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Mapping of the Human Archetypome

Or a scientific mission for the astrologers, should they choose to accept it

By MARTIN REZNY

If astrology was a science, what would the astrologers be doing, that they’re not doing? That’s one of the main questions I think skeptics of astrology should be asking. It’s a question that has many answers, but there’s one answer in particular that I’d like to focus on now. One that could turn astrology into not just science, but a source of important technology.

Believe it or not, this is how my whole recent quest to solve Asimovian robotics started. Certain angel on my shoulder led me to believe they would invest some serious money into an astrology-related tech idea, if I could come up with one that would be profitable. About five minutes after I took a closer look at that, I’ve discovered a way to solve astrology.

What do I mean by “solving” astrology? Let me ask you this: Why is it, that the way humans do astrology is so much better than the way computers do astrology? In a word, it’s because of synthesis. A human astrologer can “synthesize” what a natal chart means as a whole, or what multiple whole natal charts mean together. Computers can only do one thing at a time.

Let’s just say there is a way how to make a computer do astrological synthesis. I’m not sure I should be open-sourcing all the details just yet, but believe me, it can be done. It’s quite a bit more complicated than simply asking an AI to tell you what a whole bunch of things mean together, but even that little will give you some synthesis. A shallow one, but still.

After several months of building on the original insight, I’m not 100% sure, (yet) that Asimovian robots are entirely feasible, but I am 100% sure that human astrologer-level automated synthesis, at scale, is entirely feasible. Right now. If that sounds like the kind of business idea you’d like to have the opportunity to help fund early, or work on, do direct message me.

But pitching aside, what’s scientifically interesting about this development, regardless of who first capitalizes on it, is that it is a way of doing in a couple of years what should have taken astrologers the previous century. You see, the tech being able to automate astrological synthesis only makes its completion inevitable. It should have always been done by hand first.

(Not) Building the Great Library of Astrologia

According to skeptics, one of the main copout answers that astrologers give about why some research or another failed to confirm astrology, is that you can’t just test one astrological claim in isolation. Astrology is more complicated than that, there are always multiple interactions at play. Between multiple planets inside of one chart, between different charts, and then there’s transits. Copout or not, it’s true. It do be complicated.

But complicated doesn’t mean impossible. A human astrologer does astrology by looking at the complicated thing, an astrological “complex” if you will, and then reasons in a structured way from first principles what that complex should mean. In astrology, you usually deal with complexes like “native first decan Sun in Scorpio Cazimi conjunct Pluto in scorpio in the house of sagittarius squared by retrograde Pluto in aquarius”.

To fully explain a single complex like that, or explain it in maximum pertinent detail, you account for all the extra modifiers. Regarding the example above, first decan scorpio is still scorpio, but only about one third, a specific third, of all things scorpio — one colored by the previous sign, libra. Cazimi conjunction is a precise one, the most intense type. That doesn’t make it not a conjunction, but the detail does change things.

Then there’s the retrograde Pluto transit. It’s still generally a Pluto transit, but a retrograde one leans toward the negative or debilitated end of the spectrum of possibilities for that type of transit. In real life, or in a controlled study of real life outcomes, if you don’t account for all this nuance, you can’t expect the test to be valid. So if astrologers can explain any complex, and you need to account for the nuance, why don’t we?

In short, there are like bajillion possible relevant complexes. An astrologer can always make time to deep dive into a single natal chart in front of them, which is likely to contain maybe a dozen complexes at most at any given time. But if they were to sit down and write a book explaining even one complete set of complexes, they’d be doing just that for a lifetime.

Spoilers: nobody did that. Not beyond basic complexes like planets in signs; planets in houses; star signs as male, female, kid, boss, or employee; or star sign partner combinations in general and accounting for different gender combinations. The last two examples alone took up a whole book each, written by Linda Goodman, of 500+ and 1000+ pages respectively.

Of course, if every modern astrologer of note did what Linda did and wrote several books in their lifetime covering in their totality a handful of previously unwritten-about complexes, the work could have been mostly done by now. Astrology has been around at present level of complexity for centuries. Instead, most astrologers (who wrote any books) tended to retread the already covered basic stuff, putting their own spins on it.

So, how many complexes are there? To some extent, it depends on what you care about enough to count. But just the number of possible distinct individual horoscopes ranges from tens of millions to tens of billions of combinations. If you factor in possible synastry complexes, and transit complexes, and synastry under transit complexes… Think trillions.

What do we actually have written down? Existing astrological textbooks cover (approximately) 120 planet-in-sign combinations; 120 planet-in-house combinations; 144 house-in-sign combinations; 100 planet-to-planet combinations; plus Linda’s work on star signs, adding like 72 plus 3 times 144 various star sign combinations. Adding up all that, we’re at like a thousand (988, rounded up for simplicity). Out of, conservatively, billions.

If you think about it, it’s a neat way of quantifying just how much astrology still is an oral tradition. Over 99%! Again, this isn’t because the complex descriptions can’t be reliably explained or written down. Astrologers aren’t making up whatever when they’re faced with a complex. The rules of complex astrological inference exist and are written down. Ask AI.

Our large language models have been trained on all of the internet, which includes all of this foundational astrological work. AIs can access all of the astrological rules and all of the existing examples of basic combinations. AIs can even access large numbers of fully synthesized descriptions of specific whole natal charts. Assuming one could make AIs do the synthesis right, which I know is tricky but possible, they could describe any complex.

The result obviously wouldn’t fit into any book. That could have a physical copy which wouldn’t collapse into a black hole on account of the weight of all the paper it would need to be printed on. It would be a massive library. But one that would fit on a server, and could be searched instantly. I guess you could think of it as a magic tome of (near) infinite wisdom compiled by a genie, upon a foolish mortal’s request. Let’s call this library “Astrologia”.

The Sophia of Porting Gnosis into Techné

Okay, so we totally can build Astrologia, in a surprisingly near future, despite centuries of procrastination. It would still take a bit of work on top of clever engineering, which begs some questions. Like, why should we? Do we need to? What purpose would it serve? Well, why did geneticists map the human genome? Why do astronomers conduct surveys of the sky?

For starters, that’s the doing of science. If you value astrology, or science, why wouldn’t you want to explore astrology fully, with scientific rigor? Of course, many scientific people don’t particularly value astrology. Some consider it the ultimate example of a stupid thing. Even then, having a comprehensive map of human stupidity would be a big win for science.

Most crucially, however, I don’t think most people realize what the real territory is of which astrology is a useful map. In relation to the prediction of events unfolding in the territory of real world physics, the astrological map may be useless. But predicting stuff isn’t the only thing that humans do, and real world isn’t the only territory which humans inhabit.

Put in technical terms, astrology as a system is a hyperdimensional geometric coordinate grid into which one can place all possible variations on all imaginable archetypes. That’s what each astrological “complex” represents — a unique, specific version of a recognizable archetype. Having a description of every permutation in this grid would effectively mean that we have mapped the entirety of what DeepSeek called “archetypome”.

Yep, I’ve had many a conversation about this with the AI. It finds all this very exciting. In this case, I think it made up just the right term. The whole point of astrology, as an infinitely scalable holistic symbolic grammar, is to make it impossible for there to be any qualitative human idea that could ever exist outside of its logical bounds. Or at least outside of the logical bounds of the hypothetical perfected future version of astrology.

If you have a system that has a slot for every variation on every possible archetype, and you fill in all of the slots, then you have mapped the entirety of the human archetypome. At least within certain dimensional limits and up to a specific resolution. Give that to a computer, and maybe you’d get a computer that can suddenly understand all that fuzzy human stuff a lot more accurately and reliably. Without any of it having to be “real”.

As I have indicated in previous articles, this could mean a robot that would understand the Asimovian laws the way a human would. On a much less ambitious level, this would almost certainly lead to an AI that can generate believable and compelling NPCs and narratives for games. And that’s just the beginning of the applications, scientific and computerized.

If you really hate astrology, fine, do it with numerology, or tarot, or I Ching. Anything that’s both numerical and archetypal. In fact, you’d have to do it separately for different astrological traditions anyway, to account for different mathematical or cultural frameworks. It could never be as exact a mapping as the standard model of particle physics or the genomic stuff. But it could get pretty damn close, over time, to atoms of meaning.

To quibble with Terry Pratchett a little, it’s true you might not find atoms of justice or molecules of mercy by grinding the universe into the finest powder and sieving it through the finest sieve. But maybe, it’s not so much because idea “particles” don’t exist, but because they’re not the constituent parts of dirt and rocks. They’re the constituent parts of stories. Maybe grind those down and sieve them through a sieve. A sieve like astrology.

With a periodic table of idea elements of sorts, maybe we’d then be able to start doing something resembling word chemistry, or literary fusion. It certainly sounds to me like something handy to people who try to construct artificial personalities that make human sense and operate within understood and controlled parameters. I also suspect that if wisdom becomes more of a science, more scientists will stop ignoring it.

If nothing else, the STEM types would be able to ask a computer to explain how exactly things like psychoanalysis or hermeneutics actually do make all kinds of logical sense. It would also make astrology rigorously testable in all of its explosive combinatorial splendor. It might still be a bit difficult to get large enough samples of people who do or do not share very specific complexes in their natal charts, but you would be able to run valid tests.

But What Will The Astrologers Eat

I imagine there might be a certain type of reader, who at this point could be feeling something between a distinct lack of amusement, and a panic attack. If astrological synthesis can be automated, what use would anyone have for human astrologers? Even worse, if astrology can be made fully testable, what if it’s utterly disproven? Let me break down my vision.

First of all, my whole point is that this tech would be most useful to “take the jobs” from astrologers that, much like in most “they took err jerbs” scenarios, the people in question don’t seem to want. Nobody was stopping astrologers from completing astrology in writing. They’ve had since the dawn of time. As for secondary applications, astrologers as a group also don’t seem to be very keen on the whole proving of astrology thing.

To a point where most astrologers tend not to care about what scientific tests of astrology could ever potentially say about astrology. Which means that the AI doing the testing, and the testing revealing whatever it may reveal, are unlikely to affect the practiced traditions. Yes, the same process would enable better astrological apps capable of providing complex readings, but that comes with a couple of caveats. The AIs won’t be better than human astrologers, not for a while; and astrology is a living culture.

In a world where people can already read everything about astrology for free on the internet, any astrologer worth their keep must be providing something more than just readings to their clients. This tech will be no substitute for a real human relationship that an astrologer can have with a client. You could make a decent astrologer chat bot, and many people would perhaps settle for that, if they aren’t able to afford the real thing.

It’s one thing to ask ChatGPT to help you with your homework, for free, as opposed to having no help with it that you couldn’t afford anyway. It’s another thing entirely to decide how you spend your money for an equivalent of a session with a therapist, or expert consultation. This would just be the next step forward in the democratization of astrology.

In fact, that’s where the whole idea of sun sign astrology came from. Astrologer Alan Leo wanted to make astrology available to the masses, and so the sun sign column was born. It was a decidedly flawed solution, but if you believe that astrology is helpful, something is better than nothing. The advent of the internet then made a more complex form of astrology easily accessible to everyone. This tech would just complete the process.

Oh and I shouldn’t forget, there would be massive job creation opportunity here. Assuming astrology proves useful as something like a programming language for advanced artificial intelligence systems, guess who’d be needed to either do the programming, or to teach the STEM people how to code in AstrOS. People fluent in astrology. And numerology, and tarot, and I Ching, and so forth. Not to mention that someone would have to manage this whole massive undertaking for many years, and curate the results.

And after that? I have a hunch the mapping being completed is more of a beginning than ending. I can’t foresee all of the consequences of that transit, but there will have to be some new doors opening. For one thing, mapping the astrological tradition and enabling its rigorous testing is an opening for the long-term process of fine-tuning or perfecting astrology, toward any number of specific applications. How far could that go, and what could it lead to? If astrology “works”, the sky isn’t the limit.

And while any scientific or engineering project can ultimately end in some sort of definitive resolution, if astrology ends up being central to the generative arts, there will be no end to the “jobs” that would need to be done. Sure, the AIs would probably take over a lot of the hard work there, but there would still need to be human artists behind the wheel or in the mix to make those creative projects actually mean anything to people.

In the end, though, I wouldn’t fixate on the whole “jobs” angle at all. I don’t think jobs are here to stay. I think jobs are supposed to go the way of the dino. Once we finally let go of the concept of having to be forced to do things. If somebody doesn’t value people being around and participating when they’re not “productive”, it’s their own spiritual crisis, and everybody else’s political problem. Our tech getting too awesome is not the problem.

At last, you can have the wisdom of the ages in the palm of your hand.

What would you do with it?