Astrology of Transformation: A Multi-Level Approach

by Dane Rudhyar

A four-step approach to psychology through astrology.

Genres: Astrology

205 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

French-American astrologer, one of the most noted and respected astrologers of the 20th century.

He was called a modern renaissance man for his ability to express himself in many fields; music, painting, poetry, philosophy and metaphysics.

He wrote for national magazines since the '30s and was the author of many books.

Reviews

[Yitzchok · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review later. Great book!

8/15/18 - Truly a magnificent book! The first chapter where he discusses the Yang and Yin way of life is crucial to understanding life. See the excerpts below. The second chapter on the Two Faces of Astrology was also outstanding. His approach to the astrology of the transpersonal level really shines as well!
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The Yang Way

Yang type of activity is essentially outgoing, forceful, and aggressive. It is archetypally associated with the ‘masculine’ attitude and character. The basic yang philosophy sees the universe as a stage on which force meets force, and at the biological level, most often fights against force. The Yang type of personality tries to use superior force to control, and in many instances, to dominate and subjugate whatever it meets, especially if a confrontation is involved which upsets the status quo or seems inimical to it. Whatever happens has to be controlled, then put to use in order to fulfill the needs, or often the personal wants and perhaps the greed or ambition, of the human being responding to the event.

…At the animistic level of tribal societies, the techniques of control had a radically different character from the ones used in our modern world. Yet both the medicine man or shaman and the modern technician act in much the same spirit. They intend to make nature subservient to their wills. If the technique of the two types radically differs, it is because human beings who formulate and apply them operate at two distinctly different levels of power, and their consciousnesses are structured by widely divergent philosophical and cosmological assumptions.

These assumptions are derived from different ways of experiencing the world of nature. A shaman perceives the universe and deals with what he experiences at a biopsychic level in his own characteristic, and to the academic modern mind, very naïve, puzzling, and irrational manner.

Our inventors, engineers, and technicians deal with another kind of universe whose nature reflects the character of the type of mind – the analytical intellect – our Western civilization has so strongly developed since the 6th century B.C. and especially since the European Renaissance.

…No wise person should deny all value to the Yang approach to life; but also no really sane human being should find value in a nearly exclusive use of this approach. The universe itself will inevitably give rise to a reversal of the tide, for neither Yang nor Yin can be allowed to overpower the other beyond a certain limit. Existence itself depends on the balance of these two principles, and an extreme disequilibrium is bound to lead to a compensatory reaction.

The Yin Way

The Yin type of response to what life brings is essentially receptive and adaptive. It is archetypally associated with the feminine attitude and character. In a culture that upholds the Yin ideal, philosophers and wise men tend to consider the universe as an immense network of relationships linking and integrating a multitude of centers of consciousness…

While the Yang type of philosophy leads to a pluralistic, personalistic, and atomistic image of the universe, the Yin type is essentially holistic, seeing component parts of a cosmic Whole in every manifestation of a universal ‘ocean’ of life.

A Yin type of person is essentially characterized by its acceptance of what ‘is’, and by a willingness to experience every aspect of the ever-unfolding process of change. Such a person is thus free to meet whatever this process brings, and adapt to every new situation. A Yin type of person is primarily concerned with the relationship between the entities or forces involved in a meeting rather than with what this meeting will do to his or her self or ego, because the person seeks to understand what function this relationship is meant to perform within a larger frame of reference – a family or community, a nation and its culture, mankind and the whole earth.

Relationship and meeting are words that describe the coming together (convergence) of two or more spheres of consciousness and activity – two entities or persons – within a particular area of space.

…The Yin type of person tends to be focused upon the total situation, whose meaning the person tries to understand, rather than be concerned with his or her own reactions and those of the other parties to the meeting. Any event is seen as a ‘meeting’. For example, if a person walking in a storm is struck by a falling branch, the happening would be interpreted as the meeting of the person and the tree. If attacked on a deserted street by a drug-addict in desperate need of money, this too is to be understood as a meeting. The respectable citizen and his attacker are performers in a situation for which, in different ways, both are responsible; the entire society is also responsible for the state of affairs which produced social conditions which gives this meeting its character.

Whatever the situation is – a boxing match, a Judo match, a love affair, or baby-sitting with an aggressive child – the Yin-manifesting individual will not react to it instinctively or indignantly by trying to oppose superior force in an emotional outburst of violence and anger which might lead the attacker to use still greater violence. He or she will try to ‘flow with’ the situation, to adapt to what it implies. He or she will use ‘intelligence’, and intelligence is essentially the capacity to adapt to every changing types of situations.

To adapt is, first of all, to accept and not to resist the change. It is, in the deepest sense, to try to understand the meaning of the happening. Why did the meeting occur between the attacker and the attacked? Why does the person who built a home near a river known to have flooded often find himself washed by the torrential waters amid the wreckage of his home? Why?

The search for meaning may come only after the experience is lived through, but the immediate reaction of the Yin-motivated individual is nevertheless one of essential acceptance of the meeting with whatever produced the crucial or painful change.

I repeat that to such an individual the relationship between the experiencing self and the tormenting or disturbing factor – whether it be ‘natural’ or the result of personal enmity or social stress – is the essential element to be concerned with. And it may be a very pleasant meeting, ‘love at first sight’, or a deeply moving experience to which one normally would attach the qualificative ‘spiritual’. In all cases, the experience is a meeting, even if it be the meeting of two biological or psychic or other process.
The Yin-ideal of response to such a meeting is no longer ‘mastery’ but sagesse (a French word that has deeper implications than ‘wisdom’).

The Sage is not a ‘master’ in the Yang sense of the term; for the very word master implies slave as a referent – just as to be a mother implies having a child. The sage uses control only in the sense of being in control of the aggressive and/or rebellious tendencies of human nature within his or her biopsychic organism, especially when this human nature has produced the solid unyielding, and rigidly self-centered entity we call ‘ego’.

The Sage does not seek to exert superior force upon an attacking power; he does not live in a world where every change and event are interpreted as referring to a force-against-force situation – the world in which our modern Western science and technology exclusively operates. In that world even man’s most superior mind and willpower is in the end always defeated. The Sage is not defeated because he seeks no victory. He does not fail because he courts no success and has no ambitions for achievements.

…The Sage is totally unattached to anything in particular. He or she allows all life, all events, all human relationships to pass through his or her consciousness – indeed through the whole of his or her being at all levels of activity. The consciousness of the Sage could almost be called a ‘sieve’, for the vast flow of life’s experiences pass through it; but the sieve has form, an individual form. It is a structured supreme mystery of la sagesse. It gives a meaning to everything that flows through the unresisting, yet totally focused, consciousness.

In this sense only can it be said that the experiencer and the experience ‘are one’. The instinctual and intellectual reactions we call resistance vanish; where resistance was, meaning now arises: resistance is transmuted into meaning. Pgs. 4-13

… An aggressor bent on attack will naturally aim at the point where a person is weak or unprotected. In such a situation, a Yang type of individual will rush reinforcements to meet the attack by opposing force to force. From the Yin point of view, this is senseless or at least exhausting; the consciousness becomes involved in the state of violence, and a long series of actions and reactions follow. What one should do is to refuse to be identified with that state of violence and counter hate with love, by opposing only space and emptiness (or egolessness) to the aggressive movement; thus, ‘not being there’ where the attacker expects a resistance to his attack. ‘Not being there’ may be physically impossible; but it is always spiritually possible, in the sense that a person being attacked may not be active in the situation as an ego. Even if the physical body suffers, the consciousness remains unaffected, secure in its own center and intensely aware.

The Sage meets such a type of situation according to the wholeness of what it implies. If he is weak, he accepts his weakness as he accepts the strength of the adversary. He understands the cause of this weakness and this strength, and is ready to let the energy involved in these causes exhaust itself. He transmutes what in him could have been resistance into meaning and understanding. He grows in wisdom through non-resistance against the karma of his past. Pgs. 16-17

Always Activity

What makes it difficult for most people trained in our Western modes of thinking to understand the Yin way of life is that they associate this way with inaction and passivity. An unbalanced Yin type of attitude will lead to passivity and inertia, just as an unbalanced Yang attitude produces the ruthless, egocentric ambition and craving for any kind of exciting activity we often find in our present world.

If it is difficult for us today to understand the character of the Yin type of activity, it is because we have been programmed to give value almost exclusively to the kind of behavior which brings to the ego the satisfaction of achieving what our senses can measure and our mind can manipulate in order to gain always more power over something or someone. Material results – and today this mostly means money and social connections – are considered almost the only proof of success in life, because no one can concretely measure and assess spiritual results. Pg. 19

…the transpersonal astrologer tries to evoke (for the individual eager for self-transcendence), the possibility of using every opportunity, every tension, every crisis as means to gradually overcome the inertia of his or her past, of social and mental habits and prejudices and, above all, the resistance of the ‘I’ to changes that would undermine its centralizing and controlling authority. Pg. 117

Progressed Moon Conjuncting the Angels

The first revolution of the progressed Moon is primarily a period of formation; the second, one of personal or individual expression and at least relative achievement – if all goes well. If the individual remains solely at the level of individual consciousness, the third period, after the 56th year, should be one of either personal fulfillment or gradual degeneration or crystallization.
If, however, the individual has deliberately and consciously entered the path of radical transformation and remained on it, the last third of the life can be the most important, as it may bring clearer and steadier transpersonal realizations, and the ability to radiate at least a degree of mature and spiritually illumined wisdom.

The passage of the progressed Moon over each of the four Angles of the natal chart usually coincides with, and helps us interpret, some important inner or outer changes in a person’s life and consciousness. The passage over the Ascendant is particularly important, for it often correlates with a change in one’s environment or in one’s psychological or physical relation to the environment. The change should lead to some kind of personal readjustment, perhaps the readjustment of one’s intuitive feeling of identity in terms of the new environment or of a new realization of the meaning and value of the already familiar life-situation – the sense of individual selfhood being always intimately related to and most often conditioned by the various kind of close relationships and associations one has entered, positive or negative as these may be.

When the progressed Moon crosses the Descendant of the birth-chart, changes in relationships are often expectable, or rather as this progression is about to occur one should try to pay closer attention to the quality of the relationships one is involved in, and to reassess their value.

The crossing of the natal Nadir (the cusp of the fourth house) by the progressed Moon may stir the feelings and should impel one to become more objective to what these feelings are and arise from – perhaps the home situation. As the progressed Moon crosses the Midheaven, a new approach to one’s mental, social, or professional activities may seem valuable, if not imperative.
Pgs. 170-171

[Michaella Montana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cosmic greetings! Am writing this review as I just finished reading this book. As one of his later works, this book is a summation of many Rudhyarian themes, but what makes it different from his other books is the transformation aspect which gives it an alchemical tone. How can we use astrology to transform, as he puts it “karma” into “dharma”, or our past into our future fulfillment? There are many operations to do this through the chart, which is really a transformative, alchemical art. And the nice thing is that it’s not just a man vs nature type deal of transformation, its cocreation with the cosmos, as Rudhyar writes that spirit is descending to matter and matter ascending toward spirit (p.97). In other words, the cosmos meets us halfway on the transformational path. And its for this reason that there is a potential sort of mystic marriage of “heaven and earth” through chart as the Cosmos descends to transform us as we ascend to transform through the cosmos.(p.113).

As for transforming karma into dharma, Rudhyar includes the moon’s nodes as a representation of a form of this transformation as the south node would represent karma and north node dharma. For instance, he writes “the moon’s south node indicates in symbolic terms the pitfalls that the inertia of the past (or subconscious memory of past failures) places in the way of personal fulfillment” (p. 71). This is interesting with respect to the way transformation can be both individual and personal, as the nodes also function collectively. In this way the inertia of the past is a shared karma, and the individual can work to transform this through following the north node. And as stated before, as the individual ascends towards this north node the cosmos also descends to help this transformation which then can help collective transformation as well.

Additionally Rudhyar includes progressions as a timing factor in the alchemy of astrological transformation. He writes “the progressed-to-natal aspects seem to mark particular times at which an opportunity to neutralize the karma of the past appears” (p. 179). All the more reason to study one’s progressed chart to proceed toward one’s dharma. The alchemy is even more pronounced as this progressed chart is also in relation to current planetary transits. I really like this quote “One may speak of ‘correspondence’, ‘synchronicity’, or an ‘inner clock’ set at birth and continuing to run at its own speed while the solar system maintains its complex rhythmic patterns of ever-changing interplanetary relationships.” (p. 182). Admittedly am not well-versed in alchemy but in chemistry which I have studied timing is key in reactions. Thus astrology is fundamental in the timing of transformation, and one can use progressions and transits to understand this. There is a time and a place where transformation to occur and this timing is specific to each person.

One thing I would have liked in this book is a discussion on the 12th house and the transformation process resulting from that unconscious factor. He writes that the chart can become an open mandala through the workings of the trans-saturnian planets, but does not mention the 12th house in Jungian unconscious assimilliation, rather a relaxation of the consciousness. Is there karma to be found in the 12th house in addition to the south node? Perhaps when I revisit Person-Centered Astrology the process of individuation will be clearer through the astrology chart as moving the ego from the center to the entire chart being the center.

To conclude, I appreciate how Rudhyar included that the purpose of transformation is “not actually to ‘solve’ personal problems, but to transcend them by illumining the process that produces them, and what is still more important, by suggesting how they can be used in terms of a new kind of purpose. (p. 51). In transformation, process is more important than product. The product may be repurposed anyway for the sake of transformation. What is transformed is our way of seeing, which may be the most worthwhile activity one can do. Thank you Rudhyar for sharing your transformative astrological vision.

[Hannah]

got through a few chapters