the-astrology-book

Rudhyar, Dane
published in Madras, India, and published a volume of poems, Towards Man (1928).
He was a charter member of the International Composers Guild, founded in New York
in 1922 by Edgar Varese and Carlos Salzedo, and of the New Music Society of California,
begun by Henry Cowell, who featured Rudhyar’s orchestral Surge of Fire at the
society’s first concert in the fall of 1925 in Los Angeles and published several of his
compositions with financial backing from Charles Ives.
Living in Carmel, California, in 1929, Rudhyar composed music, including a
piano piece, Granites, a poetic novel, Rania, and Art as Release of Power. (Except for two
works for string quartet written in 1950 and revisions of earlier work, all of Rudhyar’s
music was written before 1930.) In 1930, he wrote a booklet entitled Education, Instruction,
Initiation. After moving back and forth between California and New York, on June
9, 1930, Rudhyar married Malya Contento, then secretary to the writer Will Levington
Comfort. Through her he met Marc Edmund Jones, then living and teaching in Hollywood,
in September 1930; Rudhyar then returned to New York, where Jones sent him
his mimeographed courses for the Sabian Assembly, in which he presented astrology in
terms of what was then an unprecedented philosophical approach. These courses and a
growing acquaintance with the depth psychology of Carl Jung awoke Rudhyar to the
possibility of marrying astrology and depth psychology into a new kind of synthesis. In
the winter of 1931–32 in Boston, he wrote a series of seven pamphlets under the general
title Harmonic Astrology; he later renamed his concept “humanistic astrology.”
In 1931, Rudhyar started a small magazine, Hamsa, but the Depression, ill
health, and lack of support led him to drop it in 1934. By then he had met Paul Clancy,
who had, in 1932, founded American Astrology, the first successful popular magazine
in astrology. Clancy was willing to publish anything Rudhyar wanted to write on
his new kind of astrology. Month after month, Rudhyar was able to write two to five
articles for one, then several, astrological magazines with national circulations of several
million readers.
During the summer of 1933, while staying at Mary Tudor Garland’s ranch in
New Mexico, he was able to read through all of Jung’s works that had been translated
at that time, and realized he could tie together Jung’s concepts and a reformulated
type of astrology. Rudhyar used his new approach to write on many topics—politics,
philosophy, psychology, esoteric traditions—that no other magazine would have printed,
simply by centering the discussion on the birth chart of a person important in one
of these fields. Alice Bailey encouraged him to develop these articles into a unified
treatise, which he wrote during his summers in New Mexico in 1934 and 1935 and
which Bailey proceeded to publish under the title The Astrology of Personality (1936).
Rudhyar dedicated the book to her in gratitude for her support and for the influence
her earlier works had had on him in the 1920s. His next book, New Mansions for New
Man (1938), was also published under her auspices. Rudhyar was also writing poetry
during these years, gathered in a volume entitled White Thunder (1938). After 1939,
he began developing a style of nonrepresentational painting and composed music during
two summers in New Mexico.
In his forties, crises of personal development and marriage difficulties led Rudhyar
to question many things he had accepted on faith, and he wrote two more
[580] THE ASTROLOGY BOOK