Bioenergetics, Astrology and the Solar System

Planets in People

His fundamental insight was that the eight planets could be considered opposite or perhaps as complementary. He correlated the planets with the bioenergetic stages in childhood in the order Pluto, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Mars (See table below). These, he maintained, were grouped in the pairs Pluto- Mercury, Jupiter-Saturn, Venus-Uranus, Neptune-Mars.

The bioenergetic literature is rich in descriptions of character types. Alexander Lowen,in his book Bioenergetics, says: "Each type has a special pattern of defense on both the psychological and muscular levels that distinguishes it from the other types...It is recognised that no individual is a pure type and that every person in our culture combines in different degrees...some or all of these defensive patterns."

In other of his and Wilhelm Reich's works, rather detailed descriptions are given of the types and Iadnamad was the first to realise that these descriptions tallied very closely to traditional planetary typology.

We need not accept the theories of bioenergetics to realise that the different clinical types described by Reich, Lowen, Freud, Fenichel and others form a large body of valuable observational data. For example, it is commonly accepted that many actors exhibit oral tendencies - the oral or narcissistic type enjoys the kind of adulation available through theatre or film - and the research of the Gauquelins shows that Jupiter tends to be strong at the birth time of such individuals.

The insights and attributions of Iadnamad owed nothing to astronomy and when I first encountered them I tried to relate them to the planets in the time they took to circle the Sun and in their order to and from the Sun. But, as the table below shows, while Pluto, Mercury, Jupiter and Saturn are paired together in the Iadnamad order, the other four planets are not.

When Iadnamad first compared the nature of the planets to the bioenergetic types, he realised that the characters described by Reich, Lowen et al, overlapped in some cases. The correlations he uncovered were:-

The two sets of planets are Lunar and Solar respectively and, if the bioenergetic connection is valid, each set is again divided into pre-genital and post-genital.

Something striking about these relationships caught my eye. If Cancer was assigned to Pluto rather than the Moon, Virgo assigned to Uranus rather than Mercury and Pisces assigned to Neptune rather than Jupiter, this fitted both the bioenergetic and zodiacal patterns.

This arrangement meant that constellations could then be paired along planetary lines: Pisces-Aries, Gemini-Cancer, Virgo-Libra and Sagittarius-Capricorn. This formed a pleasing symmetry. If the traditional neo-Platonic planets were omitted from the table of constellations, the symmetry was complete.

Schematicism is one thing but how do these diurnal and nocturnal attributions correlate with the nature of the signs themselves? There is no doubt that they are helpful to an understanding of both the symbolism of the constellations and their nature. And, for the first time, the octaves of childhood development, the planets and the constellations are shown to be inter-dependent.

For myself, the last 16 years have amply confirmed that Iadnamad's original insights were valid. The nature of the trans-Saturnian planets in astrology has been difficult to fathom. Pluto was only discovered in 1930. But the descriptions of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are ancient and verified, to some degree, by the work of the Gauquelins. So we can discover the true nature of the trans-Saturnian bodies by comparing them with their opposites.

If Venus is soft, vulnerable and affectionate and Uranus is its planetary opposite, then we can confidently predict Uranus will be hard, invulnerable and cold. If Mars is aggressive, goal-orientated and thrusting we can judge that Neptune will be passive, not interested in goals and receptive. Observation confirms such insights. Jung's extraversion and introversion and Reich's narcissism and masochism are modern-day versions of the ancient classification into solar and lunar types.

Copyright © 1995 Mike Magee. Artwork © 1995 Jan Bailey. All rights reserved.