I am so very pleased and excited to announce that my new book, Jung on Astrology, is now available!
This book gathers Jung’s thoughts on astrology in a single volume for the first time. My co-editor and colleague Keiron Le Grice and I selected the writings from Jung’s Collected Works, seminars, and letters, which contain numerous discussions of this ancient divinatory system.
Understood as a symbolic representation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung found in astrology a wealth of spiritual and psychological meaning, for it represents the “sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
Topics treated include the archetypal symbolism in astrology, the precession of the equinoxes and astrological ages, astrology as a form of synchronicity and acausal correspondence, the qualitative nature of time, and the experience of astrological fate—allowing readers to assess astrology’s place within the larger corpus of Jung’s work and its value as a source of symbolic meaning.
The origin story of this book began a decade ago when I went to a small seminar given by Richard Tarnas on archetypal astrology. Listening to how he approached the planets as gods and their meaningful correspondence to life (both inner and outer), I was honestly thunderstruck. I always appreciated astrology and had studied it casually, but Tarnas’ approach rooted in Jung and the psyche was something I had never heard before. I realized that astrology could combine mythology, Jung’s psychology and an understanding of the archetypal ground of life. Astrology put into practice a perspective on life that Jung developed in his work. Everything I had been studying from high school through to graduate school moved out of the more scholarly place and into a psychological and spiritual practice. Astrology could be reimagined as a soul practice.
Over the years of much deeper study, I was surprised to find that while many astrologers who are psychologically oriented are attuned to Jungian psychology, but there was no book on Jung’s own writings on astrology. So in early 2015 I approached my colleague Keiron Le Grice about compiling just such a book for the “Jung On” series. Keiron has studied astrology for 25 years and has written two books on archetypal astrology, and I felt that together we could pull this project off. And we did. The Jung family gave us their permission to use all of Jung’s relevant published material, and we are grateful for their generosity.
I hope you will enjoy this book as much as we did putting it together. You might consider approaching this volume as if you were a sea-diving bird, dipping in and out where you please, rather than reading from cover to cover. Jung on Astrology is available on Amazon.
With joy,
Safron