Mythology, Gods & Archetypes in Psychology

In this Cosmic Connection, Astrologer Rick Levine and Amanda ‘Pua’ Walsh discuss “Is Jungian Psychology Related to Astrology?”

You’ll learn …

•  About the parallels between Astrology & Psychology
• What are Archetypes and how they’re a useful tool to help you understand life
• The potential origin and meaning of the Gods and Goddesses in Mythology

Chapters 📼

0:00 Intro

0:56 What is Psychology?

21:18 The Tibetan Book of the Dead

24:40 Was Jung an Astrologer?

31:37 Astrology and Contemporary Theosophist Philosophy

38:45 Archetypes, Gods and Goddesses

58:06 Astrology vs Psychology

1:05:44 Outro

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Transcript

This transcript is automatically generated. Some miswording might be present.

Unknown Speaker 0:00
Hi, this is Becca Tarnas.

Unknown Speaker 0:02
And I’m Rick Tarnas. And we’re really looking forward to teaching an upcoming workshop here at astrology hub on September 21.

Unknown Speaker 0:09
If you want to be the first to know when registration opens, make sure you’re signed up for the cosmic insider at astrology hub.com/insider.

Unknown Speaker 0:19
We look forward to seeing you there.

Amanda Pua Walsh 0:27
Welcome to the Cosmic Connection. This is your place to explore the beauty and order of the cosmos and your connection to it all. My name is Amanda Pua Walsh, and I’m the founder of astrology hub.

Rick Levine 0:37
And I’m Merlin Levine, your cosmic navigator.

Unknown Speaker 0:41
Now let’s dive in. Let’s do it.

Amanda Pua Walsh 0:56
All right, hello, everybody, and welcome. So great to be here with you. Today, we are going to be covering a topic that I absolutely love. I know I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but I have my master’s in psychology. And I never got what I was really looking for, from astrology. Until I started learning about astrology. It was the first time I was like, Oh, this is a system that’s actually answering some of those questions that I had and really satisfying the interest I had in psychology in the first place. So it’s been a really interesting journey for me. And I know that there’s a lot of you out there who are also really interested in kind of like the psychological angle of astrology and how it can help us understand ourselves better, how it can help us understand the people in our lives better, how it can, how we’re expressing different archetypes in different patterns at different times in our lives. So there’s so much to explore here. Today, we’re going to talk about this overarching idea of astrology and psychology, especially young in psychology, we’re going to talk about archetypes, gods and goddesses. And this is all completely related. And really just address this big question of is youngin psychology related to astrology? And if so, how? And we could not have a better person here with us today. Rick Merlyn Levine to address these topics. And yeah, Rick, welcome. So great to be here with you.

Rick Levine 2:36
Lovely, lovely to be here. Great, great topic today. One that is incredibly deep and wide. It could be it could be the name of a series that was a 13 part, you know, mini series of just this. And there’s so many smart people that would have so much to offer to this discussion. Like you I have a degree in my I’ve a bachelor’s in psychology. And like you, it wasn’t really resonating in the way that it should until, until I discovered astrology. What kind of psychology Did you study? Was it more cognitive or

Amanda Pua Walsh 3:19
I did well undergrad was just basically the, you know, psychology psych major at UC Santa Barbara. And I remember having to take like calculus and chemistry and all these other things that I was really not interested in. And then my graduate degree is in Organizational Psychology. So it was a lot around Leadership and Motivation. And you know why people do what they do within organizations. So I think I chose that because I felt like it would be a practical thing I could apply. But again, it never really satisfied my like real curiosity about about us as as humans, you know. So yeah,

Rick Levine 4:03
although this wasn’t on my list to talk about just running down the chat. Someone Daryl has put in the psychology of experience by rd Lang, one of the most important books that I read as an undergraduate. There’s so much good material, but But that book, that book in particular, is like a brain twister when it comes to defining psychology, because so many of us have very different views of even what psychology is. So where do we jump in? Maybe with what is Psychology?

Amanda Pua Walsh 4:38
Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts on that. I think it’s a great starting point.

Rick Levine 4:42
You know, in some way psychology has has been around for as long as you know, humans have, but but it wasn’t really labeled such I mean, psychology really didn’t come into its own until the early 1900s. And before or that, you know, I mean, there was human experience and, and, but it was really trying to figure out what makes the brain tick. And of course, there were two very distinctive branches and absolute bifurcation. In the study of the mind and the working of the mind, that is, largely falls into, you know, a classification of behavioral, which also has a cognitive branch to it, and depth psychology. And when we talk about psychology, really, and astrology, we are really mostly talking about the depth version of it. But you know, it’s intriguing, because we do describe people’s behavior using astrology. You know, the, the leader or the, you know, the leader isn’t quite the right word, the breakthrough person with depth psychology, and although people always want to talk about human union psychology, and we will certainly get there. The fact of the matter is that without Young’s precedent, Freud, we wouldn’t have union psychology the way we do, you know, you was never really he was a student of Freud’s, but he was never, he was never really never really bought into the psychoanalytic picture completely. And although Freud is very politically incorrect on so many issues, he was a result of his time. And, and, and as such, he was the person who broke through the barrier from surface behavioral, what happens in someone’s life in their actual behavior that they have and what we can observe and what someone knows about their own behavior, to realizing that there was an entire dimension that was unseen, an entire universe, of things that drove people’s behavior that was invisible even to the people themselves. And And what’s fascinating about this, and I’ll make this a very short detour, but it’s but astrologically it’s so significant, because the disease of the late 1800s in Germany, in particular, Germany and Austria that doctors were working with, is something that they called Conversion hysteria. Now, let’s just make the point that the word hysteria has the same root word as hysterical isn’t hysterectomies for uterus. And so conversion hysteria was a disease that was largely being suffered by middle aged women who were had to say this gently, going crazy, and not, not mentally, but physical things were occurring that couldn’t be explained that there were spontaneously happening, body symptoms and, and even things like like functional deafness was occurring. Think of the woman who just didn’t want to listen to her husband talk bullshit.

But things were things were happening somatically and doctors were at a loss to try to figure out how to cure this. This this illness, this disease of conversion hysteria, and Freud made a trip to Paris to visit a demonstration done by a French doctor named shark Co. And in this demonstration shark CO this is the time of animal magnetism and for an fryums mez, Franz Anton Mesmer, Mesmer mesmerism, animal magnetism. And this medical doctor shark co hypnotized the patient in front of a group of doctors it was as a demonstration, and then brought the person back in their life and the person remembered things that they never knew about. And when the person was brought out of hypnosis, the person didn’t remember being hypnotized or saying any of those things. And Freud went, oh my god, this is it. This is the solution to figuring out why people are behavior behaving the way they are. Something’s happened in their life that they forgot about, that is creating this situation. And he was totally excited. He went back to Vienna, and he couldn’t hypnotize anybody. He was a lousy hypnotist. If Freud was a good hypnotist, we would not have talked therapy. So Freud began to look at other ways to figure out what people didn’t remember what was coming from When he called the unconscious before that, that was not even a word that was in use. So many words of modern psychology, projection, and, you know, and unconscious and an ego. And all these words were words that were brought into, into the trade by by Freud. But what he realized, and during this period of time from an astrological point of view, this was the once every 400 year conjunction of Neptune and Pluto, Neptune and Pluto align every 400 years. And they did through the 1890s, early 1890s, which is When Freud wrote his breakthrough book, the interpretation of dreams. The first time anyone posited the idea that dreams were actually communications from the unconscious to the conscious mind and had material in it, that can help people break through their, their, their process that was creating these somatic reactions. And from that Freud began to explore other other methods. And one of the most effective methods that he came up with is what we now call talk psychology. All modern therapies, or I should say most are based upon the patient coming to a therapist and talking. And it’s really crazy, because if you we’ve talked in other sessions about Pluto, and Pluto’s relationship to the underworld and the unconscious, and, and the perhaps the leading, what’s the right word torchbearer of union psychology after Jung passed? In the, I think in the, in the early 60s

was a man named James Hillman who just passed away a few years ago. James Hillman, incidentally, was a teacher and a, what was the teacher of Thomas Moore, who I know you’ve interviewed, one of Thomas Morris first books was a collected works of James Hillman James Hillman also was a very strong influence on Rick Tarnas, Richard Tarnas, who was the author of cosmos and psyche, and this is all where union psychology has, has gone to it was Hillman Hillman that took union psychology and kind of created what’s now called transpersonal. Psychology. So there’s a real continuity there. But the thing of, of interest is that in all of these Freudian post Freudian psychoanalysis, individual psychology, you know, all these different branches of, of psychology that are depth psychology or talk psychology, all us talk, and in astrology, we know what planets related to talk, do we not? It’s mercury. And what’s crazy about this is that when series daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, Hades, Pluto, the underworld, the that that series, a real goddess, the goddess of the grain, the word serial, comes from the word series, and series went to Jupiter, the king of the gods, and said, Jupiter, you have to go rescue my daughter, Pluto abducted her. And Jupiter said I can’t do it. I can’t I can’t cross into the hell realms. I can’t cross over the river sticks because when when we humans go one way or another across into those realms, we lose awareness and I can’t do it. However, mercury, who would have who would have Mercury’s primary jobs that we sometimes forget about was Mercury was a psycho pomp and that word is someone who guides people into the unknown realms between realities. Mercury’s job was to guide souls into the underworld. So Mercury goes into the underworld and works out a deal with Hades, Pluto, the hell realms to let Persephone come home to mom for six months each year. Now, here’s the punchline on this talk therapy is basically a play on this mythology of these gods, because what we do is we send mercury, talk into the underworld, our unconscious, bring that stuff out into the light where it’s worked on in a psychological process. This is the basis of talk therapies, depth psychologies, certainly Freudian and UNIAN psychology. So that’s where we start And that’s a fascinating connection between astrology and depth psychology because it’s all based upon Mercury talk therapy.

Amanda Pua Walsh 15:12
That is so interesting. I’ve never heard it described that way. And I don’t think I’ll be able to forget it exactly what you just said that we send Mercury the words into the subconscious to bring it up into awareness. And then we can actually work through the content there.

Rick Levine 15:29
Although I’ve taken this a little bit further than original idea, the original seed for that idea I got from a man named David ham. Hamblin, who wrote several books on harmonics and astrology. And so and so really the seed from that story that I told he didn’t do it in quite the same way. But it was really his idea originally, as far as I know.

Amanda Pua Walsh 15:55
So I’m very curious. What did they find out about these women who were quote unquote, hysterical, and doesn’t have anything to do with the Uranus opposition? And like from Barbara hand clouds book, The the astrology of the rising of Kundalini, like does it have anything to do with that period of life that we quote unquote call the midlife crisis

Rick Levine 16:19
may but it also may begin back into Saturn Return even, you know, or the opening Saturn square at age 35. You see, we forget we might earners forget that when someone went into therapy with Freud, or with Jung, they didn’t go once a week for six months or three months or until they felt better. They went four or five times a week for five to seven years. Oh my God. That’s what psychoanalysis or or individuation, which is the process of individual psychology or young psychology of four types that that process of individuation, or psychoanalysis was basically a 4567 year process of 450 minute hours a week.

Amanda Pua Walsh 17:22
So only certain people could really afford the time and money to do that. I mean, that’s pretty.

Rick Levine 17:29
Yeah, what you’re saying is true. But to some extent, even going to therapy once a week for a few months is certainly a privilege. I mean, yeah, but But what you’re saying is even more so. But the reason why that was like that, is that we modern nors have no conception of how shut down and repressed and suppressed and I’ll come back to those two words in a minute, the Western European mind was out of places just in a regular way of sharing dreams and feelings and, and things that whether their histories in our own life that are just part of, of why we are, you know, where we are now, family issues, things that were dark secret, these things people didn’t talk about, largely because they didn’t remember them. Because largely, this stuff was shut down. That, that if you think of Germany, and I’m just going Germany, because that’s where this stuff erupted, was, you know, Austria and Germany, which may have not been a whole lot more shut down than England. But certainly you as we come out of the Victorian period of time, there’s a whole universe of things where we don’t go because we don’t even have language, there was no language then to talk about things the way we talk about now. This, this is all 20th century, additions to language. So the bottom line is that what Freud discovered was that as he was working with these patients with these symptoms, that the symptoms would go away, as the patient talked about them and got things out into the open. And but you know, we forget when you know, if you were in Freudian analysis, if you were in psychoanalysis, you know, you went into the doctor’s office, you know, again, four or five times a week, you lay down on the couch, and the doctor was behind you and off to the side. You never even got to look the doctor in the eye. You laid there and you talked. That’s how, you know, I mean, how disconnected they were even from the therapist themselves. There was because they didn’t want any interaction. Did you know And yet, there was a whole process that people in therapy would often kind of take whatever their issues were and begin to project them onto the doctor, there was this whole thing called transference and countertransference, where the doctor would project that back. It Freud laid out a, almost like a, like a, like, like a traveler’s map of what this land was like. So that other doctors could use the same signposts. And no matter what your individual story was, the doctor could guide you through this. And when you met a point where nothing was happening, they understood why resistance was occurring, because the ego was coming in full force to protect itself. So you couldn’t delve into the unconscious. And then we’re in. So all these things were basically handed to Young, who basically didn’t have to fight to get there, like Freud did, I mean, fight against a normal flow. And what that allowed you to do was to go a step further, and you went past this initial place where we go to, and

I’m going to open up a can of worms, and I’m not going to talk about it. But it’s something that we have talked about, in a previous issue about reincarnation, where we’ve talked about here in the cosmic connection, and that has to do with the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and those states of existence, between death and rebirth. And in a way, there are three of these states that we move through when we go past our ego. And the first is what the Tibetans called clear light, everything is one we are one with everything, there’s no I to say I feel this. The second stage is what the Tibetans called the state of duality, where there was subject and object, I, and everything else, but there’s no body, we’re in a state of pure thoughts. This is the dream world. This is the world of consciousness, without body when when we die, and consciousness, in effect is free floating, these, this is that state of whatever you think, is automatically manifest. And then as we long for physicality, or long to feel something again, with our senses, that puts us into the third state, which is the state of rebirth, in which we’re dealing with issues like sexuality, constriction, because we have to get small to fit back into the real world. And so we deal with issues of sexuality of possession of, of all the things that Freud discovered, as he came into this the other way. So Freud came into it and landed into a very sexualized world of this third Bardo of rebirth. And it was young, who pushed further and found himself in this world filled with, with archetypes, which we’ll get to in just a moment. And it was Jung’s awareness of what something that he called the collective unconscious, which Freud said, Nope, no, doesn’t exist too far. You’re gone. You’ve gone off the map, because Freud’s map was about individual pathology, and using that to basically cure physical symptoms. And now Jung is talking about something that’s on an entirely different level, that there are that there are archetypes that when we go into our unconscious, we all meet the same archetypes. We all meet the the superhero, we all meet the Trickster mercury, we all meet the the, the the giving, nurturing mother, the moon, and and although young at first didn’t necessarily relate all this to astrology, the connection between union psychology and astrology is very, very significant. Whereas with Freud, there was no connection at all, because Freud was much more a Tory, and he was a Taurus, pragmatist, and everything was about his work as a doctor trying to cure patients. So where do we want to go here?

Amanda Pua Walsh 24:40
So my question is, is young? Was he an actual astrologer? Or are we just now able to correlate a lot of his teachings to astrology?

Rick Levine 24:54
Absolutely, the former not the latter, Jung did not call himself An astrologer, and yet he wrote about astrology. In his, in his formally published works, which I came across as a senior psychology major senior in college, and I met someone who owned the entire, I don’t know how many volumes that were maybe 25 or 30 volumes of the full works of young. And they were, that was called the bowl engine series because bowl, the bowl engine foundation, I guess I’m not even sure actually published it. But for any union, they would know what the Boland gin series is. It’s the complete works of Jung. And, and a lot of it was very therapeutic. I mean, not to read but oriented towards therapy. But some of it was so out there esoteric. One of the volumes is called symbols of Transfiguration. You know, we’re talking about alchemy, which Jung also embraced fully, because Jung was, as far as I know, one of the first modern owners to understand that alchemy was not about changing lead into gold. It was about changing the planet that led rules Saturn reality, into gold, the planet, that gold rules, the sun, pure consciousness, that alchemy itself was about the creation of pure consciousness from base gross, you know, material reality. And this reading, and I have to say that although I read most of Jung’s work, there was so much of it that just went over my head that I couldn’t quite grasp. Because I believe it to really get young, you either have to have a teacher who, who does, or you need to be able to read German, Latin and Greek, because Yun moves freely between the Latin and the Greek, in a lot of his stuff, and he gets the remember, when you created his psychology. He called it analytical psychology to separate it from psycho analysis. That was his word. But his subtitle to analytical psychology was the psychology of four types. And he got these four types from his observation and corroboration of what the Greeks called the four humors, hot, cold, wet dry, which when combined, created the four elements fire earth, air, water, so whether he was an astrologer or not, and he did do astrology, he did construct birth charts. But remember, then constructing a birth chart was not a simple task. I mean, you didn’t just put in some data, hit a button and have it on your computer. However, Jung did notice that in his patience, that people tended to be emphasized in certain areas. Some people were thinkers, other people were feelers. Some people were really, what we would say is astrologically, earthy, they were in their senses, they were down to earth common sense. And they were very sensible. Other people were more active in action, and almost intuitive. And what they did, they didn’t think about it, they didn’t feel they just did it, like fire burns, and they were fiery. So the fire earth, air and water, actually, were the four types of humans, the psychology of four types. So even just to begin to say, is young Mian psychology related to astrology or not, for anyone to say it’s not, they’ve never read new young, they don’t understand it, because that is the common basic thesis. And again, yes, Stephanie’s wrote the four humors, the four humors, which are also related to healing and this goes back to high Hippocrates. Then remember, every modern Western doctor takes the Hippocrates the Hippocratic Oath. And yet the second paragraph of the way Hippocrates wrote it was that no one should be allowed to practice medicine without knowledge of the stars. That gets slipped away, where people say, Oh, well, that was the superstition at the time. And, you know, and that’s, you know, the way that’s the way

Amanda Pua Walsh 29:53
original Hippocratic Oath actually says that.

Rick Levine 29:57
Hypocrisy is wrote that that be a doctor when needed to have knowledge of the star someone could probably Google it and find it. Yeah.

Amanda Pua Walsh 30:05
Amazing. I that’s never said that’s never mentioned.

Rick Levine 30:10
Of course not. Well, it’s also never mentioned, you know, that you know that Johann is Kepler, you know, who is the father of modern astronomy, actually was a lifelong student of astrology, and was the chord astrologer not to do it for money. But that drove his interest in astronomy, you know, if you know modern science does a great job of, of suppression, and repression. And cycling back to that, although the result is the same. The difference between suppression and repression is very powerful. Because if you don’t know you’re doing it, you’re repressing it. If you know you’re doing it, you’re suppressing it. And it’s what you repress often is the deepest, hardest stuff. Someone says, you know, don’t be like that. You’re really like that. And you go, No, I’m not like that. And 15 of your closest friends all go, Yes, you are. And you go, No, I’m really not, because Because repressed behavior is invisible. And that’s why a therapist can’t do two sessions with you, and just tell you what’s wrong. Because the ego goes, nope, that’s not me. And so you have to uncover it like an onion, piece by piece until you actually integrate that, that that part of you. So keeping

Amanda Pua Walsh 31:33
astrology helps us, like, fast track into that, in some ways.

Rick Levine 31:37
It can used in the way many miners use it, it doesn’t, in what I would call glam astrology, which is, you know, you know, what each sign wants for Christmas, or, you know, or, you know, what’s your, what each sign would bring to a relationship or why you should never date and Aries Taurus Gemini can? No, I mean, but there is the astrology that we practice. Absolutely, that that is true. For me, although I was reading all this young, and realizing that he was actually talking and writing things about astrology, the real question was, how much did it you know, did it move him? And was this really important? And somewhere in this because I was already reading astrology, my senior year, junior senior year of college, someone came by with a copy of this book, and said, You need to read this book. And this book is called the astrology of personality by Dane Roy, Jr, who was a theosophist. And perhaps one of the handful of important astrologers in the 20th century. And the subtitle of this book, in little tiny letters down here is a reinterpretation of astrological concepts and ideals in terms of contemporary psychology and philosophy. And this is the book that actually, when I read for the first time, made me go, Holy shit, this isn’t just some curious party game that actually really works. There’s something here that is way, way deeper. And in fact, the first section of this book well, it’s astrology faces modern thought, A Brief History of astrology. And in chapter three, astrology and analytical psychology, remember, analytical psychology is too young. When psychoanalysis was the Freud, analytical psychology is the word that Freud created to name his whole study of, of the therapeutic process of individuation of each person, not just being cured of an illness. Jung’s great line fantastic line is bring me a healthy man and I will cure him. I mean, if that’s not brilliant, bring me a healthy man and I will cure him. But But Jung wrote this is a quote from Jung. Astrology is assured of recognition from psychology without further restrictions, because astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity. That is a that is a, a direct quote from from Young. Wow. Now, when Young’s red book was published 10 years ago, maybe maybe somewhere around there, which was a which was years of his private writings that were not published prior prior, when his red book was published, all of a sudden his real relationship with astrology, I mean, he, he knew astrology, he, I mean, he wrote things even that were published that, that it is my observation that when in marriage, when a husband or wife’s Moon is in the same sign as her part, his or her partner, son, that that can be the basis of a good connection. Now, that’s very simplistic astrology. But it means that there were charts being calculated beyond just a Sun Sign. But in but in his red book, and I’m sure that if you want to pursue this on a very deep conversation, that Rick Tarnas, or Becca, for that matter, would be able to take what I’m saying two steps further, because that is, in to some extent, been the focus of their work. It’s a facet, not a focus of mine. So there they are the experts, there are other experts to some of whom I know you’ve had on your show.

Amanda Pua Walsh 36:10
Right? Well, so Becca wrote a book about Young’s red book, correct, Becca Tarnas. Did and Yeah, and just, they’re going to be actually teaching a course with us in the fall. So if this is interesting to you, this is going to be a really great opportunity for you to study with both Rick and Becca. But that’s, that’s kind

Rick Levine 36:28
of two other things be that kind of tie in in different ways. One of the first books that I read by you, I got a book called man in his symbols that was like a coffee table book, and everyone that I knew that, you know, at that time had that book. But aside from his technical writing, which can be very intense and formidable to read and understand this book, which, let’s see, when was this published, this was published in first published in 1933. And this book, called Modern man, in search of a soul was basically about Young’s position, that the modern world basically had become unpinned that the meanings that we thought we had, that the earth even being the center of it all the, the old belief that the earth was a geocentric world, that, that, that modern humans, were facing this loss of identity. And, and this particular book, is really an introduction to to his thought. And it’s a very, very powerful book that discusses, let’s see here, the primitive unconscious and the relationship between psychology and religion. And the differences in particular between union Freud, because you really took the psychology of Freud and brought it into what might be called, it’s not religious, but It’s spiritual. Because here we get into the concept of archetypes, and gods and goddesses. theory result of the second Bardo, that collective unconscious, that is the unconscious that we all as humans share, that go beyond that language, they go beyond culturalization, they go beyond individual civilizations, they are somehow floating around, out there. And in here, you were gonna say something, and I wouldn’t

Amanda Pua Walsh 38:45
want that I’m saying you’re so good, because I was exactly gonna go here next into archetypes, and gods and goddesses. And you just kind of answered my question that maybe you could do it again, which is, what exactly is an archetype? And how does this relate into the gods and goddesses? And how does it all relate into astrology?

Rick Levine 39:04
Well, you know, an archetype is an archetype is actually a Greek word. And, and, and an archetype is a how do we say this? It’s a very specific, but generalized example of a certain perfect certain person or thing. In other words, we can have a book and say, this book is the perfect archetype of murder mysteries. You know, the book is a specific thing, but there’s a genre. And so in a way, it’s a recurrent symbol that appears again and again and again. So that we have mythical archetypes of good or evil. We have an archetype of someone who was faithful to the point of doing, how should we say stupid things, Abraham, who heard the voice of God and said, sacrifice your son, and Abraham without even blinking, built the fire, put his son on it. And God said, No, you’ve proven yourself, of course, don’t sacrifice your son. But the point is, is that Abraham is an archetype of what it means to be faithful. So an archetype is is both generalized and specific. And, and in it, we see that the archetype is an individualized individuated version of a larger thing, that in some time, some, in some ways, are the myth or the symbol, or the god or goddess. And I have a piece here that I want to share with you. It’s one of my favorite things. I know, some of you have seen this, copy my copy of the portable Blake, which looks as beat up as a, you know, 300 year old family Bible, you know, with bookmarks, and scratched out pages and margin notes, and whatever. I’ve, I probably have about, I don’t know, maybe 15, or 20 books on various aspects of Blake. But I’ve had this book since I was about 9018 18, or 19 years old. And it’s just a collection of much of Blake’s work. But there’s a piece in here from the marriage of heaven and hell that I want to read, because it because I’ve never read anything that so clearly explains the connection between Gods goddesses, religions and archetypes. And this is from Blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell. The ancient poets, animated all sensible objects, sensible objects, meaning objects that they could perceive with their five senses. The ancient poets animated all sensible objects, with Gods, or geniuses. And this is a connection to the word Genie, which is the magic gods or geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever they’re enlarged, and numerous senses could perceive. In other words, the poet’s were perceiving more than what you and I would see. And they were taking these things and animating them by, by calling them the names of what we then we’re gonna call gods or goddesses. And particularly, they studied the god or genius of each city, and each country, placing it under its mental deity, until a system was formed,

which some took advantage of, and enslaved others by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began the priesthood. In other words, what he’s saying is that there’s magic out there poets could see the magic and they described it, but along came people who took advantage of that. And then they abstracted the those magical archetypal things, and, and from the objects, thus began the priesthood. It’s brilliant, but it goes on, it goes on another statement. And they chose forms of worship, from poetic tales. And at length, they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things. And then the punch line, thus, men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. That’s William Blake in probably 17 at 1790. Wow. Did that make sense? I mean, did you get that?

Amanda Pua Walsh 44:35
lately? I feel like it just explained the last 2000 years. Hopefully what happened?

Rick Levine 44:41
Well, that’s why this book is like this. That’s what like does. But the point here is that that the Greeks began, and maybe not only not maybe certainly prior to that humans created these are representations based upon collective archetypes that were called gods or goddesses. Now remember, God with a capital G, is a relatively new thing to humanity that occurred 4000 years ago, which was the vision of Abraham, that there is one God. But gods and goddesses have been around for as long as humanity has. And that Gods and Goddesses are the collective created genius of various naturally occurring things. Now, there’s an important concept here about God with a capital D, though. And that God with a capital D, capital D.

Amanda Pua Walsh 46:03
Are you talking about dog now? Like, how do we go to dogs?

Rick Levine 46:07
It reminds me of the agnostic insomniacs, who wander around all I wondering if there was a dog. I, capital G, I’m sorry. My dyslexia was coming, okay. The God with a capital G has an analogue. In the 18th century, when Isaac Newton made the discovery, that white light was a mixture of all the colors of the rainbow, that clear, clear light was made up of all the colors that existed. And to the same extent, one might understand the word God as representing that white light that’s made up of the mixture of every god and goddess that exists. This is this is this is very basic in forms of Hinduism, in many multi, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not polytheism, that there is basically a still a ruling something over all of it. And in some, in many cultures, that ruling God or deity is silence. White light, it’s the it’s the, it’s back to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Bardo, when you’re at one with everything, there is no everything and there is no one, you are at one with it. And therefore, and therefore all there is, is what is, but you can’t say I am at one with it. Because as soon as you say that, you are something separate from one because otherwise you can’t say I, I has a self reflective thing of something else. And so in a sense, I, I am totally okay and even embrace the concept of God, or goddess because it really is a what’s the right word, in a beyond a meta gender, it’s neither. It’s neither male, nor female, nor both nor it’s like beyond that concept. But I can embrace the idea of God with a capital G or D if you’re dyslexic. I can embrace that concept. By understanding that it is the one that is in all that is in everything, but we don’t experience it directly. Just like if you go to a huge building, and you want to experience the the the boiler or the the heating plant for let’s say, a, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 storey building, you can’t go to the heating plant and stick your head inside the, you know, because you’ll be burned instantaneously, there won’t be any you. So what you do is you go looking at the measurements and the various rooms and floors of the pressure and the temperature and whatever. And that’s what all these gods and goddesses are they’re different diffractions and reflections of this one invisible thing that we cannot perceive directly yet, is in and within and without each and every one of us. So our gods and goddesses and archetypes connected to astrology. Absolutely. Because going back To the ancient poets who have enlarged senses, maybe it takes humans, meditation or drugs of, you know, some sort of mushroom or something to enlarge their senses. But there were poets and shamans, who could actually begin to make connections between the archetype of anger and Mars.

Or the archetype of a loving Princess goddess, ideal romantic partner. These are archetypes, and Venus. And so, to the ancients, Mars was actually a god. Venus was a goddess, the gods and gods, the gods and goddesses of Olympus, the Olympian gods, are represented in every culture around the world with different names and different characters. But they’re all the same principle. It’s just that the Greeks had this sense of connecting to the planetary energies. And so what we call astrology is really the study of the manifestation of the archetypes from the Define gods and goddesses that have taken planetary form. Wow.

Amanda Pua Walsh 51:29
I mean, so when you were talking about Mars, or Venus, or Jupiter or Saturn, they’re just like the quintessential embodiment of a certain of certain qualities. They’re their representatives.

Rick Levine 51:44
And as Rick Tarnas loves to say, they’re multi Vaillant, meaning that Saturn has, I mean, there are books, there are many books written about Saturn, you know, Saturn can be, you know, the jailer, you know, that is beating a prisoner for addressing him directly. But Saturn is also you know, the, the mentor, who is the old wise woman or man, who has basically taken a student under their wing wings to create, you know, a future for In other words, a valence is where either something, hide something, or in physics, a valence is where a an electron is shared by two different atoms. So that the valence basically is how things connect to other things. And so, when, when Rick Tarnas. Shoes me when Rick Tarnas says that the planets are multi valent, it means that they have an infinite number of ways of making connections, still being true to their archetype.

Amanda Pua Walsh 53:04
So that archetype is almost like the catch all category for a certain spectrum of qualities, that different either nature, like so in Hawaii, it’d be like Pele, the goddess of the volcano, right? And she represents all the fiery, distracted, they’re also creation of new land, all of that she represents, in that archetype. And so she’s like the, essentially the placeholder for this whole spectrum of qualities that you see represented in nature. How did we get the connection? Like where did the connection happen with the planets? Like how did they, it’s easy to see in nature. Here.

Rick Levine 53:49
Well, if you observe the observable planets, it’s probably also easy to see over generations of people doing that, you know, the, the actual, I mean, there are significantly main main archetypes, but looking at the Tarot Deck, the Major Arcana Kana, you know, but you know, there’s the innocent, there’s every man there’s the hero, there’s the Outlaw, there’s the Explorer, there’s the Creator, there’s the magician, the lover, the caregiver, the jester, the sage, the magician, you know, these are all different types of archetypes. There’s the shadow. There’s the shapeshifter and, and astrology, basically, is the result of one of the things that did not begin, you know, with the Greeks, but actually began way before that was the observation of the sky and the belief that somehow what happened in the sky was a sign of what was is gonna happen on earth it is done on earth as it is in evidence, you know, but of course, don’t believe in astrology. No, it is done on earth as it is in heaven. And the religion in the West, that most exemplified that was Zoroastrianism were the actual temples of the Zoroastrian priests were observatories, they were, they were called ziggurats, there were three or four or five storey temples, that at the very top, there was an observatory. And it was because the Zoroastrian priests called Magi, they were observing the heavens to try to understand what was going on down here on Earth. And to some extent, that may be part of the origin story of astrology. Although it may be a lot more complicated than that, certainly there is an Egyptian connection which is not about individuation. You know, the astrology that we 20th century 21st century people use is very specifically about individuation. It’s about, you know, it, but the Egyptians, it was more about the royalty and the global. Even in Kepler’s time, no individuals had their charts done, unless they were an emperor or a Duke, or, you know, it was just not not something that people did. Now, people go online, hit a few buttons, and they know that they, you know, that they have, you know, blood antarious rising or whatever, they don’t necessarily know what it means, but they know, because they have that ability to do it. And there’s that connection, that goes back to the Egyptian give her of wisdom, Thoth or Hermes, the three times great Hermes Trismegistus, from the Emerald Tablet, that we moderner is no as above, so below, but that’s just the opening line to a tablet of metaphysical teachings, you know, the as above, so below is followed, this is kind of like, you know, like, Hippocrates oath, we know the first line, as above, so below. But the second line is very intriguing because it says, The within of things, is as the without of things. It doesn’t say that the without of things, the planet, cause the within of things are psychology, it just says that they mirror one another. But the point is, is that when we look for the origins of astrology, we look back into history, and it may be trial and error. On the other hand, this whole system may have been given to someone in a book by an alien. And I say that, Oh, well, a partner in Korean cake. We don’t know.

Amanda Pua Walsh 58:06
Oh, my gosh, Rick, that was amazing. Thank you so much for that just complete journey. We we brought up several topics that will Joe actually came up with a lot of great topics for today. And, and they seemed maybe disconnected. But then Rick was like, no, actually all of these go together and now I can absolutely see why you said that. So, astrology and psychology brought us to youngin psychology, which brings us to archetypes, which brings us to Gods and Goddesses and, and how all of these are present within astrology through in and throughout.

Rick Levine 58:44
There’s there’s some really good work by non astrologers who are astrologers, meaning they don’t practice astrology, but their union writers or psychology union, psychologists, Jean Shinoda Bolen wrote a couple of books, the gods in every man and the goddesses in every woman, two separate books. And they’re brilliant because they’re basically about archetypes. And as I or you would read these, you would recognize many of the astrological archetypes. Robert Johnson, another union analyst, who many people might recognize from his little monographs called he she they, we wrote a book called The Story of the Fisher King and the handless made and the subtitle, which I never get exactly right word for word, but it’s something like a critical analysis of the wounded feeling function in Western society. Let me say that again, a critical analysis of the wounded feeling function in Western society. It’s basically a book about the Fisher King which is really a book about Chiron. But he was not a practicing astrologer. And yet, when you read that book, you understand what Chiron is about. It may be the best book ever written about Chiron, but you wouldn’t know it on the surface? Because it’s not there’s no mention of Chiron or how to interpret it. It’s a book about the archetype. And so is astrology and psychology connected? Well, not necessarily, I know, competent astrologers who have been doing astrology for 40 years, who publish a quarterly gold report, and have a huge following, because of their work in predicting market trends, commodities, stocks, etc. And does that have anything to do with gods and goddesses? Not to them? You know, there are, there’s many different types of astrology. And yet the astrology that I would say most of us, here on astrology hub do is coming from what we would call humanistic astrology, which is a psychological spiritual, rather than a predictive tool, although there certainly is a predictive aspect to it. And that certainly is very hand in glove with Union psychology. In fact, one might say that the glove is astronomy, and the living hand inside that glove is astrology. But psychology and astrology are still two very different things, because one can be one without being the other. And I would add one additional thing to this, and I’ll save you from how I came to realize this, but it was through OPA and through some very intense individualized peer supervision work. I always thought because I was an astrologer who was well educated in psychology. I always thought that an astrologer who knew psychology was basically the same as a psychologist who knew astrology. And the two it is basically that old law of noncommutative. Math, one plus two, does not equal to plus one in this case, because Because trained practicing psychologists, therapists, psychiatrist, who would later learn astrology and incorporate it into their practice into their trade are still very different in their practice is therapeutic. Whereas astrologers practice, largely catalytic. In other words, bringing up the information putting someone in touch, it’s almost like, like shock therapy, you know, versus process therapy. And I know that there’s a criss cross or a crossover. But But astrology and psychology together can be a very powerful tool. On the other hand, without spirituality, it operates in a little bit of an environment. I was talking with a friend earlier today. And I remembered rom das once saying that going to a psychologist, even the best psychologist in the world, is basically helping you rearrange the deck furniture on the Titanic.

In other words, it’s we can put all the pieces into place in psychology, but without a spiritual grounding without getting out of that psychological model. We’re still gonna go down without knowing what’s going on. Yeah, food for thought.

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:04:03
Yes. Okay, so to answer our very basic question that we have entered into this conversation is youngin psychology related to astrology? It seems absolutely yes. I mean,

Rick Levine 1:04:18
yeah, it would not. It’s not first cousin. It’s, it’s shared parents.

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:04:24
Right. Exactly. Exactly. Amazing. Rick, thank you so much. There’s so many like lightbulb moments, aha moments, you just brilliantly weaved all that together. Thank you so much. It’s always so fun to be here with you. And I love when we get on one of these topics where she’s like, Oh, this is your sweet spot. Like this is? Yes. So thank you for all of that. And I’m sure many people will be watching this several times because there were so many golden nuggets through it was just like yeah, by the

Rick Levine 1:04:53
way, there’s there’s so many good comments, Darrell put in the phone the real name of The Fisher King in the handless maiden in understanding the wounded feeling function in masculine and feminine psychology, my Robert Johnson, someone else referenced the Cabal Yin, which is allegedly by Hermes Trismegistus. Someone mentioned Terence McKenna, who certainly was a post union brilliant brain, if you don’t know who Terence was go to YouTube, and he passed away. I don’t know, probably 20 years ago, but listen to a few of his things, if you want to. I mean, he was a champion of the concept of archetypes, you know. And, yeah, there’s so many good comments here, I want to go back and, and talk to each of these people individually.

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:05:44
Well, and that’s what I would say to anybody listening on the podcast, this might be a great one to go look at the comments on YouTube and on the astrology facebook page, too. So astrology, hub, YouTube, astrology, hub, hub, Facebook, because of the comments, there’s tons of resources and books and people having great conversations back and forth about this. So if you haven’t checked us out on either of those platforms, it might be a great time to engage with the communities that exist there. And if you love Rick as a teacher, and you haven’t yet taken his foundation courses, and you have this orientation, this more psychological orientation and interest in astrology, he is an amazing teacher for you. And we have a foundational series of classes that you can take to learn Rich’s approach to astrology. Rich, Rick’s approach to astrology. And you can get that at astrology. hub.com/foundations one, that’s your level one. So astrology hub.com/foundations. One, there is a level two. And there are several chart reading courses that we did that help you apply the concepts you learned and actually start looking at charts and start to actually do it. So that is available for you. And I also want to just say, If you love this channel, if you love this show the Cosmic Connection, make sure you subscribe. So subscribe on the podcast player that you listen to, or on YouTube. Because that way, you will be notified whenever we have new episodes. So

Rick Levine 1:07:19
are you telling people that if they attend ESR, that they’ll be able to meet you in person?

Unknown Speaker 1:07:25
No. And you I have not told them that yet?

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:07:31
For sure, Oh, definitely. So ESR is a astrological astrological conference happening at the end of August. We’re in 2022 right now. And it’s in Denver, Colorado. And

Rick Levine 1:07:44
Westminster, which is about halfway between Denver and Boulder. And it eats our 2022 numbers to zero to two.org. And it’s it’ll be the astrology gathering of the year. They will be teachers there from at least 30 different countries. And, and Amanda will be there in the trade booth area, and I will be there hanging out with her.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:11
Yes, I know. I told

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:08:12
Rick, I was like, it’s just get ready for me to be in Hawaii, we say you know, an OP, which is those little snails that like stick on rocks, and it’s really hard to pull them off. So I’m going to be your opihi like, I’m just going to be hanging out with you.

Rick Levine 1:08:27
I can think of worst types.

Amanda Pua Walsh 1:08:30
Awesome. Alright, everybody, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for tuning into the cosmic connection for being a part of our community and as always, for making astrology a part of your life. We will catch you on the next episode. Take care, everyone. Thank you, Rick.