Immortal Curiosity

Concerning Richard Tarnas’ “Cosmos and Psyche“–

Having not heard of the book before coming across it sitting on a shelf, I perfunctorily read the description on the back cover. The paragraph revealed what might be quite an interesting and informative philosophical and scientific work, as others I had come across. But the phrase “correspondence between planetary alignments and the archetypal patterns of human history” threw me for quite a loop. Astrology? From a “distinguished philosopher”? Something must be amiss. It did make me curious enough to purchase the work, of course.

I mention the above observation because it initiated a process in my mind as I started reading the work that I found quite interesting. Despite my initial surprise at what the book’s content might be, after I started reading I tried to put all astrological thoughts out of my mind, and simply read the work for what it was to be. However, I kept noting a tendency in Tarnas’ diction that coalesced into the conclusion that he either had read many works of a astronomical, cosmological, or astrological nature (or had a smaller number in his mind quite distinctly) or that he was perhaps purposefully trying to remind the reader of these subjects without discussing them directly. He used “constellate” at least three times in the first 25 pages [edit: Make that 5 in the first 37! [And more. I give up.]]. While a fine enough word, it is quite uncommon. One corpus search of several million words had it listed 13 times. Another term was “nadir”, and there were several others.