Ultimately, Neither Explanatory nor Fascinating

A lot of people drop this book after the first section because they find out that it's about it's about the ancient discipline of astrology, even though it's written by a respectable university professor. I'm not one of those people I think even those who are skeptical, or even antagonistic about astrology should be able to respect its historic importance as a tool of ancient kings. This book had a different issue for me.

Dr Richard Tarnas makes a gigantic mistake in couching a is touching a potential explanation for astrology in the theory of Carl Jung. Jung is not a respected source. He's actually viewed with about as much skepticism as astrology ,so referencing Jung actually makes his argument worse—especially since Tarnas didn't justify his use of the controversial psychiatrist at all. Even more unfortunate, the theory that Tarnas cited was synchronicity; easily among the least provable, least evidence-based, and most mystical of Carl Jung's ideas.

The development of the ideas of architects was was fascinating though and I will give credit where credit is due I never made a connection between Plato's theory of forms, Kantian categories, and Jungian archetypes. The psychological history was also interesting. The fact that ancient mankind saw the world as a sort of enchanted realm and modern man has relegated all the enchantment to the mind alone is a fascinating development. His points on Copernicus and Galileo were...factual.

But about a 5th of the way through I realize that unlike the introduction material the rest of this book was not going to be well argued or argued at all. We are given Jung, Plato, Copernicus, the Anima Mundi, and that's it. Somehow, Dr. Tarnas believed that that's enough to convince the scholarly audience hes attempted to pitch the book to, but even though I find astrology fascinating I was far from convinced by his approach. The rest of the book, then, has this underlying issue clawing at any other reader such as myself.

I am 3 hours from completing this 35 plus hour the hemeth of a book and I'm getting a terrific history lesson, but at the end of the day it really is just a glorified list of events that correlate with planetary alignments. This could have been interesting we could have tracked the architects as they developed across history almost like a narrative but instead we get: This is what Neptune and Pluto mean together and here is a list of 50 events that happened during those alignments with some explanation. Then he moves on to the next pair.

Worst of all is that there is a long rich history of studying a certain pair of planets and how their conjunctions correlated with events here on Earth. That is the Saturn Jupiter pattern. Because a lot of scholars, and therefore ancients who wrote history, were aware of astrology enough to know about the 2 slowest planets and how they had been studied in relation to world events, this theme crops up quite often in both history and astrology. I would have loved to see Dr. Tarnas latch into this ancient tradition with details, such as how the conjunctions always happen between two signs of the same element, and how after a how after a few centuries it switches to new elements. How ancients used to try and see if this factored in to certain long term epochs. But as far as I can tell from chapter headers the the little of the book I have left doesn't have any discussion of this historic set of alignments, and I'm a little disappointed.

So as somebody who's fascinated by And knows a bit about the history of alignments namely Saturn and Jupiter I was disappointed on pretty much every single front. By the end of this we know that Tarnas is very educated in history, and incredibly good at writing ornately. Too ornately. Fancy prose doesn't when you an argument. One final criticism is that Tarnas never tries to falsify his argument he never talks about events that happens outside of his theory's predicted alignment correspondence. What if there is a Saturn Pluto plague that occurred when Saturn and Pluto weren't in alignment tarnish never addresses this issue. We have no idea if the data is cherry picked or to what degree.

I appreciate the effort. I'm not giving this a negative rating but more than neutral rating rating. At the end of the day it is just a huge (explained) list of events with a pretty fascinating introduction. I'm a little hesitant though because a lot of astrologers astrologers like that this book tries to frame astrology in a more respectable academic light. But I'm hesitant even to grant it that, because, doing my best to dawn the scholarly hat, as somebody with the University degree I can tell you it doesn't really succeed on that front either.

If you want to sort of "trick" academia into entertaining the idea that there's something worthy of study in this ancient discipline, the best way to do it would be to work with the already existing idea of historical cycles. Establish that different cycles have different flavours. Then, at the end of the book—in an appendix maybe—muse muse how they just happened to potentially align with astrological correspondences. Leave the academic reader with this question that steps outside of provible fact only when they're so invested that they're about to close the book. Let it grow and linger in their mind. Then, academia would be forced to respond to the the far more substantiated portions of the book, and if you're lucky some of them will consider the astrological question you planted at the end with some historical seriousness.

3/5. Decent, especially if it's what you're looking for. Maybe release the intro with the later "list" matter abridged to 1/20th the length and market it to astrologers.

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