A Time for Astrology
Jan. 23rd, 2012 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
my_starzGrant Lewi's Heaven Knows What remained my primary sourcebook for quite a few years. I continued to purchase occasional astrology books from The Universe Book Club, trying to expand my knowledge of the field, but most of what I acquired was far too advanced for me. What I needed, and never found, was a systematic, step-by-step approach to learning astrology from the ground up; instead, I kept trying to fill in what I knew to be gaps in my budding practice, and overshooting my reach in the process. For example, I knew that I knew nothing about the houses, so when Dane Rudhyar's The Astrological Houses: The Spectrum of Individual Experience was offered as the monthly book club selection, I pounced on it -- only to discover on its arrival that it was all abstract and theoretical, without a word on how to calculate house placements.
There was one book from this period, though, that had quite an impact on me at the time, but again without containing anything on the how-to of chart casting or interpretation: Jess Stearn's A Time for Astrology. Mr. Stearn was a best-selling author at the time, having written a very successful book on the life of Edgar Cayce, a then highly-publicized psychic; this latest book was set out to examine the possible validity of Astrology. Actually, according to the author, he'd intended to debunk astrology as fraudulent and misleading, but over the course of his researching the book became persuaded of its legitimacy. Veering from its originally intended course, the book became instead a chronicle of discovery, relating incident after incident that brought the author from skepticism to acceptance.
After several decades, and with over a dozen moves spanning 3 states behind me, it's been a long time since I last saw that book; somewhere along the line we went our separate ways. But as with Heaven Knows What before it, one brief section has remained quite fresh in my memory though the intervening years. In an early attempt to dismiss a particular astrologer as a fraud, Mr. Stearn provided this individual with the birthplace and time of someone he knew to be already deceased, and asked for a quick assessment of what the oncoming year would look like for this person (or persons: some part of my memory insists the data was for a pair of identical twins). After working with the data for a short while, the astrologer replied to the effect of "This is a waste of my time; this person died during childhood, in some manner associated with water." And indeed, according to Mr. Stearn, the natal data was for someone who had drowned before reaching their teens.
I'm not sure I would find the book having as much of an impact on me today as it did all those years ago; the author has been routinely dismissed as being over-accepting, and not displaying a sense of impartiality or critical thinking in many of his works. But at the time, given my personal astonishment at the accuracy of my early charts (such as they were), having a well-known author publish an entire book which supported my new belief was all the validation I needed to carry on -- it's in print now, so it must be true! Fortunately, I wasn't that naive about every book I read at the time: while Chariots of the Gods raised some interesting questions, each of its sequels wandered further and further from the realm of the rational, and I was able to dismiss Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs as balderdash and hogwash from the get-go!
That's all for today, folks! Next time around, I'll describe my first (and pretty much only) steps into the world of predictive astrology.
There was one book from this period, though, that had quite an impact on me at the time, but again without containing anything on the how-to of chart casting or interpretation: Jess Stearn's A Time for Astrology. Mr. Stearn was a best-selling author at the time, having written a very successful book on the life of Edgar Cayce, a then highly-publicized psychic; this latest book was set out to examine the possible validity of Astrology. Actually, according to the author, he'd intended to debunk astrology as fraudulent and misleading, but over the course of his researching the book became persuaded of its legitimacy. Veering from its originally intended course, the book became instead a chronicle of discovery, relating incident after incident that brought the author from skepticism to acceptance.
After several decades, and with over a dozen moves spanning 3 states behind me, it's been a long time since I last saw that book; somewhere along the line we went our separate ways. But as with Heaven Knows What before it, one brief section has remained quite fresh in my memory though the intervening years. In an early attempt to dismiss a particular astrologer as a fraud, Mr. Stearn provided this individual with the birthplace and time of someone he knew to be already deceased, and asked for a quick assessment of what the oncoming year would look like for this person (or persons: some part of my memory insists the data was for a pair of identical twins). After working with the data for a short while, the astrologer replied to the effect of "This is a waste of my time; this person died during childhood, in some manner associated with water." And indeed, according to Mr. Stearn, the natal data was for someone who had drowned before reaching their teens.
I'm not sure I would find the book having as much of an impact on me today as it did all those years ago; the author has been routinely dismissed as being over-accepting, and not displaying a sense of impartiality or critical thinking in many of his works. But at the time, given my personal astonishment at the accuracy of my early charts (such as they were), having a well-known author publish an entire book which supported my new belief was all the validation I needed to carry on -- it's in print now, so it must be true! Fortunately, I wasn't that naive about every book I read at the time: while Chariots of the Gods raised some interesting questions, each of its sequels wandered further and further from the realm of the rational, and I was able to dismiss Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs as balderdash and hogwash from the get-go!
That's all for today, folks! Next time around, I'll describe my first (and pretty much only) steps into the world of predictive astrology.
Yes...
Date: 2012-01-24 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-01-24 11:25 am (UTC)With cook books it's measurement and ingredients. Is that cup what I call a cup? What is that ingredient? What sort of flour? What would I call that cut of meat?
Unclear diagrams are another good one...