HUMANISTICASTROLOGY
Humanistic astrology was created in the 1930s by Dane Rudhyar, who followed the
lead of Marc Edmund Jones in reinterpreting traditional astrology in terms of modern
psychology. Rudhyar combined the Theosophical approach to astrology that he had
learned at the Krotona Institute with the insights of Carl Jung’s depth psychology,
whose works he read during the summer of 1933.
By the 1940s, Rudhyar was trying to create an astrology based on a philosophy
“freed not only from the materialistic biases of our Western tradition, but also from
the glamour surrounding so much of what today passes for esoteric revelations and
unprovable occult claims,” as noted in his book My Stand on Astrology.By this time,
the letters he was receiving about his regular columns in American Astrologyhad alert-
ed him to “the psychological danger involved in careless astrological statements about
birth-charts. I therefore tried to stress the psychological responsibility of the practi-
tioner, and to develop theoretically a consistent approach to those astrological factors
which were more particularly related to the individuality and the potentiality of
growth of the person whose chart was being studied. I increasingly emphasized the
need to take a holistic approach to the birth-chart.” In this approach, Rudhyar rein-
terpreted factors in the birth chart that had traditionally been called malefic or evil as
being instead weaknesses in personality structure; and these he saw, not as tragic flaws,
but as opportunities for learning and growth.
Rudhyar went on to emphasize that “astrology is a symbolic language...
attempting to formulate, by means of symbols based on the common experience of
men facing the all-surrounding sky, an immensely complex structure of relationships
between the universe and man.” He proposed, for example, that the signs of the zodiac
refer not to the vastly distant constellations they were named for, but to 12 zones in
Earth’s magnetic aura through which Earth turns every day.
Rudhyar stresses the concept that astrology should be “person-centered,” that
the individual birth chart is intended as a guide for telling a person how best to actual-
ize as fully as possible her or his birth potential. If the chart is to do this, then those
elements in it that apply to mankind as a whole should not be emphasized; instead,
those that reveal a person’s unique individuality should be stressed. Behind this lies
the concept common to all modern astrology, psychology, and therapy: The individual
personality is not fixed and unchangeable. It can be revised, rewritten, reprogrammed,
restructured, and any means that gives the individual some insights into her or his
internal patterns can be used for such work on oneself. Rudhyar’s belief—which goes
back to his reading, as a youth, of Nietzsche—is that the goal of the fully actualized
individual is to become totally free “from the Collective and from an unconscious,
compulsive bondage to the values of one’s particular culture—values which a person
takes for granted because they have been stamped during childhood upon his sensitive
mind by the teachings and even more the example of his elders, and also by the ambi-
ence of his society” and to develop one’s own unique qualities as fully as possible.
Rudhyar says that the birth chart is “a set of instructions ... showing you how
in your particular case the ten basic energies of human nature should be used to the
best advantage.... In modern astrology, these basic energies are represented by the tenHumanistic Astrology
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