Interview with Mark Jones
EA Interview series, part 5
Disclaimer: Somehwat unplanned, this interview turned out much longer than the others. Enjoy!
Biography
Mark Jones is an astrologer, teacher, author and psychosynthesis therapist based in South Wales. He has written several books on astrology and counselling, including Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes, The Soul Speaks: the Therapeutic Potential of Astrology, and most recently, Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution. Drawing on 20 years of experience working with clients blending transpersonal psychotherapy and astrology, Mark has developed an approach to chart analysis focused on connecting with “the deep self” or the true nature of the psyche or soul.
You can connect with Mark and find more information about his books, courses, webinars and podcasts on his website:
https://markjonesastrology.com/
He also has many classes available through Astrology University, including an in-depth course on counselling dynamics as well on the lunar nodes and other key astrological subjects:
https://www.astrologyuniversity.com/category/search-by-astrologer/mark-jones/
Interview questions and answers
How did you get into Evolutionary Astrology and how long have you been practicing it now? How big of a role does it play in your psychotherapy practice?
At university I studied English and American literature. Whether it was the poetry of T.S.Eliot or W.B.Yeats or the wild mysticism of Walt Whitman, my close friend and I managed, in the 2nd and 3rd year, to write our own program on lyrical and symbolist poetry which two professors were kind enough to teach us!
The best poetry seemed to us to be pointing to a mysterious factor of meaning that we christened the “X Factor” (long before it became associated with tv shows). We began to see this mysterious factor as the missing spiritual component of our lives up to that point, and in Western life in general. This conviction, fortified by certain inner experiences, lead me, after a post-grad in creative writing, to study religion, mysticism, and the occult. A key structure to integrate these studies was the Kabbalistic Tree of life which I studied with Warren Kenton when I was 23. It was during this course of study that Kenton introduced me to the profound art of Kabbalistic Astrology. This was the event that triggered my becoming an astrologer. Following the course, I went to the famous Watkins book store in London and got charts for my friend and myself printed out and very shortly after, my small community of artists, musicians, scientists and mystics started turning to me for astrological guidance.
The advantage of learning astrology through a Kabbalistic lens was that it gave me a pre-existing sacred architecture, so whilst I was respectful and profoundly engaged with astrology, I was never just a naïve believer. In 2002 I graduated from a psychosynthesis therapy training, as well as Jeffrey Green’s Evolutionary Astrology school and Noel Tyl’s Synthesis and Counselling in Astrology Masters program, and I went on to establish a private psychotherapy practice and teach my first Evolutionary Astrology schools in the UK. Initially my private therapy practice was just that, and my astrological studies were separate. Over time the two began to blend, and in that process, charts for certain people with complex problems became absolutely crucial to me for working out what was happening in their lives. In my 2011 Healing the Soul: Pluto, Uranus and the Lunar Nodes, I shared two case studies of long-term client work that had been influenced profoundly by my understanding of astrology.
Almost immediately I was aware how powerful the right kind of astrological understanding could be for therapeutic work with clients. It’s almost as if it was revealing a hidden map or architecture for the work. I knew even back then in my mid 30’s how powerful this combination could be. I was not alone. People I worked with began to notice how powerful this combination of blending psychotherapy with astrology really was and, alongside the publication of my first book, the teaching and conferences lead to my work becoming more well known. Increasingly I did less and less pure psychotherapy and more and more complex alchemical blending of astrology and therapeutic guidance. In keeping with this transition, I retired from this private psychotherapy practice at the end of 2016 and committed all of my time to this complex blend of the two disciplines.
As someone who has been offering EA consultations for a few years now, I sometimes feel as though astrology lends itself a bit too much to putting people into boxes, and in my experience many clients will be expecting that kind of treatment. I have also sometimes found that my focus on the client’s chart can steal the focus from the actual interaction between counselor and client. How do we defend against such pitfalls when using astrology as a tool for counseling and healing?
This is such a good and important question. If anything, you are being a bit too nice when you say “I sometimes feel as though astrology lends itself a bit too much to putting people into boxes!” In my experience this is something of an understatement. I would say it is crucial to look directly into the face of the problem that astrology so often has. Which is to say a complexity problem. Astrology may seem complicated to even an advanced student but the complexity of astrology is nothing compared to the complexity of life itself. Therefore, any attempt of astrology to explain things has an inherent danger of imprisoning the complexity and nuance of life into some more readily digestible format. Now, that is understandable and even appropriate. As a system of pattern recognition, astrology must reduce the complexity of life in order to make meaningful statements to guide us through said complexity. Yet, this genuine attempt to make meaning is frequently derailed by a series of factors. The first is the need of the student of astrology to simplify interpretations in order to grow as a practitioner, combined with a certain statistical naivety i.e. one says for example, Moon in Capricorn means such-and-such a mother, and yet with approximately 8 billion people on the planet there are well over 600 million people with this placement. Are we convinced that our cook-book interpretation is going to stand up well in all those 600 million+ cases? Even the simplest assertions based upon the charts symbolism alone can appear suspect when approached from the larger statistical scale or from the shear variety of people’s lives.
“Well then”, you might say, “from your perspective Mark, astrology is useless.” Well no, clearly not. I am, after all a professional astrologer! What we have instead is a lesson on relying excessively on the interpretive power of the natal chart alone. The real creativity in astrology, in my view, is not contained in the purely interpretive realm; it is the blend that arises from your creativity in training your interpretive skills, meeting the reality of the individual people that seek your advice and support. This is more than just a “counselling orientation” – this is actually an interpretive point, one that Rudhyar underlined when he stated that the final determinant in the natal chart is the consciousness of the individual. From this perspective, you cannot interpret this symbolism of the natal chart without including the actual experience, insight, love, hope, dreams of the individual of whose chart you are reading. So, the real challenge and gift of being an astrologer, is not learning how to read charts, though that is a crucial step, but learning how people “inhabit” their charts, and remake and remodel them. So, the points I make about the therapeutic application of astrology in, for example my 2015 book The Soul Speaks, are not an after-thought – how to dress up difficult interpretations by being “nice” to your clients. To really understand how a natal chart becomes unique, from being lived in, you have to open yourself to the reality of the individual and let that opening lead your astrological interpretation to clarify the way the astrological symbolism works in a unique way in that individual.
“I have also sometimes found that my focus on the client’s chart can steal the focus from the actual interaction between counsellor and client.” I appreciate your honest and observational insight when you raise the point.
I have given detailed analysis in multiple educational formats of these issues including an audio counselling course with Astrology University and a counselling dynamics class. The one that you have singled out is a particularly interesting point. I have noticed multiple times in readings when one is coming to a point of potentially life changing depth, that a person recoils through fear and starts asking more minor or trivial points of analysis about their chart as a way of breaking the process. Clearly, the natal chart can be used as a defence. We could note that in Post Traumatic Stress examples of developmental trauma or stress, people tend to escape their bodies and feelings into the excitement of a racing mind or the richness of the symbolic domain. I don’t think it needs pointing out how the richly complex subject of astrology could play into that.
I would like to talk about your book The Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution. I believe it was Dane Rudhyar who first articulated the idea that a north node represents the positive pole of integration for a planet, whereas the south node stands for the negative pole of (dis)integration or release of past patterns for that planet (cfr. The Astrology of Personality, p. 268). This was later picked up by evolutionary astrologers and connected to the notions of past-life karma (south node) and evolutionary potential (north node). What struck me when I read your book though was that north node conjunctions in history don’t always seem to manifest in such a “good” way, even if there is a sense of newness to their expressions. For example, Pluto conjuncted its own north node and that of Saturn during the rise of Nazism (and Stalinism), and Uranus conjuncted its own north node quite dramatically when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (The Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution, p. 143-152). What are we to make of this, as evolutionary astrologers? Do we need to take a page from the Vedic Astrology playbook and consider that a north node, on a purely descriptive level, can be akin to an obsessive energy that amplifies whatever it touches? I am personally a bit hesitant to go there, but I have sometimes seen hints in this direction in the charts of celebrities or clients (e.g. Donald Trump’s Sun conjunct the Lunar North Node describing an inflated ego).
This, for me at least, simple thinking about the nodes is very frustrating. The idea that in some literal way the SN is just the past, or even worse, is in some way “bad,” is from my perspective extraordinarily simplistic. Astrology is a symbolic art form in my view more than a science. Having said that, the actual mechanisms are hardly irrelevant to it. The Moons Nodes are abstract points in space formed by the Moons orbital motion as it crosses the ecliptic: the NN as it rises above the ecliptic, the SN as it descends below it. Both abstract points are formed by the orbital motion of the Moon. The idea that you could completely separate them is astronomically incoherent as they are both expressions of one motion. I think there is a lot to be said for this when we adopt our interpretative stance within the symbolic domain of Evolutionary Astrology. The research I did for the 2020 book The Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution saw me re-investigate Rudhyar’s primary material on both the lunar and planetary nodes. Although in his 1936 Astrology of Personality, as you rightfully point out, he has begun to establish an interpretive pattern between the two nodes, by the time of his 1971 pamphlet for the theosophical society, The Lunar and Planetary Nodes, it is clear that his thinking has evolved much further beyond his earlier writing. At the risk of creating even greater complexity, we could look at an idea from quantum physics where, under certain conditions, light behaves like a particle, and yet in the same experiment from a different vantage point, it behaves like a wave, thus being called by some a Wavicle. In a sense, whist it is understandable that we would separate the two nodes for interpretive purposes (particle), to fail to recognise that they are a living continuum or circuit of energy together (wave) is to profoundly miss the point. Why are these, seemingly technical considerations, so important? Well, in many cases, simplistic and dualist thinking about the nodes in Evolutionary Astrology creates real emotional pain and psychic suffering in peoples’ lives. To take a really simple example, when starting a reading with one lady, she began talking to me through tears about her SN in Libra NN Aries and how this meant she had already had relationships in past lives and now she had to be alone! Clearly this example shows how a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. All these books and courses separating the nodes and turning them into “lessons,” with the idea that the SN lessons ought to already be understood and if not then bad grades would follow, are being peddled a little too simplistically with too much of a simple beat. This idea of demonising the past has never made sense to me. If I graduate from college in New York and form a group of bohemian like-minded friends in my 20’s, does this mean that in my 30’s when I move to California, that New York is just a terrible place where all it does is rain and you can’t surf? This is such a needlessly simplistic and dualistic way of looking at one’s life. To go back to the example of my client, we could say that the NN has the potential intention for the person to develop greater courage and independence to express themselves, including expressing themselves in relationships (SN Libra). The idea that it HAS to be one thing or the other is frankly childish. Donald Winnicott, the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst, defined maturation as the ability to handle paradox. We clearly live in immature times! The mature view of the nodes is that they both must be active for the person to get the most out of themselves on their evolving path. We do not get the best out of the dragon’s head by cutting off its tail!
We also return to the complexity problem outlined earlier. Life is extraordinarily complex. History is extraordinarily complex. The complexity of history defies any simple attempt to give a simple narrative arc of meaning. So, when you raise the points you noticed in The Planetary Nodes and Collective Evolution, that the NN of planets do not equate with good experiences, to me this is not a surprise because of my more nuanced view of the nodes as well as the complexity issue, which after 7 years of working together, my researcher and I have gotten used to, when looking at large astrological datasets.
I once listened to an interesting conversation between you and Steven Forrest where you discuss the question of archetypal complexes in astrology: the idea that Jupiter, Sagittarius and the Ninth house all represent the same archetype, so that having the Sun conjunct Jupiter is a bit like having the Sun in Sagittarius, for example, or that a planet in the Fourth house resembles a planet in Cancer. I know that Jeffrey Green taught this approach while many more traditional astrologers (but also Steven Forrest) are opposed to it because they feel it blurs or “flattens” the horoscope to an unnecessary degree. Supposing you haven’t fundamentally changed your method since that conversation, could you tell us something about how you like to work with these archetypal complexes and why you find it astrologically useful and meaningful?
I like the idea of Jazz that Ornette Colman promoted where your joy rests in what your “spin” was on those 12 notes in an octave. To deal with the complexity problem in astrology, to recognise that astrology is a 12-note language, is a helpful analogy in my view. To me at least it is obvious that Mars, Aries 1st house are not the same thing because one of them is a planet, one is a sign and one is a house! Having said that, to learn the 12-note musical scale you could see a resonance between Mars, Aries and the 1st house that might help a student musician/astrologer orientate to the complexity of their field.
Where would you like to see Evolutionary Astrology 10 years into the future?
I would like to see a more nuanced dialogue between the world of astrology and the world of psychotherapy and coaching. Outside of some very technical astrological areas, most people doing readings are involved in a de-facto counselling coaching dynamic, at least temporarily; whether they like it or not. So, it’s a no-brainer how much astrology can learn from counselling and coaching which have been studying effective techniques and building rapport between people for so long. Since Maggie Hyde’s excellent book, Jung and Astrology, Jung’s interest on the subject has been made clear, as Liz Greene’s recent extensive contributions reveal. In 2012, with a friend and colleague I ventured to the Florence archive of Roberto Assagioli, founder of Psychosynthesis, where it was made clear to us that Assagioli was also an astrologer and had used astrology in his client work throughout his life. So, whilst it’s obvious to many how counselling can help astrology in the counselling and couching world, they are less aware about how astrology could help the counselling world. I would like to see that dialogue open up more explicitly. I see part of my work as explicitly connecting those domains. On a more personal, even spiritual note (with no great expectation of this happening in the next 10 years) I would love to see the reality of the human soul acknowledged more directly. Even the so-called transpersonal or spiritual orientated psychologies fail to recognise directly enough, at least for my tastes, the luminous light, the infinite love and the shining wisdom of the soul’s direct energetic capacity to inspire human life. During the Covid years I taught a two year psychosynthesis coaching program where I addressed the evolution of psychology from this soul-centred perspective. Even asserting at one point that psychosynthesis was the kind of psychology that prepared you in readiness for a spiritual path. In personal terms, my spiritual life precedes both my astrological and therapeutic studies, as they both emerge from the original intention to serve all of life through a direct discovery of the reality of soul.
