Seasons of agony and grace: An archetypal history of New England Puritanism.

摘要

This dissertation challenges the world view now dominant that holds the cosmos as disenchanted and denies the possibility of significant correspondences between external events and internal psychological events. It challenges this view by a detailed case study of New England Puritanism that examines that movement's major events for significant patterns of synchronic, archetypally coherent correlations with specific outer planetary alignments. The case study demonstrates a developed methodology (archetypal historiography) that is suitable for other similar examinations. Archetypal historiography as a methodology is based on the perspective, parameters, and research recently published by Richard Tarnas, which presents a vision of human culture in which major events of specific historical streams consistently present significant patterns of archetypal correlations in synchrony with specific planetary alignments. If such a vision is valid, it should be possible to demonstrate precisely these kinds of archetypal patterns in great detail for a specific historical movement. Contrary to the dominant world view, the compelling body of evidence presented in the case study demonstrates that profound patterns of archetypal correspondence do exist between the events of the Puritan movement and the planetary motions.;The implications of this evidence for the current world view are approached by first investigating the philosophical and cosmological foundations of ancient astrology, starting with its divinatory roots in the Mesopotamian celestial omen tradition and followed by the Hermetic tradition in which the first full astrological systems emerged. Ancient concepts are then compared with those of archetypal astrology, illustrated by the evidence. In the perspective of archetypal astrology that emerges, the cosmos, including the planets and all dimensions of human culture, is pervaded, structured, and intricately connected by archetypal formative principles as essential symbolic organizing forces. Something like the ancient concept of anima mundi seems to be operative. But the ancient preoccupation with predicting specific future events determined by the stars is replaced by a focus on complex archetypal patterns in which human choice and creativity play essential roles.