Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View [Hardcover]

Richard Tarnas (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 19, 2006

Richard Tarnas’s The Passion of the Western Mind—acclaimed by leading voices in philosophy, religion, psychology, and history—sets the stage for this major work, thirty years in the making, that dramatically reframes our understanding of the universe in the light of extraordinary new evidence.

Cosmos and Psyche is the first book by a widely respected scholar to demonstrate the existence of a consistent correspondence between planetary movements and the unfolding drama of human history. A vast and impressive body of evidence illuminates patterns of meaning and precise correlations between the universe and the world of human endeavor. With meticulous detail, Richard Tarnas takes us on a journey that begins with the ancient Greeks and culminates in our own era and its transformative potential, putting into perspective these chaotic, tumultuous times—from the sixties to September 11, 2001—and pointing the way towards the future.

In terms of planetary cycles, our present moment in history is most comparable to the period five hundred years ago—that era of “extraordinary turbulence and creativity,” the High Renaissance. Not since Copernicus conceived the heliocentric theory has the human community faced such a profound realignment of the way we think. Readers of every persuasion will be impressed by the vast canvas here, the wealth of research and analysis, and the profound conclusions that may be drawn—conclusions that reunite religion and science, and restore a transcendent dimension to the universe.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

According to Tarnas, acclaimed author of The Passion of the Western Mind, history is on the verge of a major shift, comparable to the one wrought by Copernicus and Galileo, but a seemingly antiscientific one: an astrological turn that can only be understood thorough chronicling planetary alignments as they correlate to the rise of the modern mind over the last 500 years. Understanding planetary alignments, for Tarnas, is crucial to the world's future and requires "a genuine dialogue" with the cosmos, by "opening ourselves more fully" to "the other," to ancient and indigenous epistemologies, even "to other forms of life, other modes of the universe's self-disclosure." Filled with philosophical, religious, literary and scientific thinking ranging from Luther and Kepler through Hemingway and even Hitchcock and Dylan, Tarnas's book is not only sweeping in subject but dense and sometimes painfully slow going. It requires at once a strong background in the history of modern thought, an advanced knowledge of astrology, a willingness to withhold skepticism about the role of planetary alignments of the past in understanding life today and the avoidance of imminent world catastrophe. Tarnas's call to redefine what we consider as "legitimate knowledge" will resonate in some sectors, but it will be a tough sell with the more scientifically hardheaded. (Jan. 23)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

World history is vast and confusing. How to find coherence? Tarnas thinks the answer lies in astrology. Possessing a tremendous amount of historical knowledge, the author correlates human history's big events and personalities with the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Why only Pluto, but not Pluto-size objects (or, for that matter, extrasolar planets) recently discovered, should reign over us goes unexamined, but be that as it may, Tarnas discusses charts, planetary alignments, and archetypal personality traits embodied by the planets so aligned. Reaching into mythology and Jungian psychology, Tarnas associates history makers with, for example, a Neptune-Pluto conjunction. Averring an empirical basis to his research, Tarnas proves a determined writer whose fortress of connected dates, historical trends, and philosophical thought defies would-be challengers to his cosmic viewpoint. Casual astrology buffs and readers of the daily horoscope may find this volume heavy going. This is a book for those who are as intrigued by and as convinced of astrology's validity as Tarnas. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition, First Printing. edition (January 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670032921
• ISBN-13: 978-0670032921
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #570,341 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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152 of 161 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Visionary History: infectiously readable!, January 19, 2006

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P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Hardcover)

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas (Viking) Students of Carl Jung and astrologers will find Tarnas's new work an extension of their own cultural psychology of cycles. To what degree the skeptical majority will be willing to read this large work and suspend of their skepticism long enough to seriously entertain Tarnas's correlations and conclusions is another matter altogether. Much as in his previous work, The Passion of the Western Mind, Tarnas has a gift for global statements and pattern-recognition often missed in less far-reaching histories. Essentially this work is an account of the postmodern mind or the cultural formation of self within the last 500 years with an eye towards the future. The book brims with intense learning, literary history, social movements, philosophical schools, scientific trends, business and economic inclinations, scientific developments, environmental changes in particulars are woven together in to decipherable patterns of cyclic development. Readers of Joseph Campbell's Masks of God will find in Tarnas a fuller account of modern creative mythology, often disguised in our world as history and ideology, science and religion. Like his preceding work, this volume is a work of speculative history as corresponding to the long cycles of the outer planets such as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. These 20 and 30 some odd year cycles offer a grid for Tarnas to notice uncanny correspondences between historical and cultural events in our globalized world which seems to demonstrate a collective unconscious and a human consciousness that will continue to change in profound and essentially unpredictable but radical ways in the future. Tarnas recognizes that we live in a time of incredible cultural and scientific ferment that will radically remake what human beings are and can do in the near futures. These times are fraught with great danger and great promise. Even if one is unwilling to seriously entertain the correspondences between astrological planetary cycles and world-historical events, the book is inspiring because of the way the author sees how we can grasp hold of our future and ride the cycles much as a surfer rides a wave. In many ways Tarnas' study represents one of the most sustained arguments for pattern and predictability in historical processes. One that may set historians on edge because it almost seems to be saying that noticing the cycles of the outer planets can reveal deep patterns of correspondence in terrestrial events. However one responds to this organizing claim in this study, Tarnas has created a great visionary historical work that will influence many, not only in the new age counterculture but also in the business entrepreneurial world of creative innovation and social engineering. If for no other reason, this work has importance as a continuation of Carl Jung's cultural psychology of archetypes and how they can be applied to the interpretation of contemporary events and social and cultural trends in the arts, business, politics, science and religion.

81 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm Convinced, January 26, 2006

By 

Grant Orsborn (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Hardcover)

When I read Tarnas' first book, "The Passion of The Western Mind," I was incredibly impressed by the depth of his insight, especially in the Epilogue, which expressed a whole constellation of profound ideas concerning the dialectical progression of world views and the relationship of self and world that I (and probably many others) had been blindly groping towards but had neither the breadth of knowledge nor the integrative power to articulate. In those thirty pages, Tarnas managed to formulate not only a tenable, but a rigorously convincing theory of how the subject-object dichotomy and the disenchantment of the cosmos (which he renders intelligible as the necessary price that we have paid for the individuation of the modern human subject) can be overcome. Since then, through years of study and thought, I have gone back to that Epilogue many times, always impressed, not only by the unique depth and clarity of the insights expressed therein, but by those insights' applicability to a vast number of unresolved intellectual and practical issues that constellate our current, postmodern world view.

After reading "Passion," I did some research on Tarnas and I discovered that he was interested in astrology. At first, I was disappointed that the man who had written "Passion" could believe in something as obviously naive and ridiculous as astrology. However, after reading several elegant and rigorously reasoned essays Tarnas had written about archetypal astrology, I was forced to reconsider my position. Over the next few years, I bought several books on astrology, and I found them to be interesting, though I remained unconvinced since the philosophical arguments contained in the books that I read (when they bothered at all) were generally cursory and unsophisticated.

Over the last few months, I have been waiting for "Cosmos and Psyche" with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, hoping that it would live up to the enormous promise of "Passion" while fearing that Tarnas might have gone a way that I could not follow. However, I have just finished reading "Cosmos and Psyche" and it surpasses all of my expectations. I think it can be safely said, without exaggeration, that this book could initiate a global transformation of world views on the level of the transformations initiated by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Not only is the argument the clearest, the most rigorous, and the most inspired feat of sustained philosophical inquiry I have ever read, but the sheer volume of the evidence that Tarnas presents blasted away the last lingering shreds of skepticism I had been holding onto. Anyone who reads this book will be stunned by the synchronistic (not mechanistically causal) correlations of events in human history with the movements of the planets. There are too many of these incredible revelations to list here. Just read the book. Even if you're ultimately unconvinced, which I find highly unlikely assuming that you're willing to question all of your most basic assumptions (the primary philosophical task), you will still be impressed by the consistently high level of discourse that Tarnas has brought to bear on this "outsider" (at least academically speaking) subject. It's impossible to say whether this book will have an immediate catalyzing effect or whether it will take decades for it to come to popular consciousness, but I sincerely hope that its genius is recognized sooner rather than later.

107 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A superb, tour de force, February 11, 2006

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Dr. C. H. Roberts (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View (Hardcover)

Don't let the references to astrology in the other reviews turn you off toward reading this book. I am not particularly interested in astrology, and yet I found this book to be a breath taking, far ranging analysis of where Western culture and history have come from, where it is now, and where it is going. I have been looking for a book that could explain the spiritual dimensions of how, and why, the world has been forever changed. It is not simply a matter of having more technology today than we did 50 years ago. This goes back to the paradigm shift in how reality was viewed as the result of Copernicus' resurrection of ancient Greek philosophical theories of the Universe and our place in it. This book provides a well written, engrossing account of this story and how we got where we are today...and where we are going! Highly recommended!