Archetypes in astrology: what the term does

Hardly any term is used as often in modern astrological writing as the archetype. It is worth knowing where it comes from — because it did not begin in astrology.

Origin

The term is old — in Plato it is the original form that particular things partake of — but its present use goes back to C. G. Jung. For him, archetypes are structures of the collective unconscious: not fixed images, but dispositions to bring certain images forth.

Jung himself took an interest in astrology. Through the channels of his school the term entered the astrological writing of the second half of the twentieth century and became the standard language there: Mars as the archetype of the warrior, Venus as the archetype of the lover, and so on.

What the term does

Two things, and neither is a small matter.

It provides a link to a widely shared language. Anyone who says “the warrior archetype” is understood without any prior knowledge of astrology. In conversation, that is a real gain.

And it keeps the field of meaning open. An archetype is not a fixed content but a range. That matches the way a planet actually works: Mars stands for what separates, and what that becomes in a particular case — a surgeon, a quarrel, a tool — depends on the rest of the chart.

What it cannot do

This is where the problem lies, and it is a problem of craft.

The archetype concept describes meaning, not condition. It says what Mars stands for. It says nothing about whether this Mars, in this chart, can act at all.

Yet that is exactly what a reading turns on. A Mars dignified, angular, in its own sect is something altogether different from a Mars in fall, combust, in the twelfth house — and both are the same archetype. Anyone who reads in archetypes alone cannot tell the two apart, and ends up describing the same picture of Mars for everyone.

A workable relationship

The archetype is well suited to explaining to the person who has come for a reading what is being talked about. It is unsuited as a basis for judgement.

The workable order runs like this: first the condition — dignity, house, sect, combustion, aspects — and then the language in which the result is conveyed. Anyone who goes about it the other way round has a fine story and no judgement.

See also: the planets and their condition, the order of a reading.