The Holistic Zodiac

In his book The Pulse of Life, Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985), the philosopher, astrologer and occultist, as well as principal author of the Philosophy of Wholeness, presents the twelve signs as psychological types stemming from his vision of a holistic reality. In the page of each zodiacal sign, I provide a psychological outline of its type. I want to give in this page a brief overview of Rudhyar’s astrology as it pertains to the zodiac, and thus provide context for what you’ll find in each sign’s page. The content of said pages and what follows here is largely taken from the Spanish translation of that book, except as noted.

Order and Chaos

We live in a world of change where reality around us is dynamic, thus any philosophy of reality must be dynamic as well, able to explain the unpredictable nature of life experiences. In such a world of chaos, we perceive order in the celestial plane and also intuitively in our bodies. There are cyclical processes in both that repeat rhythmically and bring a sense of order given their predictive nature.

The search for order has been perhaps mankind’s greatest quest and it undoubtedly began with astrology. However, when humanity reached a more sophisticated level of consciousness, the search became intellectual and scientific reasoning took over. But man can only reason on what he has experienced individually or collectively, and man’s experience is essentially dual. His senses tell of an external disorder in sharp contrast to his internal order. The quest may be an attempt to “elevate” his perceptions to a level where they will feel just as ordered.

Astrology tried to “make sense” of the perceived disorder by looking at the order shown in the firmament. It is a method by which the ordered structure of celestial light may be used to prove the existence of an order, hidden but nonetheless real, on the surface of the Earth, as far as human experience is concerned.

The Old Paradigm

There are two ways to interpret the duality of celestial order and terrestrial chaos. The first and most popular is to consider the celestial level as positive, with intrinsic order, possessing active and controlling Powers that constantly influence the activities, impulses, desires and passions found in the terrestrial level which, in turn, is negative, passive, receptive and intrinsically chaotic.

The celestial plane becomes the world of ideas. In medieval philosophy it corresponded to Natura naturans: active nature, whereas the terrestrial plane was Natura naturata: passive nature. “Human nature”, from such a point of view, almost invariably acquires a pejorative meaning. It is perceived as depraved by the “original sin”, needing to be controlled by the will of the celestial Powers and the reason of the Divine Intellect, or redeemed through the sacrifice and compassion of an ethereal being, a “Son of God”.

Needless to say such interpretation has been held by most philosophies through history, creating a nearly-absolute dualism between good and evil, spirit and matter, God and nature, intellect and emotions, “higher” and “lower” levels. Every human experience has been divided in two fundamentally irreconcilable parts, despite human will and Divine Love.

A Holistic Approach

In the second interpretation, which unfortunately few people pursue, there is no duality of order and chaos but order everywhere. However, we are unable to visualize the order because it manifests at a more inclusive level. As a physiological organism, a human being is an ordered entity within a closed body, or bodies in some traditions, that could be called a “lesser whole”. As long as there is no need for identification with a “greater whole”, reality remains ordered. However, that is not possible, for the “lesser whole” functions within the “greater whole” and thus exists in both spheres in constant interaction. Such interaction is viewed as disorder and suffering by the “lesser whole” but as cyclic creative activity and sacrifice by the “greater whole”.¹

Rather than to consider one nature separated in two levels, one being ordered, good, and celestial while the other is chaotic, darkened by sin, and terrestrial, let’s look at one human experience consisting of two phases. The experience is that of chaos in the jungle and order in the firmament. The first phase is conditioned by human suffering when a “lesser whole” relates to other “lesser wholes”. The second phase is that of more distant human relationships, perhaps in the form of laws, of a “lesser whole” with the “greater whole”. However, both are different phases of the same experience: relating to the outside world. What is different is our perspective to the experience, so we place them in two boxes: one with individual experiences, often painful and limited, and the other with collective ones, remote and at times inspiring.

When we observe in nature the interplay of “lesser wholes” with the “greater whole”, we find cyclical processes, related to day and night, the phases of the moon, or the seasons in a year, and we realize that life is a cyclical interchange of polar energies. Both factors are always at play with varying intensity in every experience. When one energy is increased, the polar opposite is diminished. Every form of energy is always available within an organism and in every experience, although some of them may be so diminished as to be nearly non-existent. Rather than non-existence, Rudhyar talks about latency, so some energies may be latent in certain experiences, but all of them are always present.

Every human being is a whole but he is a “lesser” whole when compared to human society or the universe. A man living in a desert island without any human relationship is not an individual but a lonely organism with no meaning in terms of humanity. An individual is a distinct expression of the collective or generic human nature. What he received from the collectivity before him must return to the one after him. There does not exist an individual in a vacuum. Every organic whole exists within a “greater whole” and contains multiple “lesser wholes”. In the end, we are social individuals.

The Zodiac

Astrology is fundamentally based in the zodiac. All other significant factors, such as the sun, the moon, the planets (as points of light in a particular orbit and nothing else), house cusps, etc., refer to the zodiac which defines the twelve phases of the prototypical cycle: the solar year.

Although the most obvious cycle in our living experience is that of the day and night, we are conscious only half of the time, so the cycle reminds us more of life and death. However, primitive man quickly realized that there is another cycle, that of the seasons and their impact in the biosphere, notably in the vegetable kingdom. Man is able to experience all phases in full consciousness, unlike day and night. As such, the zodiac is a cycle of experience. It is a cycle that has nothing to do with far-away stars loosely arranged in constellations and everything to do with yearly transformations first observed in the vegetation found in the template region of the northern hemisphere, where astrology was conceived. This may seem arbitrary nowadays, with instant connectivity around the globe, but it is a fact that western civilization, arguably the cradle of psychomental progress, originated in that region.

In antiquity, the symbology used in astrology came from the biological experience we observed, especially in vegetation. Even the so-called “spiritual teachings” were centered around sexual symbols and “vitalistic” practices, as found in the forms of yoga and tantra practiced in ancient India. Over time, the Masters focused their experience, and that of their followers, onto a new structure of human integration: the individual ego. This necessitated the translation of the old integration symbols to the new language of the ego, which is basically intellectual and psychological. Unable to adapt, astrology was replaced by Greek science, logic and psychology, for the ego seeks analysis and rationality. In trying to develop “rigorous thinking”, western civilization has repudiated or devalued all organic experiences that gave our ancestors a sense of cyclical living where all situations were holistic experiences. Reason divided and neatly catalogued our experiences, and that gave rise to the duality of body and soul.

Nowadays, astrology tries to integrate the old symbols with modern psychological concepts, in particular the holistic approach of Carl Jung’s Analytic Psychology. It aims to restore our ability to see our chaotic experiences as existential wholes resulting from our interrelationships with other people and with a Greater Whole in which we participate as “lesser wholes”. What the zodiac teaches us is to perceive the dualism of individual and collective experiences not as a choice between one or the other but a gradation of more of one and less of the other. We let go of ethical judgments to embrace aesthetic ones. The dualism persists but as a dynamic process in which both polar opposites interpenetrate and transform each other constantly. No experience is therefore better or worse, more constructive or destructive. Everything is in the whole, what changes is the proportion of the polar opposites in a given combination.

Combination Forces

For any such combination to acquire meaning, it must be first understood. We do so by measuring the relative contribution of each polar component within the combination. And we can do that by measuring the relative intensity of each one according to its place within the whole, taking into account the moment it represents in the cycle, like being the “spring” or “winter” phase, or in the “waxing” or “waning” half. Each zodiacal phase, each astrological sign, represents a mode of human experience in which both basic forces are more or less active. Rudhyar named them the Day and Night forces, corresponding to the portion of daytime and nighttime, respectively, measured at the beginning of a particular phase in the year: the sign cusp.

Based on such criteria, we have four obvious important moments based on the ebb and flow of daytime and nighttime throughout the year:

• Winter Solstice: when the Day Force is at minimum intensity (daytime is shortest) with the corresponding Night Force at maximum intensity (longest nighttime). It marks the start of Capricorn.
• Vernal Equinox: when the Day Force and the Night Force have equal intensity, given that the former has been increasing since the solstice while the latter has been decreasing. Physically, daytime and nighttime are of equal length.² It marks the start of Aries.
• Summer Solstice: when the Day Force is at maximum intensity and the Night Force at minimum intensity. It marks the start of Cancer.
• Autumnal Equinox: when the Day Force and the Night Force have equal intensity once more, this time from the diminishing Day Force and the growing Night Force. It marks the start of Libra.

Armed with these tools, we can begin our analysis of the twelve combinations of Day Force and Night Force intensities that are the signs. All we need now is to pick the start for the cycle represented by the zodiac. It is logical to assume one of the four key moments mentioned earlier. Given that our philosophy of human experience tries not to favor one pole over the other but emphasize the holistic nature of all life experiences, the best start is one of the equinoxes. Human nature is such that we link beginnings with sunrise, and thus the logical choice is the equinox that marks the increase in daytime with corresponding ascendancy of the Day Force: the vernal equinox (Aries 0⁰), which refers to the March equinox in the northern hemisphere.

On the Day and Night Forces

In cyclical existence, the beginning of a new cycle immediately follows the ending of the previous one, and so it is pointless to discuss the meaning of the start of a cycle without understanding the meaning of the entire cycle, as a whole. To do that, we must discuss what the Day Force and Night Force mean in psychological terms. As we’ve mentioned, Rudhyar follows the concepts of Analytical Psychology developed by Carl Jung. In particular, both men use personality to mean an integrated human being at the psychomental level, the current level of humanity, what we earlier called a “lesser whole”.

The Day Force is a personifying energy. It gives rise to new ideas and spiritual concepts, and makes abstract notions real, concrete. It begins to develop near Christmas (Capricorn), symbol of the spiritual Incarnation, although it only begins to be noticed in Aries, symbol of germination and adolescence. It reaches maturity in Cancer, symbol of personal realization through marriage and the responsibilities of establishing a home. The overall result of the Day Force is the integrated personality.

The Night Force is a contracting energy, drawing the personalities together. In Cancer (the home) it integrates the man or the woman, the child arrives in Leo, and the servants and educators in Virgo. But it is in Libra, symbol of social activity, that the personality establishes relationships aiming to the development of a cultural and spiritual community. Scorpio seeks fruitful relationships, as in business or politics, while Sagittarius goes after the most distant relationships, in the form of travel, higher education and philosophy. It reaches its apex in Capricorn, the symbol of the State. The Night Force will highlight the value of all that refers to society.

Personality and Society. These are the two polarities felt since birth by human beings. But no experience is purely personal or purely social, so we refer back to the “more or less” gradation. In the daytime, we experience the sun as our source of light, at nighttime we realize it is one more star in the galaxy. Although the perspective has shifted, the reality is the same, just as we are social personalities.

Personality and Society. If we take these two entities at the level of consciousness, they become the conscious mind and the collective unconscious, marked by rational thinking and irrationality, respectively. Should we try to understand every experience from the perspective of the conscious mind, the ego, we have no choice but to apply the ethical distinction of being either positive and good (rational) or negative and bad (irrational). The holistic approach is to view every human experience having both a rational (conscious) and an irrational (subconscious) components in varying proportions.

On Spirit

Both activities mentioned earlier, personifying and contracting, are integrating activities and thus both the Day Force and the Night Force are integrating forces. Viewed holistically, they are “whole-making” activities and forces and, as such, work under the Principle of Wholeness which Rudhyar calls Spirit when applied to the human plane.

Spirit is not an entity and certainly not God, it is the principle by which the whole is more than the mere assemblage of its parts, what makes the parts work together for the function of the whole, and why the whole exists as the interrelatedness of its parts. The Day Force, as component of Spirit, integrates all the psychomental disparities within an individual through the process Jung called individuation. The Night Force, on the other hand, integrates social communities through the equivalent process of collectivization, which relies on the individual’s relatedness.

Gifts of the Spirit

The yearly cycle of twelve signs, the zodiac, is also accompanied by twelve lunations, smaller cycles of relationship between the two lights of the sky: Sun and Moon. Such cycles begin with the new moon, when Moon disappears as it conjoins Sun in a ritual of spiritual fecundation. Thus we speak of twelve acts of fecundation, from twelve specific needs that may be filled by solar energy or Spirit.

Rudhyar’s book An Astrological Triptych is composed of three main sections outlining what he calls “the illumined road” of living our personal destiny (dharma). In the introduction of the section titled Gifts of the Spirit, Rudhyar writes: “Every human individual, in so far as he can be considered a complete and relatively independent whole, is in himself a zodiac. In him can be found all types of human responses to life. In him the characteristic qualities of each of the twelve zodiacal signs operate in varying degrees. However, one, or a very few, of these qualities … predominate”.

Such predominance determines the psychological type to which he belongs and becomes his dominant zodiacal sign, or signs in a few cases. This is similar to how a predominance of similar traits of character makes him an extrovert or introvert, and a thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition psychological type according to Jung’s classification.

Each type reacts in a specific manner of behavior, thinking and feeling toward life experiences, and tends to exaggerate its characteristic attitudes. One function becomes overdeveloped at the expense of a complementary function. Spirit, as the power to restore balance, bestows a spiritual Gift on each sign to assimilate its combination holistically. I will thus include each sign’s Gift in its page.

Practical Considerations

In each zodiacal page, I will include the more traditional astrological information of the sign, along with the relative intensity of the Day and Night forces, as I will presently explain using Scorpio’s data for reference.³

It is easy to note the emphasis I place on numerology, which I consider to be the foundation of all esoteric astrological interpretations. The deep meaning of Scorpio, for example, has more to do with being the eighth phase of the zodiac than with generic or mythical attributes of a scorpion, an eagle or a phoenix, all symbols of the sign. The same is true with the sign’s element and mode, they could be understood by the relative place (ordinal number) each holds within the complete set. I will now provide a very brief discussion about the information presented with the symbol.

It all starts with the four critical moments outlined earlier, the solstices and equinoxes, moments of special activity of the life force. However, the type of energy release is clearly different at each of those times, which gives rise to the notion of four elements, to wit: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. When looking at the sunset position throughout the year, we realize that it sets farthest south at the winter solstice. From that moment on, the sunset moves north (correlating with the increase in Day Force) and it reaches its northernmost point six months later at the summer solstice when the sun appears to stop and reverse direction, moving southward for the remaining six months. Such cyclical movement resembles the motion of a pendulum where the solstices mark the end points, the time when the pendulum appears to stay still, indicating maximum potential energy.⁴ From that perspective, the equinoxes represent the moments when the pendulum is perpendicular to the ground, moving with highest velocity and maximum kinetic energy.

Therefore we have two kinds of factors: at the equinoxes the momentum of the life-force is greatest while at the solstices one of the polarities of that force is felt most intensely. It follows that equinoctial elements, Fire (Aries) and Air (Libra) are expressions of momentum and motion while solstitial elements, Water (Cancer) and Earth (Capricorn) are expressions of polarity and realization. Their effects on the Day and Night forces were outlined earlier but we quantify each component on a 1–6 scale, not 0–5 because both forces are in operation on every sign.⁵ In the vegetable kingdom, the period Aries to Libra represents the realm of leaf. It begins with the germination in spring (Aries) and reaches full maturation in the summer (Cancer). Conversely, the Libra to Aries portion is the realm of seed, when vegetation is latent, living beneath the crust of the earth. Leaf and seed are two great symbols of objectivity and subjectivity, respectively, which is the real meaning behind the two half cycles.

Based on these factors, we arrive to the meaning of the elements which, I will repeat, could have been simply named First, Second, Third, Fourth:

• Fire (Aries) becomes motion towards objective manifestation, the primordial desire to manifest in a body,
• Water (Cancer) fulfills Fire desire much like the sap does to the plant.
• Air (Libra) is motion towards subjective realization, a drive to find the “God within” and a thirst for liberation from the bondage of the body and its separate selfhood.
• Earth (Capricorn) will fulfill Air desire symbolically at Christmas, the birth of the Christ-body within, which is the maximum expression of the Day Force.

Finally, each element may be expressed in one of three modes:

• Cardinal signs (Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn) are the four activity-laden equinoctial and solstitial signs able to generate energy and power. From what we said above, it should be obvious that the two equinoctial signs generate a different kind of power than the solstitial ones.
• Fixed signs (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius) immediately follow to concentrate and liberate the energy and power generated in the previous cardinal sign.⁶
• Mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces) are in charge of distributing the energy and power just concentrated.

There is much more to say about the zodiac and its twelve signs, but the purpose of this page, as mentioned earlier, is to provide enough context for the other twelve zodiac sign pages.

Always Love. 🌹🙏💖

1. Remember that sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrificium, itself from sacer: holy, giving the meaning: “making holy”, or “sacred”. ↩︎
2. Equinox comes from the Latin aequi nox: equal nights. ↩︎
3. Trivia: I began writing the sign pages just prior to the new moon of November 13, 2023, which fell on my birthday, so the page for Scorpio was the first one published. ↩︎
4. Solstice comes from Latin solsticium, itself from sol: sun, and sistere: stationary, thus a time of a “stationary sun” in declination. ↩︎
5. As a side note, while the equinoxes are moments of equal intensity in both forces, it is a precarious equilibrium. This may be seen by how their intensities go from 3–4 to 4–3 in an instant, for instance from Pisces to Aries. Contrast it with the signs around a solstice when their intensities remain at 1–6 (Sagittarius and Capricorn) with just a simple reversal of their trending arrows, and indicate a much more stable equilibrium. ↩︎
6. In occultism, the halfway points between two consecutive cardinal signs represent the Four Gates of Avataric Descent, where an avatar is a release of cosmic energy in ancient terminology. Such gates are symbolized by four creatures: Bull (Taurus 15°, around May 6), Lion (Leo 15°, August 8), Eagle (Scorpio 15°, November 8), and Angel (Aquarius 15°, February 5). ↩︎