Humanistic Astrology and An Astrological Mandala

Rudhyar's 1936 book The Astrology of Personality is generally treated as the founding statement of humanistic astrology, an approach informed by Jungian psychology that read a birth chart as a portrait of a person's potential wholeness rather than a set of predicted events. The approach shaped most of the psychologically oriented astrology written after him.

Rudhyar took no part in the 1925 sitting through which Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the raw symbolic images for all 360 degrees of the zodiac. Decades later he wrote his own complete set of interpretive keynotes for those same 360 degrees and published them in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a personal, extensively reworked elaboration rather than a transcription of the 1925 material. That text is the wording now carried by the Sabian symbol degrees recorded here, and it remains in copyright under the Rudhyar estate, so, for rights reasons, the specific keynotes are not reproduced in this article. What can be said is structural: each degree receives a short condensed statement meant to distill the psychological meaning Rudhyar read into the image assigned to it, continuing the humanistic reframing that runs through the whole of his work.