Mythic Astrology Applied: Personal Healing Through the Planets

by Ariel Guttman, Ken Johnson

Overview

Your position in the universe was fixed upon the moment of your birth. Understanding and making use of this opportunity is up to you!
In this long-awaited supplement to their groundbreaking Mythic Astrology: Internalizing the Planetary Powers, Ariel Guttman and Kenneth Johnson give us a deeper look at the planetary players that operate within all of us. Understanding planetary archetypes is the key to harnessing the power of ancient mythology and archetypal energies. Through the planets in your chart, you can reveal the mythic dimension in your own life.
With an emphasis on myth and the feminine in astrology, Mythic Astrology Applied explores each planets and includes an extensive look at the archetypes of Gaia (Earth), Chiron, and the major asteroids.
Be sure to enhance your understanding by also reading Guttman and Johnsnon's companion work, Mythic Astrology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635617788
Publisher:	Echo Point Books & Media
Publication date:	10/24/2019
Edition description:	Reprint ed.
Pages:	328
Sales rank:	959,608
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.69(d)

About the Author

Ariel Guttman has been involved with the study of astrology since 19/M. In 1980 she Founded an astrological consulting firm, Astro Originals, through which astrological seminars, personal and business consulting, astrological teaching and lecturing are conducted. For several years she has been involved with asteroid research, and by including those asteroids in her astrological work, has found a growing interest in this, "the feminine" aspects of astrology. She has lectured for numerous astrological organizations and conferences both in the United States and in Europe. She is the author of Astro-Compatibility, and co-author of The Astro Carto Graphy Book of Maps.

Kenneth Johnson earned a degree in Religious Studies from California State University Fullerton. His emphasis was in the study of mythology and this interest is reflected in his writing and his astrological practice. He discovered astrology while traveling in Europe during the summer of 1973, studying in Amsterdam and London before returning to the United States and developing a practice which focused on archetypal themes and personal mythologies.

Read an Excerpt

Part I
Astrology, Psychology, and Myth
Chapter 1
Astrology and the Gods
Anyone who has ever delved into the art of astrology, whether deeply or not, has heard phrases like “Mars in Capricorn” or “Jupiter in the Fourth House.” This might give you the impression that the planets, like Mars and Jupiter, are characters in a drama, and that when we speak of them as being in “Capricorn” or “the Fourth House” or wherever, it is just as if we were to say “Joan is in Pennsylvania” or “Derek is at his brother’s house.”
In fact, this impression is correct. The planets are characters or actors in a drama, and the drama is you—your life, your consciousness, your spirit. As part of your life drama, they may choose to occupy a certain sign or a certain house, but it is the planets themselves who are the actors, the personalities.

But who are they, really? All we have to do is consider their names, and the answer suggests itself very easily: they are the goddesses and gods of ancient Greek and Roman mythology. Jupiter, for example, is the planet of abundance, just as Jupiter or Zeus, the king of the Olympian gods, was a “giver of gifts.” Venus is the planet of love, and of course the goddess Venus or Aphrodite was the ancient goddess of love and desire. But this is to state the case in a very basic, even simplistic way.

The goddesses and gods who gave their names to the astrological planets have a long ancestry—and it doesn’t actually begin in Greece itself. There is a common misconception among casual observers of history that the framework of our Western world was entirely originated by the Greeks. But the Greeks did not invent the planetary deities; the mythic background of astrology came originally from Sumer and Babylon.

During the past century, whole libraries from ancient Sumer and Babylon have been uncovered. Stacks and stacks of cuneiform tablets have been translated by scholars. Thousands of inscriptions record the omen literature of the era. Esoteric writings, ritual texts, lamentations, medical recipes, dream books, texts to counter witchcraft, lists of auspicious days, and so on fill these ancient tablets.

Anu was the god of heaven.His son Enlil was the god of earth. These were not separate domains, but instead two parts of the same domain. Earth was not lesser than heaven. There was an interdependence and complementary relationship between the two, and the omens or messages could clearly be seen as coming from one or the other realm. From them and their interplay,
the West has inherited much of the body of its astrological mythology—the names and details changing but the stories remaining relatively similar.
Though many may speculate that astrology is much older, the first written proof of its usage dates from the seventh century BCE and was found in King Ashurbanipal’s library in Assyria. Here we find predictions that dealt with matters affecting the entire country and its rulers, such as war and peace, plagues and famines, floods and droughts, etc. The world’s oldest astrology book, the Enuma Anu Enlil, was the chief atrological/astronomical text of the time. Astrological divination was its chief concern. The kings of ancient Babylon required two things from their astrologers. First, it was necessary to predict, with some precision, the occurrence of eclipses. Second, the moment the moon appeared as a crescent sliver each month in the night sky was extremely important, because it was at this moment that the Babylonian calendar month began.1 From the actual observable appearance in the sky of moons,
eclipses, stars, and planets, stories began to unfold. It was not enough simply to observe a crescent moon in Taurus; the stars that the two horns of the moon pointed to were equally important. And if the moon contained a halo, that was another omen.

The planets as we know them today originated as the goddesses and gods of Sumer and Babylon. Matched with their Greek counterparts and given
Greek and Latin names, they remain with us even today. Many—perhaps most—of them bore names that have become distant and unfamiliar to us.
There was Anu the supreme sky god, his sons Enlil and Enki (who were sworn rivals), and then Ninhursag,Marduk, Ishkur, Nannar, Ninurta, Inanna, Nabu, Utu, and Nergal. Some of the members of this divine family got along great together; others absolutely hated each other. Sound familiar? We might recognize these deities as having some similarities both in character and function to the later twelve Olympians of the Greek system. The important point here, however, is that as astrology developed in the observatories of ancient Babylon, it was these early deities for whom the planets were named, and who were recognized as having a nature and function similar to the planet with which they were linked.2

Babylonian Deity Planet
Sin The Moon
Shamash The Sun
Ishtar Venus
Ninurta Saturn
Nergal Mars
Marduk Jupiter
Nabu Mercury
Mesopotamian astrology was concerned primarily with politics, matters of state, and the fortunes of kings. It was not especially concerned with ordinary individuals and their daily problems. There is no evidence that personal horoscopes were calculated much before about 409 BC. In fact, it was the astrologers of Greek-speaking Egypt who, in the first centuries before the Christian era, transformed Babylonian astrology into the personal and individuated art form that it is today. In these same centuries, Babylonian astrology also traveled to Persia and India, where it influenced older forms of indigenous astrology. The astrologers of this “classical” period were still focused upon the observable sky, and they evolved interpretive tools that made use of their observations.Some of these tools have, unfortunately, been forgotten. One of the most important was called planetary sect. Sect was determined simply by whether one was born during the daylight hours when the sun ruled the sky, or at night when the lunar force was dominant.3 Planets were linked with the Sun and Moon, Sol and Luna, according to their nature. There were variations upon the central theme. For example, one could be born at night, under Luna’s power, even when Luna was not visible. (For this to occur, the Moon would have to be in its dark phase, very close to the Sun.) And for those instances when the Sun was right on the local horizon, just rising or setting, one had to be there to determine its true position.

There are very few civilizations upon this planet that did not deem astrology essential to its very existence all the way back through recorded history.
Astrologers have always been priests and priestesses who kept the myths and traditions of their people.

The Greeks did not invent the planetary goddesses and gods. All the same,
it is Greek mythology that forms the most important foundation for the planetary archetypes of Western astrology. Not only is it at the foundation of Western civilization itself, Greek myth constitutes a highly sophisticated and poetically detailed worldview that has sustained, entertained, educated, and informed our thinking for the past 3,500 years. The Greek poets were master storytellers. There’s probably still not a book in print that can surpass the tales told by Homer in The Iliad and The Odyssey, though if one were to curl up with Gilgamesh’s heroic journeys and adventuresome tales for summer beach reading, one might find something just as exciting as any current bestseller.

Gilgamesh, for those who haven’t met the gentleman, is the hero of a
Babylonian poem bearing the same name—a very old story indeed, for it has its roots in ancient Sumer.4 Here, already, we find some of the planetary deities—notably Ishtar—storming across the page. Here we find the symbolism of the four fixed signs of the zodiac already fully developed as Ishtar’s lion (Leo), her bull (Taurus), the scorpion men who guard the mountain passes to the Otherworld (Scorpio), and the fabulous Utnapishtim, Keeper of the Waters of Life (Aquarius) and survivor of a Great Flood much older than the one in the Bible. Though Gilgamesh’s tales were told 6,000 years ago, a good Hollywood screenwriter could no doubt turn it into an epic blockbuster (for a few hundred million dollars).

But despite astrology’s Mesopotamian origins and Greek florescence, the names we give to the planets today are Latin. The Romans had their own tribal myths that greatly resembled those of Greece (and in fact the two cultures are linguistically related), but tended to adopt the Greek versions of the stories in their entirety after Greece was conquered by Rome. They tampered but little with the images and symbolism that the Greeks wrote, sung, talked about, and painted on thousands of temple walls, frescoes, friezes, and vases.

They just changed the names—Greek Zeus was now Roman Jupiter; Greek
Aphrodite was now Roman Venus. And that’s where our planetary names originate—imported from Mount Olympus by way of Rome. (The following list includes asteroids and contemporary astrological factors as well as the traditional ones.)

Greek Roman
Apollo Sun (Sol)
Artemis Moon (Luna)
Gaia Earth (Terra)
Hermes Mercury
Aphrodite Venus
Ares Mars
Zeus Jupiter (Jove)
Cronus Saturn
Ouranos Uranus
Poseidon Neptune
Hades Pluto
Demeter Ceres
Athene Pallas
Hera Juno
Hestia Vesta

The appropriation of one culture’s religion by another is something that is oft repeated in almost every civilization.When one civilization overtakes another, whether by conquest or cultural absorption, it sometimes seeks to eradicate the other culture’s religion entirely. There are countless examples all over the world: Greek temples built upon the sites of former Goddess shrines, Christian cathedrals built over Pagan worship sites, Spanish missions built next to an Indian pueblo’s sacred kivas, and the like.
And yet one civilization often adopts the other’s gods peacefully, though usually with significant changes. In many cases this is a true integration of religious traditions between the conqueror and the conquered. In ancient Ireland, the deities of the Indo-European Celtic tribes were clearly merged with and influenced by the older religion of the megalith builders. In Brazil, the gods of the African slaves have impacted and influenced the religious attitude of the entire culture.We may be seeing another such phenomenon in America today, as the Japan it conquered during World War II continues to influence Americans through its religious traditions such as Zen and other Buddhist or Taoist traditions that the Japanese themselves had inherited from the older civilization of China.

In the case of Greece and Rome, the adoption of Greek deities by the
Romans was more than peaceful—the Romans were eager to experience the more sophisticated culture of conquered Greece, and eagerly embraced her gods. And because Western civilization as a whole derives directly from the break-up of the old Roman Empire, the deities of the Greeks have become the common inheritance of our entire civilization, something all of us hold in common in the deepest recesses of the soul.

By the twentieth century, astrology had all but been removed from the sky.
On the one hand, precision of mathematical calculations made the calculation of planetary motion much easier for astrologers, first with astrolabes, then with calculators, and finally with computers. But at what price? In a sense, we have lost the real feeling and imagery of what the sky looks like at the magical moment of creation or birth, with their accompanying stories.

Next time you’re in the desert, under a clear night sky, you might notice that a luminescent Venus is setting in the western sky while a brilliant Jupiter might be rising in the east through the horns of the bull. Further, a two-thirds full moon is up overhead. That is the way to the magic of the birth moment.
Nothing else shows this magic of existence with the crystal clarity of astrology.

Astrology As A Mythic Language

It is the premise of our earlier book, Mythic Astrology: Archetypal Powers in the Horoscope, that the identification between planets and ancient deities is more than just a vague, generalized kind of identification—it is specific and deep, and it opens windows of understanding upon the planets that cannot be opened in any other way.5 These windows of understanding are important because they help to make it clear that astrology is indeed a mythic language.

But what do we mean by the term mythic language? Many people are accustomed to thinking of the word “myth” as referring to a mere fairy tale or, at worst, a fabrication, an “untrue story.” But this is to misunderstand the very nature of mythology itself. The stories we call myths are, in fact, the wisdom tales and spiritual truths of ancient religions, the religions of our own ancestors as well as of people in widely scattered regions of the globe. As such, myths convey to us, in story form, the deepest and most profound truths of the human psyche, and of our shared human experience. This is why it is important to understand that astrology is a mythic language, and that it contains the same universal truths about the human soul that are to be found in all the world’s great mythologies.

It is even more important because of the simple fact that most of us are no longer aware of the rich, profound world of myth. The Western world has been progressively turning away from myth ever since the advent of Christianity, and the so-called “scientific revolution” of the past 200 years has very nearly destroyed our mythic sensibilities altogether. Astrology is one of the few remaining ways in which we still touch the mythic dimension of life. Through astrology, people living in urban apartment buildings, rural farmsteads, or middle-American trailer parks know that Jupiter is the planet of abundance and Venus the planet of love. They may not know that Jupiter’s abundant nature reflects his status as “king of the gods” and they may not know the lore and legends surrounding the goddess Aphrodite, whose myths provide us with the inner meaning of the planet Venus. But because of astrology, they too are speaking a mythic language.

Psychology And Myth

For centuries, then, astrology was the last remaining “mythic language” to be widely known and practiced in the Western world. But in recent years, psychology has also discovered the world of myth.It began with Carl Jung. One of the founders of psychology, Jung broke with his mentor, Sigmund Freud, in 1912. The two great thinkers had reached a point of fundamental disagreement about the nature of the human psyche.

Freud saw the unconscious minds of human beings as a chaotic and dark receptacle of primitive sexual urges; and, as a scientist, he took a dim view of all religious and psychic phenomena, preferring to see these elements of human nature simply as another aspect of sex, neurosis, and repression.
Jung, on the other hand, believed that the unconscious world discovered by
Freud was only the tip of a great iceberg. Beyond the primitive sexual unconscious perceived by his mentor, Jung perceived an even greater ocean of the unconscious mind, one shared by all human beings and one that was mystical and magical rather than troubled and neurotic. He called it the collectiveunconscious.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious was a vast ocean of dreams,
images, and symbols, shared by all of us. From this limitless symbolic ocean arose all the myths and stories, legends and lore that have given meaning and delight to humankind ever since the beginning. To Jung, then, such stories and myths were not mere fairy tales, silly bedtime stories for children; they were, in fact, the repository of all the wisdom and meaning that lead us onward towards wholeness, joy, or “enlightenment.”

To Jung, the characters who appear in myths and legends were figures filled with power and great inner meaning; he called such figures archetypes,using a word coined by the Greek philosopher Plato to refer to “a divine idea in the mind of the infinite.” Therefore, a magician in a fairy tale, such as the Celtic Merlin, is not just a colorful character with a staff and a white beard; he is the archetype of the Wise Old Man, and like wise old men in hundreds of other tales, he symbolizes wisdom and knowledge. The mysterious and otherworldly lovers who appear in so many European legends featuring young women are not just fictional creations; they represent the animus within every woman, the masculine half of her own soul; this is why the young women in such fairy tales inevitably win through to wisdom and wholeness after mastering their relationship with this turbulent character.

Joseph Campbell often said: “A dream is a private myth; a myth is a public dream.”6 Just as archetypes appear in the “public dream” of mythology and folklore, they also appear in the “private myth” of our own dreams and fantasies. Each one of us contains all the archetypes common to humanity as a whole; the Anima, Animus, Wise Old Man, and Divine Child walk through our dreams every night, and appear in our fantasies and our aspirations, even if we do not know them by name. Because of this, it is dangerously narrowminded and incomplete to imagine, as Freud did, that the human unconscious is just a turbulent sexual soup. Although this aspect of the unconscious does exist for most of us, it is by no means the whole story, or even the most important part of the story; the deeper meaning of our unconscious lives is to be found in the world of the archetypes.

Jung also believed that the goddesses and gods of all the old mythologies were also archetypes—in fact, Plato (who served as an inspiration for much of Jung’s work) had stated as much in very explicit terms. This means that each one of us contains, within our own unconscious being, all the deities of ancient times—the shining female figure who comes to us in a dream to teach us may well be the same archetype the Greeks called Athene, while the wild and hairy man-beast at the nervous edges of our awareness is more than likely old Pan himself, the goat-footed god of “panic.”

As we have seen, the planets that astrologers use to chart the course of the human psyche are, in fact, none other than the goddesses and gods of Greek and Roman mythology. So Jungian psychology, like astrology, believes that all the old deities reside within us. In fact, Jungian psychology and astrology seem to be made for each other, a “marriage made in heaven.”

But that is not quite the end of the story. Jung himself believed that all the archetypes within us sought naturally to unite together into a oneness, a whole, a unified field of consciousness. A student of alchemy, Jung saw the quest for the Philosophers’ Stone, which turns lead into gold, as the quest for such a unity of consciousness. He even had a name for the archetype of wholeness: the Self. He believed that the Hindu concept of the atman, which also refers to a higher or divine Self, was the same thing; and he believed that Christ was the symbol of the Self for Western civilization.
Over the years, however, some of Jung’s students and followers came to disagree with him. These new thinkers are sometimes called neo-Jungians,
although a better term (and the one that they prefer) is archetypal psychologists.Let us spend some time becoming familiar with their opinions, because, as we shall see, astrology is a form of archetypal psychology. How do we knowthis? Because the archetypal psychologists themselves are telling us so.

For most of us, the most familiar names among the archetypal psychologists are Jean Shinoda Bolen and James Hillman. Bolen’s best-selling books Goddesses in Everywoman and Gods in Everyman introduced readers to the idea that the old Greek goddesses and gods dwell within all of us as archetypes.

Bolen’s vision of archetypal psychology, as set forth in her books, became best-sellers in the 1980s, during the same years when Joseph Campbell was also emerging into the public consciousness with his numerous books and his renowned series of interviews with Bill Moyers.8 For a while there was even a lingo that developed among Bolen’s readers, who, convening at conferences and seminars, replaced the old “What’s your sign?” with “Who’s your Goddess?” as a way of meeting and identifying people. It was a refreshing way of reframing ourselves as well as an excellent way to meet the goddesses and gods of Greece—and go home with them or not.

The limitation of this type of thinking, however, is that when taken to extremes it quickly becomes as restrictive as reducing an individual to her or his astrological Sun sign. As we shall explore in the next chapter, we all contain all the Goddesses and Gods within us, all the time.

The principal philosopher of the archetypal psychology movement is
James Hillman, who has stirred up a great deal of controversy with his unorthodox views on psychology. As we go on, we will examine some of those controversies, because they have just as much importance to the practice of astrology as to the practice of psychology. But first, let us start at the point where Hillman parts company with Jung, just as Jung once parted company with Freud.

According to Hillman, Jung’s idea of a unified Self reflects his deep study of Hinduism and his strong background in Christianity (Jung’s father was a minister). Hillman believes that this concept was not part of the old Greek worldview that gave birth to Plato’s notion of the archetypes. Instead, the original Pagan idea behind archetypal psychology was more concerned with psychological diversity—a recognition of all the divine forces within us, each one appreciated for itself rather than simply as an element to be bent,
blended, or coaxed into some “unified” Self.In ancient Greek psychology, those states of consciousness that we now describe as “madness” or “mental illness,” as well as those that we describe as “bliss,” “divine ecstasy,” and “inspiration,” were all said to come to us “from the gods.” To travel beyond our “madnesses” and produce and sustain the bliss and inspiration that is our true heritage is, in the ancient or Pagan sense,
a process of appeasing some of our own inner gods while nurturing others.

Some people may feel that such a notion is close to branding everyone as a
“multiple personality,” or at least creating an inner climate of the soul that is somewhat like the chaos of a subway rush hour. But it may just as easily be seen as a dance. In fact, we are constantly creating the divine dance of the
Gods within our own psyches, and in the old Pagan sense of things a “life well lived” was a life spent in dancing gracefully along with the divine flow—dancing with wisdom and with humor, whether the Gods (the planets) should choose, in their capricious way, to bless or curse us. Hillman suspects that our own lives might be happier were we simply to accept them as a strange, chaotic, but ultimately ecstatic dance rather than fussing too much about Oneness, or “integration,” or any of the other disciplines that seek to resolve the polytheistic richness of the human psyche into a homogenized whole.

This, of course, is very close to the ancient worldview of astrology, and
Hillman himself says that astrology is an early form of archetypal psychology. If Jung’s psychology opened the door to a “divine marriage” between astrology and psychology, the door lies even more widely open when we consider the overtly Pagan sensibilities of the archetypal psychologists.

Astrology And Psychology

If Jungian or archetypal psychology combined with astrology constitutes a
“marriage made in heaven,” it is certainly not the first time that astrologers and psychologists have attempted such a marriage. As a matter of fact, astrologers have been speaking the language of contemporary psychology and doing much the same work as psychologists for at least thirty years now. Many astrologers are, in fact, licensed psychotherapists in their own right.

The basic idea behind psychotherapy is that we talk about our problems until they become clear to us—until we recognize the source and meaning of our problem or “complex.” In becoming consciously aware of our issues, we become better equipped to deal with them, because awareness is the first step towards action.

A psychotherapist may see our problems, issues, or “complexes” in any number of ways, depending on her or his training and orientation. A classical Freudian psychotherapist (there are very few of these left) might see things in terms of repressed sexual feelings, while more contemporary psychologists would focus on issues surrounding dysfunctional family structures, interrelationships, and so on. A therapist with a background in recovery therapy sees dysfunction as a kind of illness, and seeks to heal the illness through the “twelve steps” common to all recovery therapies. A Jungian or archetypal psychologist sees issues and complexes in terms of the archetypes or Goddesses and Gods within us.

But despite all these different (and sometimes contradictory) ways of looking at the human psyche, all psychologists share one thing in common:
they all strive to make us more aware of the issues and problems that disturb our potential for happiness, and, by making us more aware, they hopefully make us stronger.

The astrologer does precisely the same thing, using her or his own model of the psyche. This model is based on the planets and their positions in the signs of the zodiac and the houses of the horoscope, and their interactions with each other, whether harmonious or otherwise. Complexes and issues are seen in terms of the archetypes (or deities) represented by the planets. The astrologer makes the client more aware of these issues, and, hopefully, gives the client some material with which to heal the problem.

It is because of this essential similarity between astrology and psychotherapy that so many astrologers have become interested in psychology. Numerous books have been written to link the astrological model with various kinds of psychological models, from transactional analysis to Freud to recovery therapy. And many of these experiments in astrological thinking have great value.

Nevertheless, astrologers and psychotherapists alike are generally content simply to talk to their clients. We should remember that psychotherapy was originally referred to (somewhat sarcastically) as the talking cure. Many astrologers, just like many therapists, are proficient at the art of “talk therapy” and are able to help their clients tremendously. But is talk always enough?

Some of the archetypal psychologists have wondered if we need something more than mere words in order to touch the soul at its deepest level. And, in fact, from Jung’s time onwards they have given a great deal of attention to techniques such as active imagination, in which clients use guided imagery to journey to deeper levels of the self and contact the Goddesses and Gods who dwell there.

A technique like this may seem to be closely allied with astrology.Why not use active imagination to visit the planetary archetypes within us?
Indeed, why not? And yet the majority of astrologers never use such techniques Nor do they make use of their clients’ dreams, despite the fact that our dreams are another “road” to the planetary archetypes within.
To some, such techniques may seem more akin to magic than to “rational”
forms of psychology. And perhaps it is closely linked to the old magical arts.
This may disturb some astrologers (or astrological students) who, for years,
have labored to remove astrology from its old magical context and link it with modern science. And yet a truly scientific proof for astrology remains elusive.

Meanwhile, the last thirty years have seen a disillusionment with science itself, and a deepening respect for spiritual practices and disciplines that, years ago, would have been criticized as “magic.” At a recent world congress of astrologers, the keynote speaker was Thomas Moore, author of the best-selling Care of the Soul and Soul Mates. He asked the body of astrologers in attendance to consider focusing less on making astrology statistically accurate to please the scientific community and on trying to psychologize astrology in order to gain more academic credibility. Instead, he suggested that astrologers honor their ancient legacy of Pagan worship and magic; seen in that context, astrology still constitutes one of the best and most well-defined oracular systems in place.

This vision has powerful implications for our own time. As we are thrust into a new millennium in which technology seems to overtake every aspect of daily life, with computers, modems, and cell phones practically strapped to our bodies like appendages, we must look to nature to resolve our dilemmas and polarize our extremes. Here we find the archetypal mother and father of all the gods, Gaia and Uranus, at work in our own time. As we enter a technological Aquarian age (ruled by Uranus), the natural mythic polarity must necessarily be Gaia (Earth, nature, Taurus, simplicity). So why not forge a union between the most Uranian of divinatory systems—astrology—and the ancient sense of oneness with nature by looking back to our Hellenistic and Renaissance forebears to see what wisdom their approach contained?

If astrology embodies a frame of references that originated from correspondences between heavenly bodies (each assigned to a god) appearing in the sky and the actual events on earth as recorded in the Babylonian lists of omens, then we must examine those correspondences.What are the natures (desires, impulses, whims) of those planets/gods? And if we are predestined to act in certain ways at a prescribed time, how then can we best handle that occurrence?

There is an underlying assumption by practitioners of astrology that character is fate, or that character is destiny.What better way to determine one’s destiny or fate than to examine character as revealed by one’s stars? Recently, Hillman has written and spoken about the force of character as it relates to age, and the force of character as a distinctly missing ingredient from our culture.

He asserts that character has pretty much been relegated to the domain of the palmists and astrologers.12 Going all the way back to Heraclitus, he tells us: “Character is our guardian daimon and our fate.”
If astrology is successful at revealing character and ultimately predicting fate, then what part does “mythic” astrology play? If there’s anything the current paradigm shift and pending age change is producing, it’s the idea that storytelling, imagery,mythology, visualization, and right-brained methods of achieving understanding are at a peak rebirth. Astrology has usually been taught through means of learning a language. First, one learns the alphabet
(Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc.). Then one develops keywords, sentences, and lists of ingredients that make up a Taurus or a Gemini type. It’s a great way for computer technicians and engineers to learn, but totally incomprehensible to those with visually oriented processes. Myths are stories. Like the arts, drama, and music of any culture, myth provides a way of understanding that opens up a universal language, a poetry of the cosmos through a simple story.

Learning in ancient times was through storytelling and imagery.Why do we keep uncovering so many cave paintings and petroglyphs along the way? Our predecessors were attempting to preserve something of their knowledge and information that would withstand the challenges of the elements and the ravishments of war. Some modern thinkers actually believe that once we began to use our brains for reading and writing, we lost essential attributes of communicating with one another through shared visions, dreams, and telepathy.

In this book, we shall examine a number of ways in which the planetary archetypes within us can be contacted, worked with, and brought into harmony. You don’t need to be an astrologer to practice these techniques or gain from them. In fact, you don’t really need to know anything about astrology at all. You can simply start with the images themselves—the dreams and imaginative pictures you share with all other living human beings. You can allow those dreams and images to lead you to your inner planetary deities and, later, to the horoscope itself.

But before we examine the techniques of healing, let us try to learn more about how archetypes become troubled, and why the Gods are in need of our help.

Table of Contents

Acknowlegments

Preface

PARTI1: ASTROLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, AND MYTH

Chapter 1 Astrology and the Gods

Chapter 2 The Gods Must Be Crazy

Chapter 3 Planetary Healing

Chapter 4 The Healing Power of Dreams

PART II1: THE INNER PLANETS

Chapter 5 The Sun: God of Light and Life

Chapter 6 The Moon: Ruler of the Night

Chapter 7 Mercury: Messenger of the Gods

Chapter 8 Ven us: Goddess of Love

Chapter 9 Gaia: Mother Earth

Chapter 10 Mars: God of War

PART III: THE ASTEROIDS

Chapter 11 An Introduction to the Asteroids

Chapter 12 Ceres: Goddess of the Harvest

Chapter 13 Pallas Athene: Wisdom's Warrior

Chapter 14 Juno: Goddess of Sacred Union

Chapter 15 Vesta: Goddess of Hearth and Home

Chapter 16 Lilith: Dark Goddess of the Night

PART IV: THE PLANETS BEYOND

Chapter 17 Jupiter: King of the Gods

Chapter 18 Saturn: Lord of Time

Chapter 19 Chiron: Teacher and Healer

Chapter 20 Uranus: Maker of Worlds

Chapter 21 Neptune: Ecstasy and Dreams

Chapter 22 Pluto: Lord of the Underworld

Appendix I: The Minor Asteroids

Appendix II: Planetary Archetypes

Bibliography

Index

CHARTS

Lotte Lenya

Kurt Weill

Sigmund Freud

Carl Jung

Carl Jung's 1912 Solar Return Chart.

Hillary Rodham Clinton