Dane Rudhyar

Daniel Chennevière was born in Paris on 23 March 1895. A severe illness in childhood left him physically limited, and he turned toward music and intellectual work in its place, training at the Paris Conservatory and finding himself drawn to the ultra modern composition that had little audience in France at the time. He moved to New York in 1916 at the age of twenty one and became an American citizen a decade later.

In 1917 he changed his name to Rudhyar, a coinage he traced to an old Sanskrit root carrying a sense of dynamic red action, which he linked astrologically to Mars and to the sign of his own birth. As a composer he was part of the American ultra modern circle around the 1920s and 1930s, and he was also a painter, later associated with the Transcendental Painting Group active in New Mexico. Astrology, which he came to through the Theosophical Society and through his friendship with Marc Edmund Jones, became the field in which he did his most lasting work. Over his lifetime he wrote more than forty books and hundreds of articles, and he died on 13 September 1985 in San Francisco, at ninety. His music drew on Skryabin and on the modernist circle around Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, and in 1938 he joined the Transcendental Painting Group in New Mexico, a short lived circle of abstract painters who shared his interest in art as a vehicle for spiritual perception rather than representation. He also wrote on Jungian psychology, mysticism and what he called the planetarization of human consciousness, threading those same concerns through his music, his painting and his astrology alike.

Rudhyar's 1936 book The Astrology of Personality is generally treated as the founding statement of humanistic astrology, an approach informed by Jungian psychology that read a birth chart as a portrait of a person's potential wholeness rather than a set of predicted events. The approach shaped most of the psychologically oriented astrology written after him.

Rudhyar took no part in the 1925 sitting through which Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler produced the raw symbolic images for all 360 degrees of the zodiac. Decades later he wrote his own complete set of interpretive keynotes for those same 360 degrees and published them in 1973 as An Astrological Mandala, a personal, extensively reworked elaboration rather than a transcription of the 1925 material. That text is the wording now carried by the Sabian symbol degrees recorded here, and it remains in copyright under the Rudhyar estate, so, for rights reasons, the specific keynotes are not reproduced in this article. What can be said is structural: each degree receives a short condensed statement meant to distill the psychological meaning Rudhyar read into the image assigned to it, continuing the humanistic reframing that runs through the whole of his work.