We were supposed to meet on the campus of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, the first week of April 2020. Of course we didn’t. That was when–surely you’ve not forgotten?–everything was closing down, academic conferences no exception.
The gathering in question was the triennial conference of the International Association For Jungian Studies, for which I’d submitted a paper and where I’d been looking forward to meeting a new set of colleagues, people who might not be Jungians exactly–as I’m not a Jungian exactly–but who were ready to grant that Jung and his followers might have important things to say about the human psyche and the role played in it by religious belief and experience. “Religious” including those phenomena often relegated to the flakier fringes of religion, called “paranormal” or “anomalous” or other names less complimentary. For such matters, Jung and his followers have shown an openness that’s not quite the norm in most intellectual circles.
Astrology, for example. Or UFOs.
Then came COVID; the conference was postponed to March of 2021. Surely, most of us were confident, the pandemic would by then long be past.
Which it wasn’t, but in the meantime there was Zoom. Thanks to the devoted and painstaking organizational work of conference chair Roger Brooke and co-chairs Camilla Giambonini and Stephen Farah, the gathering took place as promised this past weekend–and with very great success.
I gave my paper on Thursday afternoon, March 18: “Anatomy of a Vision: a Psychological Approach to the Papua New Guinea UFO Sightings, June 26-27, 1959.” (On the Father Gill sighting, about which I’ve blogged here from time to time.) I shared the session with Cynthia Poorbaugh, a Jungian analyst practicing in New York City and Cold Spring, NY, who gave a rich, complex and erudite presentation entitled “The Nightmare of Astrology.”
Listening to Cindy’s paper, my mind went back to Berkeley, California, of 50 years ago. There astrology, both in its newspaper-horoscope version and in more intellectually sophisticated forms, was not only “very much alive” (as Jung wrote in his seminal essay Synchronicity, to which I’ll return) but a significant part of the culture. So much so that, for a long time, I was embarrassed to admit I didn’t believe in it.
“What’s your sign?”
That was a standard opening line among the long-haired, patchouli-oil-smelling youth of “Berserkeley,” as it was sometimes fondly known. I arrived there at the beginning of the summer of 1969, my hair starting to grow long but my demeanor and attitudes, as it took me some months to realize, far too square for me ever to fit in with either the political or the erotic counter-culture. My loss; for which, in retrospect, I’m deeply grateful.
Not long before I reached Berkeley, the struggle between the Telegraph Avenue vision of California and Governor Ronald Reagan’s had turned deadly and terrifying–the worst the political violence there would ever get, but we didn’t know that at the time. Not long afterward, on July 20, astronauts walked on the moon.
Of course we witnessed this only on TV. “Been watchin’ those dudes walk around on the moon,” one friend of mine proclaimed, and he was awe-struck at the sight, as well he might be. But a few days later I saw a poster advertising something having to do with astrology, billed as “an antidote to astronauts.” I didn’t share the sentiment, but I understood it.
For the astronaut, the moon was a lifeless world, good for planting the flag on as a token of its subjugation to American know-how. For hitting a golf ball on, perhaps, as a demonstration of the entertainment value of low gravity. To the astrologer, the moon might be both those things, distasteful as they were. But it was something more, calling to the human soul in a language to which the technologically-minded had made themselves deaf.
About a year later I became close friends with a lovely, charming lady, much involved with the San Francisco Bay Area Jungians. That autumn she gave me, as a present for my 23rd birthday, my horoscope as read by her analyst. I don’t remember the analyst’s name, but I do recall something of our conversation.
Why didn’t I believe in astrology? the analyst asked me. I answered her: because it rests upon a pre-Copernican universe. If the “fixed stars” are embedded, as Ptolemaic astronomy presupposed, in an eighth sphere encasing the spheres of the seven planets–with a spherical Earth at the center of it all–then it might make sense to speak of the signs of the Zodiac as things that really existed. But we know now: they are tricks of perspective, their component stars light-years distant from each other. How could they possibly have a meaningful connection with human life?
Keep an open mind, the analyst said. Let’s see what your horoscope tells us about you.
Somewhere in my file cabinets or my attic, I may still have the sheet of paper on which she wrote her results. It didn’t make much impression on me. It wasn’t entirely off the wall, but not strikingly revelatory either; the sort of thing, I thought, that some reasonably perceptive person could figure out just by looking at me. And didn’t think much more about it for the past 50 years.
Back now to Cindy, another Jungian analyst who, as her website describes, makes judicious use of astrology in working with her patients
The title of her paper derives from a chapter title in Charles Poncé’s The Game of Wizards: Psyche, Science and Symbol in the Occult; the word “nightmare” serves as a dramatic pointer toward the anomaly that Jung flagged in his Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (originally published in 1952). Astrology is so thoroughly rooted in what seems to us Westerners an archaic and exploded way of viewing reality that it ought many years ago to have dwindled into obscurity–gone the way, say, of the once-popular pseudo-science of “phrenology.” Yet, perversely, it thrives.
“Nor,” Jung wrote (and Cindy quoted), “has the determinism of a scientific epoch been able to extinguish altogether the persuasive power of the synchronicity principle. For in the last resort it is not so much a question of superstition as of a truth which remained hidden for so long only because it had less to do with the physical side of events than with their psychic aspects.”
“The seat of astrological synchronicity”–Jung here followed the formulation of the mystic and scientific pioneer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)–“is not in the planets but in the earth.”
My objection, that astrology presupposes a once-scientific but now exploded astronomy, doesn’t entirely collapse with this reformulation of what it’s all about. But maybe it’s no longer so relevant? Astrology, when it’s properly understood–forget about horoscope-column cliches like “the-stars-impel-they-do-not-compel”–takes the heavenly bodies to be something other than themselves in their august deadness. They function, rather, as a visible, symbolic encasement of hidden correlations that bind the human spirit to a greater cosmic spirit.
The human is the microcosm, the “little universe.” It performs the dance of life in harmony with the “greater universe” that is the macrocosm, that appears to our eyes as sun and moon, Mars and Venus, Jupiter and Saturn and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Not controlled or even impelled by that greater universe, but in participation with it.
It’s a haunting and powerful image, dating from a time when science and occultism hadn’t yet parted company and, in the hands of a genius like Kepler, could make inspired music together. But does it have any chance of being true? The central concept, for which Jung coined the term “synchronicity”–connection between apparently distinct things or events, without any relationship of cause and effect–has never been one I could get my mind around. Maybe I would find it easier if I understood quantum physics. But I don’t, not at all, and I find myself using synchronicity in its sloppy sense, of a wonderful coincidence which deep down I know is random but feels like it ought to be the working of a kindly providence.
Responding to me in the question period, Cindy used two words that helped allay my rationalist qualms. One was “projection,” that what we find in the heavens is a projection of internal realities that we experience as true; and I could buy this, because it never made sense to me that ancient people actually looked at the night sky and saw pictures there. Sagittarius, Cassiopeia and the rest had to be something that they brought to the stargazing experience and imposed upon the random jumble of glittering specks. Why shouldn’t they have brought it from a place deep in the psyche?
And she compared astrology to a fairy tale, which worked for me because I believe fairy tales are profoundly true.
Not on the surface, of course. On the surface, they dwarf astrology in their sheer absurdity. A gingerbread house in a forest–how impossible is that! Yet, as I often told my students, once you’ve heard about that gingerbread house in the woods, you’ll never forget it. (Just as I don’t have to explain to you where the image comes from.) It will be part of you until the day you die.
Because, as Bruno Bettelheim has taught us, it’s an unconscious representation of your mother’s body, nourishing and sheltering. How sweet, how warm, how delicious! Yet if you don’t manage to break free of that warmth and sweetness, you’re in bad trouble.
So I come to the verge of thinking astrology might be something thinkable, not in competition with the astronomy that gave us the moonwalk but as a parallel truth operating in a different realm. But then I draw back. Cindy told us in her paper: Jung’s experiment with finding empirical support for astrology, described in his Synchronicity essay, turned out inconclusive. With the partial and very qualified exception of the fabled Michel Gauquelin, I don’t think anyone has ever had better luck.
Whereas those dudes did unquestionably walk on the moon.
Perhaps we’re back with the question posed in Colin Dickey’s book The Unidentified, about which I blogged last month. “The main and central difference hinges on the question of what you expect out of the natural world: do you see it as a wondrous and strange thing unto itself, or do you expect it to reveal humanity back to itself?”
Which perspective, do you think, evokes the deeper and more authentic awe?
by David Halperin
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“persuasive power” is the key, as James Hillman noted the human-animal form of display is rhetoric…