Archetypes and the Planets

Why do some places make you feel more alive, while others never quite feel like home? In this episode, we explore astrocartography through our own stories of immigration, travel, friendship, and creative opportunity. From Madrid to Missoula, Prague to the Camino, we consider how places -- and the people who come from them -- can shape a life. Along the way: highlights from UAC, planetary lines you can walk in your own neighbourhood, and why chasing a Jupiter line isn’t a good enough reason to pack up and move.

In this episode we explore Jung’s concept of individuation which is the lifelong process of becoming more fully ourselves by recognizing and integrating parts of the psyche that have remained unconscious. We discuss how dreams, fairy tales, creativity, and synchronicity can provide clues to what is asking to be acknowledged, and why individuation often involves periods of difficulty, disruption, and profound change. We also explore astrology as a map of this process, looking at how planetary complexes, major transits, and cycles such as the Saturn return, Uranus opposition, and Chiron return can correspond with important developmental passages. Along the way, we consider how individuation asks us to separate inherited expectations and collective values from the life that is genuinely ours to live.

Marriage in this episode is framed as our very human “Eden project”: the fantasy of finding a magical other who will restore a lost sense of total safety, oneness, and being fully seen—and the necessity of withdrawing those projections if we want real relationship instead of a spiritualized dependency. Drawing on James Hollis, Marie‑Louise von Franz, Jung, Rilke, Plato, astrology, and romantic literature, we explore marriage as a symbolic, alchemical vessel: a third thing that holds two distinct individuals in a lifelong conversation between conscious and unconscious, where difficult aspects, wounds, and disappointments become material for individuation rather than proof of failure. 

In this episode, we look at the astrological ages as a giant mirror for the human psyche. We dive into the precession of the equinoxes, that 26,000-year cycle that slowly drags the spring equinox across the zodiac and rewires our mythologies in the process. We also apply Carl Jung’s psychological theories and the heavy-duty research from Hamlet’s Mill to figure out where we find ourselves now. We track the move from following external religious leaders and a shift toward individual individuation and high-tech complexity. These cosmic metaphors are tools for making sense of human consciousness while the culture feels like it is shifting under our feet.

In this episode we examine how translation influences meaning across psychological and spiritual traditions. We discuss examples from religious and historical texts, consider the work of Giordano Bruno and Frances Yates, and reflect on “masculine” and “feminine” as symbolic principles shaping human experience. Books Mentioned:   James Hollis Under Saturn’s Shadow Frances Yates Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition S.J. Parris Heresy (Historical Fiction) Demetra George Mysteries of the Dark Moon Iamblichus On the Mysteries Plato Timaeus Richard Gotshalk The Classic of Way and Her Power (Lao Tzu translation) Erich Neumann The Fear of the Feminine Iain McGilchrist The Matter with Things  

In this episode, we dive into the hidden mathematical and geometric architecture of the cosmos. Inspired by the work of John Addey, we look at "Harmonic Astrology," which moves away from static house divisions toward a dynamic, wave-based view of the birth chart. We also explore the wonderful book by John Martineau--A Little Book of Coincidence: In the Solar System. Is the universe a machine or a symphony? From the "Seal of Hermes" to the mystery of the number 108, find out why your birth chart might be more like a piece of music than a map.   Other books mentioned:   The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell. Jesus Christ, Sun of God, by David Fideler. The Little Book of Coincidence (originally an academic thesis called The Big Book of Coincidence) by John Martineau. Harmonograph: A Visual Guide to the Mathematics of Music by Anthony, who is John Martineau's grandfather. In Love with Venus by Angela Moore. Elements by Euclid The Quadrivium by John Martineau.  

In this episode, we break down the mythology, music, and philosophy of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde ahead of the Metropolitan Opera’s production this month. We trace the myth to its 12th-century Celtic roots and examine its psychological meaning using the work of Joseph Campbell and Robert A. Johnson. We detail how Wagner applied Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy to create the "Tristan chord," a musical innovation built entirely around unfulfilled longing. This is the opera that changed the art form and influenced many other artists beyond the operatic world. The myth itself sparked a revival of the “feminine” in the West, introducing a wholly new concept of romantic love that led to a change in consciousness itself.

In this episode, we examine the approaching Saturn–Neptune conjunction in Aries as a way to ask how cultures shape their myths, maps and collective identities using Spain as an example. We begin with Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl moment reclaiming “the Americas,” then explore how recurring Saturn–Neptune cycles echo through history in the blurring of borders, the collapse of old narratives, and the struggle between idealism and hard reality. We look at visionary rulers, explorers who mistook one world for another, artists who turned confusion into beauty, and political figures who fused devotion with rigidity. Along the way we consider how countries develop archetypal signatures, how illusions can structure entire eras, and how the arts often preserve what official histories erase. We close with demographics, future maps, and what this conjunction might signal about collective imagination and the choices we make together.

In this episode, we pick up from where we left before, tracing the thread running through science, symbolism, and human meaning. We return to the Pauli-Jung connection, Kepler’s mathematics, Fludd’s rejected cosmology, and the ancient Goal-Year cycles that linked planetary motion to deep time. We revisit Jung's notion that number acts as an ordering principle across cultures and discuss how ideas emerge, why some are silenced, and why others return in new forms. We move from buried archives in Zurich to Babylonian astronomy to questions about how humans create myth. The conversation ends with a simple challenge: what are you attending to, and how does your attention shape the world you live in?   Books Mentioned:   • The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser • Atom and Archetype (Correspondence between Wolfgang Pauli and C.G. Jung) • Psychology and Religion by C.G. Jung • Answer to Job by C.G. Jung • Divination and Synchronicity by Marie-Louise von Franz • A Portable Cosmos: Revealing the Antikythera Mechanism, Scientific Wonder of the Ancient World, Alexander Jones

In this epidose, we explore the hidden bridge between psyche and matter through the extraordinary meeting of analytical psychology and quantum physics. At its center is the unlikely dialogue between Carl Jung and a Nobel Prize–winning physicist whose inner life, dreams, and obsessions revealed that the unconscious does not stop at the edges of the mind. Drawing on Marie-Louise von Franz’s work, we explore how numbers are not merely quantities but living patterns that structure both inner experience and physical reality. The deeper argument is a cultural one: modern life has privileged measurement over meaning, calculation over consciousness. What is being asked for here is not a rejection of science, but an integration--where individuation, symbolic awareness, and psychological depth become essential for living in a world that has forgotten how to see meaning. Note: Just as we were discussing the Pauli effect [lab equipment of all kinds would stop working whenever Pauli was in the room], my power went off, the Internet crashed and kicked us both out of the recording. We were able to resume but had a good laugh about "Pauli being in the room."   Books Discussed Conversations with Marie-Louise von Franz (Inner City Books) Number and Time by Marie-Louise von Franz 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 13 The Jung-Pauli Conjecture and Its Impact Today (anthology) Valley of Diamonds, J. Gary Sparks