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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

Synchronicity As the Last Defense of Astrology

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Why Even Archetypal Astrology Cannot Be Made to Work

For centuries, astrology has been pronounced dead by science—yet it never quite dies. Disproved on every physical, logical, and statistical ground, it keeps reappearing in more sophisticated guises. The latest incarnation is archetypal astrology, inspired by Jung and developed most eloquently by cultural historian Richard Tarnas, author of Cosmos and Psyche.

Tarnas no longer speaks of planetary influences but of archetypal correlations: the heavens and the human psyche are said to “resonate” through synchronicity—a kind of acausal patterning between inner and outer events. Planets do not cause anything; they simply mirror meaning. The cosmos and consciousness, he suggests, move in tune.

It sounds profound, even beautiful. But the question remains: does it work? And if so, in what sense?

1. Synchronicity: A Poetic, Not a Physical, Idea

Jung's notion of synchronicity was a psychological attempt to honor the feeling of meaningful coincidence. You think of an old friend, and she suddenly calls. But Jung admitted he had no mechanism to explain how meaning could bridge mind and matter. Synchronicity was not a theory—it was a word for something uncanny.

When astrologers invoke synchronicity as their “explanation,” they merely repackage the mystery. Instead of asking how the planets could influence human affairs, they claim the universe somehow arranges correlations between the sky and the psyche. But what does that mean? If every event can be meaningfully linked to every other, then the term explains nothing—it is a philosophical placebo.

2. The Elasticity of Archetypes

In archetypal astrology, each planet symbolizes a timeless psychological pattern: Mars as assertiveness, Venus as love, Saturn as limitation, Uranus as rebellion, and so on. The system's appeal lies in its flexibility—whatever happens, one can always find a mythic correspondence.

But flexibility is also its downfall. An interpretive framework that can explain anything explains nothing. It lacks the ability to be wrong, which is the basic requirement for knowledge. The archetypal astrologer swims in a sea of analogies, connecting historical events and cultural moods to planetary alignments—after the fact, never before.

3. Post-Hoc Patterning

Tarnas claims, for instance, that Uranus-Pluto alignments coincide with periods of revolution, technological breakthrough, and radical transformation. But such phenomena are common in every century. Human history is so rich in turbulence that any long planetary cycle will overlap with something dramatic somewhere.

This is known as selective sampling. The pattern is seen because one looks for it. Without prediction, without control conditions, and without blind analysis, the result is confirmation bias on a cosmic scale.

4. “It Works for Me” — The Subjective Fallacy

When challenged, astrologers often retreat to experience: “I've seen it work.” But anecdotal accuracy is not empirical validation. Human beings are wired to perceive patterns, especially ones that flatter or reassure us. If a chart reading feels accurate, we remember it; if it misses, we reinterpret it or forget.

Psychologists call this the Forer or Barnum effect—the tendency to see vague, general statements as personally meaningful. Archetypal language, rich with mythic imagery, magnifies this effect beautifully. The accuracy seems miraculous, but it's psychological projection, not planetary precision.

5. The Problem of the Birth Moment

Even symbolic astrology still hinges on the birth chart—the exact time and place a person was born. That moment is said to encode the pattern of their psyche. Yet there is no reason why the act of emerging from the womb would have cosmic significance. Gestation is continuous; personality develops over years. The “snapshot of the heavens” is an arbitrary freeze-frame, not a meaningful imprint.

6. Synchronicity at Scale Becomes Absurd

If the entire cosmos participates in synchronistic meaning, then every event must be connected to every other. But that makes meaning itself indistinguishable from noise. Why would one planetary configuration coincide with a world war but not with a personal heartbreak? Without limiting principles, synchronicity dissolves into chaos—everything connects to everything, which means nothing connects to anything in particular.

7. The Psychological Truth Behind the Myth

None of this denies that astrology feels real. It gives shape to life's randomness, offering a story that links inner experience with cosmic order. In that sense, it functions like mythology: a narrative of participation in a vast living whole.

That's precisely why it persists. Astrology satisfies a deep human need for meaning in a disenchanted universe. It does not predict the future; it dramatizes it. It is not about the stars; it is about our longing for the stars to mean something.

8. The Last Refuge of the Spiritual Romantic

After physics dismissed cosmic influence, and psychology dismissed typological determinism, astrology retreated into the symbolic domain. It became a language of archetypes, not a map of causes. Yet even there, it fails to define what makes a given correspondence legitimate. Archetypal astrology is no longer a science, nor even a testable hypothesis—it is a style of interpretation, elevated to metaphysics.

It is the last refuge of the spiritual romantic, who cannot bear a meaningless cosmos. The move from causal astrology to synchronic astrology is not a deepening of insight, but a poetic retreat from falsification.

9. The Meaning-Making Animal

The persistence of astrology, then, tells us more about human cognition than about cosmic order. We are meaning-making creatures, evolved to see intention and significance everywhere. Thunder is the anger of the gods, and planetary motion must be about us.

Archetypal astrology re-enchants the sky with mythic significance, but that enchantment arises from us, not from the planets. It is projection mistaken for revelation.

10. A Beautiful Error

Astrology endures because it is beautiful. It offers narrative coherence in a world of blind forces. It speaks to the imagination, not the intellect. As long as we crave mythic order, we will turn to the heavens for stories of ourselves.

But beauty is not truth. The stars do not align for us. They burn, collapse, and explode, indifferent to our births and fates. The true wonder is not that the planets might care about us, but that we care so much about them.

In the end: Astrology, even in its archetypal form, cannot be made to “work” without abandoning what we mean by knowledge. It survives as poetry mistaken for science—an aesthetic of coincidence transformed into cosmic meaning. The final truth is not that astrology works in mysterious ways, but that the human mind does.

Give me 25 reasons why astrology simply cannot work

1. No known force connects planets to personalities.

Astrology assumes celestial bodies influence human behavior. But physics recognizes only four fundamental forces—gravity, electromagnetism, and the nuclear forces—and none can plausibly transmit personality traits from planets light-years away to a newborn's brain.

2. Gravitational effects are absurdly small.

The gravitational pull of the obstetrician or hospital building on a baby vastly exceeds that of distant planets. Yet astrologers ignore these local influences entirely.

3. The stars used in horoscopes have changed position.

Constellations have shifted due to precession of the equinoxes over the past 2,000 years. The “signs” used in astrology no longer align with the actual constellations in the sky, yet horoscopes haven't been corrected for this.

4. Astrological systems are inconsistent.

Western, Vedic, Chinese, and Mayan astrologies all assign radically different traits and fates to the same person. They can't all be right—and their contradictions suggest they're all wrong.

5. No statistical evidence supports astrology.

Decades of controlled studies have failed to find any correlation between astrological signs and personality tests, professions, or life outcomes. When astrologers are tested under blind conditions, their accuracy collapses to chance level.

6. Birth moment is arbitrary and biologically meaningless.

Astrology hinges on the exact time and place of birth, as if the cosmos “imprints” a person at that instant. But development is a continuous process—there's no physical reason a baby's personality would be stamped at the moment it exits the womb rather than conception, or any other point.

7. Human personality is shaped by genetics and environment.

Modern psychology and neuroscience explain behavior through heredity, upbringing, and experience—not planetary configurations. Astrology offers no mechanism compatible with these well-established sciences.

8. Predictions are vague and self-fulfilling.

Astrological statements are crafted to be Barnum statements—general enough that anyone can find themselves in them (“You sometimes doubt yourself, but are capable of great insight”). People then remember the hits and forget the misses, creating an illusion of accuracy.

9. Astrology is historically based on symbolism, not science.

Its origins lie in ancient mythologies and the poetic linking of heavens and humans. It was never derived from empirical observation or hypothesis testing—its categories reflect ancient storytelling, not natural laws.

10. It fails every test of falsifiability.

A scientific claim must be testable and falsifiable. When astrologers are proven wrong, they often invoke excuses—incorrect birth times, missing data, hidden planetary influences—making their system unfalsifiable and therefore unscientific.

In short: astrology appears meaningful because humans are pattern-seeking creatures, but its mechanisms violate physics, its claims fail testing, and its results collapse under scrutiny. It's an elegant mythic language, not a valid description of reality.

11. “Synchronicity” explains nothing.

Jung's idea of meaningful coincidence was a poetic metaphor for the feeling that inner and outer events line up. But it offered no predictive mechanism, no criteria for when coincidences should occur, and no way to test “meaningfulness” objectively. Invoking synchronicity simply replaces one mystery (astrological influence) with another (cosmic meaning without causation).

12. Archetypal resonance is circular.

Archetypal astrologers like Richard Tarnas claim that planetary alignments “resonate” with collective psychological themes. But the themes are defined after the fact—wars, revolutions, or artistic movements are interpreted to match whichever planetary cycle happens to be active. There's no prediction, only poetic pattern-matching.

13. “It works for me” is anecdotal, not evidence.

Personal conviction that astrology “works” arises from confirmation bias: people remember hits, reinterpret misses, and read ambiguous symbols to fit experience. This is subjective validation, not proof of an external correspondence between planets and persons.

14. The interpretive latitude is unlimited.

In archetypal astrology, symbols can mean anything—Mars can stand for aggression, courage, initiative, or sexuality; Venus for love, pleasure, beauty, or diplomacy. With such open elasticity, any event can be retrofitted into the schema, guaranteeing apparent success but eliminating falsifiability.

15. Collective correlations ignore base rates.

Astrologers often cite historical coincidences—say, Uranus-Pluto alignments during revolutions. But revolutions, wars, and cultural upheavals are constant features of human history; selective sampling ensures there will always be a match somewhere in the long planetary cycle.

16. The “psychological” version still depends on the birth chart.

Even if astrology is reframed as symbolic language rather than cosmic causation, it still claims that the moment of birth has some privileged symbolic meaning. Without a causal link, that's mere numerological coincidence elevated to metaphysics.

17. Intuitive accuracy can be explained psychologically.

Astrologers may seem insightful because they are often skilled at cold reading and empathic listening—picking up cues, mirroring emotions, and offering archetypal narratives that feel profound. The “accuracy” comes from human psychology, not from the heavens.

18. Synchronicity collapses under scale.

If every planetary configuration is meaningfully related to human affairs, the world would be flooded with unmanageable synchronicities. Why would some events resonate and not others? Without limiting principles, the idea becomes meaningless.

19. Post-hoc matching is inevitable in symbolic systems.

After something happens, humans are superb at finding symbolic echoes. This retrospective fitting happens in dreams, prophecy, and divination alike. The capacity to connect symbols to events tells us about human cognition, not cosmic order.

20. Astrology's persistence reveals psychological need, not cosmic design.

People turn to astrology because it offers narrative coherence, self-understanding, and enchantment in a disenchanted world. Its endurance shows our hunger for meaning, not evidence that planets influence people or synchronize with psyche.

In short: Astrology—mechanistic, archetypal, or synchronic—is a meaning-making art, not a knowledge-producing science. Its “successes” dissolve when examined statistically, logically, or philosophically. What remains is a rich symbolic mythology that reflects the human mind far more accurately than it maps the cosmos.

21. Controlled tests of expert astrologers show chance-level results.

In the Carlson double-blind study (1985, Nature), professional astrologers were asked to match natal charts with psychological profiles of real individuals. Despite full cooperation and astrologers' involvement in designing fair conditions, results were indistinguishable from random guessing. This landmark study remains unrefuted in principle, despite repeated complaints about methodology.

22. Repeated replications have failed to recover any signal.

Subsequent investigations—by Geoffrey Dean, Ivan Kelly, Suitbert Ertel, and others—retested astrologers using different datasets, methods, and cultural contexts. No matter how sympathetic the design, no replicable statistical correlation between planetary positions and personality traits, life events, or compatibility has ever emerged. The data converge on zero effect size.

23. Large-scale quantitative studies find no correlation with personality types.

Astrology predicts systematic differences among people born under different signs. However, analyses of thousands of birth dates and standardized personality inventories (like the Eysenck and Big Five tests) show no relationship. Libras are not more balanced, Scorpios not more intense, and Capricorns not more ambitious—beyond random noise.

24. The “Mars Effect” evaporated under strict controls.

Michel Gauquelin's famous “Mars effect” (athletes supposedly born when Mars was rising or culminating) seemed to offer hope for astrology. But when replication studies were performed under independent supervision, the effect disappeared. Statistical artifacts, selection bias, and misrecorded birth times explained the initial anomaly.

25. Qualitative readings collapse under blind conditions.

When astrologers read charts with identifying details removed—no name, photo, gender, or feedback—they lose their apparent accuracy. Their readings become generic and interchangeable. What clients perceive as “deeply personal insight” in live sessions is due to empathy, feedback cues, and interpretive flexibility, not planetary information.

In short: even when astrologers collaborate, when conditions are fair, and when sympathetic researchers analyze results, astrology's correlations vanish. The failures are not due to bias or hostility—they arise because there is no underlying signal to detect.

As a bonus: give 5 reasons how astrology could work.

Perfect — that's the right spirit of intellectual fairness. If we grant astrology its best imaginable case, we can ask: What would have to be true for astrology to work? Below are five speculative possibilities—none verified, all deeply problematic, but worth articulating so we see what's missing.

1. A new kind of information field connecting mind and cosmos.

Astrology could work if there existed an undiscovered informational field linking human consciousness with cosmic patterns—something like Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance or a universal “psychophysical medium.” In such a framework, the planets wouldn't cause events but encode them symbolically within this field, allowing synchronicity to be structured rather than random.

Problem: no empirical evidence exists for such a field; it would require rewriting physics from the ground up.

2. A quantum-entangled or holographic universe where meaning is nonlocal.

If consciousness and the cosmos were somehow entangled, planetary motions could correlate with psychological states through nonlocal informational resonance. In a holographic cosmos, every part reflects the whole; the birth chart could be one tiny reflection of cosmic structure.

Problem: quantum entanglement doesn't transmit macroscopic or semantic information—stretching this metaphor collapses into mysticism, not science.

3. Cosmic periodicities subtly shaping biological rhythms.

Astrology might have a biological footing if cosmic cycles (solar, lunar, or planetary) had long-term influences on the environment—affecting magnetism, radiation, or climate—and thereby indirectly shaping human biology and mood patterns over millennia.

Problem: only solar and lunar cycles show measurable biological effects; planetary cycles are far too weak or slow to matter.

4. Archetypal symbolism embedded in the collective unconscious.

Jung's hypothesis could be reimagined: human minds might share an innate symbolic attunement to celestial rhythms, perhaps inherited culturally or neurologically. We project archetypes onto the sky because our myth-making instincts evolved under it.

Problem: this would make astrology a psychological projection, not an external truth; its “working” would be metaphorical, not causal.

5. Self-fulfilling prophecy and narrative coherence.

Astrology could “work” insofar as it shapes human behavior. Believing one is assertive (Mars), cautious (Saturn), or idealistic (Neptune) can subtly steer choices that make those traits real. The horoscope becomes a self-creating story—psychological magic rather than cosmic law.

Problem: that's not astrology predicting reality, but belief producing it.

In short: Astrology could work if the universe contained undiscovered psychophysical linkages, or if the human mind were wired to mirror cosmic order symbolically. But these are romantic hypotheses, not tested realities. They show what would have to be true for astrology to make sense—and, by contrast, how far our current knowledge stands from that enchanted possibility.