Reframing Astrology Beyond Causation
Contemporary discussions of temperament and personality increasingly emphasize neurobiological organization at birth, while astrology is typically dismissed as pre-scientific superstition. This essay argues that such dismissal rests on a category error. Drawing on Richard Tarnas’ theory of archetypal coherence and Liz Greene’s depth-psychological approach to astrology, the paper reframes astrology not as a causal theory competing with neuroscience, but as a symbolic language historically used to describe stable patterns of temperament and unconscious dynamics. The nervous system and astrology are shown to operate at different explanatory levels—biological and archetypal—yet converge phenomenologically in their concern with enduring styles of human experience. Understanding this distinction clarifies why astrology persists culturally and psychologically despite its rejection as a scientific mechanism.
The question of whether astrological configurations predict or shape the nervous system at birth is often posed as a challenge to scientific legitimacy. From the standpoint of contemporary neuroscience, the answer is unequivocal: there is no empirical evidence that planetary positions exert causal influence on neural development. Yet the persistence of astrology across cultures and centuries suggests that the question itself may be poorly framed. Rather than asking whether astrology causes biological traits, we might ask why astrology historically functioned as a compelling language for describing human difference—and why it continues to resonate despite modern scientific explanations.
This essay proposes that the relationship between nervous-system organization at birth and astrological interpretation is not causal but symbolic and correlational. Astrology, particularly in its psychologically informed notions, should be understood as a pre or para-scientific attempt to articulate stable patterns of temperament, meaning, and fate—patterns that neuroscience now describes biologically but does not fully interpret existentially.
Research in developmental neuroscience and temperament theory demonstrates that human beings are born with distinct patterns of arousal, reactivity, sensory sensitivity, and stress regulation. These traits are largely heritable, shaped by genetic factors and prenatal conditions, and remain relatively stable across the lifespan. They form the biological substrate of temperament, influencing how individuals respond to novelty, threat, intimacy, and stimulation.
Such differences are not merely quantitative variations in behavior; they constitute qualitatively different ways of encountering the world. One nervous system may experience intensity as vitality, another as overwhelm. One may seek stimulation, another safety. These differences precede learning, attachment, and culture, though they are later shaped by all three.
Neuroscience, however, typically stops at description and mechanism. It explains how these systems function, but not how they are experienced as meaning, destiny, or identity. It is precisely this interpretive gap that symbolic systems such as astrology historically filled.
Astrology, as articulated by Richard Tarnas, does not posit planets as physical agents influencing human biology. Rather, it operates through what he terms archetypal coherence: recurring patterns of meaning that appear synchronously in human experience, historical epochs, and symbolic systems, Cosmos and Psyche. In this view, planetary configurations correspond to archetypal principles—such as aggression, receptivity, expansion, or contraction—that manifest in diverse and context-dependent ways.
Crucially, this framework does not claim mechanistic causation. The cosmos does not push or pull the psyche in a Newtonian sense. Instead, psyche and cosmos are understood as participating in a shared field of meaning, distinct phenomenal dimensions of consciousness. Their essential nature is that of consciousness. An idea that draws on Jung’s concept of synchronicity and challenges the modern assumption that all correlation must be reduced to efficient cause, Cosmos and Psyche.
Astrology thus functions as a symbolic cartography of human experience rather than a biological theory. Its symbols do not explain how traits arise, but articulate what kind of experience is likely to emerge.
Liz Greene’s depth-psychological approach to astrology further clarifies this distinction. Greene emphasizes that the birth chart is not a static list of traits, but a dynamic map of conscious and unconscious forces within the psyche, Dynamics of the Unconscious. Astrological symbols describe energies that may be expressed, repressed, or projected, often emerging indirectly through symptoms, compulsions, or repeated life patterns.
From this perspective, astrology parallels depth psychology rather than neuroscience. Both concern themselves with the tension between conscious intention and unconscious necessity. Greene argues that what is not consciously integrated inevitably asserts itself, shaping behavior and circumstance in ways that feel “fated” to the individual, Dynamics of the Unconscious. The nervous system provides the somatic ground for these dynamics, determining thresholds of tolerance and modes of regulation. Astrology provides a symbolic language through which these dynamics are narrated and interpreted. The apparent overlap between astrological typologies and nervous-system differences becomes intelligible when understood through temperament. Long before the development of neuroscience, cultures observed consistent patterns of emotional intensity, sociability, inhibition, and sensitivity. Astrology offered a mythopoetic vocabulary for these observations, organizing them into symbolic types rather than diagnostic categories. These symbols were never value-neutral predictions; they were interpretive tools. They allowed individuals to understand difference as meaningful rather than defective, and suffering as patterned, purposeful, rather than arbitrary. In this sense, astrology functioned less as a predictive science than as an existential anthropology.
Modern science rightly rejects astrology as a causal explanatory system. Yet this rejection does not negate astrology’s psychological function. As Tarnas notes, modernity is marked by a profound metaphysical disorientation—a loss of shared symbolic frameworks capable of integrating inner experience with a larger order of meaning. Astrology persists because it addresses questions neuroscience does not: Why am I like this? Why does this pattern repeat? How can difference be understood without moral judgment? These are not empirical questions, but interpretive ones.
The nervous system at birth is biologically determined; astrology is a symbolic language historically used to describe enduring patterns of temperament, psyche, and fate. Confusion arises when astrology is judged by criteria it never claimed to meet, or when neuroscience is expected to supply meaning rather than mechanism.
Properly reframed, astrology and neuroscience are not rivals but occupants of different explanatory domains. One measures, the other interprets. One describes how the nervous system functions; the other offers narratives through which human beings have long made sense of their inborn differences.
The enduring challenge is not to resurrect astrology as science, nor to reduce human experience to biology alone, but to integrate biological knowledge with symbolic understanding—without regression, superstition, or denial.
Brenton L. Delp
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