Did Jung Believe in Astrology? His Verdict
By Evgeny Smirnov, PhD · Psychological counsellor & founder of Individuate.me
Did Jung believe in astrology? He tested horoscopes of 483 married couples, called the result chance, and read the zodiac as a projection of the unconscious.
Did Jung believe in astrology? Carl Jung ran a statistical test of it and discussed it in at least five volumes of his Collected Works, in texts dated from 1930 to 1958. His answer is more careful than the one-line quotes that circulate online, so on this page I quote him paragraph by paragraph.
Did Jung believe in astrology? The short answer
No, not in the popular sense. Carl Jung called the belief that the stars shape character 'the old superstitious assumption' (CW 9i, §7) and allowed at most a speculative physical link (CW 8, §876). His statistics on 483 married couples gave figures he called chance (CW 8, §901; CW 18, §1198). He did take astrology seriously as a psychological fact, a 'complete projected theory of human character' (CW 12, §346) rooted in the collective unconscious, and he read the striking pattern in his results as synchronicity, not as proof (CW 8, §904; CW 18, §1203).
Jung's Collected Works are cited here by volume and paragraph (CW 8, §901 means volume 8, paragraph 901). I read every quoted paragraph in the volumes myself; the quotes keep the British spelling of the translation.
What did Jung say about astrology and the collective unconscious?
For Jung, astrology is a projection: the zodiac and the planets carry images from the collective unconscious, and people see them in the sky because they cannot yet see them in themselves. This is the center of his view, and in my opinion the most interesting part of it.
Three definitions, because everything depends on them. The collective unconscious, in Jung's theory, is the layer of the psyche that is not personal; it holds inherited patterns of imagination which he called archetypes (the hero, the mother, the union of opposites). Projection is the unconscious transfer of an inner content onto an outer object, so that the content is experienced as a property of the object. Both are theoretical concepts of analytical psychology, not measured findings.
In 'Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious' Jung argues that myths about the sun, the moon and the seasons are not allegories of nature but 'symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection' (CW 9i, §7). Then he names astrology. This 'age-old "scientia intuitiva"' was condemned, he says, because man 'had not yet succeeded in making the psychological description of character independent of the stars'.
The same paragraph holds his sharpest objection to popular astrology. Believers 'fall almost without exception for the old superstitious assumption of the influence of the stars'. And yet 'anyone who can calculate a horoscope should know' that, because of the precession of the equinoxes, the spring-point has moved from Aries into Pisces, so 'the zodiac on which every horoscope is based is therefore quite arbitrary' (CW 9i, §7). The signs no longer match the constellations they are named after. For a believer in star influence this is a problem. For Jung it was a clue: if the zodiac still 'works' for people, the working part cannot be the stars (CW 15, §82).
In Psychology and Alchemy he puts it in one line. In the stars 'mankind discovered … the dominants of the unconscious, the "gods," as well as the curious psychological qualities of the zodiac: a complete projected theory of human character. Astrology is a primordial experience similar to alchemy' (CW 12, §346). The alchemist, in his reading, experienced his own unconscious as the behavior of matter; the astrologer experienced it as the behavior of planets.
In 1930, in his memorial address for the sinologist Richard Wilhelm, Jung wrote that 'astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity' (CW 15, §81). Where an astrological reading of character is correct, this is due 'not to the influence of the stars but to our own hypothetical time qualities' (CW 15, §82). Please note: in the same paragraph Jung claims that birth data allow one to reconstruct a person's character 'fairly accurately'. That is his 1930 claim. I report it, I do not endorse it, and his later statistics were not designed to test it.
In the 1958 paper 'An Astrological Experiment' the archetypal reading is at its clearest: 'astrology is the last remnant, now applied to the stars, of that fateful assemblage of gods whose numinosity can still be felt despite the critical procedures of our scientific age' (CW 18, §1182). The horoscope, for him, is 'the numinous assemblage of gods' (CW 18, §1183), a picture of archetypes rather than a map of forces.
Where does synchronicity come in? Synchronicity is Jung's term for a meaningful coincidence between an inner state and an outer event with no causal link between them. 'I do not hesitate to take the synchronistic phenomena that underlie astrology seriously', he wrote, '… we should rather investigate the psychological foundations on which they rest' (CW 9i, fn. 168). The concept itself, with the famous scarab case, is on the page about Jung's idea of meaningful coincidence. Here it matters for one reason: it is how Jung read his experiment.
What was Jung's astrological experiment?
Jung's astrological experiment compared the horoscopes of 483 married couples with pairings of the same men and women who were not married to each other, to see whether the aspects tradition links to marriage turn up more frequently in real marriages. It is chapter 2 of 'Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle' (CW 8, §§872-915), first published in German in 1952; his reasons for choosing astrology and marriage are in CW 8, §§867-871.
Why marriage? Character is hard to measure, so Jung wanted 'an absolutely certain and indubitable fact', and marriage is one (CW 8, §868). He also made a point worth repeating today: 'No belief in astrology is needed to carry out such an investigation, only the birth-dates, an astronomical almanac, and a table of logarithms' (CW 8, §869).
An aspect is an angle between two points of a horoscope: a conjunction means they stand close together, an opposition means they face each other. The method, in Jung's own numbers:
| What | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Where the birth data came from | donors in Zurich, London, Rome and Vienna, stacked in the order the post brought them | CW 8, §873 |
| Aspects tested | 50: conjunctions and oppositions of sun, moon, Mars, Venus, ascendant and descendant | CW 8, §878 |
| Allowed deviation (orb) | 8° either way | CW 8, §880 |
| First batch | 180 married pairs, compared with 180 × 179 = 32,220 unmarried pairs | CW 8, §880 |
| Later batches | 220 and 83 pairs: 483 marriages, 966 horoscopes in all | CW 8, §880 |
| Most frequent aspect per batch | sun-moon conjunction 10%; moon-moon 10.9%; moon-ascendant 9.6% | CW 8, §880 |
| Final probabilities (Markus Fierz) | 1 : 1000, 1 : 10,000 and 1 : 50 | CW 8, §901 |
| Co-worker | Dr. Liliane Frey-Rohn | CW 8, §896 |
The three winning aspects are exactly the lunar aspects that astrological tradition links to marriage (CW 8, §§869, 902; CW 18, §1185).
How did Jung read his own results?
Jung read his figures as chance and said so in print: 'From the scientific point of view the result of our investigation is in some respects not encouraging for astrology … there is little hope of proving that astrological correspondence is something that conforms to law' (CW 8, §901). The 10% maxima are 'far from representing a significant figure' (CW 8, §881).
The numbers sank batch by batch: the average frequency of the three most common constellations fell from 8.1% in the first batch to 7.7% in the second and 5.6% in the third (CW 8, §895). Professor Markus Fierz of Basel first computed 1 : 10,000 for the first two maxima, then found an error, then another (CW 8, §901). Jung's comment on 1 : 1000 is very practical: with such odds of getting the telephone connection he wanted, he would rather write a letter. In the revised text he added that the errors 'all tend to exaggerate the results in a way favourable to astrology' (CW 8, §906), and named the 'great disadvantage' of the design: 'the entire experiment was carried out on only one subject, myself' (CW 8, §913).
His letters to Fierz, printed in CW 18, are even plainer. On 2 March 1950: 'For myself I regard the result as very unsatisfactory and have therefore stopped collecting further material' (CW 18, §1197), and 'The statistical findings undoubtedly show that the astrological correspondences are nothing more than chance' (CW 18, §1198). On 28 October 1954: 'It was never my intention to prove that the astrological prediction is correct—I know the unreliability of astrology much too well for that' (CW 18, §1203).
So why didn't he stop there? Because of the coincidence itself. Out of 50 possibilities, the three maxima fell on the three lunar aspects tradition expects. Jung's image: three matchboxes with 1,000, 10,000 and 50 black ants and one white ant in each, and each time the white ant crawls out first (CW 8, §902).
He called this combined coincidence very improbable, in 1958 even 'highly significant', while still saying the experiment proves nothing (CW 8, §904; CW 18, §§1185-1186). Then the key sentence of the chapter. If the figures fall within chance, 'they do not support the astrological claim, they merely imitate accidentally the ideal answer to astrological expectation … It is just what I call a synchronistic phenomenon' (CW 8, §904). He even counted his and his co-worker's 'lively interest in the outcome' among the conditions (CW 8, §905).
Two cautions. First, Jung also speculated that solar proton radiation and planetary aspects might give astrology a causal basis, a link he called 'just conceivable' (CW 8, §§875-876). It is his hypothesis; nothing on this page rests on it. Second, the 1951 lecture version (CW 8, §§987-995) gives older, uncorrected probabilities and, pointing to the same solar-radiation research, says 'Astrology is in the process of becoming a science' (CW 8, §§987-988). The sentence is real, but it is his 1951 position. By 1958 the material was 'much too scanty for us to be able to draw from it any conclusions either for or against' (CW 18, §1179).
Did Jung use astrology with patients?
In the volumes I searched, the Collected Works document one clear case of a patient's own horoscope: a patient Jung calls Miss X, who 'knew her horoscope' and put her own sign, Cancer, into a mandala painting (CW 9i, §606). A footnote records her chart: 'four earth signs but no air sign' (CW 9i, fn. 166). A side experiment in CW 8 is different: two women patients and a third woman each drew marriage horoscopes of other people by lot, and Jung compared the aspects that came up with each woman's psychological state, while counting the figures as chance (CW 8, §§897-900).
What Jung did with it is instructive. Miss X 'gave no context' for the crabs in her picture, so he collected what the crab and Cancer meant in older traditions: resurrection (the crab sheds its shell), caution and foresight, the house of the moon (CW 9i, §604). This is Jung's amplification method applied to an astrological image. The horoscope enters as one more source of symbols, not as a forecast.
A broader claim circulates online, including, as of November 2026, in Google's AI summary for this question: that Jung 'frequently calculated natal charts for his patients'. I did not find a CW paragraph that says this. The scholar Stephanie Buck argues that astrology 'provided Jung an objective means to a fuller understanding of the analysand's true nature' (Buck, 2018). It is a scholar's interpretation, not a CW fact.
What do scholars say about Jung and astrology today?
Two recent papers in the Journal of Analytical Psychology draw different lessons from Jung's astrology: Buck (2018) argues that it aided his work on synchronicity, while Zeng and Fraikin (2025) conclude that his experiment shows synchronicity cannot be verified by natal astrology. For both I read the abstracts, not the full texts.
Buck (2018, JAP 63(2):207–227, PubMed 29504681) calls astrology 'a lifelong interest for C.G. Jung' that 'aided Jung's work on synchronicity', and argues that its role is 'all but absent from historical notice'.
Zeng and Fraikin (2025, JAP 70(5):808–824; open copy at the University of Essex repository) state that Jung's 'experimental results reveal that synchronicity cannot be verified by natal astrology'. They review two post-Jungian authors, Liz Greene and Richard Tarnas, who 'overlooked … Jung's cautious epistemological attitude towards synchronicity in order to establish a grander cosmology for astrology'. Their own proposal emphasizes 'the numinous foundation of the unconscious', which is close to the projection reading above.
Is Jungian astrology a science?
No, Jungian astrology is not a science: Jung's own experiment did not show that the stars correlate with marriage beyond chance, and he said so (CW 8, §901). Jungian psychology as a whole is not a tested science either: some of its claims have research support and others do not, and I go through them one by one in how scientific Jungian psychology is.
What survives is the psychological reading: astrology as a very old symbolic language into which people project their own archetypal images. That reading makes no prediction and needs no star influence. The same rule applies to spiritual readings of dreams: report what a tradition says, do not report it as a finding.
Claims about Jung and astrology that circulate online, checked against the texts:
| Claim you will see | What the sources say | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Jung believed the stars shape character | He called star influence 'the old superstitious assumption' and pointed to the arbitrary zodiac; he only speculated about solar radiation | CW 9i, §7; CW 15, §82; CW 8, §876 |
| Jung proved astrology with statistics | He called his figures chance and said he never meant to prove it | CW 8, §901; CW 18, §§1198, 1203 |
| Jung said astrology is becoming a science | True for the 1951 lecture; by 1958 the material was too scanty for conclusions | CW 8, §988; CW 18, §1179 |
| 'Astrology represents the sum of all the psychological knowledge of antiquity' | Genuine, 1930 | CW 15, §81 |
| Jung frequently charted his patients | One documented case in the CW volumes I searched; a wider role is Buck's interpretation | CW 9i, §606; Buck 2018 |
| The 'vintage years of wine' quote | Not found in CW 7, 8, 9i, 9ii, 11, 12, 15, 16 or 18; nearest is 'the quality of this moment of time' | CW 15, §82 |
When is this page not what you need?
This page is history and psychology, so it is the wrong place for three things.
- A horoscope, a natal chart or a forecast. An astrologer or astrology software does that. Individuate.Me does not: it has no astrology, birth-data or chart feature, and it makes no predictions.
- A full scholarly account. The anthology Jung on Astrology, edited by Safron Rossi and Keiron Le Grice (Routledge, 2017, DOI 10.4324/9781315304519), and the two JAP papers above go much deeper.
- Help with a decision that frightens you. Neither a chart nor a dream reading is the right tool; a licensed counselor or psychotherapist is.
If your real question is 'why did I dream about stars, planets or my zodiac sign?', that is a different matter. Jung read such images in dreams as symbols, the same way he read Miss X's crab. And if a dream seemed to come true, the page on dreams that seem to predict events explains how Jung and memory research each describe that.
How does Individuate.Me read a symbolic dream?
Individuate.Me gives a Jungian reading of a dream that starts from your own associations, not from a fixed dictionary of signs. In Step-by-Step Analysis (the guided mode) you first tell the dream and what was going on in your life, then the objects and characters of the dream are identified, you give your associations for each, and only then comes the interpretation; I describe the steps in how to interpret a dream. The Dream Landscape panel tracks recurring motifs and archetypes across your dream journal, which is closer to Jung's idea of individuation, a lifelong path of development than any single reading.
It is not therapy, and it does not tell your future. Credits come in one-off packages with no subscription, starting at $1 for 100 credits (about five dreams); see Individuate.Me credit packages and prices.
Dreamed of stars, planets or your sign?
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Frequently asked questions
Did Jung use astrology with his patients?
In the Collected Works volumes I searched there is one clear case: a patient Jung calls Miss X knew her horoscope and painted her sign, Cancer, into a mandala, and Jung amplified the crab symbolism (CW 9i, §§604-606, fn. 166). A wider clinical role is the interpretation of the scholar Stephanie Buck (2018), not a CW fact.
Did Jung say astrology is a science?
He said it was becoming one, in his 1951 Eranos lecture: 'Astrology is in the process of becoming a science' (CW 8, §988). About his own data he was far more cautious: the correspondences are 'nothing more than chance' (CW 18, §1198, 1950 letter), and by 1958 the material was too scanty for conclusions (CW 18, §1179).
Is the 'vintage years of wine' quote really from Jung?
I could not find it in the Collected Works volumes I searched (CW 7, 8, 9i, 9ii, 11, 12, 15, 16 and 18). The nearest genuine passage is CW 15, §82 (1930): 'whatever is born or done at this particular moment of time has the quality of this moment of time.'
What is Jungian astrology?
It is the work of post-Jungian astrologers, such as Liz Greene and Richard Tarnas, who build Jung's synchronicity into astrological theory. Zeng and Fraikin (2025) argue that they overlooked Jung's cautious attitude to synchronicity. Jung's own texts approach astrology as a psychological phenomenon to be studied (CW 9i, fn. 168), not as a method for reading charts.
Can Individuate.Me read my horoscope or birth chart?
No. Individuate.Me reads dreams through your own associations and has no astrology, birth-data or chart feature. Zodiac, star or planet imagery in a dream is read as a symbol, the way Jung read the crab in Miss X's mandala, not as a prediction.
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