The Pantheon of the Planetary Archetypes: A Workshop With Richard Tarnas

In this Saturday workshop, after a brief review of the basic principles set out in Friday’s lecture, I will explore the crucial dimension of insight that emerges through the study of the planetary aspects—the various alignments or angular relationships between two or more planets relative to the Earth. The archetypes never act alone but always do so in ever-shifting combinations with each other. It is here, in the study of birth charts, personal transits, and world transits, that we see the complex archetypal dynamics in our lives that are associated with these combined planetary energies. During our time together today, I will draw on illustrations from psychology and psychotherapy, cultural biographies, history, and the arts, displaying all the planetary archetypes in action.

As in Friday’s lecture, we will be exploring all ten fundamental planetary archetypes: the archetypal meanings corresponding to the luminaries, the Sun and Moon, including how both the solar and lunar principles have feminine and masculine expressions, and how both live in all of us; the five planets known to the ancients—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; and finally, the three outer planets discovered by telescope in the modern era —Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto—for which we have both the most evidence and unanimous consensus among astrologers as to their archetypal meanings. But in the Saturday workshop, we’ll be focusing on their combinations, as reflected in the aspects between them that occur in natal charts and transits.

Again, of the many archetypes that Jung recognized as informing the psychic life of his patients, those he found in the astrological tradition seemed to him especially significant, as reflecting timeless structures in the deep collective psyche. He drew on their meanings throughout his career and spoke repeatedly of the insights rendered by studying the birth charts and transits of his patients. Indeed, he suggested that it was the modern negation of this level of symbolic knowledge in our era that forced the need for the very existence of psychology:

Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols.

Becoming familiar with the profound archetypal meanings associated with the Sun, Moon, and planets is invaluable for everyone interested in depth psychology and self-understanding. Because they are so universal in nature, as soon as each planet’s archetypal character and range of major expressions is presented, we quickly tend to recognize them as familiar realities in our lives.

Central to this weekend’s presentation, of course, is our understanding—or at least glimpsing the mystery of—the very nature of archetypes, and how our always-evolving level of self-awareness and agency can play an essential role in how these powerful forces and complexes are enacted in our lives.

Richard Tarnas is professor emeritus of cultural history and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He has taught courses in the history of ideas, archetypal studies, depth psychology, and religious evolution. He has also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network and is the basis for the just released 10-episode documentary series "The Changing of the Gods". He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and long served on the Board of Governors for the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.