Dane Rudhyar

Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895 – September 13, 1985) was an American author, modernist composer, painter, and humanistic astrologer. He is recognized as a pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology and a key figure in the New Age movement.

Born Daniel Chennevière in Paris, Rudhyar was disabled at age twelve by a severe illness and surgery. He compensated by focusing on music and intellectual pursuits, studying at the Sorbonne—where he graduated at sixteen—and at the Paris Conservatoire. Early exposure to philosophy and Paris’s artistic circles convinced him that existence is cyclical. Influenced by Nietzsche, he saw himself as a “seed man” for a new age of cultural evolution.

In November 1916, his music brought him to New York City. On April 4, 1917, the Metropolitan Opera performed his composition *Métachorie*, one of the first polytonal pieces heard in the United States. During this period, he met Sasaki Roshi, a Japanese Zen teacher, and began studying Eastern philosophy and occultism. Between 1917 and 1919, living in New York, Canada, and Philadelphia, he adopted the name “Rudhyar,” a cognate of Sanskrit words including the god Rudra. His interest in Theosophy grew after he was asked to compose music for a production at its Los Angeles headquarters in 1920. He became a U.S. citizen in 1926. Through the 1920s, he divided his time between California and New York. In 1930, he married Marla Contento, secretary to theosophist Will Levington Comfort, who introduced him to Marc Edmund Jones. Jones provided Rudhyar with mimeographed astrology lessons.

While learning astrology, Rudhyar was also studying Carl Jung’s psychological writings and Jan Smuts’ *Holism and Evolution*. He sought to merge astrology with depth psychology, rejecting determinism. He argued that stars do not cause human events but are synchronistically aligned with them, depicting psychological forces without overriding free will. He first called this “harmonic astrology,” then “humanistic astrology,” which he laid out in *The Astrology of Personality* (1936). Theosophist Alice A. Bailey, who coined the term “New Age,” encouraged his work and published the book through Lucis Publishing. His early articles appeared in *American Astrology* and *Horoscope Magazine*.

After divorcing in 1945, Rudhyar married dancer Eya Fechin, daughter of painter Nicolai Fechin. He began creating larger-scale paintings. The couple lived in Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, and New York before divorcing in 1953. Over the next two decades, he wrote and lectured on astrology, respected within the astrological community but little known outside it. The 1970s New Age movement brought him wider recognition; Penguin Books published *The Practice of Astrology* in 1970. In 1969, he founded the International Committee for Humanistic Astrology. He then entered a prolific period, producing several books annually. Absorbing transpersonal psychology, he moved beyond humanistic astrology to “transpersonal astrology” by the mid-1970s. He also wrote on planetary consciousness and New Age philosophy.

Rudhyar died on September 13, 1985, in San Francisco.

Most of his more than forty books and hundreds of articles concern astrology and spirituality. *The Astrology of Personality* established his reputation, arguing that astrology yields intuitive insights rather than predictions. Despite its dense, circuitous style, it became a key text of free-will astrology. His work influenced the 1960s and 1970s New Age movement, especially San Francisco’s hippie scene, whom he saw as potential harbingers of a new era. In 1972, he predicted the Age of Aquarius would begin in 2062.

Rudhyar also wrote two novels: *When Cosmic Love Awakens – A Transpersonal Love Story* (1952) and *Rania – An Epic*.