This article is published with permission from Mark Jones’s blog. Mark presents an interesting perspective on the evolution of astrology and the birth of psychology in the 20th century, describing the fertile ground from which emerged the astrological psychology of Bruno & Louise Huber, who were closely involved with Roberto Assagioli in particular12.
As many of you know, I am forever striving to produce educational material that challenges us to raise the bar in astrological consultation work. In a continuation of my previous newsletter on Spiritual Astrology, I’d like to explore with you how the birth of psychology arose during the same period as modern astrology – and this is not by coincidence. I believe the two streams evolved together, as I explore below, and it is only because of western cultures’ historical persecution of our profession that has prevented this idea from being fully explored until relatively recently.
In my research trips to Psychosynthesis founder Roberto Assagioli’s archive in Florence in recent years, it started to dawn on me that the two people who knew Sigmund Freud and who took psychology beyond Freud’s reductionist vision, that is Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli, were not into astrology in a small way. They were full on astrologists.
This is in light of Maggie Hyde’s great work on Jung and the more recent Liz Green scholarship on Jung’s use of astrology. The question I raise then is this: has astrology itself played an invisible role in the birth and shaping of a meaning orientated psychology in the 20th Century?
During my first visit in 2012, I was one of a few privileged people to enter Assagioli’s archive for the first time. Upon reaching his study, our guide directed me personally to an entire wall of box files saying “this will interest you.” Upon each box was scrawled “Spiritual Astrology in English” in Assagioli’s own handwriting. I was astounded! Here was direct evidence that the man who created the first vision of a spiritual psychology in the 20th Century, was not just into astrology as a passing interest. Here was an entire room, full of hand-drawn charts in archive boxes, charts that must have taken an hour or two to create each time. I went through hundreds of them: Sigmund Freud, Mohandas Ghandi, the great spiritual teachers of the 20th Century. He created these charts by hand and was studying them. As any astrologer who became such before the advent of computers can testify – it takes time and at least a basic understanding of astronomy to draw up a birth chart, and Assagioli had taken the time to learn how to do this.
Assagioli studied with all the major psychiatrists of the time: Claparède and Flournoy in Geneva; Kraepelin and Jones in Munich; Bleuler and Jung at the Burghölzli in Zurich, but you must remember that the subject of psychiatry was a fringe area in the early 20th century and so these great minds were already out on a limb. And then to study astrology! Well, that’s a new low is it not, and best kept secret?
It makes me think of Stan Grof’s autobiography, When the Impossible Happens, in which it is much easier for him to confess his lifelong use of psychedelic drug at sacred sites, to inspire his visions, and in therapy too, than it is to admit his interest in astrology. You could be tripping your nuts off at the Great Pyramids of Giza and write about it as a legitimate academic psychologist, but to talk about astrology would ruin your credibility and most likely your career. That is what we are dealing with here.
So, you can see that astrology has been a secret influence on many important people in a big way. People who were inspired with soul visions of psychology, were using the astrological archetypes and cycles of meaning revealed in the astrological symbolism, to form a ballast for their vision of spiritual psychology. This is something not discussed in the world at large.
Assagioli had a beautiful wooden desk that still sits in the same location in his home in Florence that has become the archive. And in the centre of that desk is a locked drawer. I asked our guide about the locked drawer and what was in it to which she replied “oh, the drawer is stilled locked. It has never been opened.” I was astounded, again. In the thirty-nine years since Assagioli’s death, no one had thought to open the drawer! In the years since that trip, my friend and colleague Keith Hackwood, who I run the Psychosynthesis Coaching Training course with, has become a member of staff at the archive and because of this privileged position was allowed into the room and shown what was hiding away in the locked drawer all these years. Inside was a green leather journal, a gift to Roberto Assagioli from, none-other-than, Alan Leo. And inside was a full natal chart reading written by Alan Leo for Assagioli when he was aged twenty-four. An entire green ledger of Leo’s musings about Assagioli’s soul growth and his development throughout life, and Assagioli would sit and look at this, meditate on it every few months, and every year of his life he would re-read it. Alan Leo, thick from the theosophical fog of London and its magical astrological scene, reached out to this young Italian doctor and inspired him. This is the invisible network of astrology’s influence. Not public, no big names, but of central enough importance to lock in the centre drawer of your desk and look at it all the time and base the inner sense of the direction of your life on it.
So, just because astrology runs counter to consensus thinking, let us not be fooled into thinking it is insignificant.
Alan Leo, of course, tragically and somewhat ironically, as shown recently in the excellent book The Modern Astrologers, by Kim Farnell, was prosecuted for fortune telling. This was a man who had gone out on a limb to talk to people on the symbolism of their true nature, of their psychology and the true nature of their spirituality. His family realised the impact the trial had on him and took him to Cornwall soon after so he could recoup his strength and settle his agitated mind. But he couldn’t break out of the malaise that the injustice had awakened in him, and he spent the entire vacation writing a frenzied series of letters trying to justify his innocence. He could not let go of it and he died of an aneurism soon after.
It’s quite sickening that a man who took the risk of speaking about psychological and spiritual astrology was singled out as a fortune teller and paid with his life. In America there are still laws that have seen many astrologers having to apply for an “entertainment” type licence. Astrology cannot be taken seriously; it has to be classified as entertainment for the safety of the public. “Astrology is light entertainment folks!” We can have a bit of a laugh together, we can laugh about Aries being, you know, self-dominated and Pisces being lost souls but anything more than that? Well, I put it to you, there is an invisible history running through the heart of the 20th Century that says differently.
Shortly after the publication of his seminal book The Astrology of Personality in 1936, Dane Rudhyar arrived in Florence on the way to meet his wife in India, and Rudhyar and Assagioli studied together in Assagioli’s villa and office. Tragically, that home would be burned to the ground by Mussolini and his black shirts only four years later when psychosynthesis was doomed a pacifist organisation and violently shut down.
The impact of the Second World War on Assagioli was stark. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement and later went on the run in the mountains of northern Italy with his wife and child. It was tuberculous of the bone that the cold exposure from those years induced in the young boy, that claimed his life a few years later. The losses were significant.
I very much believe that Rudhyar remained in correspondence with Assagioli. When I was last in the archive in September 2023, I found Christmas letters from Rudhyar, from California; these little send-out newsletters which tell of the time they are having and what has occurred since last they wrote, printed and mailed to Assagioli in Florence in 1965. So, it’s likely they remained in close contact the whole time and there would have been more visits. There is clear evidence of them studying together, looking at charts together, looking at the charts of great artists and visionaries. They likely had a huge impact on each other. Assagioli’s visions of psychosynthesis and, of course, the theosophy that inspired both Alan Leo and Assagioli to some extent, had a massive influence on Rudhyar and his vision of astrology.
Roberto Assagioli encapsulated his vision of spiritual psychology in the form of an egg, where a radiant star of spiritual power shines down into the authentic personal self. The star is our Sun and the personal self is like the Earth which revolves around the Sun to form the ecliptic. In a little-known pamphlet from 1971 called The Lunar and Planetary Nodes, Rudhyar made clear his perception of the significance of the ecliptic because nodes are, of course, formed by planets crossing the ecliptic, hence emphasising the importance of the nodes. The ecliptic, the journey of the Earth around the Sun is the symbol of the personal self, Earth, travelling around the great radiance of the spiritual Sun. It is the ultimate symbol of psychospiritual growth.
The Self is an ontological Reality, a Being; and is on its own level, a stable Centre of Life from which it radiates energies. The personal self, the self-conscious “I,” is a projection or reflection of the Self into the normal human level.
So, the very essence of astrology, embedded in its DNA in the ecliptic, along the passage of which you find the twelve signs of the Zodiac, is embedded with psychological and spiritual meaning.
If you look at Assagioli’s egg diagram, you can see that the same Sun, personalised at a given moment by the Earth, that is you symbolically, becomes a map of the human energy field, the aura of psychic potential that you are, as you shine the light of your essence, your miniature Sun, into the world. This is the model of spiritual psychology laid down in the middle of the 20th Century by this underground lineage, where three streams, Theosophy, early psychology and astrology, merge through Dane Rudhyar, Roberto Assagioli and Carl Jung.
When Rudhyar visited Assagioli in 1936 he had already read the entirety of Carl Jung up until that point. Rudhyar, the founder of modern psychological or spiritual astrology, was completely immersed in Jung and spent a great deal of time in Florence with Assagioli. The two of them create a fusion of Jungian and Theosophical thought to become, through Assagioli, psychosynthesis, and through Rudhyar, this breakout vision of astrology that attempts to offer you a mirror for your psychological and spiritual growth.
Mark’s post goes on to outline the spiritual coaching training that he and Keith have developed, inspired by this understanding. You can refer to his post for details.
- See Hopewell, Barry & Joyce, Piercing The Eggshell: The Hubers and Their Astrological Psychology, which includes speculation on the possible family relationship between Assagioli and Bruno Huber. ↩︎
- For a wider context of astrological psychology in western esotericism, see Sue Lewis, Astrological Psychology, Western Esoterism and the Transpersonal. ↩︎
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