reflection.
Part III: Through the Archetypal Telescope
1. Cf. Aby Warburg’s description of astrology as uniquely “the meeting and confrontation point between the demands of a rational order, as in Greek science, and the myths…inherited from the East: between logic and magic, between mathematics and mythology, between Athens and Alexandria” (Eugenio Garin, Astrology in the Renaissance, trans. C. Jackson and J. Allen, rev. C. Robertson [London: Arkana, 1983], p. xi). Similarly, Gustav-Adolf Schoener, following the classical philologist Franz Boll’s statement that astrology at its essence seeks to be “religion and science at the same time,” defines astrology as “a tightrope walk between religion and scientific astronomy” (G.-A. Schoener, “Astrology: Between Religion and the Empirical,” trans. S. Denson, Esoterica: The Journal, IV[2002]: 30).
2. Weber used the term “rationalization” to signify the systematic deployment of reason in any social activity, whether in law, science, or religion, to effect greater calculability, efficiency, predictability, and control. The tendency towards an increasingly rigid mechanistic determinism that accompanied this development in the history of astrology can be seen as another form of Weber’s “iron cage,” a state of oppressive depersonalization and alienation, here with ancient and medieval rather than modern sources.
3. Se
e, for example, Michel Gauquelin, Cosmic Influences on Human Behavior (New York: Aurora Press, 1973). For a thorough discussion of the Mars effect, see Suitbert Ertel and Kenneth Irving, The Tenacious Mars Effect (London: The Urania Trust, 1996), and Hans J. Eysenck and David Nias, Astrology: Science or Superstition? (London: Penguin, 1982). For an insider’s account of the scandal of the attempts by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to discredit the Gauquelin results (the account of the scandal was written by one of the committee’s own founding members and chief researchers), see Dennis Rawlins, “sTARBABY,” Fate, No. 32, October 1981 (http://cura.free.fr/xv/14starbb.html). See also John Anthony West, The Case for Astrology (New York: Viking Arkana, 1991), and G. Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology.
4. This brief overview of astrology’s historical development in the West is highly schematic and intended only to suggest its larger evolutionary vector. At each stage in this development, many factors—societal and cultural, philosophical, religious, scientific, commercial, biographical—played a role in shaping the astrological perspective and practice of any particular era or individual. In any given instance, elements from these different stages and periods continued to live on and intermingled in complicated fusion and compromise formations. This multilayered complexity can be seen to have existed like a palimpsest in all of the cultural epochs in which astrology flourished—from Hellenistic Alexandria and the Roman Empire through Persian and Arabic culture under Islam and the High Middle Ages and Renaissance in Europe to its worldwide revival in the twentieth century. This complexity is especially characteristic of the contemporary astrological milieu, in which many schools and practices, traditional and novel, concurrently flourish. Despite these complications, however, an evolutionary pattern of development does seem discernible.
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