The Summer of Love and the Stars

Beyond all the hype and nostalgia, it’s still clear that something extraordinary took place in the 1960s, and San Francisco’s Summer of Love was a defining expression of that larger explosion of cultural creativity and consciousness expansion.  Why did this sudden opening of horizons happen then, and in what way does it connect with our own time?

The astrological alignments of the planets, widely embraced as meaningful within the newly re-enchanted cosmos of the Sixties’ psychedelic counterculture, were celebrated in popular songs and musicals and thoughtfully examined in books and articles of the time.  Drawing on the pioneering work of C. G. Jung, Dane Rudhyar, and more recently the Archetypal Research Collective based at CIIS, what light does a half-century of careful studies of historical correlations between planetary movements and the archetypal patterns of human history shine on that era and our own?

Join Richard Tarnas for an exploration of these questions and more in a conversation on Archetypal Astrology and the 1960s.

Richard Tarnas, PhD, is the founding director of the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at CIIS.  He teaches courses in cultural history, archetypal studies, depth psychology, history of philosophy, and religious evolution.  He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network and is the basis for the upcoming documentary film Changing of the Gods.  He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and served for many years on the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.  View his website here.