Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View

Richard Tarnas is professor of philosophy and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is the founding director of its graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness.

"From a philosopher whose magisterial history of Western thought was praised by Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith comes a brilliant new book that traces the connection between cosmic cycles and archetypal patterns of human experience. Drawing on years of research and on thinkers from Plato to Jung, Richard Tarnas explores the planetary correlations of epochal events like the French Revolution, the two world wars, and September 11. Whether read as astrology updated for the quantum age or as a contemporary classic of spirituality, Cosmos and Psyche is a work of immense sophistication, deep learning, and lasting importance."

Professor Tarnas revealed that he wrote Passion of the Western World (the book praised by Campbell and Smith in the above quote) in order to gain street cred among academics before publishing Cosmos and Psyche! Astrology is often controversial with regards to its influence on individuals, personality and especially as a forecasting tool. History, in retrospect, provides powerful proofs for this ancient science. And in my mind no more profoundly than in his chapter on the Axial Age, that great blossoming of spiritualty in the sixth century BCE.  Click on book cover to visit the Amazon page.
 
​The following excerpts illustrate the point:

"It is now time to examine the only period in recorded history when all three of the outermost planets, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, were in a virtually exact triple conjunction...that extended from the 590s to the 550s BCE. These decades constituted the very heart of the great Axial Age that brought forth the birth of many of the world’s principal religious and spiritual traditions... This was the age of Buddha, bringing the birth of Buddhism in India; of Mahavira and the birth of Jainism in India; of Lao-Tzu and the birth of Taoism in China, which was followed a decade later by the birth of Confucius, Lao-Tzu’s younger contemporary. This same epoch coincided with that sudden wave of major prophets in ancient Israel—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Second Isaiah...n this same era the Hebrew Scriptures were first compiled and redacted. The traditional dating for the immensely influential Zoroaster and the birth of Zoroastrianism in Persia, ...has long centered on the sixth century. In Greece, the period of the triple conjunction exactly coincided with the birth of Greek philosophy itself, as the first Greek philosophers, Thales and Anaximander, flourished during these decades of the 580s through the 560s, and Pythagoras, towering figure in the history of both Western philosophy and science, was born. In Greek religion, Orphism was emerging and the oracle of Delphi was at the height of its influence...
The great figures and events, ideas, movements, awakenings, and transformations of the collective consciousness that were brought forth during this prodigious epoch have pervaded the subsequent evolution of humankind. I found it most impressive that the era universally acknowledged as the single most significant in the entire religious and spiritual history of the world coincided with the only exact triple conjunction of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, the very planets whose cyclical alignments were associated with archetypal meanings so precisely relevant to such an extraordinary global epoch of spiritual awakening and cultural transformation."

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