Archetypal Astrology
Discover The Cosmos Within
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"Put into words exactly how I've been feeling. It's crazy. It feels like magic."
—Vanessa (Social Entrepreneur, Ecuador)
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“Archetypal astrology is the Rosetta Stone of consciousness research.”
—Stanislav Grof
What is Archetypal astrology?
Why can two people take the same dose of LSD, in the same setting, and have radically different experiences?
This question became central to the work of psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and philosopher Richard Tarnas, and eventually led them toward a surprising discovery about astrology.
The Psyche Is Patterned
In the 1960s, Grof was conducting clinical research into LSD and non-ordinary states of consciousness. He observed that the substance did not produce one predictable experience. One person might relive a childhood memory. Another might encounter terror, or dissolution. Someone else might experience rebirth, divine presence, or unity with the cosmos.
The psychedelic experience seemed to open the door, but it did not determine what came through.
Over years of research, Grof began to recognize recurring patterns within these experiences. He concluded that the psyche contained layers extending beyond personal memory.
Among them were the basic perinatal matrices, four archetypal patterns connected to the stages of birth:
BPM I: Unity
BPM II: Confinement
BPM III: Struggle
BPM IV: Liberation
These patterns appeared not only in psychedelic experiences, but also in dreams, myths, spiritual traditions, and periods of profound psychological transformation.
Grof’s research suggested that the psyche has an archetypal structure. Our inner lives are deeply personal, yet they also participate in universal patterns.
But a deeper mystery remained:
Why did a particular archetypal pattern emerge for a particular person at a particular time?
From Psyche to Cosmos
In the 1970s, Grof met Richard Tarnas at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where Tarnas became involved in his research.
Grof and his colleagues had already used an extensive battery of psychological tests in an attempt to predict the character of each psychedelic session. After years of study, however, no clear answer emerged. Astrology was eventually introduced as another possible method.
Both Grof and Tarnas were skeptical and approached it with hesitation. Still, they began comparing the timing and character of psychedelic experiences with each participant’s birth chart and the planetary transits occurring during the session. What they found surprised them.
Again and again, the planetary patterns appeared to correspond with the archetypal quality of the experience—whether someone encountered dissolution, struggle, revelation, or rebirth.
Astrology could not predict the precise details of a session. But it seemed to reveal the deeper pattern of the moment, and why one psychological world might open rather than another.
The Development of Archetypal COSMOLOGY
What began as an attempt to understand the timing of psychedelic experiences gradually became a much larger investigation into the relationship between psyche, history, and cosmos.
Over the following decades, Tarnas expanded the research beyond individual sessions, tracing the same archetypal patterns across philosophy, cultural history, and major collective events. This work culminated in two landmark books:
1) The Passion of the Western Mind — Published in 1991, the book traces the evolution of Western philosophy, science, religion, and culture.
It explores how the modern worldview gradually separated the human mind from a living cosmos, and asks whether a more participatory and enchanted understanding of reality might still be possible.
2) Cosmos and Psyche — Published in 2006, Tarnas’s magnum opus presents three decades of research into the relationship between planetary alignments and recurring patterns in history and human experience.
He examined planetary cycles alongside:
Political revolutions
Scientific discoveries
Artistic renaissances
Cultural upheavals
Spiritual awakenings
He found that the same planetary combinations repeatedly coincided with similar archetypal themes across different periods of history.
A New Understanding of Astrology
Archetypal astrology is the practice of interpreting the relationship between cosmos and psyche.
It explores how planetary patterns correspond with the deeper themes moving through an individual life, a historical period, or a cultural moment.
Rather than asking only, What will happen?, archetypal astrology asks:
What deeper pattern is expressing itself?
How is an individual experience connected to a larger human story?
It is less concerned with prediction than with participation.
Archetypal astrology helps us recognize that our lives unfold with with mythic potency.
A Participatory Cosmos
The work of Grof and Tarnas was deeply influenced by Carl Jung, particularly his ideas about archetypes, synchronicity, and the collective unconscious.
Jung proposed that the psyche contains universal patterns that shape human imagination and experience. Grof encountered these patterns in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Tarnas found that their timing appeared to correspond with planetary cycles.
Together, their work points toward a cosmos that is not empty or indifferent, but alive with meaning.
From this perspective, astrology is not about surrendering our agency to the planets. It is a way of becoming more conscious of the larger patterns in which we are already participating.
The cosmos does not give us a script.
It offers a language.
Archetypal astrology helps us learn how to read it.
The Astrologer
Somya Desai, M.A.
Co-Founder & Chief Cosmologist at Numinous Realm
If you're feeling the stirrings of a deeper calling or standing at a crossroads, Somya is a guide who offers more than insight. She brings clarity, resonance, and the kind of elegant precision that helps you step into the next chapter of your life with confidence.
Once a skeptic herself, she understands what it’s like to question everything. But in 2019, during her graduate studies in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS, she encountered a different way of seeing, where psyche and cosmos move in synchrony, and meaning reveals itself with poetic depth. Under the teachings and mentorship of Dr. Richard Tarnas, Dr. Becca Tarnas, Jessica DiRuzza, MFT, and Abeer Desai, M.A., she trained in archetypal astrology not as a fortune-telling gimmick but as a rigorously researched map for personal and cultural transformation.
With a background in deep history, world affairs, and the symbolic language of style, Somya blends intellectual depth with intuitive elegance. Her roots across Singapore, India, Japan, and the U.S. give her a rare, multidimensional perspective, allowing her to meet each client with warmth, discernment, and a quiet sense of magic.
This isn’t astrology as prediction. It’s alignment. Reclamation. A reintroduction to who you truly are and the life that’s been waiting for you to claim it.
“Imagine, for a moment, that you are the universe.”
— Richard Tarnas
TESTIMONIALS
“it truly is going to change your life.”
“If you are someone who wants to tap into your full potential, who wants to understand yourself better, who wants to create something meaningful, lead with authenticity and lead with alignment, this is for you.”
—Alejandra (Entrepreneur, Ecuador)
“Fully fully fully highly recommend!”
“You know the answers, but when you see your chart and how it affects you on a day to day basis, and a cosmic basis, and a lifetime basis, you start to breathe and sink in and understand your full self...”
—Clara (Actor, New York)
“knew me better than I knew myself.”
“It was just plainly put in my face because the answers were already there, I just didn’t know how to read all of this stuff myself. So if you’re hesitating about starting the journey, I implore you to just do it.”
—Jaidev (Artist, Maryland)
“It’s so powerful, transformative, and supportive.”
“One of the challenges that I had lingering in the back of my subconscious mind was actually triggered by a friend who practiced astrology, and had told me some things around my romantic relationship that did not really resonate with me. And so I was left with a question mark in my mind. My reading with Somya soothed a lot—the lingering doubt and questioning went away.”
—MariaPaula (Healer, Florida)
“I’m starting to see a lot of positive changes in my business.”
“I feel like clients are just flocking to me the more that I lean into my true self. I would say that was a big thing that I got from the reading.”
—Emily (Realtor, New York)
“incredibly helpful experience for me as an entrepreneur, as a writer.”
“Some ideas I resonated with immediately, while others I had to digest and think about it for awhile, and that really laid the ground work for some interesting reflections in the weeks after our first session.”
—Andreas (Entrepreneur, Norway)
“Feeling really grounded, feeling really confident!”
“Both sessions really opened my eyes to a whole world and a way of thinking which I had never been exposed to.”
—Sally (Designer, San Francisco)
“I have a new level of awareness and understanding of myself.”
“Archetypal astrology helped me create art differently. I have a clear idea of what I’m supposed to do in the future, and why I create the type of art that I do.”
—Nanae (Artist, Japan)
Discover your depths
“Synchronicity is an ever present reality for those who have eyes to see.”
― Carl Jung
Writings on Astrology
copernican revolution 2.0
At the turn of the 16th century, a new world view was coming into being. A world view that would accelerate itself into the Scientific Revolution…read more.
Saturnian Initiation
The stop sign at the intersection helpfully cautioning you. The door that shuts before your eyes painfully rejecting you. The stern look on…read more.
Something is Happening…
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work…read more.
“We ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the universe. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the skies so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.”
― Johannes Kepler
Resources
Academic Journal
“As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul.”
― Hermes Trismegistus