Originally published in The Mountain Astrologer magazine. Reprinted with permission.
This interview was conducted by Adam Sommer for his podcast on October 16, 2015.
Adam Sommer: Welcome, Mark, to the Exploring Astrology podcast. Thank you so much for coming on the show!
Mark Jones: Thank you for inviting me.
AS: It’s so great to be able to hear you so clearly via Skype, even though I’m having Internet problems here at home.
MJ: The 21st century does bring some magical things, doesn’t it? We can have an intimate conversation while thousands of miles apart, and relatively effortlessly, without paying for it or making any grand gestures. Only 150 years ago, we’d have had to travel for months to speak to a particular person.
AS: To give everyone a little background, I recently heard Mark speak during the Evolutionary Astrology Network’s online conference, “Real Money and Lasting Love. It was a beautiful conglomeration of Evolutionary astrologers speaking about their passion. I believe the title of your lecture, Mark, was “Radical Empowerment: The Nature of the Pluto–Uranus Square.” It was, in many ways, a great inspiration for me. A lot of the references you mentioned really hit home — especially the work of Rupert Sheldrake and Stan Grof, who have been incredibly important in the development of my own work.
I’d like to start with a question about how you combine your long-time practice as a Psychosynthesis therapist with astrology. How did the two come together for you?
MJ: I’ll start in a strange location and then work my way back. Recently, a colleague was speaking at a Psychosynthesis conference in Rome, and the two of us were privileged to gain access to the Institute of Psychosynthesis. It’s located in Florence, Italy, in the home of the founder, Roberto Assagioli. Right away, we noticed boxes of files piled up on the floor, and when we went through them, we discovered they were all on the topic of spiritual astrology, in English! How ironic that I should make this discovery years after I had trained in Psychosynthesis, and years after I’d already become an astrologer! I had completed Noel Tyl’s Masters in Counseling Astrology program, then began the Psychosynthesis training, and went on to study the evolutionary work of Jeffrey Wolf Green around the same time, graduating from all in 2002. After the training, it took quite a while to build a private practice, and then there was the ongoing endurance test of hours of regular therapy clients each week. With all of that going on, I put astrology on a back burner.
But there were other reasons that astrology took a backseat. Even in the very progressive practice of Psychosynthesis, astrology was seen as antithetical to its therapeutic ideal — that coming together with clients would let them self-discover, in their own beings, the images, feeling states, and inspirations they needed to live well. The Institute saw an astrologer as representing a kind of “figure on high” who looked at peoples’ charts and professed to know what they needed. I actually brought the conflict to my supervisor, a woman who was a progressive and open-minded Buddhist. She was very helpful, but still the two disciplines were seen as opposing poles not easily reconciled. Now, all these years later, fast-forward to finding these fountain-pen–scrawled notes on astrology charts — charts that were hand-drawn in some detail, no less — including analyses of family, friends, clients, and famous people. Suddenly, I was discovering that Roberto Assagioli, the man who founded the form of therapy I’d trained in, had been a dedicated astrologer for decades. I heard that, at some point, he wouldn’t see a client without consulting their chart. It was one of those moments when my life suddenly made sense!
AS: Didn’t Carl Jung also work with astrology in the later years of his life?
MJ: Yes, Jung got into astrology in a massive way. His daughter, at one point, was a practicing astrologer herself. There’s some interesting history here. Freud started his psychoanalytic psychology group in Vienna, where he met Jung, who became his heir apparent. Freud was very paranoid that psychoanalysis would be dismissed as a kind of Jewish science because of the anti-Semitic age that was building up to the horrors of the Holocaust. It was part of Freud’s explicit attraction to Jung that the latter was of Aryan descent (white, Swiss) and thus had the potential to take the study and practice of psychoanalysis into the future.
Around the same time, Roberto Assagioli, a teenage prodigy from Italy, began a correspondence with Freud and then studied psychoanalysis from a distance. Assagioli became a medical doctor (as they all were at that time) and later trained in psychiatry at the Burghölzli Hospital in Switzerland. Jung did his first major work there, so he and Assagioli met and became friends. Right there at the beginning, both of these founding figures of the 20th-century depth psychology movement were forming a more spiritually oriented vision of psychology. Jung focused on a sort of balance between the light and the dark, if you like, while Assagioli was explicitly spiritual, envisioning a benefic, loving cosmos that wants us to grow, evolve, and achieve our true potential. Both of these men had a vision of the Self as a larger, unifying field of being that was more than just the ego, more than the primary sense of I, or individuality. And they were both astrologers, not just dedicated students. I would say that Assagioli was more dedicated to astrology than Jung — essentially, he was a practicing astrologer for the greater part of his working life as a therapist.
AS: I’ve never even heard of this man until today!
MJ: That’s the strange thing about Psychosynthesis: It’s a massive institution in Italy; it’s got centers in Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, and Belgium; but there are only a couple of centers in America, and only because Assagioli was teaching in California at the end of his life. He was quite a self-effacing man, and he didn’t write as prolifically as Jung or Freud did, so his work never got out there in the same way.
Interestingly, in my article in a recent issue of The Mountain Astrologer, I wrote about the planetary nodal contacts in their charts.2 To clarify this idea, nodes are abstract points in space formed when a planetary body crosses the ecliptic, so all planets have them. The Sun is the only exception because it’s the apparent path of the Sun that forms the ecliptic. When a planet rises above the ecliptic, it forms a north node, and when it descends below the ecliptic, it forms a south node.
Freud had the Moon in Gemini conjunct the North Node of Uranus, and he was this radical, innovative figure. From a modern, spiritual viewpoint, we might see his limitations, but at the time, by the conventions of Victorian morality and society, he was a radical. On the other hand, Jung’s natal Venus was conjunct the North Node of Pluto. He had a depth of vision into what he called the anima, the inner woman within the man, and the animus, the inner man within the woman, and he believed that both sexes must embrace these inner polarities to evolve into wholeness.
Not surprisingly, Assagioli’s personal North Lunar Node was exactly conjunct the North Node of Neptune, and his work is a subtle architecture that many therapeutic disciplines borrow from, especially his idea that we have little parts of our personality that are not our whole self — what he called sub-personalities — but few link this insight to Assagioli. He had this great vision of a progressive psychology that would integrate the spiritual dimensions of the psyche, one that didn’t just analyze the psyche in order to break it down and find its historical provenance. Psychosynthesis is a vision of embracing the psyche and forming a harmonious blend of all the archetypes and sub-personalities we find within ourselves.
So, the fact that Assagioli and Jung, the earliest innovators of depth psychology, saw in astrology a unifying vision that could help people to progressively evolve is really affirming for me. That’s the way I like to think of the heart of Evolutionary astrology, as a vision of the evolving self, or a soul potential that can come into people’s lives and lead them forward. From one point of view, it seems that we’re searching for our souls, for meaning, for enlightenment, but from another point of view, one could say the soul is searching for us. The soul is there, leading us toward it.
AS: I love that idea. I’ve thought a lot about how astrology helps us to evolve as human beings, and what comes to mind right now is its ability to contextualize a person’s life experiences. Astrology can help people begin to see past events in their lives as meaningful, even though they often appear to be random and challenging.
MJ: I feel that’s an incredible service. One of the primary things to emerge in my astrology readings is the acknowledgment, and then validation, of what’s already happened to someone. It provides a seemingly objective, archetypal validation of the soul issues and psychic material they’ve come into this life to resolve. This is even more important when I work with older people who have lived a large part of their lives already; the reading is not going to be about a new star on the horizon, or what will happen when they grow up. They’ve already had many life experiences that they may or may not understand.
So, I think you’re right about the sense of meaning the chart can bring. I read a science book recently where the author compared a sensible idea to a stupid idea. The example cited astronomy as the sensible idea and astrology as the stupid idea. It was an otherwise good book, but, yet again, astrology gets ridiculed! It’s ironic to me that in our materialist, rational culture, the things that get ridiculed often carry enormous beauty and meaning. I experience over and over in my therapy sessions with young, intelligent, kind, moral people with successful jobs that they’re struggling to find a sense of their own meaning, of who they are and why they are here. What we’ve lost in all the brilliance of these vast technological advances in our world is our sense of meaningful participation in the larger cosmos.
AS: Pluto is one of the major focuses of Evolutionary astrology because of its potential to transform life and people on a deep level. How do you see Pluto in general, and how are you experiencing the energies of Pluto transiting through Capricorn?
MJ: Thinking about Pluto brings to mind the Demeter/Persephone myth and Persephone’s abduction by Pluto. I love the treatment of it by James Hillman in his book, Re-Visioning Psychology,3 where he uses it as a metaphor for naïve anima, or naïve psyche. There’s innocent, happy Persephone moving through the flowers in the meadow, enchanted by nature, and suddenly the earth is ripped asunder and Pluto rides up in his chariot and grabs her and takes her down to the Underworld, where she’ll now be forced to live for half the year.
Hillman sees it as a metaphor for how the young psyche is absorbed in itself and its point of view, until something happens to destroy that innocence — we fall in love and the person leaves us, or someone in our family dies, or there’s a crushing disappointment, like not getting into the college we had our heart set on because we didn’t make the grade. Whatever it is, something breaks the heart, and when the heart is broken, the wound begins in the psyche, the wound that will act like the grain of sand in the oyster. Dealing with that wound over years, with awareness and hard work, will produce the pearl of inner essence that cannot be taken away, because it’s indestructible. But to build an inner indestructible essence, we must first be destroyed in our more naïve form. I think Pluto speaks of the power of that depth encounter, when our own needs come into contact with the transpersonal forces of the unconscious.
Now, for me, the highest vision of the Capricorn archetype is to take responsibility — existential, moral, and spiritual — for our own destiny, for who we are, for who we have been. I thought it was brilliant that Stanislav Grof was far more confessional in his last book;4 he wrote about his travels around the world, taking large amounts of hallucinogenic drugs in many different places and sacred sites. He even wrote about encountering and dialoguing with the spirits of those places during inner visions. In one of his particularly illuminating moments, he suddenly understood that he’d had many past lives, and even though he didn’t know what they were or what had occurred in them, he still needed to take responsibility for the self he doesn’t even remember being.
On another level, as individuals we all participate in the collective consciousness of humanity, symbolized by history. So, in a way, we are all responsible for the horrors and difficulties of the world, for the struggles, the crises, the violence, the persecution of minorities. So, on this depth level, Capricorn is about recognizing our responsibility, here and now, to stand up and be counted as both an individual being and a part of a collective being, and that includes our personal karmic history, our reincarnational past. It often feels like the end when we encounter this Plutonian wound — that inner place of shame and guilt and grief that we think is hidden from the world in some private little space where we bury our failings — but it’s actually the starting point. That wound is the key to our spirituality. If we can go into the core of it and not try to escape from it, it will lead us to an expanded state of being.
AS: Let’s say you’re counseling a younger person and you can sense they haven’t had their Plutonic wake-up call yet, but you see Pluto heading for their natal Venus. How would you approach the reading?
MJ: That’s a good question. I can’t really say exactly how I would approach that client situation before looking at the whole chart, especially Pluto and the nodal axis, to see what their intended developmental direction is in the broadest possible sense. But I like that the question articulates the opposite dynamic of doing a reading for an older person who has already lived much of their life. We’re talking now about the sensitivity of how to approach the life that hasn’t yet been lived. I wouldn’t want to say anything that might narrow a young person’s sense of their potential, like a warning or an attempt to summarize what’s going to happen to them in the future. That doesn’t interest me; their future is their own.
I would probably introduce the idea of a significant life event in a general way, without linking it to Pluto approaching their Venus, or to some potential future happening. I would present it, perhaps a number of times, as an archetypal event, when something hits you deep down on a core level, and how it can feel really difficult or even terrible at the time, but can lead to a more profound depth of being in the world. I would frame this message in the general context of the reading, perhaps at multiple points, knowing there is the possibility of something like that occurring during the upcoming transit. But it might not, you see, so I wouldn’t want to wrap it in any kind of predictive context. What would that serve? No matter how gently something like that is suggested, the person will probably leave the session thinking: “Something bad is going to happen to me!” And I don’t want anyone to go away feeling like that.
AS: No, neither would I. I’ve learned quite a bit so far about what not to say, and of course that’s because of things I have said.
MJ: That’s the best way to learn — from one’s own mistakes, of which I’ve made legion!
AS: One of the things I love about astrology is how it shows us the upcoming weather, so we can make conscious choices about how to meet what’s on the way. An insight I’ve had about challenging outer-planet transits is that if we can develop ways to communicate with the energies of the planet, we can affect the impact of the transit when it becomes more exact. A big thing I’ve noticed about Pluto, for instance, is that meeting it requires honesty and complete transparency.
MJ: Sounds like you’re tapping into the transformational potentials of the outer planets, and I agree wholeheartedly. But the interesting thing to me is that many seemingly difficult transits turn out not to be difficult at all. I can share something about this from my personal experience. Not long ago, Pluto was transiting my 26° Sagittarius Ascendant while I was at a NORWAC conference. When I mentioned this to a group of astrologers there, I heard three horror stories in a row — the breakup of a marriage, becoming homeless for some period of time, and on and on. But nothing bad was happening in my life — no violent change, no huge upheaval. Nothing even particularly difficult was happening. I was aware, however, of an inner shift away from a sort of hermit phase. Until then, I’d been doing my therapeutic work with clients, coming out to America a few times a year to speak and teach at conferences, then going home and seeing clients again. At that point, my astrological work was still quite private, almost a secret. Just the year before, I’d gone to NORWAC and had a very successful time, but when I came home, I don’t think I discussed astrology with another living soul for three months!
What was happening was an increasing inner shift toward claiming my relationship with astrology more publicly. The end result was an inner realignment of my work. I even remember the week it happened, when I decided that astrology was really important to my work. I felt a new openness to being with it and doing more of it. And soon after that, a person I met at a conference called me. I thought it was just an interview he was looking to do, but he went on to transform my website and publish both my books. I saw this as resonant with the inner changes that were happening.
So, I think so-called challenging transits are somewhat contingent on the type of consciousness they’re happening to, and also where someone is at regarding their past. With Pluto transits, we have a powerful transformational opportunity, although many times it can be quite subtle. In my case, it was subtle but profound. Astrology was already very important in my work, but to make that inner acknowledgement led to me coming out into the world much more with it — the shift from the 12th-house Pluto to the 1st-house Pluto. It was like being on a private ship in a stormy sea and then arriving on a new shore and saying hello to the natives!
AS: Good thing you didn’t listen to those astrologers at the conference.
MJ: If I had, I might have come away from the conference in a hugely paranoid state. And that’s what I worry about with astrology — the tendency for people’s fears to get projected onto upcoming transits and even onto their natal charts. I’ve worked with people who are ashamed of their charts, literally frightened by them — “I’ve got this terrible aspect, this terrible chart.” There is no terrible aspect. There is no terrible chart. The chart is a symbolic correspondence to the nature of our soul energy, our karmic imprint. So, the only thing that could be terrible is our feeling about ourselves, or our feeling about life experiences we’ve had. We can say the world is meaningless and it’s all about luck, or that a bad chart causes our troubles. But what if life is the perfect expression of our own soul nature meeting the field of everything, meeting the free space in which divinity has allowed us to express ourselves? Essentially, we meet our own karma out there in the world. We meet the products of our own life and energy. That’s a very different framework than being stuck with a terrible chart, and this reframes suffering, because any form of unenlightened activity will involve a degree of suffering, no matter how subtle. So, it’s actually a dead end to project our suffering onto transits or Venus in detriment or fall, or an afflicted birth chart. We’re actually projecting our personal insecurity and neurosis and inner shame onto the chart and onto what astrologers have said to us.
AS: Now there’s a loaded topic. Over five years, I’ve probably read a thousand charts, and something I’ve commonly seen are the scars people still carry from past astrology readings.
MJ: Every astrologer in the world should sit for a minute and contemplate what you just said. It’s so important to realize that when we’re conducting any kind of counseling session, we’re creating an intensely heightened and potentially transformative environment, and people are going to internalize whatever we say as a significant and meaningful imprint. Obviously, there are some very naïve astrologers who say things that people internalize very negatively — messages like “You’ve got an afflicted Venus.” But, in many cases, the astrologer just tries to suggest something, and because the client is in a heightened state, that suggestion gets internalized and becomes: My astrologer told me I should do this or that.
AS: This is a difficult problem, because many people see astrology as a connection to higher energies, so whatever they hear about their charts seems fated, or doomed, and that’s very hard to soften for someone. But I’ve also noticed a brilliant aspect of an astrology reading, when clients can sit with an astrologer they feel comfortable with and share about themselves in a deep way. In a case like that, those same higher energies feel like a sacred presence that holds the session. Have you had that experience in your client work?
MJ: Yes, I have. This quality you’re talking about, this third thing in the room, I call “the field” or “the knowing field.” So, as an example: Here we are speaking right now and there is a knowing field that interpenetrates us, even though we’re thousands of miles apart. This field operates in a sort of nonlocal way. It’s the part of the infinite field of everything that’s in residence because you and I are talking, because of our karma and our resonance with each other. And that quality can be present in therapy sessions and in astrology sessions. It contains nonverbal information and spiritual information, mental and emotional information, and it can be intuitively accessed. In fact, it can emerge in spontaneous flashes at times. In therapy sessions, I’ve had images appear to me that suggest what I need to be aware of to better assist my client in that moment.
For me, the chart is a gateway, a lens, into that knowing field. It provides a symbolic map that can be held lightly during the session. Honestly, the ideal format for me is to study a client’s chart for a while, so I can hold a picture of it in my mind. My intention is not to try to interpret it per se, other than having my own strongly internalized sense of the chart symbols I’m looking at. This lets me sit and look at the person while holding the chart in my mind. That’s not always possible in a conference setting, where I may be doing multiple readings in a row. At those times, I’ll position my laptop with the chart between us, but not in a way that blocks our line of sight or communication, just so I can glance at it occasionally. It feels as though I’m just witnessing their beingness, which lets it emerge in the room, and the chart is this wonderful, multidimensional symbol map to assist us.
AS: I’m so glad to hear you say that, because sometimes I feel a little guilty about not giving enough astrological information in a session, even though it’s usually reflected back to me that the readings are good. My work with clients feels more like spiritual counseling, a place for someone to experience a type of catharsis, while feeling listened to and supported.
MJ: I see that as an extraordinarily valuable contribution, but I do understand the sense of risk you might feel when you take that approach. Based on a more conventional paradigm, people could say that it’s not even an astrology reading. I’ve certainly had people be surprised by the fact that I’m not doing most of the talking during a session. For some people, when it’s their real need, I will turn on the astrology. I can certainly sit and talk about a chart for an hour — even hours. I mean, I teach classes for days at a time. But this work needs to be about what’s most valuable to their sense of their own being, and I think the space that you’re describing, that you afford people, is oftentimes more valuable, more in service, to their whole self.
AS: We’ve talked quite a bit about Pluto today, but let’s include Uranus for a moment. I resonate with Uranus for many reasons: the idea of becoming who we truly are, this planet’s unpredictable nature, its tendency to be antithetical to culture and society, and the radical shifts it often brings into our lives. And, of course, you’ve included Uranus in the title of your first astrology book, when it isn’t a major player in the practice of Evolutionary astrology. What led you to do that?
MJ: This is a question that’s very relevant to my evolution. As you know, in the Evolutionary astrology paradigm, at least as Jeffrey Green’s work pioneered it, the point of entry into the chart is the evolutionary axis — essentially, Pluto and the point opposite Pluto (where it’s evolving toward), and the nodal axis and its rulers and any planets squaring the axis. So, Jeffrey’s methods focus primarily on Pluto and the Moon’s nodes. And yet, he wrote this very interesting book that’s no longer in print, Uranus: Freedom from the Known.5 Based on ideas in Jeffrey’s book that were then developed through my psychotherapy practice, I began to see the Uranus archetype as just as central as Pluto. That’s why my book was entitled Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes. I began to include Uranus in the evolutionary axis because I saw it as the higher octave of Mercury, but on a completely transpersonal level. It shifts the mind from the linear mode, like taking an exam or learning to drive a car, to a level of nonlinear mind that can access this “knowing field,” which is really a kind of Neptune/Pisces archetype.
The nonlinear mind holds fantastic amounts of information, including significant trauma events from the past, soul blueprints, and karmic memories. To put it metaphorically, soul is the key to me, and Pluto is like the heart of the soul and describes the way the soul has internalized meaning, whereas Uranus is the mind of the soul, a more transpersonal mind. Uranus remembers everything — early childhood experiences we think we’ve forgotten, memories of being in the womb, the experiences of past lives and in-between lives. Uranus is a kind of nonlinear data storage, in a sense, and Pluto is the way we’ve internalized what’s contained there, the way we’ve created a meaningful, soulful story from that data storage. So, you might have manifested several lifetimes where you try to explore your understanding of the cosmos, or the nature of relationships, or what have you.
To me, Uranus always includes this deeper element linked to individuation. Why is it linked to individuation? Because when the nonlinear mind makes contact with us, the information that’s transferred — not just rational information, since it’s the subtle mind — pressures us to evolve and individuate, to connect at that deeper level of our being. We can no longer believe everything we’re told in the newspapers or on television, or everything our minister has said to us, or even what our partners say to us. We have to shift from that Saturnian identification, where we defer authority to other people without question, over to the Uranian principle, where we begin to realize that our own consciousness, our own being, is the central resource, and in some ways the only resource we need. If we connect to the essence of our own inner being, it will start to reveal information to us. I’m not saying there’s no value in reading and studying. I’ve personally found that there is. Being well-read has really helped me in my writing and teaching. But the essence of information can be made known to us directly at the Uranian level.
AS: Uranus has been locked into a dance with Pluto for a long time now. After three years of this Uranus–Pluto square, do you have a better sense of what it wants to bring to our attention, what it’s asking of us?
MJ: In my estimation, this Uranus–Pluto square carries enormous revolutionary potential for radical empowerment on the collective level. These two were conjunct in Virgo in the 1960s, and the current square is their first critical juncture since then. Collectively, we’re trying to make sense of some of the issues that came up in the ‘60s — the environmental crisis, certain medical breakthroughs, a shift in psychology from a behaviorist model to a more transpersonal understanding, and the shadow around the use of drugs. Psychedelic drugs have been marginalized since that time, but it’s now very clear that they have therapeutic efficacy. It’s no longer just about people wanting to get high all the time. Starting back then, ecstasy and LSD were used therapeutically in clinical settings, until they were deemed dangerous by the controlling powers of the state and became illegal. But more and more frequently, they’re used for healing.
For example, Johns Hopkins Medical School offers controlled LSD sessions for people who have terminal cancer and are also suffering from depression. This drug is still considered to be a high-risk agent, but, hey, if you’ve already got terminal cancer and you’re depressed, they can give it to you, because from a conventional perspective, you’re screwed anyway! What these people find, in this wonderful controlled setting, is a doctor who gives them this pill in a chalice, like a goblet, as if they’re receiving a sacrament. They lie down with soft eye pads on and headphones that play beautiful classical music, and they have “sitters” — nonmedical people who sit with them and hold their hand so they have physical contact with someone the whole time. It’s been reported that 70% of these people have a primary mystical experience during their first-time use of LSD, and that it helps them to cope with their approaching death.
I cannot believe that, as a culture, we denigrate that reality and push it into the shadows because the powers-that-be are afraid of the impact on society. In their defense, the excesses of the ‘60s didn’t help. The glamorized view of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, for example, seems fantastic even now, but the reality, as Gary Lachman showed in his wonderful book,6 was much more seedy and grim: drug dealers preying on vulnerable young hippie girls who had arrived from out of state, sexual assault and molestation, many people taking drugs and freaking out. So, it’s not just that the government is conservative and anti-freedom. It’s a very complex issue. But why ignore the healing benefits for others? In my line of work, I see the incredible suffering that people go through in their lives, and I find it sad that powerful, therapeutic healing tools are discovered but then, because we’re so frightened of them, hardly anyone can experience them.
Actually, my own father died of cancer. He went from healthy to obviously quite ill and to dead very quickly. Watching this documentary about the work at Johns Hopkins, I was moved to tears, because I would have wished that experience for him. He was a good person who set up an entire university department and traveled around Asia bringing foreign students to England to study. He was a popular and charismatic speaker. And yet he died at a relatively young age, probably feeling very frightened and projecting absolution of the self and the void onto life which he could only see as a material phenomenon. And of course, reality is so much more magnificent than that!
AS: Powerful! I’m sorry to hear that.
MJ: Thank you, man. Thank you.
AS: Well, we’re at the hour, Mark. I’d really like to chat with you a lot longer. We’ll have to do this again!
MJ: I’ve really enjoyed it, Adam. You held a nice space, and you’ve asked some really thought-provoking questions.
References
- Mark Jones, Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes, Raven Dreams Press, 2012; The Soul Speaks: The Therapeutic Potential of Astrology, Raven Dreams Press, 2015.
- Mark Jones, “The Space between the Stars: The Nature and Function of the Planetary Nodes,” The Mountain Astrologer, Dec. 2013/Jan. 2014.
- James Hillman, Re-visioning Psychology, HarperCollins, 1975, p. 208.
- Stanislav Grof, When the Impossible Happens: Adventures in Non-ordinary Realities, Sounds True, 2006.
- Jeffrey Wolf Green, Uranus: Freedom from the Known, Llewellyn, 1993.
- Gary Lachman, Turn off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius, Disinformation Books, 2003.