Kochunas, Bradley Wayne

Kochunas, Bradley Wayne

Bradley Wayne Kochunas was born July 29, 1950, in Hartford, Connecticut. He is a graduate of Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio (B.A., religion, 1975), Miami University in Oxford, Ohio (M.A., religion, 1985) and the University of Cincinnati (C.A.G.S., counselor education, 1995). He first became interested in astrology in college after reading Grant Lewi’s introduction to astrology, Heaven Knows What, then immersed himself in the voluminous writings of Dane Rudhyar, which initially shaped his thinking about astrology.

Kochunas majored in religion in graduate school with the express purpose of researching astrology to help it gain academic legitimacy as a field of study. His thesis (available online at cura.free.fr/cura-en) focused upon the religious and therapeutic dimensions within contemporary astrology, applying the hermeneutic methods of religion historian Mircea Eliade (one of the modern founders of religious studies as an academic discipline) to the field of astrology to establish that it could be regarded as a cosmological discipline evidencing structures of sacred space and sacred time as elaborated by Eliade’s work in the phenomenology of religions.

Since 1985, his view has been greatly influenced by James Hillman, Thomas Moore, and the other archetypal theorists. Kochunas describes astrology as providing a framework for imagining a profound intimacy between ourselves and our world. He views his contribution to astrology as promoting it as a discipline of the imaginal rather than the literal: In personal communication in 2002, Kochunas said, “It is a poetics of the Imagination, like art and religion, better suited for soulmaking than ego building. It has value in its own right without need for validation from the dominant cultural paradigm. The whole enterprise to concretize astrology, to insist that it is a science, and to pour time and money into research to prove this is simply misdirected.” His award-winning writing on counseling and astrology has appeared in both public and professional media in the United States, Ireland, Britain, France, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.

In addition to being licensed as a clinical counselor with board certification in clinical mental health and addictions, working in a correctional setting, Kochunas is also an adjunct instructor in the Department of Religion and Philosophy for Wilmington College and certified as a professional astrologer by the International Society for Astrological Research. He is a member of the Association for Astrological Networking, the Ohio Counseling Association, and the Ohio Association for Spiritual, Ethical and Religious Values in Counseling.