Introduction to K of C Astrological Aspects 2

Laurence Hillman likes the analogy of acting, and sees the different planets as actors, the different signs as costumes and the different houses as different stage sets or scenes where the action plays out. A common example L. Hillman gives is the same planet (actor), Venus, if she is in the sign (costume) of Pisces may be clothed in a medieval flowing gown, while if she was in Scorpio, she’d be wearing leather and carrying a whip. And the house placement (scene) would reflect where this actor is acting in your life, for example Venus in the fourth house would be in the home, while Venus in the tenth house would be at work. L. Hillman’s zodiac chart is very handy in this regard. [link to Twelve Principles Chart]. He notes that “either you do the gods or the gods do you” and in his practice L. Hillman seeks to make the archetypes in a person visible, and helps clients to find ways for these archetypal energies to constructively express themselves in a person’s life.

Tarnas’s major focus is on the aspects—the archetypal combinations or the relationships that the different planets, especially the four outer planets have to each other. Tarnas’s (2006) epic work Cosmos and Psyche is truly profound and in this section I will only begin to skim the surface of this very deep work. Tarnas's main student, Matthew Stelzner [Link to website] focuses on these archetypal combinations and helps clients identify and then work with the energies that they represent.

I have had the opportunity to study with Richard Tarnas [link to website], Lisa Dale Miller, Laurence Hillman, and Matthew Stelzner in the last few years, and since I am a beginning student of astrology, and because astrology is not the focus of this dissertation, I will stick mainly with Tarnas’s focus for simplicity's sake. When discussing the different cultural pieces, I will occasionally and tangentially mention the significance of the signs and houses.

Astrology begins to let you see archetypally, and you do not need to know all that much in order to begin looking at the world through archetypal eyes. And the view is well worth it. If you know the meanings of the different planetary archetypes, then you can put them together and see how they affect each other. I like to think of it like the learning to sing sequence in the Sound of Music (Wise, 1965): “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start; when you read you begin with A, B, C, when you sing you begin with do, re, me,” and in astrology we begin with the different planetary symbols. And just as Maria substitutes one word for each note, we can substitute different words for the different planetary symbols, called glyphs, and see how they interact with each other. It is similar to an algebra problem in this way where you substitute different numbers or meanings in the case of astrology for different symbols, but unlike algebra, where letters can represent any number, in astrology, the planetary glyphs or symbols have very specific meanings.

We will be dealing mainly with Saturn and the trans-Saturnian planets, which Rudhyar (1976) calls “the planets of the unconscious” (p. 23) and “ambassadors of the galaxy" (p. 151). We are mainly concerned here with the four outer planets—Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, which simplifies things even further. Saturn and the more newly discovered “trans-Saturnian planets” are known as the transpersonal planets, because they move so much slower than the other planets, which are known as the inner planets or the personal planets. The outer planets are called transpersonal because of their meaning, not just because of their velocity or movement. Jupiter takes 12 years to go through the zodiac, staying in each sign approximately 1 year, while Saturn takes twice as long, 28-30 years to make its way around, and the outer planets take even longer—Uranus takes 84 years, Neptune 165, and Pluto 248 years respectively. Since these planets remain in an individual sign from 7 to over 20 years they have a “generational” effect because they leave their imprint on an entire generation.

Planetary Relationships—Aspects and Transits

Not only are the planetary locations of importance, but so are their relationships to each other. Ptolemy divided the circle of the heavens into 12 parts of 30° each, and the movements of the planets in relation to each other geometrically is also considered to be important and these relationships are known as aspects. When planets are in these geometric configurations in the sky, their archetypal energies are “constellated,” a Jungian term meaning activated or expressed. There are five different major aspects, which one gets by dividing a circle by the different numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6, which accounts for angles of 360° (=0°), 180°, 120°, 90°, and 60° respectively. When the planets are next to each other, this is called a conjunction, when they are across the circle from each other, at approximately 180° it is called an opposition, when they are at a 90° angle, one quarter of the way around the circle, this is called a square. These three configurations or aspects—the conjunction, opposition and square are called the hard aspects and they are more challenging. When the planets are in these configurations, their energies result in tensions forming which are reflected in the linguistic phrases of “butting heads” or “getting under my skin” for a conjunction, “being at odds,” “polarized,” or “diametrically opposed” for an opposition, and “being at cross purposes” for a square. The harmonious aspects are said to occur when the planets are 120° away, or one third of the way around the circle, known as a trine, and 1/6 of the way around the circle or 60° apart, known as a sextile. When the planets are in these two smooth and flowing configurations, their archetypal energies are said to get along with each other, or harmonize.

As all of this circling occurs, the different planets come into different geometric alignments with each other, aspecting each other, which are known in astrology as transits. Your natal chart, the snapshot of the sky at the moment of your birth shows what transits were occurring at that time. The planets continue to move on their sojourns around the sun, and as they do, they make geometric configurations with each other (called world transits) and make geometric configurations, or aspects in relation to the planetary positions in your natal chart. The aspects between the current planetary positions in the sky compared to your natal chart are called personal transits.

For example, as I wrote this part of the dissertation in mid-October 2005, in my natal chart, Uranus was 14° Leo, and the current position of Saturn in the sky at the time was approaching it at 9° Leo. So I was experiencing a Saturn transit of my natal Uranus—transiting Saturn conjunct my natal Uranus, among the many other things that were occurring in my chart. And transiting Neptune was at 14° Aquarius, so I also had an exact Neptune-Uranus opposition, too, because transiting Neptune was opposite my natal Uranus. In the sky at the time, Saturn was opposite to Neptune, so everyone was experiencing the effects of this Saturn-Neptune world transit, while I personally was experiencing Saturn-Uranus (conjunction) and Neptune-Uranus (opposition) transits. [Link to my chart] It only recently occurred to me, as I was writing the astrological portions of the dissertation, on the home stretch, that the three major archetypal patterns that we will be exploring in the "Kaleidoscope of Culture" section, Saturn-Pluto, Uranus-Neptune, and Uranus-Pluto are all transits that I either had during my coursework or while working on my dissertation.

One last thing about aspects is important to note. The different aspects have different ranges of influence, so that there is an area of +/- a certain number of degrees away from the exact geometric angles where the archetypal energies are considered to be operative. These are known as orbs.

In the case of these world transits, Tarnas feels that the orb, or range of archetypal effectiveness is 15° away from exact for conjunctions and oppositions, and 10° away from exact for squares. He notes that the effects of the planetary influences can be seen beginning at 20° from exact with conjunctions and oppositions, which Tarnas refers to as their penumbra, but that their full force does not begin to be felt until 15°, while squares have a smaller penumbra. With trines and sextiles the orbs are even smaller, and for personal transits, the orbs are smaller still, and different astrologers have different feelings about what size they are. But according to astrologer Lisa Dale Miller (personal communication September 12, 2005), “standard orbs in Western astrology are 7° for conjunctions, squares, oppositions, trines and sextiles, 5° for quincunx.” Vedic astrology considers the different houses, and is not as concerned with how many degrees, so the orbs in Vedic astrology are thus much wider in comparison. Since the outer planets move very slowly, some of their transits can last for a decade or longer.

As mentioned in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, Tarnas and Grof (2002, seminar) noticed correspondences between the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs) and the outer planetary archetypes. And they also found surprisingly that transit astrology was a better predictor for work with nonordinary holotropic states than any of the other tests that they had tried, such as the Minnesota Multidimensional Personality Inventory (MMPI), Shostrom's Personal Orientation Inventory (POI), Rorschach Inkblot Test, their own Psychedelic Experience Questionnaire (PEQ), and others (Grof, 2000c). Grof and Tarnas were trying to predict the “reaction to psychedelics and the therapeutic outcome” as well as whether different times would be more conducive to a more favorable versus more challenging experience. This predictive tool turned out to be even more controversial than the LSD research itself. Grof (2000c) writes:

Ironically, when after years of frustrating effort I finally found a tool that made such predictions possible, it was more controversial than psychedelics themselves. It was astrology, a discipline that, even after years of studying transpersonal phenomena, I myself tended to dismiss as a ridiculous pseudoscience. I also realized that astrology could be an invaluable tool in the work with other forms of holotropic states of consciousness, such as those induced by powerful experiential techniques of psychotherapy (primal therapy, rebirthing, and holotropic breathwork) or occurring spontaneously during psychospiritual crises. (p. 1)

The non-English language versions of Grof’s (2000a) book Psychology of the Future (German, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) have a chapter devoted to astrology, but SUNY Press felt that the subject was too controversial so the astrology chapter was not included in the English version. [Click here to read it.] Now that we have some basic background on astrology, we will now turn to the outer planets themselves, to get better acquainted with them. We have already seen them in passing in the "Cosmic Game" chapter, when they were archetypally correlated to Grof’s different Basic Perinatal Matrices or BPMs. Now let us look at them again in their starring roles.

Outer-Planetary Playbill

Structured Senex Saturn

Saturn was the last planet known to the ancients because it is the farthest planet that can be seen with the naked eye. Mythologically, Saturn was the father of Zeus (Jupiter) and Saturn’s “complex of meanings directly reflected” the fact that it was the farthest out planet that the ancients could see, with its longer orbit; thus it was seen as “the ruler of boundaries and limits, of finitude and endings, of distance, slowness, age, time, death, and fate” (Tarnas, 2006, p. 91). Here is Tarnas’s (2006) description of Saturn:

the principle of limit, structure, contraction, constraint, necessity, hard materiality, concrete manifestation; time, the past, tradition, age, maturity, mortality, the endings of things; gravity and gravitas, weightiness, that which burdens, challenges, fortifies, deepens; the tendency to confine and constrict, to divide and define, to cut and shorten, to negate and oppose, to strengthen and forge through tension and resistance, to rigidify, to repress, to maintain a conservative and strict authority; to experience difficulty, decline, deprivation, defect and deficit, defeat, failure, alienation; the labor of existence, suffering, old age, death; the weight of the past, the workings of fate, character, karma, the consequences of past action, error and guilt, punishment, retribution, imprisonment, the sense of “no exit”; pessimism, inferiority, inhibition, isolation, oppression and depression; the impulse and capacity for discipline and duty, order, solitude, concentration, conciseness, thoroughness and precision, discrimination and objectivity, restraint and patience, endurance, responsibility, seriousness, authority, wisdom; the harvest of time, effort, and experience; the concern with consensus reality, factual concreteness, conventional forms and structures, foundations, boundaries, solidity and stability, security and control, rational organization, efficiency, law, right and wrong, judgment, the superego; the dark, cold, heavy, dense, dry, old, slow, distant; the senex, Kronos, the stern father of the gods. (p. 91)

These qualities of Saturn correspond archetypally to the first stage of biological birth, BPMII, where the cervix is still closed and the uterus is contracting: the “Antagonism With the Mother—Contractions Within a Closed Uterine System.” (Grof, 1975).

Tarnas relates that the Gnostics, along with different mystery traditions “believed that beyond Saturn existed another realm ruled by a greater, more encompassing deity, governing a domain of freedom and immortality beyond the constraints of fate and death” (p. 91). So let us go there now. ∆RC[inSat]

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