Thomas Ring: The Painter Who Revised Astrology

The short answer

Nuremberg, Berlin, a prison camp

Ring was born on November 28, 1892, in Nuremberg, Germany – in the Muggenhof district, according to English-language Wikipedia – and died on August 24, 1983, in Schärding, Austria. Those dates come from the Deutsche Biographie, the German national biographical register.

His childhood was a series of moves. The family lived in many places during his first twelve years and settled in Berlin in 1905. That is how the psychologist Gerhard Mayer summarizes it in his review of the major Ring biography by Elmar Schübl, published in Zurich in 2021.

In 1914 Ring volunteered for the German army. He ended up a prisoner of the British and came close to being executed; the Swiss consul saved him. Wikipedia, drawing on Ingrid Skiebe’s 1988 biography, places his capture at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 and says the death sentence followed a mutiny in the camp. He began painting in a prisoner-of-war camp in Wales and was released in November 1919.

The painter from the Sturm circle

During the war Ring came into contact with the poets and painters around Der Sturm, the Berlin avant-garde magazine edited by Herwarth Walden. In that circle he published poems and showed work in exhibitions Walden organized (Mayer, after Schübl). The Berlinische Galerie, Berlin’s museum of modern art, lists him in its online collection as painter, astrologer and poet – along with the pseudonym he also used: Tom Weller.

His first wife, Gertrud Ring, née Schröder, ran the Sturm bookshop in Berlin in 1920, according to the Austrian women’s biographical lexicon biografiA (Böhlau, 2016). With her he co-founded an agitprop group called “Die roten Sensen” (“the red scythes”); he later distanced himself from communism. Mayer singles out Schübl’s point that Gertrud was of “eminent importance” to the development of Ring’s work.

The title of that first book already reads like a program. According to Wikipedia, the Bauhaus painter Georg Muche advised him at the end of 1919 to take astrology seriously. That detail rests on a single biography, so we treat it as tradition rather than fact.

Austria, Strasbourg, the Black Forest

In the fall of 1932, months before Hitler took power, Thomas and Gertrud Ring left for Austria. From 1933 they lived in Johnsbach in Styria, from 1934 in Graz (biografiA). After Austria’s annexation in 1938 they stayed; Gertrud painted abstract pictures to accompany his cosmological writing.

In 1943 and 1944 Ring worked in Strasbourg with the psychologist Hans Bender, who taught at the university there. Schübl’s biography (via Mayer) and Wolfgang Bock’s study Astrologie und Aufklärung (Springer, 2016) both document this. After Strasbourg was liberated in November 1944, the Rings were interned in France. Gertrud died in February 1945 in the camp at Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe near Toulouse.

From 1952 to 1962 Ring lived in a farmhouse in the Black Forest, then at Stettenfels Castle near Heilbronn. He died in 1983, aged ninety, in Schärding on the river Inn.

What “revised astrology” means

“Revised astrology” is Ring’s own term; it was also the title of his 1974 seminar in Copenhagen, recorded in the Danish television building (Astrodienst). It means an astrology that cuts back its own claims.

Three ideas hold it up. First, Ring rejected determinism: planets, in his view, do not act on people mechanically. Second, he refused to label configurations “good” or “bad” and wanted a reading to take a person’s level of development into account – that is how the professional astrologers’ section of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce summarizes his contribution. Third, he named limits: a chart, he held, shows neither a person’s sex nor their level of development or intelligence, and it does not show death (Astrodienst).

He also had a compact formula for what separates astrology from fortune-telling. The difference, he wrote in 1972, lies in “the play situation and the manipulation of the unconscious there, and logical inference here” (our translation, quoted after Mayer 2020). The fortune-teller plays; the astrologer is supposed to calculate and reason.

How seriously he took those limits shows in a sentence from the first volume. Writing in 1956 about Pluto, discovered only in 1930, he warned that with a factor that had been under study for only about twenty years, “all caution is called for” (our translation). Mayer notes dryly in a footnote that many younger astrology writers lack that caution.

The main work: four volumes in seventeen years

Astrologische Menschenkunde appeared in four volumes between 1956 and 1973, the first in 1956 from Rascher in Zurich. Later editions came from Hermann Bauer in Freiburg; the German National Library lists, for example, a fifth edition of volume II from 1985, 361 pages. Astrodienst, the Swiss astrology service, now offers all four volumes as free PDFs.

At the theoretical core sits the idea of the “cosmotype.” Mayer describes it as a concept “mediating between genotype and phenotype” (our translation) – between what a person is born with and how they appear in the world. The label “psychological astrology,” Mayer writes, does not do justice to Ring’s many-layered approach, even though Ring shaped that field strongly.

Hans Bender and the test of the astrologers

Hans Bender (1907–1991), who later founded the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP) in Freiburg, met Ring in Berlin in the late 1920s. It became a long collaboration – first in Strasbourg, after the war in Freiburg. Bender credited Ring with helping to free astrology “from the squabbling of schools and sects” (our translation).

From 1952 to 1954 Bender ran a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in which 178 astrologers took part. According to Mayer, five of them stood out; four of those were prominent and experienced, and Thomas Ring was one of them. All followed the revised, psychologically oriented astrology with a clearly rule-based practice.

What this proves – and what it doesn’t

Research on Ring has its own gaps. Mayer praises Schübl’s biography but criticizes its reliance on an older Bender biography instead of the IGPP archives, and he is unconvinced by the attempt to link Ring’s work with that of the philosopher Jean Gebser. For readers that means: the life dates are well established; interpretations of the work less so.

What remains of Ring

The professional section of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, where commercial astrologers in Austria are organized, today calls Ring the “pioneer of modern astrology” in the German-speaking world (our translation). The Thomas Ring Foundation was set up in 1978; it published an annual “Werkstattblatt” until 2017 and was dissolved at the end of 2021. Astrodienst now hosts material from its holdings online, along with parts of the Copenhagen seminar.

For English-speaking readers, Ring is the missing middle chapter between the old fatalistic astrology and the psychological astrology of the late twentieth century. His influence runs on in Germany: the Cologne astrologer Alexander von Schlieffen, by his own account, came to astrology in 1991 through Ring’s writings. If you want the building blocks Ring worked with, start with what a Sun sign means in a birth chart and Pluto in your birth chart – with the caution Ring asked for in 1956.

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