Viking 2006 · Plume 2007
Indicative, not causal.
The planets do not “cause” specific events any more than the hands on a clock “cause” a specific time. Rather, the planetary positions are indicative of the cosmic state or archetypal dynamics at that time.
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View was published by Viking in 2006, and by Plume in 2007. Richard Tarnas sets planetary cycles beside the character of cultural history. The book is not a birth chart. It is not a forecast.
A hand on a clock does not make the hour. It says which hour you are already in. Read that way, a planet indicates a quality of time. It does not push an event into being. The same quality can show up in acts that contradict one another.
Sympatheia
The Stoics’ name for a cosmos that is one body.
Marcus Aurelius asks that the universe be kept in mind as one living being, one substance, and one soul.
The word is not in Tarnas’s sentence. The clock is.
Note
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 4.40, translated by C. R. Haines, Loeb Classical Library, 1916: “Cease not to think of the Universe as one living Being, possessed of a single Substance and a single Soul.” The Greek of that section is about one living being and the weave. It does not use the noun sympatheia. The Stoic term for co-affection in one cosmos is older than this room, and older than Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche (New York: Viking, 2006). That book is cited for the clock. It is not cited for this word.