The Birth of Psychological Astrology

It is difficult to appreciate just how far astrology has come over the last 30 years. It wasn't until the advent of humanistic psychology in the 1960's that astrologers began to think seriously about the chart in terms of growth and transformation. For those who began studying astrology only recently, it might seem that it was always this way. But it was not. Although Jung (1962) once said "astrology represents the summation of the psychological knowledge of antiquity " (p. 142), the fact is that there was very little in astrology prior to the 1960's that bore much relationship to what we would generally consider "psychological " today. Ancient peoples initially perceived the planets as gods that ruled over the various processes of Nature, much as a king ruled over his subjects. The conceived relationship between celestial and terrestrial events was linear, dualistic, and hierarchical: a superior power had dominion over an inferior one. While later and deeper forms of astrological philosophy recognized that macrocosm and microcosm were actually interpenetrating and thus their relationship was not linear or dualistic, this view declined with the collapse of the Hellenistic culture in the 3rd century. A simpler model prevailed during th