Dane Rudhyar - Astrology for the Modern Psyche

by Chet Zdrowski

Dane Rudhyar is a towering figure in modern astrology. Long after his passing in 1985 he continues to have a pervasive influence on much of modern astrology, especially evolutionary and psychological forms. Many of his later works are relatively unknown and there are many treasures for coming generations of astrologers to discover in them.

Here we’ll be taking a look at his first astrology book, one of the craft’s most ground-breaking and enduring classics, The Astrology of Personality. The story of how this book came together and some of the ideas that made it ground-breaking begins in Paris in the decades before World War I.

Paris during this era was an exciting place to be. This period is sometimes nostalgically called the Belle Époque, or the beautiful era. Rudhyar was born in Paris as Daniel Chennevière in 1895.

Despite being born into “well to-do French bourgeoise” circumstances Daniel had no shortage of adversity. His health was poor and he lost a kidney just before his 13th birthday. He wrote that he “seemed destined to live a short, not too healthy life, piano lessons were stopped”.¹ The family business started having a lot of financial difficulties and shortly after Daniel’s 16th birthday his father died of pneumonia. The family was in crisis.

As sometimes happens in the midst of crisis, an epiphany was triggered. Young Daniel saw in a flash that almost everything in existence is part of a cycle. The yearly pattern of Spring-Summer-Autumn-Winter is mirrored in the day, in our individual lives, even in the life cycle of nations and civilizations. This epiphany shaped his life work. Amusingly he later said, “I had the naïve idea when I was 17 or 18 that I had more of less invented the idea of cycles because I had never heard anyone talking about it... I saw later that this was not a new idea; it was well known in Europe and the Orient.” ²

He threw himself into the Paris music and art scene, and accelerated his already voracious reading habits. His lifetime of writing started with a book about the music of Claude Debussy.

Missing a kidney had some advantages, when WW1 started in 1914 Daniel was exempt from the French army. He felt that Europe was in a waning, autumnal phase and the future belonged to the New World. He decided he would try to go to America.

The New World

Daniel received a small inheritance when he was 21 and used it to take a ship to the New World. He arrived in New York in 1916 with almost no money, no knowledge of English, and a lot of musical and intellectual ambition. He survived by transcribing and copying musical scores, and learned English by staying warm in the newly completed New York Public Library.

There he indulged his vast curiosity in the metaphysical and spiritual aisles, gradually transitioning from French translations to the English versions. He read books on Eastern religions, philosophy and science.

He wanted to make a clean break from his ancestral past, and he likely realized his family name Chennevière was difficult for Americans to pronounce. So, in 1918 he changed his name to Dane Rudhyar. Rudhyar was meant invoke the ancient Vedic god Rudra, the fiery god of storms and disruptions. Perhaps it was also a nod to his Sun in Aries.

Hollywood

His musical ambitions took him to Hollywood in 1920. Soon after arriving he made friends with several Theosophists who belonged to the nearby Krotona community. Rudhyar took some classes there but didn’t approve of the way the community was run. He soon left to join an “informal group of discontented Theosophists”. His Theosophical reading and explorations for the next few years were inspired by B.P. Wadia, an Indian Theosophist he met at Krotona, who was India’s first labor rights leader. Rudhyar later said that Wadia had triggered what he called “a decisive spiritual experience” ³ and he remembered him fondly.

By the late 1920’s Rudhyar had outgrown the teachings of Theosophy. He retained an admiration for Blavatsky’s writings and many of Theosophy’s core teachings, but did not commit beyond that. .

He was also exploring Eastern spirituality and occult teachings. While he had taken an astrology class in Los Angeles in 1920 and did some readings for friends, he hadn’t been particularly moved by what he found. That changed in 1930 when he was introduced to Marc Edmund Jones. Jones gave him the course material for astrology classes he was teaching and Rudhyar was deeply impressed. He realized astrology could be used in a much deeper way than what he had learned in 1920. This touched off years of exploring and learning the ancient craft.

Holism

At an important point in his development in 1930, Rudhyar encountered the highly influential book Holism and Evolution by Jan Smuts. The central ideas of this book were digested and incorporated into Rudhyar’s worldview, and are key to understanding his astrology.

One of the clearest statements about holism comes from Aristotle. “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Rudhyar stated that there’s a quality of Wholeness that pervades everything that is a functional whole. That quality of wholeness can’t be measured in normal ways but can it can be felt.

The book Holism and Evolution describes the universe as an interconnected system of wholes, a series of wholes within wholes within wholes, like Russian nesting dolls. Everything is part of something larger and everything contains parts that in turn contain parts. Holism postulates that there is no end to these interconnected levels, wholes within wholes.

Holism also focuses on the idea of fields. Everything that is a whole has a field. This field isn’t just around the whole, it’s a continuation of that whole and yet we can’t detect it with our physical senses. We now know that all living beings have electromagnetic fields and that we’re constantly interpenetrated by all sorts of electromagnetic fields, along with solar and cosmic radiation. Field theory has grown into a major part of physics and it’s especially interesting that forms of field theory are now being incorporated into the social sciences and psychology. Beyond its effect on Rudhyar, Holism and Evolution helped inspire complexity science, ecological thinking, systems thinking, integral theory, field theory and holistic thinking in general.

These concepts triggered breakthroughs in how Rudhyar looked at astrology and metaphysics. The idea of being part of something larger, which is in turn part of something still larger gave him a framework that was much more flexible than Theosophy. The idea of interpenetrating fields shaped much of his later work.

The Making of The Astrology of Personality

1932 was a year of crisis for Rudhyar. He was ill that year and said later that he had received “alarming medical tests” during the summer. While he was recuperating in New Mexico he was given a gift of Carl Jung’s collected works in English. As he wrote later “At once the idea that I could develop a series of connections between Jung's concepts and a reformulated type of astrology came to me.” ⁴

At this point astrological opportunities began to open up for Rudhyar. Without his permission, one of his friends had distributed copies of a series of astrological pamphlets he had written several years earlier called “Harmonic Astrology”. A New York publishing executive named Paul Clancey was given these pamphlets and was quite excited by them. He was planning to start a monthly astrology magazine. When they met in New York, Rudhyar made something of a sales pitch to Clancey. He told him that he thought astrology could be used “in close connection with depth psychology if it were considered in a new light and if many of its basic concepts were reformulated.” ⁵ Rudhyar felt astrology needed to be “reformulated so as to fit the mentality and the experiences of ... modern men and women.” ⁶ The pitch worked and Paul Clancey happily offered to publish whatever Rudhyar wrote along these lines in his new magazine.

Clancey’s magazine “American Astrology” was a hit, circulation and sales increased rapidly and so did requests for more articles from Rudhyar. They added a psychology section and Rudhyar wrote at least two long articles per month. He also started writing for more magazines, often under pseudonyms. It’s estimated that Rudhyar wrote well over a thousand articles in his sixty-year writing career.

Alice Bailey, who Rudhyar had met in Hollywood, read some of the articles and offered to publish a book on this type of astrology. Rudhyar worked on The Astrology of Personality from 1934-1936 and it was published in late 1936. He was very clear about his intentions in writing this book, hence the extended title: The Astrology of Personality- A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals, in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy.

The astrology he presents is steeped in cycles, holism, holistic thought, Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the unconscious, occultism and Eastern metaphysics. The influence of this book was large and many of the attitudes and ideas presented have permeated astrology ever since.

What’s in The Astrology of Personality

Rudhyar covered an incredible amount of ground in this book. It’s easy to forget just how unique and thought-provoking these ideas were at the time.

So many of his ideas have been absorbed into the collective mind of the astrological community. A look at some of the ideas covered is helpful to remind us of just how mind expanding this book was.

• Astrology as a search for order and meaning, rather than simply prediction.
• Cycles as the most important factor in astrology.
• Astrology as a tool to discover and fulfill your purpose or dharma.
• The need to shift from “what’s going to happen” to how to use inevitable crisis and difficulties as part of your path. “How can this be used?”
• Astrology’s goal is the “alchemy of personality,” using it as a tool of transformation.
• Transformation as the path to wholeness and integration.
• Seeing the chart holistically, moving beyond piecemeal descriptions.
• The integration of Jung’s ideas about archetypes and the unconscious into his reformulated astrology.
• Using Jung’s idea of synchronicity to replace causality.
• Pluto’s importance in transformation and integration, a view that was very modern sounding only six years after Pluto’s discovery.
• Precession of the Equinoxes, which he called “The Great Polar Cycle”.
• Uranus, Neptune and Pluto and their role of linking the inner planets to the larger galaxy.

Important chapters

While the whole book is ground-breaking and crackles with energy, a few of the chapters have had particular influence.

The chapter called “Planetary Interweavings” discusses the nodes of the Moon in a way that prepared the ground for evolutionary astrology. Most discussions of the Moon’s nodes in the west have been influenced by the insights that Rudhyar supplies here. In reading this chapter, you get the feeling that this material represents the roots of evolutionary astrology, the source of some of its most key ideas. This is important reading if you’re a psychological or evolutionary astrologer, or use the Moon’s Nodes in your astrology.

“Planetary Interweavings” also discusses the planetary nodes. The nodes of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto as of late have been receiving more attention and research and Rudhyar again seems to have prepared the ground for this research.

The Sabian symbols are discussed and explored in another important chapter. Through this discussion the work of Marc Edmund Jones and his system of degree interpretation was introduced to a much wider audience.

Principles of Astrological Interpretation

This chapter is perhaps the most pivotal and has had a big effect on modern astrology. In it, Rudhyar describes two primary approaches to astrology, the ethical approach and what he calls the esthetical approach. As he points out, there are many possible blends.

The ethical approach judges astrological factors as good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, benefic or malefic. This was the dominant outlook at the time and of course is still widespread. Fear and anticipation seem to be frequent side effects of this approach.

The esthetical approach is one of accepting the “good” and the “bad” equally. Wholeness and integration both depend on accepting all parts of yourself. In his later work he often referred to the “way of the sage,” the path of equanimity, acceptance and flow. For Rudhyar astrology at its best can be a path to this kind of acceptance of life’s ups and downs, knowing they are part of a cycle.

To illustrate this approach, I’d like to share verbatim the strong statements he made about the implications of the esthetical approach that he recommended.

• “There is no bad planet. Every planet has a definite function. Every function is necessary to the achievement of organic wholeness. Elimination is as valuable as assimilation. The boil which frees the system from poisons is as valuable as the flesh which rounds up the angles of the bones.
• There is no bad aspect. Involution is as necessary as evolution. The destruction of forms that have become dead shells and the release of the power they held are as valuable as the building of new forms. Tensions are as valuable as ease, and more creative.
• Each zodiacal sign is as good to be born in as any other. There is no better birth-month or birth-day. What matters only is to fulfill the life-function or "quality" revealed by the sign or degree-symbol.
• No birth-chart is better than any other. One is always better for some one purpose. But as all purposes are equally valuable and necessary in the economy of the greater Whole, each man's chart is better for the purposes of his life than is anybody else's.” ⁷

As he beautifully put it “Every life is a work of art.” ⁸

Later Reflections

When this book was released in 1970 as a mass market paperback by Doubleday, Rudhyar wrote a fascinating preface. He stated that there were quite a few interpretations and statements in the book that he would change if there were time for a full revision. His philosophical, psychological and spiritual ideas had grown beyond what he initially referred to as “the Theosophical-occult tradition” that was part of the book.

In spite of this, he felt that astrology was at a crucial point in its evolution and this was an important time to release the book to the wider public in a paperback edition. Astrology was becoming increasingly more popular and the people seeking him out at that time needed a different type of astrology. It seemed that the wider public that was interested in astrology was finally ready for Rudhyar’s reinterpretation of the ancient art.

Rudhyar wrote many books and articles in the five decades following The Astrology of Personality. In retrospect we can see that he continued to develop many of the themes that first appeared in that seminal book. He never stopped exploring new frontiers of consciousness and science and he left many more treasures for us to explore.

Endnote:

1. Rudhyar: Person and Destiny pg 134
2. Dane Rudhyar: His Music Thought and Art pg 15
3. Rudhyar: Person and Destiny pg 88
4. From Humanistic to Transpersonal Astrology - pg I
5. The Astrology of Personality - Preface to the Third edition pg VII
6. The Astrology of Personality - Preface to the Third edition pg VII
7. The Astrology of Personality - pg 380
8. The Astrology of Personality - pg 380

Published in: The Career Astrologer, Mar/Apr 2020.

Author:
Chet Zdrowski has been involved with astrology since 1977. He studied for several years with the late Richard Idemon and 12 years with Steven Forrest.
Chet’s greatest pleasure is to alert people to their individual, unique path, and to help them understand and navigate their current life challenges. In addition to working with clients, teaching and writing, the primary focus of his current work is presenting Dane Rudhyar’s teachings in an accessible and entertaining form to astrologers everywhere.
You can reach Chet at www.czastrology.com or czastrology@gmail.com

© 2020 Chet Zdrowski - The Career Astrologer

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