BOOK REVIEWS AND ARTICLES
The Re-Enchanted Universe
By Louise Danielle Palmer
Spirituality & Health August 2006
Philosopher Richard Tarnas asks us to step back and consider that the ancients,
who looked to the night skies to make sense of their lives, were on to something
— and that perhaps it is we who are lost in space. Here’s a new case
for astrology.
On a bitterly cold day in the middle of winter sometime in the late sixties, Richard
Tarnas and his friend Chris Hunt, students at Harvard, were walking across a bridge
spanning the Charles River. Halfway to the other side, Tarnas suddenly jumped
up onto the curved handrail, frozen and slick with ice. Hunt remembers standing
in awed silence as he watched his friend run the length of the rail, icy waters
roiling and rippling below him, laughing the whole way.
This moment, enacted with flair and courage, may serve as the enduring metaphor
for Tarnas’ life. As a philosopher and cultural historian challenging the
intellectual orthodoxies of his day, Tarnas has been not only crossing an impossible
bridge, he’s become its careful architect, its imaginative engineer, and
its inexorable builder as well.
This bridge ushers us across a deep divide between two worldviews — the
ancient and the modern, the spiritual and the scientific — and into an entirely
new cosmology. It took Tarnas 30 years of sustained empirical and philosophical
inquiry to shape the ideas and marshal the evidence for this reconciliation, outlined
in his latest book, Cosmos and Psyche (Viking, 2006).
Tarnas asks us to step back and consider that the ancients, who looked to the
night skies to find their way and make sense of their lives, were onto something
— and that perhaps it is we, with our high-powered computers, big bang theories,
and relativist notions, who are lost in space. Without discounting the implications
of the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the revolution in post-modern
thought — and in spite of our successful efforts over the past 300 years
to deconstruct meaning in the cosmos and dismantle our false gods in science,
religion, and philosophy — Tarnas makes a compelling case for the idea that
we are not an isolated oddity of consciousness floating in a meaningless, indifferent
universe. And more: that we are participating in one that is conscious and exquisitely
ordered, albeit mysteriously.
Tarnas supports this case by laying the philosophical ground for a radical shift
in perspective, supported by a sweeping body of evidence that illustrates an uncanny
correspondence between the movement of the planets and the timing and character
of historical events, from September 11th to the French Revolution, from the unfolding
creative genius of Descartes and Darwin to Beethoven and the Beatles. These correspondences,
numbering in the thousands, may give culture, biography, and history itself an
elegant coherence. They also may be “intimations” that we are more
deeply connected to the cosmos than we have ever imagined. Yes, Tarnas is talking
about resurrecting ancient astrology (not the newspaper horoscope variety), knowing
it’s a ludicrous notion to anyone with a good education. But he’s
staked his reputation on it, and even to the most skeptical and critical inquirers
— and I count myself among them — Tarnas’ brilliant scholarship
is an invitation: Throw away your old glasses. Behold a new vision. Step into
an enchanted universe.
Mysterious Patterns Emerge
In Tarnas’ universe, the planets that orbit the sun — such as Venus,
and Mars, and Pluto — are not just a bunch of spinning rocks, ice, and gas.
Rather, they correspond to specific archetypal principles that are dynamically
present in our inner and outer lives. This universe is saturated with purpose
and meaning, with freedom and responsibility, speaking to us in a poetic and symbolic
language we can understand. In this universe, the human psyche and the cosmic
psyche are entwined and expressed through patterns that are neither imagined nor
conjured by us, but rather constellated by the mysterious force some call God.
“The evidence suggests that our universe is informed by a powerful, creative
intelligence, and an ordering principle of truly astonishing power, complexity,
and beauty,” Tarnas says. “Some scientists describe this intelligence
as having an Einsteinian quality, but I think it’s Shakespearean as well.
It’s richly multidimensional, requiring the moral, aesthetic, and spiritual
imagination as well as the scientific and mathematical. Seeing the patterns emerging
in life awakens us to the fact that meaning happens not only within the psyche
but also within nature and the cosmos. It suggests that the whole universe is
supporting our spiritual evolution.”
Tarnas’ journey into cosmology began in the seventies at the Esalen Institute,
where he studied with Joseph Campbell, Huston Smith, Gregory Bateson, and Stanislav
Grof. Back then, Esalen was a kind of laboratory for new ideas and psycho-spiritual
transformation. Tarnas and Grof were studying the timing and character of these
transformational experiences when someone suggested astrology. The notion seemed
ridiculous at first and yet, he says, “We found ourselves astonished at
how the planetary alignments consistently and precisely correlated with human
experience.”
Tarnas challenged his own skepticism over a 10-year period at Esalen while examining
hundreds, and eventually thousands, of individual astrological charts and deepening
his understanding of the archetypal principles associated with the planets. The
correlations he uncovered were undeniable and uncanny in their subtlety and specificity.
Extending his inquiry, he found that astrology also illuminated key moments in
the lives of pivotal figures in the West, such as when they fell in love, went
into a depression, or experienced an epiphany. Patterns began to appear.
For example, Tarnas looked at Galileo’s chart when he first turned his telescope
to the heavens and wrote The Starry Messenger, a defining moment in the birth
of the modern era. At the time, Uranus, associated with revolutionary breakthroughs
and awakenings, was in a particularly powerful one-time configuration transiting
his birth chart. It turned out that it was the exact same configuration, or transit,
that René Descartes had in 1637 when he published his epoch-defining Discourse
on Method, which became the foundation of modern philosophy. It was also the same
configuration that Newton had in 1687 when he published the Principia, the foundational
work of modern science. Amazingly, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Einstein’s
theory of relativity, and Darwin’s theory of natural selection all emerged
in coincidence with the same planetary cycle.
After his 10 years at Esalen, Tarnas retreated with his family to a small cabin
in the Northern California redwoods, where he immersed himself in the history
and evolution of Western thought in order to reconcile these astrological insights
with a worldview that made it impossible to conceive of them as valid or real.
What emerged was The Passion of the Western Mind, hailed by scholars as one of
the finest histories of Western thought ever written. Passion sold more than a
quarter of a million copies and was adopted as a philosophy text at universities
around the world.
Tarnas began lecturing internationally, and established the Philosophy, Cosmology
and Consciousness doctoral program at the California Institute of Integral Studies
in San Francisco. Meanwhile, he continued the final phase of his research for
Cosmos and Psyche, examining planetary alignments for major historical epochs,
from modernity back to antiquity. The placement of the planets in relation to
the Earth, he discovered, corresponded not only to events in the lives of individuals
but also to clear shifts in the zeitgeist — expressed in the political,
scientific, cultural, and artistic phenomena of every significant period in history.
“A great mystery was unfolding, and the more I devoted myself to it, the
more it just kept opening up,” Tarnas says. “I felt like my mind was
participating in a great revelation, as if the universe wanted to be recognized
for its beauty and magnificence.”
(Excerpted from the full article in Spirituality & Health, August 2006 issue)
www.spiritualityhealth.com/newsh/items/blank/item_10306.html
Unveiling the Archetypal Cosmos
Book Review: Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, by Richard
Tarnas, PhD., Viking Press, 2006.
By Renn Butler
New Age Journal
“Evening Star, you bring all things / which the bright dawn has scattered
. . .” With these evocative lines from Sappho, Richard Tarnas prefaces
Cosmos and Psyche, what is sure to be one of the decade’s most influential
and controversial books. Tarnas begins by reviewing the ambiguous cascade
of effects that have resulted from the intellectual breakthroughs of the modern
era. When Copernicus recognized that the earth and planets revolve around
the Sun, he set in motion powerful forces that over the following centuries
would gradually differentiate the human self from nature and dramatically empower
the human intellect vis-à-vis a now-disenchanted cosmos. But for
this intellectual empowerment humanity paid a serious price, the separation
and estrangement of the human self from its former ground of being. Tarnas
suggests that in the bright glare of our Promethean rush toward individuation
and the appropriation of all intelligence to the human mind, we may be overlooking
qualities intrinsic to the universe itself, namely consciousness, purpose, intelligence,
and the capacity to hold and communicate meaning.
In the lineage of Plato and the neo-Platonists, the Idealists and Romantics,
and more recently the work of C. G. Jung, Tarnas reintroduces the concept of
archetypes that has played such a fundamental role in Western culture.
The archetypes have been recognized at various times as Homeric deities, Platonic
metaphysical essences, Jungian psychological principles, and many other overlapping
forms. In Cosmos and Psyche’s bold hypothesis, Tarnas suggests
that the dynamic interplay of these timeless universals that have shaped and
permeated our history occurs in coincidence with geometrical alignments between
the planets and the earth, intelligible through an emerging epistemology and
method of analysis he calls archetypal astrology.
A highly respected cultural historian, Tarnas gained international acclaim with
his best-selling The Passion of the Western Mind (1991), which has become required
reading in university courses around the world. He now marshals his formidable
intellect to present five hundred pages of compelling evidence to support the
archetypal astrological hypothesis. Here are the grand lines of Western
history: scientific and technological revolutions, social and political awakenings,
cycles of creativity and expansion, of crisis and contraction, of conservative
empowerment, spiritual epiphanies, and Dionysian awakenings. With a staggering
depth and breadth of scholarship Tarnas draws upon periods such as the Axial
Age in the mid 6th century BCE that saw the birth of Greek philosophy, Taoism,
Buddhism, and Confucianism, through Periclean Athens to the birth of Christianity,
Petrarch and the giants of the Renaissance, and on to Romanticism, feminism,
postmodernism, and the counterculture. He has an uncanny ability to illuminate
the essential nature of figures such as Sappho, Aeschylus, Descartes, Shakespeare,
Melville, Nietzsche, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan, and hundreds more, bringing
these cultural giants and the archetypes they embody to life before our eyes.
Tarnas’ correlation of these narrative trajectories in our history with
cyclical alignments of the outer planets paints a portrait of vibrant historical
meaning and purpose, a highly complex yet coherent and intelligible patterning
of archetypal principles unfolding over time.
Tarnas presents for the layperson his method of analysis for perceiving archetypes
in history as well as in individual experience, essentially offering the reader
a telescope to look at the evidence for him or herself. He recognizes
and even celebrates the virtue of skepticism, as Santayana did when he referred
to skepticism as “the chastity of the intellect.” Yet Tarnas
goes further, reminding us that while “the mind that seeks the deepest
intellectual fulfillment does not give itself up to every passing idea,”
what is sometimes forgotten is that the purpose of skepticism is not to be an
end in itself but to prepare us to be ready when a new and deeper truth finally
arrives.
In contrast with traditional astrological belief and practice, the archetypal
astrology he introduces is non-fatalistic and non-deterministic. Because
of the multivalent and multidimensional nature of the archetypes—their
basic formal patterning that manifests in a diverse range of concrete expressions—he
believes that archetypal astrology is archetypally predictive rather than concretely
predictive. Although long-term planetary alignments can illuminate many
essential characteristics of an historical epoch or individual life experience,
and even suggest basic expected characteristics of an upcoming period, the specific
concrete expression the archetypes will take at any time is indeterminate, contingent
on factors such as cultural context, free will, co-creative participation, and
perhaps unmeasurables such as karma and grace. In this understanding,
precious human autonomy and creative potency are maintained, while individual
selfhood is recontextualized within a now reenchanted cosmos.
With its open-minded spirit of hypothesis, empirical observation, and ongoing
theoretical refinement, this book is a scientific triumph, scientific in the
highest sense of the word: Here is the evidence, and here is a possible theory
to explain the evidence. Most importantly, the correlations in Tarnas’
methodology are replicable. Anyone with a knowledge of the basic tools
of this method of analysis, which he carefully introduces, can investigate the
patterning of archetypal principles in his or her own life. To preemptively
criticize this body of research without actually investigating it, to refuse
to look through the telescope for oneself, might, I believe, be symptomatic
of a vested emotional position rather than a genuinely scientific attitude toward
the evolution of knowledge.
Tarnas writes that the fundamental component in a cultural paradigm is its cosmology.
The cosmology of a world view is the place, the context within which that world
view exists and flourishes. With Cosmos and Psyche I believe the emerging
new paradigm finally has its missing component: an essentially Platonic-Pythagorean
cosmos which is intelligibly ordered by archetypal patterns of meaning and experience,
and in which the macrocosm of the solar system mirrors archetypal processes
in the microcosm of human life. In this cosmology the highest and most
treasured capacities of human reason and cognition are ultimately recognized
as expressions of the universe’s own intelligence. But, integrating the
modern development of an autonomous self, the human being is also recognized
as having both freedom and responsibility for consciously and creatively enacting
these powerful forces in the most life-enhancing forms possible.
The Promethean successes of Western culture have transformed the world in stupendously
positive but also deeply problematic ways. Perhaps underlying our culture’s
less salutary features remains some fundamental omission or projection in our
vision of the universe. Perhaps the “bright dawn of our modernity”
has hidden a grand intelligence and purposefulness that both transcends and
informs the human mind, a consciousness imbedded in the universe itself.
Tarnas suggests that our long moral and intellectual evolution has prepared
us to forge a new kind of relationship with that cosmos, transforming our role
within it from peripheral byproduct to co-creative partner and explorer.
With this book Tarnas has succeeded in unveiling what only a few years ago might
have seemed impossible: an accessible bridge between the mainstream high culture
and an emerging world view that returns the soul to the cosmos.
Renn Butler is a writer and health care worker in Victoria, B.C.
www.newage-journal.com/bookreviews.htm
More Reviews
The Disenchantment of the Modern Universe
and the Tale of Two Suitors
Insights into the new book by Richard Tarnas,
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View
By Frederick J. Dennehy
Lilipoh Summer 2006
www.lilipoh.com/article_issue44_b.html
Spring into a Great Read
By Esther Fields
Inside Bay Area
www.insidebayarea.com/localnews/ci_3672310
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