Now that we’ve explored Jung’s core psychological theories, let’s return to where we began: astrology. This wasn’t just a passing interest. For Jung, astrology was not a belief system—it was a symbolic language, a code that mirrored the deep structures of the psyche.
Jung’s concept of archetypes—universal images like the Mother, the Hero, or the Trickster—found a natural resonance in astrology. The zodiac signs, planets, and aspects act like mythic characters, each embodying a particular archetypal expression or mode of being.
Even his psychological typology, introduced in 1921, Psychological Types, reflects astrological patterns: Fire signs correspond with intuition, Water with feeling, Earth with sensation, and Air with thinking. These associations reveal a shared symbolic grammar between astrology and analytical psychology.
Jung’s serious engagement with astrology began around 1910–1911. During this period, he was intensively reading theosophical and occult literature, including the works of Alan Leo, one of the first modern astrologers to link astrology with psychology. Leo’s emphasis on zodiac signs as expressions of temperament deeply influenced Jung, reinforcing his developing system of psychological types.
Liz Greene's book, Jungs Studies in Astrology, a famous letter to Sigmund Freud dated June 12, 1911, Jung wrote:
“My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you. In the case of one lady, the calculation of the positions of the stars at her nativity produced a quite definite character picture, with several biographical details which did not belong to her but to her mother – and the characteristics fitted the mother to a T. The lady suffers from an extraordinary mother complex. I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment.”
Freud was not pleased. Psychology was still fighting for its place in the scientific world, and Freud saw astrology as a threat to its empirical credibility. But for Jung, astrology wasn’t pseudoscience—it was a symbolic mirror of psychic truths, encoded in the heavens through mythic projection.
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Jung’s engagement with symbolic systems deepened. He began corresponding with astrologers and integrating astrological insights into his therapeutic work. He read Max Heindel and developed a friendship with John Thorburn, a philosophy professor and practicing astrologer who provided Jung with horoscopic interpretations.
By the late 1920s, Jung's interest in symbolism intensified as he immersed himself in alchemy, mythology, and dream analysis. It was during this time that he met Heinz Strauss, a German astrologer and historian of astrology, and Sigrid Strauss-Klöbe, a psychotherapist. Between 1928 and 1932, the couple organized small study groups in Germany focused on integrating astrology with psychological research. Sigrid’s paper, The Psychological Influence of the Symbol in Astrology, intrigued Jung, and she later worked closely with him.
One of Jung’s key students, Lilian Frey-Rohn, was also an astrologer. She played a role in shaping Jung’s formulation of synchronicity, his theory of meaningful acausal connection, which he publicly introduced in the 1950s, though its roots were planted decades earlier, in part through his astrological work.
By the 1930s, Jung was publicly acknowledging astrology as a valid symbolic system. In a 1934 seminar on dream analysis, he said:
“Astrology represents the summation of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity.”
From this point onward, astrology became one of the many symbolic traditions Jung used to investigate the psyche. He saw it as a repository of mythic images and archetypal truths—a mirror of the collective unconscious projected onto the sky.
Astrology helped Jung frame time not as linear, mechanical clockwork, but as a qualitative process—an unfolding of symbolic meaning. It supported his core belief that the universe and human consciousness are connected not causally, but archetypally, through a shared symbolic field.
Astrology gave Jung a living tradition through which he could express his theories: the archetypes, the subtle functions of consciousness, and the deep timing of our lives. And what makes this so remarkable is that Jung was not a mystic disguised as a scientist—he was a scientist who saw that myth, symbol, and meaning had been prematurely exiled from psychology.