London, 1983, a seminar room in Bayswater. A small group of students sits with Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas, learning to read charts the way Carl Jung read dreams. Liz Greene’s work relates to modern astrology as its psychological turn: she reads the natal chart as a map of the psyche, not a schedule of events.
What Does the Psychological Turn Mean?
Nothing in a Greene reading is a verdict. The horoscope is an image, in the Jungian sense, of the whole personality. Each planet, sign and aspect describes an inner force, an archetype that can be met, resisted, or allowed to run the show. The astrologer’s task is to help the client recognize the myth they are already living. That is the practice Greene spent her career building.
Where Did the Method Come From?
The seed came from outside astrology. In 1936 the composer and astrologer Dane Rudhyar published The Astrology of Personality, the first serious attempt to read horoscopes through Jung’s psychology. Rudhyar argued that the chart was a symbol of the whole self rather than a list of future facts. His book found readers who were tired of fortune-telling.
Greene, born in 1946, gave that seed roots. She was working as a professional astrologer in London in the early 1970s when she began training at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. She returned to her charts with a diploma in analytical psychology and a harder question: how do you actually sit with a person and their chart?
The answer arrived in print in 1976. Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil took the planet the tradition had called the greater malefic and read it as the archetype of the old father, of structure, time and necessary limits. Readers who had been raised to fear Saturn found themselves re-reading their own charts. The book did for astrology what therapy did for the confessional: it turned a verdict into a conversation.
Seven years later, in 1983, Greene and Howard Sasportas co-founded the Centre for Psychological Astrology in London. The school required astrologers to study Jungian psychology, mythology, ethics and supervised practice. For the first time, a diploma in astrology carried weight outside the community that issued it. Sasportas died in 1992; Greene kept the school going.
Her bibliography deepened the project. The Astrology of Fate (1984) took on destiny and free will. The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption (2000) traced that planet’s passage through myth, religion and art. Greene also completed a doctorate in the history of astrology at the University of Bristol, a reminder that her method rests on scholarship, not sentiment.
Planets as Gods, Charts as Mandalas
The history explains what she built. What follows is the symbolic engine underneath it.
Greene’s system turns the sky back into a pantheon. Saturn is the taskmaster who makes us earn our maturity. Neptune is the ocean of longing and delusion, the god who dissolves boundaries. Mercury is the trickster who steals words and returns them as questions. Most of us have met Mercury without knowing his name: the morning the words will not come, the document lost the day before it was due. The zodiac signs are the dialects these gods speak, and the houses are the stages where they act.
The whole chart, in Greene’s reading, is a mandala: a complete image of the self, shadow included. Underneath the system sits Jung’s theory of synchronicity (sin-kro-NISS-i-tee), the proposition that meaningful coincidences are not caused by hidden forces but are acausal connections between inner and outer events. Jung published the essay in 1952, and it gave astrologers a theory of why the chart works. Not because planets push. Because psyche and cosmos speak the same symbolic language, and the chart is where the two meet.
The method shows in the questions. Where a predictive astrologer sees Mars square Venus and says “arguments with lovers,” Greene asks what her client’s parents fought about, and how the client has been repeating the script ever since. The aspect is not an event. It is a pattern looking for a witness.
What Happens in a Greene-Style Consultation
Everything follows from that difference. In a consultation in this tradition, the chart is drawn on paper and the client is asked about dreams, childhood and the patterns that keep returning. The astrologer names the archetype that seems to be speaking, then asks where it already lives in the client’s life. The aim is recognition, not revelation. The client should leave with a question, not a prophecy.
Transits are read as moments when an archetype is constellated. The Saturn return, the cycle of roughly twenty-nine years in which Saturn returns to the place it occupied at birth, is the classic case. Greene’s school reads it not as a doom but as a rite of passage into what Jung called the alchemical opus (OH-pus), the lifelong work of becoming oneself.
The seminar room teaches its own lesson. A chart can say something brutal about a stranger’s life; the first lesson is to sit with that weight before naming it. The silence is part of the craft.
Not every session works. The method demands a client willing to do inner work, not a client who wants a date. Greene’s astrology is a mirror, and mirrors only help people ready to look. That readiness, or its absence, is where the comparison with other astrologies becomes useful.
Greene Between Two Astrologies
Greene’s work belongs to a family, and its nearest relatives are obvious. Dane Rudhyar opened the door; Greene built the house. She is the teacher where he was the prophet, the one who turned a manifesto into a curriculum.
Beyond the family stands the older tradition. Traditional astrology, codified in works like William Lilly’s Christian Astrology (1647), answers questions and forecasts events: will the marriage happen, will the ship return, will the thief be caught. Psychological astrology asks a different question. Instead of “what will happen?”, it asks “what is this situation asking of me?” The two schools have argued for decades, and the argument sharpened when translators such as Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt launched the traditional revival of the 1990s.
Her own scholarship gives her an unusual position in that fight. She can read the old texts, and she chose the new method. We respect that choice, and we keep both libraries. The traditional chart tells you what the sky asks of the situation; the psychological chart tells you what the situation asks of the soul. A serious astrologer, in our view, needs both.
What People Get Wrong About Greene’s Method
The argument between schools has produced its share of myths. Four misunderstandings recur.
The first is that Greene predicts the future. She does the opposite. Her method steers away from event prediction and toward meaning, and the books hold the same line from 1976 onward.
The second is that psychological astrology is undisciplined subjectivity. The school she founded required years of study, case journals and supervised practice, a standard that made its diploma one of the hardest in astrology to earn.
The third is that Jung invented it all. Jung supplied the theory; Rudhyar supplied the first synthesis; Greene supplied the school. Without her, Jungian astrology might have stayed a clever footnote.
The fourth is that Greene dismissed tradition. She wrote the history of astrology at a doctoral level. Her work is steeped in myth and in the older sources the tradition never stopped naming. If you have ever blamed Saturn aloud, you have already met her subject. She would only ask what Saturn was trying to tell you.
FAQ
Did Liz Greene really train as a Jungian analyst? Yes. She trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich and returned to astrology with a diploma in analytical psychology.
What is the Centre for Psychological Astrology? A London school co-founded by Greene and Howard Sasportas in 1983. It offers a diploma in psychological astrology with a curriculum in Jungian studies, mythology and counseling.
Is psychological astrology the same as fortune-telling? No. It reads the chart for inner meaning and development, and it explicitly avoids predicting events.
Where should a beginner start with her books? With Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil (1976). It is the book that founded the movement, and it was written for a reader who has never opened Jung.
Greene’s method is one door in a larger hall. Our astrology and zodiac library gathers the other doors, and the glossary entry on the archetype sets out the Jungian vocabulary her school speaks. To see the method on paper, begin with our guide to reading the natal chart.