Carl Jung's Aion as an Astrological Treatise or proof of a Synchronistic event.

Jung's book Aion (1951) can, depending on one's standpoint, be regarded either as an astrological treatise or as the proof of a synchronistic phenomenon of cosmic proportions.

It is, in part, an account of the meaningful coincidence of the Platonic month of Pisces-which started two thousand years ago with the birth of Christ and, as we have said, is now passing into the Platonic month of Aquarius-with the spiritual development of Christianity during this period.
The fish is an old symbol for Christ.

The parallelism between the cosmic event-the progression of the spring-point through the double sign of the Fishes-and the spiritual and historical events is exceedingly impressive.

The turn of the first millennium, just about the time when the spring-point reached the beginning of the second Fish, witnessed the rise of the heretical movements that compensated and also undermined Christianity-the Cathars, Waldenses, Albigenses, the Holy Ghost Movement of Joachim of Flora, and other sects.

Although the year 1000 did not mark the expected end of the world, it secretly initiated the "kingdom of the second Fish" -traditionally interpreted as the age of Antichrist-whose culmination, no one will deny, we are experiencing in the present century. ~Aniela Jaffe, Jung’s Last Years, Page 33

Dr. Jung: Suppose we are in the year 2200 B.C., on the 21st of March, and Aries is just coming over the horizon at 1 degree.

Dr. Jung: Suppose we are in the year 2200 B.C., on the 21st of March, and Aries is just coming over the horizon at 1 degree.

This is the spring-point, that is, the intersection of the line of the ecliptic with the equator of the sky.

Each one of the zodiacal signs represents 30 degrees.

Slowly, through the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point shifted through the sign of Aries toward that of Pisces until in 150 B.C.

Hipparchus observed that Aries was gone and the sun was coming up in a new sign.

In those days tremendous things were happening.

The gods changed when the stars changed. Here the Ram changed into the Fish, he died as a ram and was born as a fish.

The gods had bull's horns when the sun was in Taurus, and they had ram's horns during the Aries period.

Then the Fish became the symbol.

The Christian baptism in water has to do with this symbolism.

The Pope still wears the fisher ring-a gem that represents the miraculous draught of fishes, symbolizing the gathering of all Christians into the womb of the Church.

So a new psychology began to make itself felt.

It was the dawn of Christianity, and we can follow its course in the astrological picture.

The fishes are represented in a peculiar way in the zodiacal sign.

They lie almost tail to tail, joined by a commissure.

This double arrangement is supposed to indicate Christ and Antichrist.

That curious legend can be traced back to the first century-the idea that Christ had a brother, the Antichrist.

When the spring-point has progressed to the whole length of the first fish, we are in A.D. 900--about the climax of Christian influence.

Then it declines, and the spring-point is in the middle of the commissure, which would be in about 1500.

Mr. Bacon: A curious fact is that the temporal power of the Pope and the power of the Dalai Lama reached their highest points within fifty years of each other, and they also lost it within fifty years of each other.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is very interesting, and there are other parallelisms of that kind.

Now in about 1500, we have Luther, and the Catholic Church was right in saying that he was the Antichrist.

When we come into the tail of the second fish, we are in 1750, the period of the French Enlightenment, when for the first time Christianity was dethroned and replaced by the Goddess of Reason.

The spring-point leaves the fishes before the head of the second fish is reached. For the time being we are headed for the utmost destruction of that principle.

About 1940 we strike the meridian of the first star of Aquarius.

That would be the turning point-about 1940 to 1950.

So we may look for new developments at about that time.

It remains to be seen, I shall make no predictions.

Now we can go back into the past and verify some of these astrological peculiarities.

At the time the sun was in Aries, about 400 to 500 B.C., there were particularly brilliant stars, and that time coincides with the greatest development of philosophy in Greece and China.

About 2000 B.C. Hammurabi announced himself as the great lawgiver. He declared himself the Ram.

It was the time when the sun was just coming into Aries.

Probably we are dealing here with unconscious laws of creative energy, of how things develop, which we only now begin dimly to divine.

It is a very pale spectre still, but things begin to take shape.

Each spring sign is, of course, balanced by an autumnal sign.

For Taurus, when the Zodiac was first made, it was Scorpio foretelling the suicide of the sun.

The hero Gilgamesh passes through the autumn gates guarded by the Scorpio giants in going to the Westland.

In Roman times, Scorpio had ceased to be the autumnal sign, it was Libra.

When the sun came into Pisces, Virgo became the autumnal sign, and astrology has connected that fact with the worship of the Virgin Mary.

When we get into Aquarius, we shall have Leo opposite, so we would have a deification of lion attributes the worship of the sun or sun-like personalities.

I hope that by the next seminar, you will have all this clearly in mind, because you won't be able to understand the next dream if you have not. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages

Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Lecture X, 11 December 1929

LECTURE X 11 December 1929

I have here a question by Mrs. Sawyer which I rather expected and which shows that we are not yet finished with this exceedingly intricate problem about astrology and the connection between time
and energy.

As I told you, I never would have ventured into such an abstruse subject if it had not been indispensable for the understanding of the dreamer's material.

This is his universe, and if one dismissed the problem, it would be saying to him that one was not sufficiently concerned with his psychology.

For him, as for most men, the Logos side of his material is the most interesting.

It might be less important in a woman's .case.

Mrs. Sawyer's question is in regard to the relationship between ordinary astrology and the precession of the equinoxes.

I will state the problem again.

You see, ordinary astrology suggests that our life is dependent. Upon the so-called vibrations of the planets that. are in a certain relative position at the moment of our birth and, they say, actually influence that moment and all our life.

So if a planet crosses the same place it was in at that moment, perhaps twenty years later, it produces a special effect.

Astrologers still hold to the actual place of the planets, but here we are confronted with the fact that today there is no correspondence between the positions ascribed to them and their actual position in the skies.

Since 100 B.C. the spring-point has been artificially fixed at zero degrees Aries, but astronomically that is no longer true.

In reality, on account of the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point has passed from Aries to Pisces and it is shortly to enter Aquarius.

So our calculations are simply arbitrary, having to do only with time and not with the actual position.

Now, the last time I told you something that was apparently quite contradictory.

Having stated that the position of the stars had no influence upon us, I then drew certain conclusions about the effects of the sun on the earth as it passed from one zodiacal sign to another.

I told you, for instance, that in A.D. 900, when by actual astronomical calculation the spring-point was at the point of greatest extension of the Fishes, Christianity was coincidentally at the height of its power.

Then by 1500, the spring-point was in the commissure, the ribbon connecting the two fishes, and at this point began a mental and spiritual revolution and the decline of the Church.

The second fish represents the Antichrist and the decay of Christianity.

The Gothic movement was vertical, and then began the horizontal age of materialism, a time of great intellectual extension, voyages of discovery, etc., but winding up with the World War, the moral defeat of the spirit of Europe.

I said, too, that we might expect a peculiar change in the mentality of the world in the next fifty to one hundred years, in the time when the spring-point proceeds into Aquarius.

So I seemed to be linking up the astronomical positions with human affairs and with peculiar changes in mentality.

The problem is an exceedingly difficult one, and it took me years before I understood, so I don't expect you to solve it at once.

An astrologer told me that the ephemerides, that is, the position of the planets, are exact as to time but not as to the actual position of the stars.

Now I will read Mrs. Sawyer's question: "I understand that astrology has been projected into the stars, and that it does not matter whether the stars are actually at the spring point, the time element being the important thing. But when you say that the spring-point is now actually in the Fishes and prophesy about 1940, you are following the actual movement of the stars, are you not?
Was the whole projection in the first place really made with an intuition of the backward movement so that the projection works both ways-that is, that it works from a static standpoint and also at the same time from the moving standpoint?"

Well, the important point is that the horoscope is true only in the time sense, not astronomically. It is independent of the stars.

We see that menstruation has a moon period, yet it does not coincide with the phases of the moon; otherwise all women would menstruate at the same time, and they don't.

It simply means that there is a moon-law in every woman and likewise the laws of the stars are in every human being but not in the relation of cause and effect.

The fact that the spring-point changes does not mean that it is the cause of the changes that ensue on earth.

Life has changed and will change, as the spring-point is changing, but the apparent connection is a coincidence; that is, the two things occur together in time but not in a causal sequence.

In an ordinary horoscope, one is not concerned with the spring point.

In the life of the individual the spring-point doesn't matter, but in the life of the tree of mankind, it matters very much.

An ordinary year is to us what the Platonic year of 26,000 of our years is to the race.

The precession of the equinoxes is making its way backward in a circle from Aries to Pisces, to Aquarius, Capricorn, etc.

When the cycle is complete, it covers 26,000 years. That is the Platonic unit in the life of the tree.

The fixation of the spring-point is an arbitrary measure for our arbitrary use, the same condition having prevailed in 2000 B.C., when the astronomical conditions actually did coincide with the statements of the horoscope.

The precession of the equinoxes might be said to be the clock-hand that marks the great spaces of time, the hand that measures time for the tree of mankind.

On our clock, the hand moves forward, but with the clock of the race it moves in the other direction.

Each zodiacal sign then becomes a [Platonic] month, and we call a certain period of 2,150 years the [Platonic] month of the Fishes, for instance, which is of course again a projection.

So for us, our whole historical life, the length of human consciousness, is only three months.

But man has gone through those 26,000 years many times.

Divide 1,000,000 years (the probable age of man) by 26,000 and you will know how many Platonic years they have been

Paleolithic man might go back many hundreds of thousands of years to the Pithecanthropus erectus, and from that to the apes and, still further, to the saurians.

So when we speak of the coming up of the saurian in our dreams, we mean that the impressions of an infinitely remote time are making themselves felt.

In the course of the innumerable revolutions of the Platonic years we have received imprints of conditions of which we are not conscious, but they are in our unconscious.

Only three months in power is so little, it makes a poor showing.

One is embarrassed intellectually, for one does not know; human consciousness is much too young.

There are certain symbolic evidences in our dreams and fantasies, but that is far from scientific.

All that remains to us, for instance, of the "months" of Taurus and Aries are bull gods and ram gods.

Perhaps by a further elaboration of the unconscious we may sometime get further back; we may get the feeling of what Gemini and Cancer meant to mankind.

At all events, we have the Zodiac, which is the naive projection of unconscious imprints through numberless Platonic years.

Mankind has projected intuitive memory into the stars as he moved through the cycle in remote ages I don't know whether in those days he felt the exceedingly historical character, but relatively primitive man has made those projections.

Then time progressed, and slowly the spring-point wandered out of Aries; and then they felt the need of getting it fixed, and since then it is simply the law in ourselves that accounts for the validity of astrology.

It has the same validity as the connection between the monthly period of woman and the moon.

So we can think of the underlying laws of our unconscious as star laws.

But the artificial spring-point has nothing to do with the life of the tree of mankind.

At the time when the Zodiac was invented, man was in the springtime of consciousness, so the falling of the spring-point in Aries, a spring-sign, was appropriate; it is as if the horoscope of humanity had begun with the dawn of consciousness.

The essential point to remember is that the precession of the equinoxes does not prove the identity of astronomical facts with periods of human psychology.

It is just that our consciousness began in the spring-time of mankind, and that happens to fit the zodiacal sign of that time.

But here is a little mistake.

Hipparchus should have fixed the spring-time in Taurus instead of Aries.

At that time the Zodiac had only eleven or ten signs. In Roman times there were eleven, Libra, the twelfth, was made by cutting off part of Scorpio.

That had to do with the fact that the spring-point moved from Taurus into Aries.

This is very complicated, but you must get the peculiar fact that the flow of energy, the libido in ourselves, is the flow of energy in living nature and in the universe, although the two worlds are not causally connected in their energic phenomena.

The energy in both is identical in essence, but in each plane it is following different causal sequences.

And the flow of energy in ourselves and in the universe has to do with time.

How can we best catch time, in itself such an abstraction?

Well, in the flow of energy we have something upon which to hang time.

Our modern idea of time is highly abstract, we have definite notions about the divisions of time into hours, minutes, seconds, etc.-very fine distinctions about time values, in other words.

To the primitive, however, time is a very nebulous thing.

One feels this as soon as one is out of the reach of civilization, and of course the whole East has no notion of time in our sense.

So we can't expect primitive man to produce symbols with the specific time character as we know it.

He is much concerned, however, with the flow of energy, as is shown in his conception of mana.

We have plenty of material that shows us that energy symbolism.

But the question of time symbols is abstruse and more difficult, and I want to confine myself now to those that appear in language.

We are constantly using metaphors, for instance, in which time appears as a river, a wind, or a storm-"the stream of the hours that pass" or "Tempestas horarum"-devouring quality of time.

In mythology it may be the dragon that eats everything that one loves father and mother, all that one has.

Therefore the hero who overcomes the dragon brings into existence again all the ancestors, the crops, even whole nations that have been eaten by time.

He redeems all these precious things from the past.

So the quality of eternity has been attributed to the religious hero.

Before Christ, it was immortality that the hero possessed, not eternity.

In the Babylonian myth of Gilgamesh, the hero was two-thirds divine but one-third human, and in order to be wholly divine and gain immortality he must cross the great sea to the Westland.

Now in these symbols-dragon, wind, river, etc.-we have energy symbols.

It is the flow of life, the river of life, wind, spiritual energy.

So we see how the concept of time gets mixed up with energy concepts.

As a river is a fertilizer so time has also been understood as productive.

Bergson has this idea in his duree creatrice, which is really the Neoplatonic idea of Chronos4 as a god of energy, light, fire, phallic power, and time.

The material for time symbols as they appear in language is very scattered.

The concept of time is so abstract and merges so with that of energy that it is difficult to detach, in order to show that time is really meant.

It soon becomes energy.

Mana at first seems only to have to do with energy, but later on it takes on time qualities.

Now let us take Chronos, the god who ate his own children, the word having the meaning of time.

Chronos is from the Greek root chre, which later becomes the Indo-Germanic rootgher (where there is a reversal of the r and the e), and they have the peculiar connotation of a verb, activity.

The word chre has the meaning of passing over like wind. In German it is hinstreichen uber.

Cher gives the idea of taking in, holding.

From the root-word chre comes chronos, and from the root-word gher comes geron, a Greek word meaning old, in German, Greis, old man; so time takes on the guise of an old man.

With the primitives, the notion of time is expressed by an old man, or by a visible sign of old age.

In seeing an old man, it becomes visible that there is time.

My Africans thought I was a hundred years old because I had white hair.

One hundred means untold ages.

Chronos is the oldest of the gods.

Then there is an Iranian word zrvan, usually found in connection with another word, akarana, meaning a god, and Zrvan Akarana means unlimited duration that contains all that happens.

An old French scholar once made a shrewd guess about this phrase, but unfortunately it proved to be not the right one.

He guessed that since it meant an immensely long time, it contained the idea of Ormuzd (light) and Ahriman (darkness). In other words, the pair of opposites.

But this cannot be, because one version has it that Zrvan, the devil, made time and another that Akarana, the god of duration, made it, so opinions are divided about the origin of that awful thing, the flow of energy.

One can never make out who is responsible.

Nowhere is there such a marvellous dualism. One could make a diagram of it like this:

Do you see that it makes a cross?

I have a book with a picture that I would have liked to show you.

It is a crucified god hanging on the cross, and on the right is the sun and on the left the moon.

The blood from all his wounds is flowing down as grace to the world-divine energy.

The clash of the sun and the moon, unified by the suffering man on the cross, brings the energy.

The thing that flows is time.

Then in the old Persian religion there is another very interesting symbol, a real mana concept. It is Haoma,1 which means grace.

It really means fiery splendour, but it is what the Christians called grace, the gift of the Holy Ghost, like the fiery tongues that fell upon the disciples-fiery tongues of heavenly grace, mana.

It is quite possible that there is somewhere a connection between the Persian and the Christian idea.

You see, besides the time, there is also the energy concept.

I would like to discuss also another Greek word dealing with time, Aion, meaning the time of life. Aion has interesting connections.

The equivalent in Latin is Aevum, meaning eternity, also the duration of life, or an epoch in history.

There is a wonderful verse in Horace, about the river that is flowing and flowing, fleeing past into all eternity, (aevum). Again we find here the peculiar union of energy and time.

The old High German word ewa meaning "always" is close to the Anglo-Saxon and modern English word ever.

Then concerning Aion there is the interesting fact that the Persian Zrvan Akarana became in later times the god Aion and played a great role in the Mithraic cult.

This is rather difficult to understand.

He also is called Deus Leontocephalus, or the lion-headed god, and statues of him have been often found in underground caves.

The cult of Mithras was chthonic in character, so half the churches were at least half underground, and originally they were in caves. (It is said that the cellar where Christ was born had been a grotto-temple of Attis.)

In the statues, the god Aion is represented s a man witn a hon's head, about whose body is coiled a serpent, the head of the serpent projecting over the head of the man.

Another Mithraic symbol is the amphora with the lion and the serpent battling for its possession, and often a flame is coming out of the amphora.

The lion is July, the fiery heat of summer, and the serpent represents the darkness and the coolness of earth, so it is the Yang and the Yin again.

Aion is the god of the union of the opposites, the time when things come together.

Now, I think I have said enough for the present about the peculiar connection between time and energy and psychology, we have had rather a profound discussion.

Let us return to the dreamer.

One of the members of the seminar asked me if our discussions here had not affected the dreamer himself. I think they have, I must say that during the summer he made a decided step forward.

His feelings became very positive, and up to that time they did not visibly stir.

Four weeks ago for the first time he wrote a spontaneous poem about the birth of the new sun, which is a spring festival celebrated in the north of Africa.

On the 28th of July he had a dream which he brought to me to analyse on the 21st of November, three weeks ago.

Dream [18]

He dreamed of a Buddhist monk, a little old man who led him to a fissure in a Cyclopean wall, and inside he saw the wall-people, who were like a secret society doing mysterious things.

Once inside, in a sort of temple, the old man changed into a beautiful little boy, and the dreamer fell down and worshipped him as if he were a divine being.

He wore three capes one over the other and a sort of cap.

He was something like a Milnchner Kindl.

This puzzled the dreamer, but I explained to him that the Cabiri are usually represented like that, the one on the arms of the city of Munich is a little monk.

He is like the Cabiri of Aesculapius, the inspiring familiar spirit of the doctors, who is often represented as holding a scroll and reading wisdom to Aesculapius, and he is always cloaked from head to foot with a hood over his face.

His name is Telesphoros, meaning the one that brings completion, perfection, or initiation.

That is what I told him, and somehow that worked in his mind, for during the last seminar, he produced a picture of a boy in the cross position.

In one of his outstretched hands he holds a sun, in the other the sistrum, or the crescent.

Mind you, he knows nothing of what is going on here, and yet he was doing exactly what we were doing.

The dream is interesting but the symbols would not· have come from what I told him, they probably would not have come without our seminar.

I think he was stirred from within. I must draw your attention to the design on the robe.

It is like a fleur-de-lys but it is also a Buddhist symbol for the thunderbolt, or collective energy, which the dreamer did not know.

When I asked him for an explanation of the picture, he said that as he painted it, he constantly had the words in his mind, "I am the Resurrection and the Life."

Now we will take up the dream that directly followed the one concerned with the union of the pairs of opposites, the sword and scythe symbols.

Dream [21]

He sees a vast grey plain approaching him, and the closer it comes, the more the monotonous grey dissolves into multi-coloured stripes, some wide and some narrow, and they move in a peculiar way
through each other, uniting and separating.

And then he sees that many people are occupied with those stripes, as if to shape or canalize them or to change the direction or to blend them.

The work is hampered through pressure that comes from other stripes.

So on account of that interference, the activity of the people is hindered and the result~ are often quite different from the original intention, and he says to himself “cause and effect.”

Then he tries to help them and in working on them he becomes aware that they are nothing but the surface of a vast mass, like a huge river flowing in a given direction, and the movement is due to the mass flowing along like a lava stream, the stripes coming up and disappearing again.

At the same time, he becomes aware that it is all transparent and luminous, that not only the mass itself but the atmosphere and the people and he himself are all permeated with something that he compares to fluid light, and he knows that this has a tremendous influence on everything that it permeates.

He says to himself, "The Fate of Man, the Fate of People, the Fate of Worlds," yet still he remains preoccupied in shaping his stripe.

Associations: Of the grey plain, he says that grey contains all the colours because it is a mixture of all.

Concerning his remark "Cause and effect," when he sees the people remodeling the stripes, he says, "That is indeed quite illogical. People couldn't hope to make any effect on that huge mass. They would have no effect on the total thing."

Then he says that he is quite unable to get at the meaning of the dream.

He thought it must have to do with impressions he got from a book by Kunkel, called The Great Year, meaning the Platonic year. I have read that book and it is not particularly important, but there is a pretty good description of the outlook on the Fish age and the age of Aquarius.

There are some ideas in it that are interesting.

The dreamer happened to read it. Now, how can we prove that it was an astrological dream?

Dr. Baynes: By his saying, the Fate of Man, the Fate of People, etc.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that show

s the three stages, the individual man, mankind, and the world.

It is exactly what we were talking about the identity of the flow of energy and time, which contains the great Platonic years and his individual fate too.

Now, what do the stripes suggest?

Mrs. Sigg: Shaping his individual life.

Dr. Jung: Yes.

Mrs. Fierz: It is the same idea as the thread of the Parcae.

Dr. Jung: Yes, it stands for the extension of time, the thread spun by the goddesses of fate. Now what are the colours?

Dr. Baynes: The colours are the individual elements of the spectrum.

Dr. Jung: Yes, and that peculiar fluid that permeates?

Miss Wolff' It is clarity, light, the spiritual principle of consciousness permeating everything.

Dr. Jung: Yes, everybody and everything is permeated by it.

That flow of compact substance like lava is the idea of physical matter, and it is permeated by light, the spiritual principle, which is not only inside but above.

There are the two things, substance or the material body, and the mysterious unsubstantial principle of consciousness. They interpenetrate one another.

We think we know something about matter, but what is consciousness?

We have no idea.

We have no standpoint outside of consciousness from which we could judge its quality.

Now each individual is represented by a stripe, and Mrs. Fierz has compared the stripes in the dream to the threads spun by one fate, decorated with roses by another, and cut by the scissors of the third, which would be death.

This is a similar kind of extension symbol.

It might be interesting to go deeper into it.

We can say that human life is a long stripe like a long river.

Looking down at it from a mountain, one can see perhaps a hundred miles, the whole distance of the river from its source to the sea.

One can see it all in one or two seconds, yet a ship on the river needs a long time to cover that distance, and it takes the actual water a long time to flow so far.

It is time or human life seen from very far away, the beginning and the end at the same time. It is seeing time in space.

Now, supposing that from a very high Swiss mountain you see two horses and wagons coming up, and you know it will take two days for them to meet.

From above we can look into the future of those two fellows.

So in such a dream we see human life as a stripe, as the river of time, and a person having such a dream is on a high standpoint, seeing the past, present, and future all at once.

From such a point, human life would look like an extension of man, and then man himself would no longer be a definite figure, he would be extended in time.

To his present body would be added all the other bodies he has ever had.

The body I had yesterday and before that, when I was cheese high or like an embryo, down to my death, form a stripe, a long series of bodies.

This makes man into a snake, and time is a snake. In the fourth dimension, man is a worm, and our length is not measured my metres but by the number of our years.

One might say that that was a perfectly crazy notion, but I will give you an illustration full of religious dignity.

Christ is represented as a great serpent who carries twelve signs on his back, meaning the twelve signs of the zodiac and also the twelve apostles.

He says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches."

He is the zodiacal serpent and they are the manifestation of the months, so the idea of man as a serpent is not so unique.

The serpent was the original form of the physician's god.

There was an enormous serpent in the temple of Aesculapius, and in the third century, the huge beast was brought to Rome to combat the spirit of pestilence.

For centuries, there was a serpent in the sanctuary.

It was snake worship. A staff with a snake wrapped around it was the doctor's symbol, the caduceus. It was also the symbol of Hermes the Sorcerer.

There was originally an idea that Aesculapius himself was a serpent, so it conveyed the idea of healing, as Christ was the healing one.

Saviour and serpent are used interchangeably.

Moses lifted up the serpent and Christ said that so he must be lifted up to draw all men unto him.

The Gnostics say that Christ was a serpent sent by the really spiritual God who had pity on mankind when he saw what poor half-conscious things they were.

He sent Christ as a serpent into the garden of Eden to teach people to eat of the fruit of the tree, to know good from evil, and to become conscious.

It is a peculiar idea-that we ought to became wise like a serpent. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 424-435

Carl Jung Dream Analysis Seminar Lecture VIII 27 November 1929

LECTURE VIII 27 November 1929

Before we discuss further the cross and crescent symbols in their relative aspect, I want to demonstrate to you how symbolic facts leak out in families.

A little girl four or five years old has made a drawing of the things we have been talking about.

The mother is in the seminar.

Obviously she has not discussed symbols with her, yet that the child got it in a very extraordinary way is shown in this drawing.

It represents a mother's breast, and also a house, and up at the left is a crescent.

Inside is a woman, and here are windows depicted in a strange way though the mother tells me that she knows how to draw proper windows.

Evidently it is a combination of the cross and crescent symbols with the human mother figure crouching here in the centre.

It is not an ordered drawing, it still has the peculiar chaotic disorder of early psychic functioning.

The elements are there, but they are not in a cosmos or state of order, but in a primordial or cosmic chaos.

That expression is contradictory, however; we use the word "cosmos" for the universe, but one could think of the universe not as a cosmos but as a chaos, for this is the chaos in the collective unconscious of a child, the primordial chaotic condition where things are only beginning to take orderly shape.

In the child's mind this original chaos becomes projected into human figures.

In the adult mind, particularly in the second part of life, the cosmic figures, sun, moon, stars, etc., as well as other archetypes, begin to detach from the human being.

The human being becomes less important, depotentiated.

But the child, at first entirely non-personal, wakes up from the primitive chaos to the condition of relatedness, and this goes on till late in life, as the human being becomes increasingly more important.

Until puberty, the father and mother and family circle mean everything to the child.

The mother has the first place; it is as if all the suns and stars and moons had entered into the mother.

Then at puberty the detachment begins, first the social, and then the spiritual separation the last would only be at the time of the culmination of life.

I thought it quite worth while to demonstrate this case because it···shows-how such-things can leak out far more than personal secrets, for instance, which are unique and are not reinforced by collective figures.

The collective symbols are in the child, so he has the necessary foundation to receive that stimulus.

Personal secrets have less power-today they are most important, but tomorrow they may vanish, because they are not backed up by that terrific force of the collective unconscious.

An unconscious personal secret has a tendency to exteriorize itself; it has a piercing quality because contaminated by the collective unconscious; and as soon as it is conscious, it is likely to get out, for most people with a conscious secret can't hold their tongues, they babble.

Nature doesn't like secrets and forces us to talk, everything comes to light sooner or later.

Today our seminar will be devoted to the question of the interrelation of the cross and crescent symbols; we have discussed them separately so we have a certain idea of what they mean.

The sun is the main representation of the cross symbol.

One assumes generally that the cross expresses the sun, but I would put it the other way round, the sun expresses the cross.

The cross is that inexpressible background representation of unrecognizable forces of creativeness, and because that background or source is of an unrecognizable nature and expressed only through manifold representations, man has forever used that abstract symbol.

The moon is the same, it is a symbol, quite apart from its real existence.

For instance, the phallic symbol is a very definite thing, it is a symbol for generative power, but many other things represent that-a river, fruit, a tree, wind, etc.

There is no end to the symbols for generative forces. So the moon is one of the symbols, like the cross, for different psychological factors.

In all its different attributes it points to the collective unconscious, which can be expressed in many different ways-as the ocean, a lake, a jungle, a cloud, mist, the forest-all these symbolize one and the same thing, the unrecognizable collective unconscious.

Here again is the very interesting difference between the two symbols that we have remarked before.

The cross is definitely dynamic, and the moon is not; it is more a form into which one can pour one's contents.

Hence the definitely female quality of the moon.

It is linked up with the idea of the virgin and the harlot, or it is a receptacle for the souls of the deceased.

It is a passive receptacle and yet not merely passive, for no matter how dead and quiet it is, it always has a definite effect, the effect of forming and giving definite limitations to a thing.

It catches a dynamic element and solidifies it, transforms and crystallizes it, so that it has apparently attained almost a dynamic effect; it is merely that pouring certain contents into it gives it a different quality.

It is like a wine-glass: Pour a noble wine into a crystal glass with a red thread in its stem and you feel that it is in the right form, while to drink that wine from an earthen milk-jug is not right-it is no longer the same.

So the moon seems to be dynamic too because it has that formative effect upon the dynamic quality symbolized by the sun or cross.

The more we talk about the cross and the crescent, that is, the activity and the passivity of the collective unconscious, the more we approach certain concepts of Chinese philosophy expressed in Yang,
5, the male principle, and Yin, S?, the female principle.

The definite interrelation of the two symbols corresponds to the Chinese concept.

Yang is male, dry, active, fiery, creative, and is represented by the south side of the mountain, also by the dragon.

Yin is female, cool, nocturnal, humid, and is represented by the north side of the mountain.

It is the passive side of matter. (The words matter and mother are derived from the same word, materia, mater.)

Our idea of spiritual and material is exactly parallel excepting that Yang is not entirely spiritual nor Yin entirely material.

The Chinese philosophers project these ideas out into the universe and assume that the universe consists of these two agencies, the dynamic and the receptive, and that these constitute heaven and earth and all that is between.

Now, our Western idea would not be that exactly; that is not congenial to us.

We cannot grasp the Tao unless we have psychological understanding, so it is only psychology which opens up the concepts of Chinese philosophy.

But with this knowledge we can admit that there is an active and a passive aspect, a masculine principle which is generative and a female principle which is receptive.

These are understood as psychological factors, but when it comes to the physical universe, we meet great obstacles in our mental make-up.

Psychologically we can understand, and it doesn't seem entirely strange, so to us these symbols have something to do with the structure of our minds.

Those of you who are drawing and painting know that we are still reproducing those symbols over and over again, showing that they are still expressive and alive.
w
One discovers in analysis that they function in the same way as in the mystery religions and Chinese philosophy, only we do not as ·sume-thaHhey-are-world·principles; we merely assign psychological importance to them, we say that the crescent refers to one's feminine nature and the cross to one's masculine creativeness, without assuming that they are universal symbols at the same time.

But, as I said, we have the testimony of the old mystery cults and Chinese philosophy, which independently hold that they also have to do with the constitution of the world, not only with our subjective
prejudice concerning what the world consists of, and that they are responsible for the operation of the "Heavenly Laws," as they would say.

We should not consider such a statement as a metaphysical assertion, or as a fact of natural science, but as though it were the program of a party in a democracy.

It is a view and it may be wrong, yet if we want to solidify the state or put up a reasonable government, we must take into account that there are so many fools who hold these opinions.

A considerable number of people think in a foolish way.

That is what man is like, and we are human beings too, and we have to consider the fact that many people, and even our ancestors, also held the belief that man is only one case among many, in which these general laws manifest themselves.

Now we cannot scientifically prove that our functioning is coincidental with the functioning of the sun and the moon.

We observe the similarity between the periodicity of woman and the moon, but they do not coincide, it is merely the same rhythm.

So also, metaphorically, we could say that the active principle in man is like the sun.

In astrology we have another consideration, a bit uncanny and therefore particularly hated by scientists.

You remember my telling you that birthdates of important men tended to accumulate around the three points of the aerial trigon.

If this were confirmed, we might go further and make statistics about suicides, lunacy, epilepsy, etc.

That might lead to tangible results, and then astrology would be a very serious consideration.

I have suggested to astrologers that we should have more scientific statements.

Sometimes people without knowing one's birthdate can make remarkable guesses as to where one's signs are.

Twice it has happened to me, once in England and once in America.

I was told that my sun was in Leo and my moon in Taurus, Aquarius rising.

This made a great impression on me.

How the devil did they know? Did they see it in my face?

But when one once knows a little about these things, they do not appear so mysterious, and one can easily discover certain characteristics--anatomical, for instance.

Or sometimes things come out in-a negative way.

For instance, I think a certain man is quite certainly not Scorpio, and then I find that he is just that.

So I have often heard some one say, "Surely I will not marry that onel"-and then he does. Or a patient will say, "All that you say is true, but this is not true," and then I find it to be the closest truth.

Now that is where astrology is today.

It enables certain people to make verifiable diagnoses; and sometimes certain guesses, intuitive shots, are peculiarly adequate, quite astonishing.

For instance, I was in touch with an astrologer who knew my birth-date but nothing about my personal life, and I got reports from him occasionally-"on such and such a day you must have felt so and
so"-but always in the past, so that I could verify the truth of it.

Upon one of these occasions he wrote that on the 31st of March, let us say, two years ago, I must have had the feeling of being reborn, for such and such a planet passed over such and such a place in my nativity.

At that time I had in my psychological diary accurate records of everything that happened.

So I looked up that date and I had written, "To day I have a most unaccountable feeling of being reborn."

I could tell you other irrational facts, certain evidences. -But if one once takes it for granted that these things are true, one is confronted with the terribly serious question, what have we to do with the stars?

Is there any connection between our miserable little everyday condition and these stars, great Jupiter and Saturn travelling through incredible cosmic distances?

Moreover, the moment of birth is so accidental, the doctor is late, the midwife is clumsy, the mother is a little too impetuous.

How could one assume such a connection?

If you put it like that, it remains unanswerable.

Astrologers are influenced by theosophy, so they say, "That is very simple, it is just vibration!"

One astrologer after reading Psychology of the Unconscious wrote me, "Why do you bother about developing a libido concept? It is only vibration." But what is vibration?

They say it is light energy, perhaps electricity, they are not quite informed.

At all events the vibrations that could influence us have never been seen, so it remains just a word.

Now I will give you another wrinkle which is quite horrible.

I hope you will be able to follow.

You see, the astrologer says one was born when the sun was in such and such a degree of Libra, and the moon in such and such a degree of Scorpio, etc., and he bases the reading of one's horoscope entirely upon that position of the planets.

For instance, he says, "Today Jupiter is passing over its-own-place-in-your-nativity, therefore it is in the same degree in which it was at the moment of your birth."

You take your telescope and you find the zodiacal constellation and Jupiter is not there at all!

Then again the astrologer will inform you that the spring equinox is in zero degree Aries and you naturally expect the sun to be rising at six o'clock in the morning, precisely at zero degrees Aries.

But you find something entirely different, it is perhaps at 28 degrees Pisces.

In the spring equinox the sun doesn't rise in Aries.

You look it up in history and find that in 100 B.C. the sun left the constellation of Aries and went into Pisces.

Then the astrologer royal of Ptolemy said, "Now, we can't let that happen, we will fix that fact for always as it was in 2000 B.C. when the sun did the same thing-left Taurus and crossed over into Aries."

You see, the spring-point moves back, there is a regression.

That is the so-called precession of the equinoxes, moving 55 seconds each year, going back from the spring signs into the winter signs.

Now this astronomer stopped that. He simply made it consistent.

Otherwise the clocks would all go wrong each year by 55 seconds.

So since· 100 B.C. (Academy of Alexandria) we call the spring-point zero degrees Aries.

We have kept our astronomical faith, but the heavens have moved on and we are simply out of time with the universe.

If a man in 2000 B.C. said one was born in 25 degrees Sagittarius, it was true, but a hundred years later it was not quite true for it has already moved on 100 X 55 seconds and the horoscope is no longer
exact.

An astrologer perhaps says, "No wonder you have such a temperament, or such a royal gesture, because your sun is in the beginning of Leo; when the sun looked at you out of its own house at the moment of your nativity, naturally you were made into a little lion."

But it didn't look out at you from its own house, for in reality it was in Gemini.

Nevertheless you can prove that the man whose sun is said to be in Taurus gets the bull neck, or the woman in Libra gets the qualities of the sun from the heights of Libra, or the one whose sun is in Sagittarius has intuition, and you are quite right.

Yet the sun was not in those positions.

So that destroys any hope of vibration!

I told you of the statistics connected with the aerial trigon, and yet those men of superior mentality were not born when the sun was in those signs.

It is an extraordinary puzzle, and there are astrologers who don't even know it; they are theosophists and they say, "It is quite easy, it is just vibrations."

But, you see, when it comes to our Western mind, we must think.

How then do we account for the fact that our peculiar characteristics can be explained by our planets?

One says, "Venus is very clearly your sign."

How do you explain that as if when it is not?

Here is another paradox.

In order to solve that puzzle, we should say, the thing that matters is not the position of the stars, the thing that matters is time.

You can call time what you like.

It is quite indifferent whether you say the spring-point is zero degrees Aries or 28 Pisces; that is a convention; it is nevertheless the spring-point.

So you see, these old designations of time were not taken from the heavens, but given to the heavens.

Spring and winter, for example, were projected to the heavens. Man has created the constellations.

So obviously the constellations were not intended by the creator of the world to be an astrological text-book to us.

In different systems of astrology the constellations are differently arranged.

On the calendar stone of Mexico, or the famous Denderah stone in Egypt, the constellations are grouped in a different way.

We are even in doubt about the "Great Bear" or the "Wagon"; the ancients called it the "Shoulder of the Heifer."

There was a time when there were only four signs in the Zodiac.

The Romans had eleven. Libra originated in the time of the Caesars; because it was invented so late, it is the only one that is an instrument.

They made the scales by cutting off the claws of the Scorpion.

All the other signs are mythological creatures, or human. Man gives the names to the stars.

The lion does not look like a lion, but man called it that because the sun was really. at its culmination in that devastating time of the year when the heat is insupportable and everything is dried up and
burnt.

It is like a destroying power, so they said the sun was raging like a mad lion. This is the way the signs go:

Aquarius
Pisces
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo

Five thousand years ago, 3000 B.C. when the sun was in winter, there were floods of rain. Aquarius walked about pouring his water out right and left.

Then the fish swam in the floods.

The little ram, the time of little shoots and buds.

The Bull, the great push of nature.

The fertility of man.

One seldom does better than twins.

A drawback, the summer solstice. The crab walking backward when the sun descends again.

After the first inkling of solstice it dawns on man .... that the sun will really be going, from the 22nd of July till the 21st of August, just when all is most glowing.

When man is roaring like a lion there is nothing better to tame him than a virgin.

She will cut the hair of the lion and make it short, like Samson and Delilah.

It is not nice, the whole symbolism is somewhat obscene.

But at that time of the year, the 15th of September in the Egyptian calendar, the left eye of the goddess is prepared to receive the god Ra, who is to walk into it.

The eye is a womb symbol.

The female element takes the lead. The god enters the womb of darkness,

Yang is under Yin. Woman is on top.

Libra
Scorpion
Sagittarius
Capricorn

The balance after the virgin has done her job.

The fatal self-sacrifice of the sun.

The sun gets cornered by the virgin and when the forces are equal (Libra), the sun commits suicide, and then comes a clear descent into the mother.

There is a legend that when the scorpion is surrounded by fire it kills itself.

The death of the sun.

Death is a sort of river or gap.

There is a life beyond, but one is here on this bank of the river and cannot get there.

Then comes the legend of the centaur, a good archer, who with his bow can send an arrow across.

It is a means of communication.

The archer Sagittarius with the arrow of intuition foresees new birth out of the unconscious.

This is the advent season, when ghosts begin to walk again, when the unconscious begins to manifest itself.

The goat-fish. (This was the imperial sign on the coat-of-arms of Augustus Caesar.)

After the dead man contained in the sea, the next sign is this goatfish.

He is half fish and half goat, meaning that at first, as the fish, he is deep down in the sea, out of sight in the unconscious.

Then he rises to the surface and climbs to the highest peaks and valleys.

This is the sun, the promise of the new year, so some astrologers call the time after Christmas the "Promise of the Year."

It is the time of the birth of Mithras, the birth of Christ, the birth of the new light, the whole hope of the coming year.

People born then have strong hearts. They are ambitious, but they have to work hard to achieve their ends.

But the new year has to be generated.

The sun generates the year in Aquarius. Aquarius pours out the waters of fecundity.

He is also shown as a phallic god like Priapus.

After the generating water the Fishes come again, and so on around.

This is how the Zodiac came into existence.

It is really a seasonal cycle with particular qualities of climate-winter, spring, summer, autumn, qualified by the fantasies and metaphorical imagination of the human mind.

And so man has called the stars that are synchronous with the seasons by names expressing the qualities of each particular season.

The active principle is obviously the time and not at all the stars, they are merely incidental.

If, at the time when astrology came into conscious existence, other constellations had been in the heavens, we would have had different groups of stars but they would have been called a lion or a man carrying a water-jug just the same.

They are not at all like their names, even the most striking constellations.

It is a tremendous strain for the imagination.

So, as I said, it is obvious that the active element is time.

People born at a certain time of the year may have certain qualities.

The relative position of the stars is only the means for counting time.

Then here is a new paradox. What is time? How can it be an active principle?

Time is an abstract conception of duration and is perfectly arbitrary at that; one could make an entirely different division.

A second might be half a minute, why is a minute sixty seconds?

It is not at all convincing, it is merely a conventional arbitrary conception.

Then if one tries to boil it down, one comes to the conclusion that time is the flux of things, like the water-dock or the sand-clock, it is the running down, dividing the day into four parts, each part being one quarter of that day, between sunrise and sunset.

To observe time, one observes the movement of things lasting a certain time, as the hands of a watch; it is the duration of a certain flux.

This is abstract; but the flux of things is not abstract, it is perfectly concrete and tangible.

That is what we term energy because nothing moves without energy.

One must wind one's watch or turn the hour-glass.

It takes energy to produce the flux, and what we measure is energy; and this is another abstract conception in so far as it means a changing condition of things.

When one says time is merely an aspect of energy, one makes it more tangible, because everyone can observe it and measure it.

Time and energy are correlated concepts.

If there is no energy nothing moves and there is no longer any time.

They are identical, a certain movement of time is a certain movement of energy.

When we observe energy we really observe time, because it is through energy that we measure time.

So I say, with no time there is no possibility of measurement.

Take a stone just before it rolls down hill.

It is in a particular position of energy, it will crash but it hasn't. It is latent energy, the energy of position, potential energy.

It may break loose at any time with terrific vigour.

Then it crashes down manifesting mechanical energy.

It lands in the valley, crashes, splinters, and then where is the energy?

It is in the warmth of the stone and the stone against which it hurled itself. It has been transformed.

This is a new movement of energy.

Now, you can describe that whole transformation in terms of time.

If nothing happens, there is no time.

Time begins when that thing gets loose.

There is a certain amount of time until the warmth is dissipated again, and then it becomes unobservable.

The specific warmth has completely vanished, so time is only between the breaking loose of the stone and the last trace of warmth of the splintered rock.

Energy was in three forms, latent energy, mechanical energy, and warmth.

You can translate this into the terms of water falling on a turbine and creating electricity.

As long as the process lasts, there is time, simply different moments expressed through different forms.

Now consider the universal energy of the world, the life energy.

It is unknown to us, but we must understand it under those terms.

It is not observable if nothing happens.

For instance, an egg is latent, nothing moves, but if it develops, time develops, age begins.

Now take the energy of the universe and the solar system.

In winter there is less radiation, in summer there is more.

So someone who was born at a certain moment of the year naturally has a certain quality, because his origin was in those conditions.

Nothing to be done about it, it is just so.

The peculiar thing is that one should be able to trace the age of a thing to the exact time of its origin.

There are certain archaeologists, for instance, who have such a refined sense of the age of an object that they can tell it within ten years, just as an antiquarian knows by the print, quality of the paper, etc.
of a book that it suggests a time between 1460 and 1470, let us say. So an etching can be traced.

The expert will tell you that it is of the French school but influenced by the Dutch.

He judges by the actual qualities of the materials used-the paper, the ink, the objects depicted, etc.

When you see an old man, white-haired and decrepit, you say he was born about 1850.

Often I guess age within two years.

One can do that without any trouble, it is the same as saying that one was born under Aquarius but a bit more accurate.

This is merely a technical method, like looking behind the screen of a clever antiquarian who has certain little helps-for instance, he knows when a certain varnish was introduced into Europe, or that
the first pipe is not older than the discovery of North America.

Astrology consists of all these little tricks that help to make the diagnosis more accurate.

So the astrologer, though he does not know the year or the month of your birth, may guess by your qualities.

Now, the unfortunate thing is that we can designate the condition of energy, universal energy, in no other way than by time.

Instead of saying the time of the falling stone, we say it was ten seconds ago that the stone has fallen.

We call this year 1929, because once upon a time we began counting, assuming that we knew when Christ was born-though there is a controversy about that, Christ may have been born 100 B.C.

Mead has written a very interesting book about that.

In China the years have names.

In Rome they were named for the consuls, reckoned from the beginning of Rome in 750 B.C.

After the French Revolution, they began to count the years as if it were the beginning of a new epoch.

We indicate the conditions of the times by a number.

For instance, 1875 might be called the time of crinolines, the first railways, newspapers twice a week with pages, corsets for ladies, top-hats for men, bad taste generally.

They knew nothing of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer was the most recent news.

Chicago was then the most ridiculous little place, and imagine New York in 1875!

Four years after the Franco-German War, everything was moving in a different way, the way that was characteristic for that year, and nothing before or after will be like it.

So, in 1929, everything has the cast and brand of this year.

And the children born in this year will be recognizable as part of a great process and marked by a particular condition. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 401-412

Carl Jung: "Man has created the constellations"

Here is another paradox.

In order to solve that puzzle, we should say, the thing that matters is not the position of the stars, the thing that matters is time.

You can call time what you like.

It is quite indifferent whether you say the spring-point is zero degrees Aries or 28 Pisces; that is a convention; it is nevertheless the spring-point.

So you see, these old designations of time were not taken from the heavens, but given to the heavens.

Spring and winter, for example, were projected to the heavens.

Man has created the constellations.

So obviously the constellations were not intended by the creator of the world to be an astrological text-book to us.

In different systems of astrology the constellations are differently arranged.

On the calendar stone of Mexico, or the famous Denderah stone in Egypt,

the constellations are grouped in a different way.

We are even in doubt about the "Great Bear" or the "Wagon"; the ancients called it the "Shoulder of the Heifer."

There was a time when there were only four signs in the Zodiac.

The Romans had eleven.

Libra originated in the time of the Caesars; because it was invented so late, it is the only one that is an instrument.

They made the scales by cutting off the claws of the Scorpion.

All the other signs are mythological creatures, or human.

Man gives the names to the stars.

The lion does not look like a lion, but man called it that because the sun was really at its culmination in that devastating time of the year when the heat is insupportable and everything is dried up and
burnt.

It is like a destroying power, so they said the sun was raging like a mad lion.

This is the way the signs go:

Aquarius
Pisces
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo

Five thousand years ago, 3000 B.C. when the sun was in winter, there were floods of rain. Aquarius walked about pouring his water out right and left.

Then the fish swam in the floods.

The little ram, the time of little shoots and buds.

The Bull, the great push of nature.

The fertility of man. One seldom does better than twins.

A drawback, the summer solstice.

The crab walking backward when the sun descends again.

After the first inkling of solstice it dawns on man .... that the sun will really be going, from the 22nd of July till the 21st of August, just when all is most glowing.

When man is roaring like a lion there is nothing better to tame him than a virgin.

She will cut the
hair of the lion and make it short, like Samson and
Delilah.

It is not nice, the whole symbolism is somewhat obscene.

But at that time of the year, the 15th of September in the Egyptian calendar, the left eye of the goddess is prepared to receive the god Ra, who is to walk into it.

The eye is a womb symbol.

The female element takes the lead.

The god enters the womb of darkness, Yang is under Yin. Woman is on top.

Libra
Scorpion
Sagittarius
Capricorn

The balance after the virgin has done her job.

The fatal self-sacrifice of the sun.

The sun gets cornered by the virgin and when the forces are equal (Libra), the sun commits suicide, and then comes a clear descent into the mother.

There is a legend that when the scorpion is surrounded by fire it kills itself.

The death of the sun.

Death is a sort of river or gap.

There is a life beyond, but one is here on this bank of the river and cannot get there.

Then comes the legend of the centaur, a good archer, who with his bow can send an arrow across.

It is a means of communication.

The archer Sagittarius with the arrow of intuition foresees new birth out of the unconscious.

This is the advent season, when ghosts begin to walk again, when the unconscious begins to manifest itself.

The goat-fish. (This was the imperial sign on the coat-of-arms of Augustus Caesar.)

After the dead man contained in the sea, the next sign is this goatfish.

He is half fish and half goat, meaning that at first, as the fish, he is deep down in the sea, out of sight in the unconscious.

Then he rises to the surface and climbs to the highest peaks and valleys.

This is the sun, the promise of the new year, so some astrologers call the time after Christmas the "Promise of the Year."

It is the time of the birth of Mithras, the birth of Christ, the birth of the new light, the whole hope of the coming year.

People born then have strong hearts.

They are ambitious, but they have to work hard to achieve their ends.

But the new year has to be generated.

The sun generates the year in Aquarius. Aquarius pours out the waters of fecundity.

He is also shown as a phallic god like Priapus.

After the generating water the Fishes come again, and so on around.

This is how the Zodiac came into existence.

It is really a seasonal cycle with particular qualities of climate-winter, spring, summer, autumn, qualified by the fantasies and metaphorical imagination of the human mind.

And so man has called the stars that are synchronous with the seasons by names expressing the qualities of each particular season.

The active principle is obviously the time and not at all the stars, they are merely incidental.

If, at the time when astrology came into conscious existence, other constellations had been in the heavens, we would have had different groups of stars but they would have been called a lion or a man carrying a water-jug just the same.

They are not at all like their names, even the most striking constellations.

It is a tremendous strain for the imagination. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Pages 407-410

Carl Jung on "Astrology" - Anthology

Astrology has actually nothing to do with the Stars but is the 5000 year old psychology of antiquity and the Middle Ages. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 56.

Jung noted: "Astrologically the beginning of the next aeon, according to the starting point you select, falls between AD 2000 and 2200" (CW 9,2, §149, note 88). ~Liber Novus, Page 316, Footnote 274.

So the first science was astrology. That was an attempt of man to establish a line of communication between the remotest objects and himself. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1496.

Synchronous events are widely accepted in Chinese philosophy and are the basis of astrology. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 51.

the Creator God [takes] on an astromythological, or rather an astrological, character. He has become the sun, and thus finds a natural expression that transcends his moral division into a Heavenly Father and his counterpart the devil. ~Carl Jung; CW 5, Para 176.

And it is a curious fact that, all over the earth wherever we find astrology, the stars have essentially the same meaning. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 225.

Psychology did not suddenly spring into existence; one could say that it is as old as civilization itself. The ancient science of astrology, which has always appeared in the wake of culture all over the world, is a kind of psychology and alchemy is another unconscious form. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture I, Page 11.

His [Jung’s] impatience was due not only to his temperament - astrologically he was a Leo - but also to his extreme sensitivity, which both enriched and burdened his life. ~Aniela Jaffe, Last Years, Pages 114-115.

Astrology, like the collective unconscious with which psychology is concerned, consists of symbolic configurations: The "planets" are the gods, symbols of the powers of the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 175.

Astrology is not a mantic method but appears to be based on proton radiation (from the sun). ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 22-23.

"Astrology" is another of those "random phenomena" wiped off the desk by the idol of the average, which everybody believes to be reality itself while it is a mere abstract. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 230-232.

All the grapes of the same site produce about the same wine. This is the truth stated by astrology and experience since time immemorial. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 353-355.

Sitting in the central mussel-shell, we are the "sons of the mother." Hence the old astrological tradition says that our zodiacal sign is Virgo. However, there is no unanimity on this score, since the other version says that our sign is Taurus. It is a virile, creative sign, but earthly like Virgo. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 418-420

The fact, however, is that our whole astrological determination of time does not correspond to any actual constellation in the heavens because the vernal equinox has long since moved out of Aries into Pisces and from the time of Hipparchus has been artificially set at 0° Aries. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Consequently the correlations with the planetary houses are purely fictitious, and this rules out the possibility of a causal connection with the actual positions of the stars, so that the astrological determination of time is purely symbolic. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.

Astrology differs very much from alchemy, as its historical literature consists merely of different methods of casting a horoscope and of interpretation, and not of philosophical texts as is the case in alchemy. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Astrology is a naively projected psychology in which the different attitudes and temperaments of man are represented as gods and identified with planets and zodiacal constellations. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The experiment [Astrology] is most suggestive to a versatile mind, unreliable in the hands of the unimaginative, and dangerous in the hands of a fool, as those intuitive methods always are. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Astrological "truths" as statistical results are questionable or even unlikely. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The [astrological] superstitious use (prediction of the future or statement of facts beyond psychological possibilities) is false. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

There is no psychological exposition of astrology yet, on account of the fact that the empirical foundation in the sense of a science has not yet been laid. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

Undoubtedly astrology today is flourishing as never before in the past, but it is still most unsatisfactorily explored despite very frequent use. It is an apt tool only when used intelligently. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 463-464

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 195, Para 392.

The great astrological periods do exist. Taurus and Gemini were prehistoric periods, we don't know much about them. But Aries the Ram is closer; Alexander the Great was one of its manifestations. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 410-423

At breakfast he [Jung] spoke of astrology (one of his daughters is interested in it), and of a German book in which he is criticised for giving support to horoscopes. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 91

This man also asked C.G. if he believed in astrology because he had mentioned it; but, said C.G., it is not necessary to ‘believe’ in such concepts – he simply observes that they are sometimes relevant. ~E.A. Bennet, Meetings with Jung, Page 102

And now we are coming to the end of the Pisces era, as was foretold nearly two thousand years ago by the Arabian astrologer Albumasar. The pre-Christian time was Aries. ~Carl Jung, Meetings with Jung, Page 302

The fact that astrology nevertheless yields valid results proves that it is not the apparent positions of the stars which work, but rather the times which are measured or determined by arbitrarily named stellar positions. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 138-139

"The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast," says Seni to Wallenstein—a dictum that should satisfy all astrologers if we knew even a little about the secrets of the heart. But for this, so far, men have had little understanding. Nor would I dare to assert that things are any better today. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, Para 9

Carl Jung’s Letter on Astrology

Dear Prof. Raman, 6 September 1947

I haven’t yet received The Astrological Magazine, but I will answer your letter nevertheless.

Since you want to know my opinion about astrology I can tell you that I’ve been interested in this particular activity of the human mind for more than 30 years.

As I am a psychologist I’m chiefly interested in the particular light the horoscope sheds on certain complications in the character.

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.

From such experiences I formed the opinion that astrology is of particular interest to the psychologist, since it contains a sort of psychological experience which we call "projected" -this means that we find the psychological facts as it were in the constellations.

This originally gave rise to the idea that these factors derive from the stars, whereas they are merely in a rela- tion of synchronicity with them.

I admit that this is a very curious fact which throws a peculiar light on the structure of the human mind.

What I miss in astrological literature is chiefly the statistical method by which certain fundamental facts could be scientifically established.

Hoping that this answer meets your request, I remain, Yours sincerely, C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1, Page 475-476.