The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 463, titled:
Astrology as Divination, with Kirk Little
With Chris Brennan and Kirk Little
Episode originally released on September 27, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released October 23rd, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. In this episode, I’m gonna be interviewing astrologer Kirk Little, and we’re gonna be talking about astrology as divination and especially discussing the life and work of the astrologer Geoffrey Cornelius who just passed away recently, and so we wanted to do an episode to talk about the impact of his work to discuss and sort of celebrate his life and his life contributions. So hey Kirk – thanks for joining me today.
KIRK LITTLE: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity.
CB: Yeah. So let’s talk about this in terms of – I’m trying to figure out where to start, but you were the person that reached out to me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that Geoffrey had passed away. And you’re somebody who was somewhat close to him in terms of working with him and helping to – I saw you as sort of like, an expositor to exposit some of his thesis that he put forward in his 1994 book The Moment of Astrology where his central thesis was that he argued that astrology was divination. And I had interviewed him about that book before, almost 10 years ago in 2015, and I just recently re-released that this week. But about a year ago, Garry Phillipson reached out to me and said that Geoffrey wanted me to interview you about a website that you have called Cosmo Critic, which is focused on talking about astrology as divination. And that was actually one of the last communications that I had from Geoffrey, so part of what I wanted to do today is to talk about you and to sort of fulfill that last request that he had to me. Yeah. So let me know – tell me and tell the audience who you are and what’s your background.
KL: So who am I? I’m Kirk Little. I am an astrologer. I have been an astrologer since 1980, and I entered astrology in a very interesting way, I think. In 1971, I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, hitching home from college, just long hair, you know, thumb out – got picked up by a young woman probably a couple years older than myself. And she said to me, “Oh, are you a Sun in Cancer?”
And I’m like, “You mean my Sun sign?”
And she said, “Yes.”
And I said, “Yeah.” And I said, “How’d you know that?”
And she said, “Well, just by looking at you. Are you Scorpio rising?”
And I said, “I don’t know; I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She said, “Well, what time were you born?”
I said, “Well, 2:44 in the afternoon.”
“Well, where were you born?”
“Chicago.”
She starts doing this mental calculation in her head and says, “That probably puts your Sun in the 8th. Yeah, you’re probably Scorpio rising.” So she then spent the rest of our ride I guess you could say giving me a reading or talking about my Sun and rising sign, dropped me off at home, and promised to send me a reading. Got my address; promised to send me a reading. Never heard from her again. About three years later, I’m working in a coffee shop, all-night coffee shop, filled with hippies and all kinds of alternative people, and one of the people in there was a graduate student in biophysics of all things who was studying astrology, and she said, “Have you ever had your chart cast?”
I said, “No.”
So she basically sent away to Neil Michelsen’s chart service; it was a computer chart service from the first major ones at the time. A few weeks later, my chart came back, and she says, “Well, here – you want me to tell you about it?”
I was like, “Sure, okay.”
And she said, “Well, here you’ve got the Sun in Cancer.”
I go, “Yep, okay.”
And she said, “And you’ve got Scorpio rising.”
And I’m like, “Whoa. What do you mean?” And she – I said, “Show me that.”
So she points to this place on the circle and says, “Well, this is the rising sign; this is the sign that was coming up over the horizon when you were born.”
I said, “Well, how did she know that?”
She’s like, “Who?”
I said, “Well, this woman that picked me up a few years ago told me I was Scorpio rising, but she didn’t cast my chart.”
And she said, “Well, some people can just look at people and tell what the Sun sign is.”
Well, that really intrigued me, because up until then, I had had a very kind of rationalist view of the world. I had not really studied astrology. The following year, Uranus went over my rising sign; I dropped out of graduate school. I was a graduate student in history. And began studying various occult things. I was studying the tarot; I was studying dowsing; then I studied the I Ching, a bit of astrology. I still remember Ralph Metzner’s book Maps of Consciousness became one of the things where I’m like, wow, there’s this whole world I didn’t know about. And so I start looking into it, and it still didn’t quite sit right with me. But then I found out there’s a local bookstore, The Elysian Tree, metaphysical bookstore run by a guy named Bob Mulligan, who was an astrologer – who is an astrologer. He still lives in Naples, Florida. A couple years older than me. And I began studying with him, and I did essentially a three year apprenticeship with him; I don’t know what else to call it. I took all the classes he had. He would give these Saturday workshops on specific topics like progressions or transits or whatever. And he would have guest speakers come in from time to time, a number of people who, you know, were semi-well known, I guess, within the field of astrology. But I think that my real introduction to the larger world of astrology was in March of 1978, and my astrologer and myself and my brother and a couple other people drove to Tucson, Arizona, where the NASO astrology conference was being held. And the headliners were Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmund Jones.
CB: Wow.
KL: And then a guy named Henry Weingarten, who’s still around, and a man named Ron Davison from the Astrological Lodge of London. I thought, well, this is an interesting lineup. So of course I had just finished Astrology of Personality; I had Dane Rudhyar autograph it. You know, but they were on their retirement tour essentially. I mean, nothing they were doing was essentially very radical or dramatic, but it was interesting. I kind of felt, wow, here’s a line of succession here. These guys have been doing this a long, long time. Well, what could I say – Ron Davison, at the very point I met him, I only found out many years later was the time that Geoffrey Cornelius was actually – this is March of ‘78, the very time that his first truly divinatory article on astrology was published, “The Anti-Astrology Signature.” I’ll talk about that later. But needless to say, so I finished this apprenticeship in 1980, opened a practice, and for the next five years made a very poor living as an astrologer. I was a counseling astrologer; I lived in —
CB: As one does.
KL: — yeah, as one does, right?
CB: Yeah.
KL: Continued to hold other jobs. You know, part time jobs running, you know, a movie camera in a place that had weekend films for students and things like that. But yeah. So but if anybody said, well, what’s your practice? It was largely psychological astrology. So Liz Greene, I had read her book Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil; it had come out in 1977. So my entry into astrology was really kind riding that crest of people like Liz Greene and Richard Idemon and others who were bringing – and Stephen Arroyo – who were bringing this new kind of version of astrology in play here, which is blending the insights of psychology, not necessarily psychoanalysis but – well, at least Liz, Jungian astrology. Oddly —
CB: Yeah. In your paper “Defining the Moment” where you talk about the significance of Geoffrey’s work from 2006, which is up on your website Cosmo Critic, actually you situated just the importance of Liz Greene’s work. And in rereading it the other day, it really gave me more perspective on how groundbreaking Liz Greene’s work was at the time as being one of the first depth psychologists to really truly synthesize like, depth psychology and astrology.
KL: Absolutely. And her books were well-written. I think that’s the other appeal. So anybody who’s ever tried to make their way through Marc Edmund Jones, let’s just say he’s not a prose stylist. He’s not an easy read. Dane Rudhyar has his own kind of style, I think somewhat elliptical, but at least it’s fairly clear. But Liz Greene felt very contemporary; it felt very fresh. And it felt like, wow, this is somebody who knows what it’s like to kind of be alive now as a young person and express this view of astrology that was overtly psychological.
CB: Right. And that was really like, the zeitgeist at the time.
KL: Well, it was, because as I just wrote in this piece I’ve written for The Astrological Association – the journal – about Geoffrey, in the mid-1970s, the model of astrology was largely unchanged really. New voices were coming in, as I said, the psychological astrologers that I’ve mentioned. Obviously, John Addey’s work on harmonics was coming in. Certainly cosmobiology seemed to give this certain kind of look to it. Yeah, the psychological testing was coming up. So there’s a huge ferment going on. But for anybody who tried to make their living doing chart readings, which is what I was trying to do, you really wanted something that addressed people’s needs. And Liz Greene’s work – and I don’t wanna, I mean, she was the big one, but there were others as well – it’s almost like it gave astrology a legitimacy that it didn’t feel like it had. It no longer felt like, wow, we’re just dusting off stuff from the last 19th century. Wow, this is some new thinking. And so —
CB: Right. Ironically, and something we’ll come back to, ironically part of what it was almost dusting off was the notion that astrology is just fortune telling was part of the like, psychological pushback in some ways or something that was fresh about that movement at the time that astrology was more than that and that it had a deeper potential. Although that’s kind of interesting framing it that way in terms of fortune telling, since as we’ll talk about, you know, fortune telling has a very long history with divination.
KL: Right. I did not meet Liz Greene until early in this century; I met her in 2004, and I just mention that she was at an academic conference. So by the early 2000s, she had reinvented herself as an academic, and has written what I think of as a twin intellectual biography of Jung as an astrologer that I think are two very important books. But she was trying to shake off a unsavory reputation she had of somebody who didn’t have a real PhD. And that was —
CB: Yeah.
KL: — making the rounds at that time in 2004, so. But —
CB: I mean, some of that was BS. I mean, I know one of the guys that was trying to push that narrative, and I always thought it was really not just unkind but like, not well-founded, because I was somebody that found myself in a similar situation having gone to Kepler College, which was, you know, a school for astrologers, an attempt to put astrology back in academia and give astrologers academic degrees focusing on their subject, including the history and philosophy of the subject. But it failed to get national or regional accreditation —
KL: Right.
CB: So as a result of that, my degree from Kepler College isn’t recognized and doesn’t mean anything. And as far as I know, Liz found herself in a similar position with the school that she went to, and it didn’t mean that she hadn’t done the academic sort of legwork, but it just meant that the degree wasn’t as widely recognized as it could have been.
KL: I think that’s probably true. So she has now gotten a second PhD, if you will, in history, but – from University I think of Bristol – but yeah, so. But in 1977, you know, everybody – if you were an astrologer and you were trying to convince a non-astrological friend that there is something to this, you would send people to Liz Greene because they could read her and kind of go, “Oh. Oh, wow – there’s something here. There’s something to this, and it isn’t just all squiggles and dots on a page I can’t understand. It isn’t people talking about Sun trining this and Mars square – I don’t know what any of that means, but wow. When she talks about it, it gives me this feeling of, ‘This is somebody who understands human psychology and can speak to me.’” And —
CB: Right.
KL: Yeah.
CB: So that spoke to you, and that was integrated as part of your practice when you were a practicing astrologer in what, the early 1980s, you said?
KL: Yeah, 1980 to 1985 is basically – I did five years of practice. And I traveled up – so I was in Champion, Illinois, which is about 120 miles south of Chicago. Most of my client base was in Chicago, and I’d go up there on almost a monthly basis, stay with a friend, and do a series of charts over a weekend. And it was odd; I probably should have moved to Chicago because my client base then started to build up the way you would want it to, meaning one person would refer another who would refer another and so forth. But that’s not what I did. I moved out to the east coast. But…
CB: So in terms of like, what happened that led you to Geoffrey’s work? Because there was a period where you – were you disillusioned with astrology, or what happened in the late ‘80s?
KL: So what happened in – what I like to say is I came into astrology with Uranus crossing my Ascendant by transit, and I —
CB: Which I love – sorry to interject – I love, by the way, when you mention that, because I also had Uranus crossing the Ascendant when I got into astrology.
KL: Right. I loved when you told me; you had mentioned that to me at any earlier communication. You know, it’s an interesting thing, right? Because it’s like, just the broad symbolism of it, I think, any astrologer could kind of go, “Oh, I kind of get it.” Uranus, the great disruptor, the awakener, yeah, the radical revolutionary, whatever, comes across and turns your life upside down. When Pluto crossed my Ascendant, 1984, ‘85, between ‘83 and ‘85, I call these more of a process – my father died, I moved out to the east coast, and I thought, “I cannot make a living as an astrologer.” I would have people send me charts – obviously to younger listeners, pre-internet. You know, I wasn’t gonna be doing readings by phone. There was no way to communicate with people. And so I would do mail-away readings, which were read into a cassette tape. They were what are widely now called blind readings. I’d get the birthdate of somebody, I’d get their name and their birth data and say, “Please do my chart.” No questions. Or they might say, “I wanna know about romance,” or “I wanna know about my job,” or “I wanna know what I should be doing in life.” Kind of broad things like that. But nothing specific. So by the mid-’80s, I then went back and was taking courses in psychology, thinking I was gonna go back to graduate school, which I did do. And so astrology got pushed to the wayside because all my clients were in Chicago. Yes, I’d do the occasional chart reading, but once I lived in Delaware and then I moved up to Maine by basically 1985, ‘86, I no longer advertised doing astrology at all. And so it just kind of dropped away. But as I say in my paper “Defining the Moment,” I left, you know, I walked away, but it never left me. I couldn’t leave it. It was such a powerful frame of reference for me that I continued to think about people that way, and I guess you’d say to use it.
So Geoffrey. So what happened? My introduction to astrology as divination was not Geoffrey’s book, but Maggie’s book which preceded his. So to back up a little bit, I got married to a woman who was from England – another therapist like myself – and we made annual pilgrimages to England. And she had a sister in London, and I then did what I’ve always done; I would go to bookshops and find these books, these Arcana series, it’s like, “Wow, these are interesting. Nothing like this in the states.” There were no occult bookstores in Maine where I was other than Weiser, but I didn’t even know about it at the time. And so I found Maggie’s book and I bought it. I thought, “Ooh, Jung and astrology.” And in her book – I’m one of these people that reads footnotes; I read endnotes; I basically interrogate books – she was talking about the radical rethink of Geoffrey Cornelius. I thought – she kept referencing him. She thanked him in the front of her book, but she would make these references to him and to his work as divination. Her book’s very appealing, and it has some astrology as divination or divinatory astrology within it, but a couple years later – so on one of my later trips – I basically saw his book actually in Waterstones in England and immediately bought it and consumed it. And it was a wakeup call to me, because I felt like he was addressing people like me who were strong, who were well-educated, who were broadly educated within the field of astrology itself, and who are somehow or another dissatisfied with it as a complete frame of reference. And I think there’s something about his take on it – you could call it English skepticism – but there was something about him that was wry, that was subtle, and that I think spoke to me in a way that no astrology book before that had quite done. And by that, I don’t mean – I had read many books in astrology that I felt had been quite, you know, powerful and I guess you’d say influential. But more influential in the practice rather than in the philosophy of or the thinking about astrology. And I guess you would say I was one of those people who was completely troubled by how poorly astrology showed up in the testing of astrology. And you know, there’s the —
CB: Right.
KL: — Vernon Clark, which I think we did reasonably well, but I’m talking about the kinds of tests that people were putting astrologers through that basically showed if not a null effect, very slight effects. So…
CB: Right, because that was one of the, part of the context of Geoffrey’s work is that in the 1970s and ‘80s, all of these different statistical tests had been done on astrology or other types of tests. But many of these scientific tests ended up coming out not in favor of astrology or negative or ended up in like, Oakland’s case being like, hotly debated and disputed or debunked so that some of the people – there were some people that were more scientific types in the astrological community that ran into a crisis of consciousness of like, what does this mean and does this mean that astrology’s not valid if we can’t validate it scientifically or statistically?
KL: You got it exactly right. So you know, because I had taken a class in the history and philosophy of science, one of my last undergraduate classes, and of course it’s interesting the three pseudosciences that one of the philosophers put forth was psychoanalysis – one of my deep loves – and astrology was one of the other ones. I thought, “Oh, well, this is interesting.” this is pre-astrology; this is between being picked up by the astrologer and before having my chart done. So it just confirmed my view of astrology – “Okay, it’s a pseudoscience. Whatever. It doesn’t have anything to do with me.” But once I got involved with the practice of it, as I think you probably know, a lot of people when they start talking to their non-astrological friends about it kind of are incredulous. They say, “Oh, come on. You’re a smart guy; you don’t believe that nonsense, do you?” And you know, you end up with these endless debates that go nowhere and nobody convinces anybody. At some point, I just thought, “I’m not gonna keep doing this. I cannot keep doing these. They’re destructive to my practice.” But I can’t say they didn’t play on my mind that there were no really good way to talk about astrology to a non-academic group that was reasonably intelligent in a way that spoke to them or made sense. So my friend Garry Phillipson has written an article called “The Anatomy of Doubt.” Garry’s a Buddhist, and so he talks about the different ways that Buddhists think about the world, and one of them has to do with this notion that we have different ways that belief affects us and the way we move through the world. But one of the things that we need is a form of, if you will, skepticism or at least a questioning – is this so? But as he said, if you’re completely governed by doubt – thus “The Anatomy of Doubt” – you’re frozen in your tracks, and you can’t do anything. So, you know, to a Buddhist, they say you need to find the right path through the work that you do, whatever that work is, whether it’s astrology or anything else. And if you are so doubting of it, if you have such skepticism about its efficacy, about its worthwhileness, you won’t be able to function well doing it. And that made a great deal of sense to me when I read that and saw that, and I saw that in myself.
So Geoffrey’s book spoke to that part of me. Obviously, those couple chapters – I think they’re chapters three and four – that talk about basically astrology coming under the microscope under the scientific scrutiny, that I thought, “This guy totally gets it.” He totally gets the drubbing that astrology has taken. And yet not put off by that at all. In fact, if anything, he said, “We need to listen to this.” Yes, this affects our confidence as astrologers, but it should not affect the right practice of astrology. Now, I’m paraphrasing here, but.
CB: Right. Well, his central thesis became that he was – of the book – was to argue that astrology is a form of divination even though astrologers aren’t used to conceptualizing it that way, but also then he took that further and said if that is true, then it’s gonna be something that can be validated statistically because its basic nature is something – the basic nature of divination is something that cannot be – it has to do with because it’s based on chance. But I don’t know if he went into that point about chance; like, that’s something that I’ve expanded on in my work, but that astrology – if it’s divination – you’re not going to be able to validate it statistically, and therefore all of the attempts to test it in that way are doomed from the start.
KL: Correct.
CB: But then however, that doesn’t mean that it’s not real or not legitimate.
KL: Absolutely. Right. So that’s a tough line to follow. So, you know, those of us that like to think there’s some regularity in what we do, you know, think, I guess you could call it broadly speaking an empirical approach – “Oh, I’ve seen this aspect before and how it works out.” We all talk that way, but nobody – and I mean, I’ve never met anybody that says, “Oh, by the way, this reading is based upon, you know, peer-reviewed journal results” in astrology. I mean, you know, the problem was, like, if you looked at, you know, the work of the Gauquelins, you know, what did they – if they supported something statistically, what did they support? Well, broadly speaking, planets had increased power at the angles. But when you dug down and said, well, what would Gauquelin allow us to use, what did he have the data for or the statistical backing of? Well, we had it for the Mars; we had it for Saturn; we had it for Jupiter and I think the Moon, but the rest of it? No. Certainly not the zodiac. And so, you know, you couldn’t – basically, if you cleaved to a strong scientific model, you couldn’t do a horoscopic reading – judicial astrology. So this – I wanna make this point because Geoffrey made this again and again. He said, look – he went back to the old order, the two orders of astrology – the astrology of causes and the astrology of signs. And the astrology of causes, the so-called “stellar determinism” that dates back to Ptolemy and maybe even before that, has to do with this notion that there’s a causal factor here, whether it’s due to some kind of rays or something, that is regular and that we should be able to test and see it working. That’s a very different thing, and he says, look – there’s an order of astrology of causes that exists and in no way does astrology as divination negate that. And in fact, he said, you know, have at it. But it’s not gonna allow you to read charts, to practice judicial astrology. So he made that emphasis or that distinction, and it’s an important one to say, you know what? If there are certain cycles that the planets show up that there are strong correlations with and that they show statistical significance, okay, that’s fine. But that does not enable us to practice judicial astrology. So his notion is that the practice of judicial astrology, the reading of horoscopes, whether that’s an electional, whether that’s a natal, whether that’s a horary, whether that’s a mundane map, that this has to do with something else. And that something else, yes, is a process of divination.
CB: Right. Yeah, to me that was always his core argument and that was the most powerful and persuasive part of his argument to me was that he was able to very forcefully argue the case that astrology – most of the technical apparatus of the astrology that we work with that we’re familiar with – is based on the planets acting as signs or omens of what is being indicated in the chart and not that they’re actually causing things to happen. So for example, if somebody has like, a Mars transit and they get angry one day that the Mars transit was acting as like, an omen or a symbol that that would occur, but it was not actually Mars the planet sending physical rays or forces that were somehow causing the person to be, you know, angry that day. So it’s like a similar formulation of Carl Jung’s various attempts to define something like that through synchronicity —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: But Geoffrey’s access point that was the most compelling for me is that he pointed to horary astrology, which most astrologers would classify as a form of divination and that is clearly harder to make a causal case for how that works where you cast a chart – the astrologer casts a chart – for the moment that a question is posed to them, and then the chart will both describe the nature of the question as well as the outcome. And that’s very obviously, you know, is a form of divination and is based on signs rather than causes. But then he flipped it around and he said all of the other branches of astrology are also divination and based on signs rather than causes as well, even natal astrology, which sometimes through history we’ve developed these ideas of the planets maybe like, you know, influencing the gestation of the native or different physiological physical things like that perhaps. And he says, no – even natal astrology, that the moment of birth is sort of like the moment of a horary question, but it’s just a question about the person’s entire life. And that, I think, was what was so unique about his argument at the time and making that and that he did it very, very persuasively.
KL: Yes. And so again, I’m gonna go back to the mid-1970s when I was getting into astrology, beginning to study it, and then – again, formal study in 1977 – horary was nowhere to be seen. Okay, I read the Noel Tyl 12-volume textbook series as one of my introductions to it, and he had a thing on horary in there and I read it. But nobody was taking horary very seriously. In fact, if you look at what some of the remarks some of the major astrologers said about it, it was very dismissive. And they said, oh, this is fortune telling; this is nonsense; this is an embarrassment to astrology. It makes us look like charlatans, et cetera, et cetera. And you know, so I knew of nobody practicing horary astrology, and indeed in three years of study with Bob Mulligan, not once did we ever do a horary chart. That’s just not who Bob was. Again, his whole emphasis was on counseling and working with people, and he’s been a very successful astrologer. In fact, I went back to him after I’d been in the field a few years, and I said, “Bob, you taught me a lot of astrology but you never taught me how to be an astrologer, how to make it work as a business.” He said that that really struck him, and as a result of that, he restructured the way he taught courses and wanted to teach people about the business of it and the practice of it. I don’t know if that’s true, because I have not gone back to revisit that —
CB: Yeah, well he ended up being one of the early presidents then – or maybe even helped to found the Organization for Professional Astrologers later —
KL: That’s correct.
CB: — which is now an organization that’s still around today that kind of helps astrologers in that way of —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: — trying to encourage them how to practice it professionally.
KL: Yes, it was. And you know what? Nobody of all of – he said to me, “Of all of my students, you were the most thorough.” Yeah, I stayed with him, I took every class, you name it. The books – I read my way through a great deal of the Anglo-American literature on astrology. I mean, you know, Charles Carter and Alan Leo and Ron Davison, again who I’d met, but William Frankland, who I later found out that Geoffrey saw as an interesting character. So I had those people as well as the Americans. And so I felt like I had a good grounding. I studied cosmobiology, because that seemed so teutonic and rigorous and it appealed to that side of me that wanted to see this rather, I guess you could almost call it a mechanistic thing. I mean, what’s more mechanistic than a midpoint, you know, of one planet following at the midpoint of two others? It just seemed like that’s such exactitude, and there’s something very pleasing about that. And ditto with harmonics. There was something fundamentally pleasing about that to me when I saw this system that seemed to subsume or to explain other parts of astrology, whether it was the house system, whether it was the signs. You know, when I found out, oh, the 9th harmonic – oh, that’s the navamsa of Indian astrology. It’s like, oh, that’s intriguing. So again, Addey’s work was another one of those things that appealed to me because I wanted it to be more systematic and more organized and more, what can I say, consistent than I often found it to be.
CB: Right. And so there was like, this explosion of new techniques in 20th century astrology, and with some of those new techniques, there became hopes that with greater technical proficiency or with some of these new insights these techniques were providing, that maybe this would be how astrology could be validated finally is through technical advancements. And that’s one of the things that Geoffrey confronts directly in his book and says no. Like, that’s not gonna do it, because you’re still fundamentally misunderstanding what astrology is if you think —
KL: That’s correct.
CB: — it can be, you know, tested in these wide scale statistical studies and validated in that way, then you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of astrology.
KL: That’s correct. So I’d read his book; I’d read Maggie’s book. And I knew I was going to England in July – this is 1995 – so I essentially wrote Geoffrey and Maggie a fan letter. It just expressed admiration for both of their books, and I said, you know, I had gone through the bibliographies of each of them, and there were a number of articles. I’m wondering if they can help me secure them. There are various things that each of them have listed. And instead, I get Maggie asking me for my phone number and said, “Oh, well, why don’t you come to Lilly Day outside of London and meet us?” And I’m like, “Okay.”
So I knew I was going to London anyhow, and so I did. And this was – Lilly Day was basically in late July of 1995, and I met them in – one day, I met the Aries first, Pat Blackett who came and picked me up in Blackheath of southeast-ish side of London, and we drove to Twickenham, which is where Geoffrey and Maggie had a house. It turned out to be the last day of their place of their house in Twickenham. They were in the midst of packing, and they were moving to their house in Herne Bay the following day. So Maggie even apologized to me, saying, “Oh, it’s a mess here,” but I remember reading their bookshelf, whatever was still up on the shelves, and it’s just a hodgepodge of philosophy and literature and other kinds of things – a few astrology books, but they had been packed.
So we drive to Surrey, which is where Lilly ended his days basically as a member of the – a church warden, basically, out there. And so Lilly Day was something that had been started by the Company of Astrologers to honor who they see as the kind of the patron saint of horary astrology, William Lilly, 17th century astrologer. And so that ‘s how I met them. And it was a beautifully hot day, and I was just flabbergasted at the level of discourse that was going on among these people. Because I’d been to various astrological conferences by then, but nothing – they were asking me what my philosophy of astrology was. They were asking about which map I preferred for the US. They were asking me all kinds of things; they were so curious. But there was both a forthrightness but also kind of a modesty to what they were doing. I was completely taken by it, because it was so in keeping with these two books I’d read.
So I mean, among as well as Geoffrey and Maggie who I met, Graeme Tobyn was there and Vernon Welles. Patrick Curry happened to be there too, because he was helping a friend who had just published a book on William Lilly – Ann Geneva – William Lilly and 17th Century Astrology, and so he was helping her and introducing her to this lot. So all of a sudden in one day, all of these people whose books I’d read, I’m meeting them, and it was such a welcoming thing. And spent the day with them and at the end it’s like, my head’s just kind of spinning, but then I rejoin my family – I could not stop thinking about them and they go, “Well, you’re gonna have to come and visit us at Herne Bay at some point.” So the connection had been made, but whatever chart reading I was still doing was still largely what it had been – psychological natal readings. And it was only when I began to visit them in succeeding years, ’96, ‘97, ‘98, that I got more of a sense of them as diviners, as people for whom astrology was part of – a very important part, but a part of – a worldview that include tarot, that included I Ching, and included omens, and included this notion that the world, or the cosmos as we find it, oftentimes has ways of messaging us or signaling us through things that happen. Through people, through events, that if we know how to read them can be taken as omens. And whether they’re read astrologically or not might be another thing a part, but certainly this notion that the world was omen-laden, or you know was suffused with this other intelligence that expressed itself. But it expressed itself only to people who, I guess you’d say, with eyes to see. And so that – that I think I could not have gotten from just reading their books. I had a sense that these people were different than a lot of other astrologers I had met. I’d met Rob Hand by then; I had met a number of people by then, you know, who were well-known astrologers – Noel Tyl, for all of his, well, wonderfulness, and you know, these were people who to my mind had made an imprint at various conferences, at books and so forth, but nothing struck me the way – their books, I guess you could say, settled into my bones with the meeting of them and talking about what they had done. And I think that is something that helped kind of transform my view both of astrology and what it means to practice it, but also I began to look at, “Well, what am I doing here? What am I doing when I sit down with people?”
CB: Right. Yeah. In rereading – I guess two points, two reactions I had to what you were just saying and the story you were telling, but one of them is that I was struck in revisiting the interview I did with Geoffrey in 2015, just in reading his book from 1994 how widely read he was, and how much of like, the history of astrology that he had gone back and studied. But not just the history of astrology, but also the history of philosophy and thought, and that is something that was unique because this was like, 1994. So this is really before a lot of the traditional and certainly before the Hellenistic revival had really gotten going, and yet he’s already got a pretty deep insight into some of the ancient authors and what was going on back then, which allowed him to critique the contemporary conceptualizations of astrology because he could see how different the contemporary conceptualizations were compared to if you take it back to like, the first century of so. And then the second point I thought was interesting and that I’d forgotten about until I relistened to the interview with him was that he actually started, he came into astrology with a background in divination already because his original focus had been things like tarot, the I Ching, and even having a background in magic. So that really informed how he came into and perceived astrology already having this background in divination, and I think that’s a really crucial point in his biography.
KL: It is, and it was one of the things that when he met me and asked how I got into it, and I told him that story I told you about the astrologer picking me up, and of course his immediate remark was, “Oh, well, she was your daimon. She’s the one that brought you into astrology.” But he loved the fact that I had had this period of about two years of ferment where I’m looking at I Ching, I’m looking at tarot, I’m looking at other systems of divination, and you know, before I settled on astrology. He said, “Oh, that’s very important.” He said it’s very important because, you know, you were entering it through a lens of divination. I said I didn’t think so at the time, and it did appeal to me because it had this kind of mechanistic language that I think appeals to any beginning astrologer. You kind of see this, you kind of go, “Oh, this kind of adds up.” One of the first things I did, like a lot of astrologers do, once I had my chart was I was like, “Oh. Wow, let me look at the day my mother died.” Pluto was exactly – I mean, partile to a minute – square my Sun. Now, this is the kind of thing it was kind of like, “Oh, Pluto and death.” You know? And I look at that – well, so that’s one of these things you think, “Oh, this is true. This is literally true.” Rather than this is a very powerful symbol of what was happening to me when my mother died in 1971 and the kind of change that I was going through. I was in my last year of college, undergraduate year, and you know, the profound impact that had. But yeah, so that notion of divination and that he was so taken – not only by tarot; he said he had done tarot readings as a teenager. He got into I Ching, but that was a more serious pursuit because then he began reading Taoist philosophy and he began to read about the philosophy of the I Ching, so that was a more thoughtful engagement for him. And then he encountered Jung, he said at 20, and I’m thinking, “Holy shit. Before the age of 20, he’s already reading Taoist philosophy? He’d already done tarot readings and now he’s reading Jung?” But he said Jung didn’t appeal to him as an astrologer; he knew there were some astrological symbolism. It was more Jung as the symbolist, as somebody that dealt in symbols – so he thought that was important. But for Geofrrey, divination has to do with the reading of symbols. So one of the first people to understand the significance in Geoffrey’s work philosophically was Patrick Curry. He called it hermeneutical astrology in his “Radical Astrology” paper. He’s written a very important paper by Patrick written in 1981, ‘80, ‘81 just prior to him going back to graduate school to do his history of science where he basically wrote his first book on 17th century astrology. And in these papers, the “Radical Astrology” paper, they were privately printed. Most of them were completely abstruse, written by these kind of frustrated academic astrologers; Patrick was probably the most lucid, in which he said, “Look, there are these different schools of astrology. There’s a scientific school, there’s a psychological school, there’s a structuralist school, and there’s a hermeneutic school.” And so he discussed the philosophy of each of those. He revisited those basically in one of his later books in which he basically got rid of structuralist astrology that nobody was actually using, like, three people or something. But the hermeneutics went to the heart of the matter, because he knew that Geoffrey had studied Gadamer and had studied, you know, various people – Heidegger, very importantly – and so he knew that Geoffrey had studied, if you will, the theory of interpretation or what it means to unpack an interpretation. So this was not just some guy who said, “Oh, cast a few charts, and here’s what I’ve found.” This is somebody who was looking at astrology with a completely different lens that had to do with what kind of deep truths could it yield to a person.
CB: Right. Yeah. And that notion of symbolism and symbolic thinking and once you have that breakthrough that astrology isn’t working through the planets like, causing things to happen, but instead it’s acting as signs or omens of things that are happening, then you start to think about that and delve into the nature of symbolism and what that means and how it works and how fluid that can be. And that’s where I think things get really interesting in terms of starting to lean into that conceptualization and see what you can do with it, and there’s a lot of really interesting things there.
KL: Yes, there are. And it’s not – here’s what I’ll say. Even at the end of his life, Geoffrey said, “I’m still working on this. I really wanna get this done.” I mean, to those of us, you know, who knew what he had done, it was like, “Wow, you have done so, so much.” But to him, there was always more to do. This was the great unfinished task. And to him, it had to do with we need to look at different ways to understand what it is that we are doing when we interpret a horoscope. And so he used multiple approaches. So if you will, what’s interesting by the way – so you mentioned, yes, 1994. The substantial work for Moment of Astrology had been done basically between 1978 and 1986 is what he says, and I think the series of – The Moment of Astrology series, which we do have posted on Cosmo Critic, those six articles are really a deep read. But it’s the first time really where he talks about not just the stellar determinism of somebody like Claudius Ptolemy, but then he also then looks at hermeneutics basically and looks at what it is that we’re trying to accomplish. So he’s – this is his first attempt to put together a philosophy of astrology. And to him, this was an ongoing project.
CB: Right. I was really interested in that in your review of your paper that opened my eyes to something I didn’t realize, because I always kind of like, date The Moment of Astrology to 1994 as this landmark publication. But in reality, it’s partially what it is is it’s – there was a series of articles they published in the ‘80s which really outlined a lot of those views already, and then The Moment of Astrology to some extent represents him bringing some of those previous articles together into a singular book. And that actually, I didn’t realize that as fully as I could have until somewhat recently, but it made it more interesting to me realizing that his thought like, developed, and he built it up over a period of time before it eventually culminated in the book.
KL: In my essay on him, “Defining the Moment,” I talk about the English astrological context, and I try to give credit to say, “Look – this was not some loner out here doing this all on his own; he did this in the context of a group of other people and other astrologers, but not just astrologers.” There was Michael Shallis, who is a physicist; Angela Voss, who had a PhD in Renaissance music. Certainly astrologers, a number of psychologists who were at the Philadelphia Association. But his first significant paper, divinatory paper, is “The Anti-Astrology Signature,” which is 1978. That’s a full 15 years before Moment of Astrology was published. So that 15 year period was the germination, but you truly see between 1978 that publication of that first paper – which, by the way, I deeply unpack in a foreword I write to it on Cosmo Critic because I look at that because it’s such an important paper. It’s the first time that he’s kind of saying, “Look. This is not an astrology of causes. It can’t be. I am looking at a chart that was picked at random in an attack on astrology in 1975, and that was published in The Humanist magazine, and I’m taking that map and showing how through directions and through other astrological techniques it times the attack itself.” And it’s like, whoa. So where’s the causation here? Where is the, you know, where’s the thing that’s making this happen?
So the fact that by 1978, Geoffrey in the Lodge, doing a lot of horary astrology with Derek Appleby, and using horary techniques to unpack this anti-astrology signature map, that to me is the watershed moment. It’s his time, if you will, of unbelievable kind of – when I say “discovery,” I don’t wanna put him in the line of like, an Einstein. This is somebody who had a different way of seeing what we were doing, and the importance of that paper is that if somebody goes back and looks at it, and then you look at what else was being published in 1978, there’s nothing like it. It is hands and feet away from anything else that was out there. So Patrick’s naming of it as hermeneutic astrology certainly gave it a nice label, one that Geoffrey did embrace. What Patrick could not quite capture was just how unusual what he had done was. Patrick did understand that. It’s interesting, because Patrick had worked as had Geoffrey himself with John Addey on the harmonics project. A lot of people say, “Well, gee, was Geoffrey always like this?” Geoffrey, you know, was helping John Addey sort through data on his harmonics project sitting on the floor sorting through things, counting up this. You know, Geoffrey had a great interest in seeing if astrology could have some “scientific” or harmonic or other kind of foundation. He ultimately didn’t think it did, but he loved the fact that there were people out there theorizing and saying, “There might be a different way of looking at what we’re doing.” And yet, his to my mind is the one that I think is – when I say “standing the test of time,” we’re still, it’s very, very early on in this in terms of this. But I talked about his work in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s book Structure of Scientific Revolutions that the way a new theory comes to prominence isn’t because, you know, the old guard kind of goes, “Oh, this totally makes sense!” It’s because the old guard dies out and newer, younger people come in and say, “Oh, I’m not so wedded to the old ways of doing things. Oh, this is interesting.”
So Geoffrey loved teaching beginner students, and he loved teaching non-astrologers how to see symbolism. And that’s some of what he did at the University of Kent was this notion of getting people to see symbolism at work. And when he could do that, nothing made him happier than to have a beginning student, a non-astrologer, go, “Oh! I get it. Neptune in Taurus in this guy’s chart – he’s an earth mystic. Oh!” You know? That’s the kind of seeing that Geoffrey felt that astrologers needed to be able to do is to say what we’re doing sometimes is very, very basic. But it’s very profound, because the way the world, or as we like to say it now the cosmos is speaking to us.
CB: Yeah. I have a… I don’t know if this would be a good time to mention it, but to sort of like, illustrate what we’re talking about – we’re talking about it acting as an omen or a symbol. You know, this week you’re about to fly out in a couple of days, so we’re recording this on Sunday, September 15th, 2024. And in two days on the 17th, you’re gonna fly out to the UK for the funeral – for Geoffrey’s funeral – and you’re gonna give the primary eulogy there for him. And I was really struck by the fact that this is taking place the week of a lunar eclipse in Pisces that’s happening on the 17th. And I was struck by that, because I know he was born within 24 hours of a solar eclipse in Capricorn the day he was born, and it made me think of earlier this year I did an episode on Proclus, who was a philosopher and astrologer. He was one of the last great leaders of the Platonic Academy in Athens around the 5th century, and his biographer and his student way back then after Proclus died, he has this story about how there was an eclipse that took place that year that was really conspicuous in that area and that this eclipse was seen as like, an omen of the death of Proclus that occurred around the time that he died. And Proclus – or Morinus, his biographer, actually has this statement about it where he says,
“When commotion such as this are seen to occur in heaven, they are said to be significant or signs of occurrences on earth, and we take them as portents of the deprivation as it were the eclipse of the light of philosophy.”
So it’s like, Proclus – what Morinus is saying is that the eclipse symbolically represented the light of philosophy being eclipsed or sort of snuffed out when his teacher, Proclus, died, and that it was a loss for the world. And I thought that was really interesting because, you know, one could make a similar sentiment about Geoffrey, who’s sort of like, the astrologer and philosopher of our time in some sense, and just this eclipse that’s happening that’s gonna sort of coincide with the week of his funeral.
KL: You know, I went back after you said that, and I cast the chart for the solar eclipse for January 14th – it’s actually the day after, but yes, within 24 hours of Geoffrey’s birth for January 14th, 1945, set for London, which is his birth place. And that map’s extraordinary, because two of the outer planets – Neptune’s at the Midheaven and Uranus is at the 7th cusp – so the fact that, it kind of has this, you know, Gauquelin effect, but not with any of the planets Gauquelin had anything to do with, Neptune and Uranus. But what’s important actually is Mars in Capricorn rises in this map. It’s got 10 Sagittarius rising, Mars in Capricorn rises, and makes a doubly applying square to this prominent Neptune. And because Neptune’s retrograde, to my mind, that is a beautiful symbol for the energy and the work that Geoffrey did about divination.
So Geoffrey – I don’t think many people would think, oh, when they think of Geoffrey, he was such a Saturnine figure, which there is that element to him. You know, double Capricorn, if you will. But and that his writing for many people, I said oh, it’s dense; it’s forbidding; it’s whatever. But when you got to know him, there’s a lightness to him. And like I say, Neptune – he loved the notion of Neptune and divination. And if you look to Moment of Astrology, he has a couple of chapters in there in which he discusses psi – P S I, psi – influence and Neptune itself, and its role in divination. So when I look at this map, I love the fact that we have this prominent Neptune at the Midheaven. And if there’s any message that Geoffrey brought to astrology and the world of astrologers is that astrology is more peculiar, as he said, more irrational, more irregular than our wooly theorists would have us believe. And he loved that. He loved that about astrology, that it could not be pinned down to this nuts and bolts science. “Oh, well, if you have this, then that.” So when I look at this eclipse map, I think, oh, I think he would love that. And the fact that Uranus was at the 7th if you will in the map – so kind of his public, you might say, if he’s the rising sign, if he’s the Jupiter in this map – also up in the 9th – that I think he would actually appreciate that as an omen, if you will, for his influence. To anybody who wonders if Geoffrey had much to do with eclipses, he had a wonderful talk on Genghis Khan. You’d have to go to the Archives of the Astrological Association; he gave a talk about Genghis Khan and his rampage across Asia, and he talks about several eclipses at that time and I do not have the particulars in my mind right now. I still have it on cassette tape. But it’s a wonderful talk. And again, it’s filled with a kind of historical and philosophical kind of insights that Geoffrey is known for. But he was very impressed with how eclipses as omens seem to announce certain things to us, you know, to a wider world. So this would not be something he’d go, “Oh, this has nothing to do with me.”
CB: Yeah. Well, I think that’s a good sort of access point for understanding the notion of omens. Because eclipses are probably one of the earliest things in our history where in some of the Mesopotamian literature, they say that there may have been a series of three kings who all died on eclipses basically, and that this may have been like, a pivotal moment where the Mesopotamians started really paying attention to celestial omens and starting to record them, which then leads to the entire tradition of astrology, eventually developing as a textual tradition.
But to go back because Geoffrey is not just rejecting the idea of planetary causation as being the root of astrology, but he starts getting into other critiques as well about – he says that astrology is participatory, that he starts critiquing this notion of the moment of origin as well and a number of other things as part of his critique.
I guess I should explain, you know, part of my background where I got really into Geoffrey’s work in addition to just reading the book is I got on this trip for a few years about researching the origins of horary astrology. Because I noticed this thing when I started reading the Hellenistic texts, which is just we don’t have almost pretty much any Hellenistic astrological texts that are dedicated to horary, even though horary became such a major part of the subsequent tradition in the medieval and Renaissance periods. Even in modern period in the 20th century when horary was often not emphasized and looked down on, you could still find like, you know, a few texts like Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson or other people like that who had written something on the horary. But in the Hellenistic tradition, it was noticeably absent. So I picked up on this and I thought it was important because it impacted Geoffrey’s work because he used horary as the access point to say that horary is the same as all other forms of astrology, including natal astrology. But what I realized later is I think that horary did exist in a proto form in the Hellenistic tradition because there are a few traces of it starting to emerge out of the electional tradition using the term “katarche” but one of the points that I made to Geoffrey when I first met him in 2008 at the United Astrology Conference in Denver was that he didn’t even need from a historical perspective to argue from the point of view of divination, even though that’s the most compelling thing to us today. But it’s easy to just go back to the Mesopotamian tradition prior to Ptolemy, where even natal astrology was explicitly practiced as a form of divination so that you can make a similar argument just from that direction or use that way to make the same argument, and you sort of get to the same place.
KL: But you know, to go back to what you said about the eclipses as omens, he would have loved – and I know he did this – the simplicity of especially a solar eclipse, the Sun being eclipsed. And if we think of the king, whether they have the Sun sign in Leo, the king is a solar presence, right? So the eclipsing of a Sun will be the darkening of a solar presence or in this case the king. So is that an omen that they will die, be deposed, whatever – they raise important questions, enough so that, what, by the time of the Romans, they began banning the use of astrology, certainly banning its use of, you know, casting Caesar’s horoscope or casting a leader’s horoscope because they said, “Well, whether it’s true or not, it has great symbolic power for those who believe it.” So to them, they felt like this is something that we do need to control, that we do need to kind of put some guardrails around. And so but yeah, I think again I’m getting lost here – I think the eclipse material is a nice entry into looking at astrology as a symbolic practice. I love the fact that you brought up katarche, because that was one of those things that, of course, the initial moment he introduced that notion of katarche to my mind to modern astrologers – there might be a few special who say, “Oh, I knew that phrase,” but he resurrected that. And of course, he said it in both technical meanings and then also kind of more everyday meanings. But to Geoffrey, it meant the sense of initiative. And of course, it had those connotations of beginnings and origins and whatever. But for him, it also had to do with this notion of participation and initiative, and maybe that’s a lead in to when you say about participatory astrology. He felt like all good astrology did require the participation of those who got involved with it, whether they were people having their horoscope read or whether they were the readers of that horoscope. But what it did mean was that they needed to need each other, I guess is what I’d say about that. They needed to see this as what it is, which is a powerful frame of reference that potentially can shed light on a situation.
CB: Right. That’s something I’ve always struggled with with his work, because that was one of the things he started trying to argue in the book that I don’t know that I agree with, because I think he took it to the point of saying that there is no objectively occurring astrology for the most part when it comes to most of the things that we’re doing in the same way that with like, a tarot card reading, there is no tarot card reading until the two people like, sit down and the reader is asked a question by the client and then they cast the cards at that moment, and then it becomes infused with symbolic meaning that’s actually relevant to the two participants. And he made a similar case with horary, for example, where most of the time, it’s an astrologer receiving a question from a client and then you cast the chart for that moment and then it becomes symbolically significant as an omen at that moment, but it otherwise wouldn’t exist without that participation. And I can see why he’d make that argument coming into astrology, you know, from the different fields of divination like tarot and I Ching, and then —
KL: Right.
CB: — having horary become so important. But there’s this tension that I have, because it does seem like there is this difference with astrology where the planetary movements are objectively occurring out there sort of regardless of how whether we’re paying attention to them. And that might become a key point of discussion and debate about Geoffrey’s work and legacy is the extent to which, you know, first I guess I need to understand more to the extent to which he was saying that there’s not an objective astrology occurring out there independent of participation. And then two, like, how astrologers feel about that and to what extent that’s true versus to what extent one might argue that there is.
KL: So you might wanna look – Garry Phillipson did an interview with Geoffrey. I think it showed up in Mountain Astrologer – “Is Astrology Divination and Does it Matter?” Again, we have it posted. It’s an interesting interview. It was done in 1998. And you know, Garry having a background in philosophy decides to tweak his nose and say, “Well, gee, okay – so couldn’t we just randomly pick any line in an ephemeris and say, well, this is it, or do we even need a chart? Could we just kind of deal out chart cards or something?” And Geoffrey said, “Look, that goes too far. We do need the structure that astrology provides us.” So for him, it was very important that the – if you will – the objective, if you wanna say, the objective side of it is the fact that the planets are out there whirling in the heavens, that we could cast a horoscope, and that all astrologers say, “Well, as long as the software’s right or the ephemerides and table of houses are correct, we will get a map that we agree on.” Now, scientists might say, “We agree with that; we just don’t think you’d get any meaning from it.” But he said, so there is this objective thing, but it’s important for people to know that the moment of astrology is the moment the astrologer takes up the interpretation.
So go back to the thing about horary. Is every horary potentially useful? No, it’s not. And in fact, he was one of those people that lamented the fact that when horary started to – so horary was no place in the late ‘70s. By the mid ‘80s, at least in the UK, horary had come into its own. Then the journals started filling up with horary articles that had these questions like, “Is age” – this is a horary question – “Is age caused by man?” That’d be the horary question. Or “Is the Bible the words of god?” And Geoffrey wrote a rejoinder that he’s called “Horrible Horaries” that I would encourage anybody to read in which he said this is a travesty. These people have no standing to ask these questions. Meaning somebody is asking, “Is the Bible the word of god?” Well, who are they to god? Who are they to the Bible? Or with age – who is this asking? So what he fundamentally rejected was this notion that there was this objective cosmos out there that had the right answer – what Garry Phillipson said, you know, the astrological version of Google. You type in a question, and there’s your answer that, you know, Garry rejected that. Geoffrey certainly rejected it. So what he said is the horoscope by itself is not a guarantee of anything. And just because somebody asks a question – well, for one thing, because – again, this is something else that people that got to know him were like, wait a minute. He called – so he talked about two forms of astrology, what he called open and closed forms. And he was more of a closed form guy at the beginning, and by “closed form,” it meant he cleaved to, held to the rules of for instance horary astrology that there’s strictures against reading the map whether it was the Moon was void of course, whether it was, you know, the rising sign was in the first three degrees or the last three degrees of a sign, whether Saturn was in the 7th – these various strictures, the map should not be read. And that to read through a stricture was a mistake.
He said – was there a time, would there be a time a very good experienced astrologer might do that? Maybe. But he said the frame of reference must be respected. So for him, the astrology, the astronomy of it if you will, the planets, where they were moving, where they were in the houses, where they were in the signs, where they were within relation to each other – that needed to be respected. And yet, it needed to be framed as not – it might be objectively out there, but the astrology was not objectively out there. The astrology was the interpretation of the objective signs in – and now it’s been put into the world of people. So he would say this is the moment of astrology when you say, as I did a few minutes ago, “You know that rising Mars in that eclipse map – wow, that’s his work. That’s his energy. Squaring Neptune at the Midheaven – oh, so his reputation, a 10th house matter – well, it’s technically in the 9th, but conjunct the Midheaven – his reputation is one in which his work spreads the word of Neptune, of divination, of mysticism, of elusive weirdness about astrology.” He’d be like, “Yep.”
So he might disagree with particulars of my take on that, but he’d say, “It’s a reasonable take; I’ll go with that.”
CB: Right. So you were talking about like, the considerations before judgment and underlying that is the notion – and different astrologers have different positions on how closely or not to adhere to those, but underlying it is an issue with horary of radicality and then the moment of the divination and of casting a chart is supposed to be this important somewhat pressing like, charged moment. And if you meet those conditions with a horary that it’s a singular, unique moment in time that has personal, especially deep significance to the person that the chart caster at that moment will speak to that moment for some mysterious reason. But if you start asking sort of like, arbitrary or pointless or other types of questions or like that there’s sometimes like, rules to divination, and that that’s true for other forms of divination where it’s like, you can’t just ask the same question like, 10 times in a row and expect each of those divinations to be useful or to give you something that’s gonna be valid, and that there’s something similar in horary where there’s this importance of having a uniqueness to the moment that’s charged in some way and that it will speak to you if it meets that condition.
KL: Absolutely. Thank you so much for saying what you just did. It’s so important I think that there is something about certain moments we know in our lives that become charged. If we’re astrologers, we might check our watch and go, “Wow. What’s going on here?” And we might later on cast a chart for it. He thinks the most important horaries, the most important work goes on when people have – he wouldn’t say an emotional stake in the game, but I will. Where people are moved by something, it matters. So for instance, the “Is astrology” – “Is the Bible the word of god?” Well, somebody might say, “Well, I’m deeply religious; I wanna know.” Well, that’s fundamentally unknowable. See, this is not the province of astrology. And anyhow, the question is poorly framed, and it’s not impertinent, but it’s just – the person has no standing to ask it. But if somebody says, “You know, I opened the Bible, and I saw this passage, and it had such deep meaning to me.” He would say, “Now you might be onto something.” So it has to do with you, that – if you wanna call it a bit of bibliomancy, opening the Bible to a random passage and finding great relevance – he would have no problem with that. He would say, “You know what? That’s exactly how divination works.” That when people have this need, it gets answered. Now, whether people can derive the correct answer – “correct” – he would even hate my use of that. Whether they can get meaningful information from that is something apart again.
So Garry loved to ask people William Lilly’s favorite one of those phrases, you know, that those that are near – I’m gonna paraphrase here – those who are nearer to god, basically, render more accurate judgments. I think what Garry was getting at, what Lilly was getting at, and I think what Geoffrey would say is that sincerity – spiritual sincerity I would call it – is fundamental to doing good work. And I think one of the major ways that I’ve changed as an astrologer is when I’m sitting down with somebody, once I’ve cast a chart – and yes, I will go look at what Rob Hand says. I will go look at even like, some midpoint. I will go look at a lot of different things, or what Arroyo might say – something. But then kind of sit with the chart myself and think, “What is this person asking and how can I best be of use to them?” That’s how I see my role, and I don’t wanna make it sound grandiloquent, but I wanna say that I am trying to act as a I guess you’d say step-down transformer from the cosmos. I mean, that’s what we astrologers do. We’re saying the cosmos has meaning, which is in distinction, contradistinction to what the physicists say we’re in a universe of random matter, molecules moving around, there’s no meaning to it; it’s run on the laws of physics. And we have to say at some level, there’s some truth to that, but there’s another level – whether we wanna call it behind that, beneath that, on top of that, wherever it is, but it’s not there – that interpenetrates that, and it’s our mission to basically find that juice. And to the extent we can, to put that in language that could be helpful to other people.
CB: Yeah, for sure. Well, and it goes back to I think something we were trying to articulate was that we’re talking about moments of symbolic significance, and that’s where we get back into that term “katarche,” which he picked up and was so fascinated by and made such a central part of his argument that for example, you know, when two people get married, it’s like, the moment they say “I do” is a moment of symbolic significance that is charged and that sometimes people will cast a chart for that moment, for example, and the idea that that chart will act as an omen that has something significant to say for the future of the couple that got together at that moment. But it’s the symbolic charge of that moment that’s important in some ways, and that you have also a similar thing with the moment of birth where, you know, sometimes people get caught up about issues of like, conception versus birth. But the importance of the moment of birth is that is the most symbolically significant moment where the individual, the baby, starts their life separate from the mother and that astrologers since the 5th century BCE have been taking their omens from that moment in order to tell them something symbolically significant about what will happen in the person’s life. And when you start understanding that that’s what you’re looking for is these important moments of symbolic significance, then you really start to understand what you’re doing I think a little bit more clearly than if you get into the weeds about looking for different like, a causal nexus of things or something like that.
KL: Yeah, exactly. You know, yeah, that’s such… I mean, all astrologers know that. I think this is one of the things that Geoffrey loved about astrology and astrologers is that regardless of whether they agreed with him, he knew that anybody that engaged in astrology seriously, not just some casual kind of thing, but that they were wrestling with these issues whether they knew it or not, and that the more they practiced, the more they found that astrology had that mystifying, sometimes deceitful quality, but sometimes just almost revelatory quality. It’s like, oh my goodness, the symbolism speaks so profoundly and so specifically here. And I think that’s the thing that is I think maddening to people who read his book who see it largely as a critique and do not see a lot of the wonderful symbolism and chart work that is in that. And anybody who wonders that, his judgment about his aunt in the house – you know, the tenant moved into and refused to move is such a powerful map. It not only led to the development of the Company of Astrologers, those group of people who counsel him on what to do and gave him advice about what to do, but as I point out in my “Defining,” this is a map that was not cast at the beginning of an enterprise. The guy had already been living there for a while. It wasn’t cast at the end. It was cast at a particular moment that Geoffrey found significant. And I think anybody looking at that map and reads it, there’s multiple levels of symbolism in it. And in that way, he loved the multivalent quality of symbols, that they could operate at different levels. So you know, Derek Appleby said, “Oh, well, your aunt’s gonna have to testify in court, and she likes hats.” And Geoffrey said, “Well, my aunt was a very theatrical woman in her younger days.” Well, it turned out that Appleby was right. How he got that determination that she would have to testify in court, he doesn’t specify – but this is the kind of thing. It’s like, Geoffrey didn’t think he was right. He was like, how can he possibly know that? But anybody looking at The Moment of Astrology should actually take some time and look at some of the horoscopes in there and how he discusses them. Because I said that situation of his aunt’s house had a personal effect on him. It was his only primary inheritance that he was gonna receive. And if this guy basically wrestled away more than half of that, well, Geoffrey was having none of it. What I love in Moment of Astrology, he talks about that as the moment of Sun and Saturn. You know, the moment of magic – the crisis of magic he calls it. And it reminded me of what he had said earlier about, you know, Heidegger being and time – being was the Sun, time was Saturn. So that’s why Geoffrey saw him as an important hermeneutic astrologer. Not that he was an astrologer, but that he helped Geoffrey find a way in.
So Geoffrey would look at these symbols on multiple levels.
CB: One of the things that keeps coming up I feel like that I don’t know if he talked about but it seems like Geoffrey’s understanding of the history of astrology and the history of ancient philosophy, it reconnected him and one of the things he was trying to do was reconnect astrologers with this view of the cosmos that was animistic, which allowed for things like augury and other types of divination. Augury was like, a common form of divination through the flight of birds in the ancient world that could be symbolically significant in the right moment of indicating something about the future. And it seems like that’s a large part of what he’s tried to do with the book is just reconnecting people with some of those ancient views that allowed for a cosmos that was infused with meaning and with purpose in some ways.
KL: I’ll give you – yeah, maybe I’m telling tales out of school; I don’t think so. There’s a woman named Alison Bird who wrote a PhD thesis on astrology in education; she did this back in 2004 or ‘04. Lovely, lovely dissertation that’s on our site, and anybody that wants to see what a astrological – astrology in education was like, I’d recommend it. But this just happened. So Geoffrey dies, and Alison said she got a notification. So her name is Alison Bird; her father was a lover of birds. And recently, there was a bird who had been trapped somehow and was released and allowed to fly away. And Alison had become away of this. The bird’s name was Mr. Cornelius. So you can’t make this stuff up. So this is within days of Geoffrey dying, she hears of this bird named Mr. Cornelius who is set free and allowed to go to the heavens. And Alison is very aware, as I am and I’ll remind any of our listeners that one form of augury was divination by birds. And indeed, Geoffrey talks about that, you know, that one of the fundamental ways of looking were scrying of livers, right, looking at liver divination. But divination through birds – which ways they flew and so forth and what did that mean – I think Geoffrey would have been fundamentally touched by the fact that a bird, that somebody has named after him, who knows nothing about him helped free a bird that’s allowed to fly away to the heavens and that Alison took as a gesture of the heavens or of the world, if you will, saying goodbye to Geoffrey with this bird being freed to find its own way.
CB: Yeah. And with things like that, it’s incredibly charged for the person that experiences the symbol and experiences the omen in the moment, and I think that’s what’s important, because subjectively that’s a very powerful thing that just happens within the person’s field of view and within the person’s consciousness that has the most power to them subjectively who’s experiencing it. And there’s like, a second level of, you know, us hearing that story and it being kind of striking. But then there’s a different with like, so if somebody was to say, like, a scientist was to come along and say, okay, well, you know, does a bird die or whatever that’s symbolically significant every time, you know, somebody dies or something like that – then you see what the disconnect is of attempting to test things like divination scientifically, which you can’t, versus that it’s still this legitimate phenomenon that sometimes there are these omens that sort of like, come out of nowhere that can speak to a person subjectively. And even if it’s not something that’s like, repeatable under controlled environment, that doesn’t take away from the symbolic charge and importance of the moment, especially to the individual who’s experiencing it at that moment in time.
KL: Right. So who is the moment for? In this case, it was for Alison Bird, who had done a big study of astrology. She took an anthropological viewpoint or sociological viewpoint broadly speaking, knew Geoffrey, found his work challenging and difficult, had sat in on some of the Company’s classes. Of course she sat in on a number of classes because she wanted to get this broad view of how one gets educated as an astrologer in England, so she sat in on, you know, the various schools of astrology, and that’s kind of what her dissertation’s about. She clearly was touched by Geoffrey’s work in a different way, and she knew that there was something different about him. So in that case, that omen was for Alison alone. She said… And I’m getting choked up. It brought a tear to her eye because it reminded her of him. And he had been important to her at that point, that point being 15, 20 years ago. And so that omen was for her. But I retell it to say that the world of omens, it’s more common than we know. And I think we all have them, but we tend to brush them aside. And what Geoffrey was saying and Maggie still says is we need to pay attention to them, because they tell us things not only about the world but about ourselves.
CB: Definitely. Yeah. I’m thinking of this quote I can’t find right now from Cicero where he’s trying to describe the Stoic approach to divination and he says that certain signs precede certain events and that it gives you kind of – and that’s in the predictive function, obviously, but there’s also a sometimes simultaneous function as well of it coinciding at the same time. And that’s kind of where we get into some of what Jung was wrestling with when it came to synchronicity.
But so this brings it back… One of the things I like you mentioned that she struggled with his work a little bit, and that is interesting because I – Geoffrey’s book is important because it’s one of those books, to me at least, that has like, a profound impact on you, but it’s an ongoing impact because you revisit it periodically at different parts in your life, ad you come to new realizations about it at different stages as you grow and develop in your thinking and that you end up having a sort of relationship with the book that goes through stages itself. And part of that is sometimes wrestling over parts of it that maybe you think are really compelling and other parts that you’re not so sure about, and at different stages maybe agreeing or disagreeing with different arguments, but nonetheless, it still creates this intense like, relationship with the book itself that almost has like, a life unto itself. So going back to one of the things you were saying, though, that I thought that was interesting – to me it always struck me as a tension in the book is that he did try to argue that astrology is participatory, it’s more subjective, there’s a less objective component to it than we’re used to thinking. But then on the other hand, he wanted to argue that it’s not arbitrary and that it’s not a situation where anything goes. And I think that’s a central tension in the book, and tension in his argument about divination because I think it’s easy to think then if you do accept some of those arguments about it not having an objective validity or needing to be participatory, that one could say that there – one could start to think that there must be some arbitrariness to it or that anything could go to some extent. But I know that that’s something that he would push back on, right?
KL: Right. In, again, that interview with Garry in 1998 is interesting. I had reread this recently to remind myself of that. He said, “Look, I’m talking to you, Garry, and to what I know will go out to a group of astrologers. When I teach beginner astrologers, he said, of course I teach the signs and the planets and the houses. I want people to know how to do progressions, how to look at transits.” He said, “I act as if it has this kind of objective validity.” He said, “You can’t proceed otherwise. You have to do that.”
One of the things that he – so in The Moment of Astrology he has that argument of the hermeneutic circle that goes back to basically medieval theology and philosophy, but – one of the houses that Geoffrey thought was completely underrepresented in astrology was the 6th house. So he called that the house of technique or techne to use Heidegger’s term for that. And he said, you know what’s really interesting when we think of the mutable houses – of course everybody goes, oh, the 3rd house of the lower mind, the 9th house is the higher mind, the 12th house is the mystical mind, the 6th house is the what? Oh, okay, it’s the mind of, you know, craft. And he said, that is such an important thing for people to have an education of astrology like it’s a craft. Is it like shoemaking? I’m not a shoemaker, but he really felt like people needed to respect the framework and to treat it as something that needed to be studied and understood and not forgotten but kind of moved through, if you will, the hermeneutic circle. So everybody would go, so a 3rd house understanding of astrology? Oh, that’s, you know, Venus in Taurus means this. Oh, so the 6th house has to do – oh, what would be the technique be that you’d use with Venus? Would you see what domicile it’s in? Well, what would you do? Would you look at when it’s in its fall? What kinds of things would affect a reading? What’s the 9th house? Oh, that’s the higher side of it. So of course Geoffrey saw astrology itself as a 9th house pursuit – philosophy and astrology he put in the same boat, the same astrological house. But he thought that ultimately maybe what we’re aiming toward is some kind of 12th house spiritualized astrology. He certainly thought Alan Leo was moving that direction; he thought most astrologers ultimately did. But he really felt like in the work we do, he said, “Am I a mystic astrologer?” He said, “Well, I’m an astrologer that wants to help people in the here and now.” He said one of the issues he took with the Dane Rudhyar – with the humanistic school broadly, not just Dane – was this notion that oh, well, we’re not gonna have any truck with helping people with their relationships or the messy little details of everyday life. To him, that was the stuff of astrology. The thing that made astrology matter for people is if you could come up with an interpretation, help them think through an issue using the symbols of astrology. So to him, that was not only – that was a justification for astrology is that you were down in the everyday details of life, and if sometimes those details reflected very prominently or significantly in the symbolism itself and that any astrologer you pointed it out to would say, “Oh, I see that. Oh, I get that. Yeah, I agree with you. I’m not sure if I’d take the next step with you, but I agree with that.” So to him, the gift of astrology was this notion that you took something 3rd house that you studied that you might have a philosophy about – a 9th house thing – but you certainly had a craft aspect to it, a 6th house approach to it. And I remember when I pointed out to him some of Stephen Arroyo’s comments about that in astrology, psychology, and the four elements about the 6th house – he loved that. And he said, “Well, point me to that.” Because he was always hungry for anybody that he might have overlooked or not seen something and said, “Oh! I should have known other people would see this.” You know, he always wanted to find out who had seen what he had seen before him. So in that way, he was very willing.
I wanna go back to something else you said about the history. So Geoffrey, I still remember when Project Hindsight came out and he subscribed to that, and he was so excited by the work that, you know, they were doing, the three Roberts were doing. And you know, to him, he always felt like, wow – the work I did, as I said in my recent essay on him, it was done the old-fashioned way in libraries and stacks and friends lending him book. He would write to professors – not email, but write to them and say, “I see you wrote this. Is this what you really think?” And you know, so his work ethic was extraordinary. He did not bother with social media; he did not bother – and yet to the end of his life, he became very fascinated with things like AI, very fascinated with the way the world was changing. But he was a fundamental believer that you needed to hit the books. You needed to think – not just read, but you need to think about what you did. So I think your perception of him, I think he would like that that you have a renewed appreciation that this man did the hard work. Well, as future historians find refinements of it, did you find refinements? He would say, “Have at it! I’m all for that. You know, this is what I found in the ‘80s when I was doing this work. This is, to the best of my knowledge, what I could find.” And you know. Again, I think he was always very appreciative of the work that other people did and wanted to kind of knit that into whatever he had come up with if he thought it had relevance.
CB: Yeah, for sure. It’s something I have a greater appreciation of now that I’ve been in astrology for, what, 25 years now is appreciating what are the resources that a person had available to them at the time and how well did they construct their argument based on that, and how well did they push the available resources that they had to their fullest extent. And with Geoffrey’s work, I think you can see somebody who pushed every single available resource that he had at the time to its fullest extent and was able to draw some amazingly insightful conclusions, even though, you know, like, all of the Hellenistic astrological texts or all of the medieval astrological texts hadn’t been translated at the time, that there was only a handful of them that had. And yet with that handful of texts, he was actually able to draw some conclusions that still stand up strikingly well to this day and that have been borne out in some ways by subsequent translations —
KL: That’s nice to hear. Yeah.
CB: Yeah. So that’s one thing that I am really impressed by in terms of that.
KL: Well, two of the people he drew to him – Vernon Wells and Graeme Tobyn – were both pretty decent Latin scholars. And Geoffrey and those two gentlemen, as well as Charles Burnett and a couple other people, were part of a translation group in the early 1990s looking at some of these texts. So of course Charles Burnett, you know, is one of the deep scholars, right, of ancient astrology, ancient and up to renaissance astrology, worked with Dorian Greenbaum on her dissertation, and yet so here even he appreciated what Geoffrey was doing and what Graeme was doing and what Vernon were doing, you know, and helping them with this. And Geoffrey was always embarrassed about his lack of languages, if you will. So he would meet these great professors of astrology – I mean, these are people who study astrology. They’re not astrologers themselves, but who study it. And yes, they spoke German and they spoke French, and of course they had Latin and they had Greek, and he’s like, you know, “Who am I?” And I said, “Well, Geoffrey, who are you? You’re somebody that’s thought harder and longer about the actual nature of astrology more than these guys have.” And, you know, he got invited by Dorian Greenbaum to an academic conference in Erlangen, Germany, and of course there’s all these, you know, the heavyweights there, and I won’t name names here. And you know, they wanted to do, well, we’ve got somebody who’s proficient in Chinese astrology, here’s somebody who’s good in ancient astrology, here’s somebody who’s renaissance – lots to have them stack up and see which one’s the best, the most accurate. And Geoffrey’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa – wait a minute here. No, no.” He said, “I really – we’re not – I’m not gonna be party to that.” He said, “This is not what we’re going to do.” He said, “I don’t – that fundamentally goes against my understanding of divination. It’s the unique case of interpretation. It’s not, oh, well, we did better than Chinese astrology on predicting who’s getting divorced but we did worse than the renaissance on which king’s gonna flop or something.” To him, that was a complete misreading of the tradition, and to my mind, I think he was schooling them in that. And I said to him, “I don’t care how many languages speak or have read these texts in. They have a fundamental misapprehension of the way astrology functions as divination.” And I said, “And that’s why Dorian wanted you there, because you have an understanding through divination as praxis or practice that none of them can touch.” And you know, and I still hold to that. And astrologers listening to this, if I told you that Geoffrey’s Saturn falls right on my – within a degree of my natal Uranus which is conjunct my Sun, they’d go, “Wow. He was always throwing limitation or a wet blanket on top of you.” He would be – but I think he liked the fact that I would say these very Uranian things and say, “Come on, Geoffrey – please!” And he would be like, in that way of his, “Kirk, we’ve gotta bring them along. Bring them slowly along. Develop a dialogue, and soon they will see.” I’m like, “Geoffrey, these guys are not gonna see!”
Anyhow, that’s the kind of relationship that we had. He liked the fact that I’d push him, but I appreciated the fact that he would say, “Look. If you want to bring people along who are not, who do not share some of your fundamental assumptions, the key is a respectful dialogue understanding where they come from and nudging them toward your point of view.” And that’s what he did.
CB: Yeah. I was impressed when I met him in 2008, because I had just published my paper on the origins of horary, and I partially challenged some of the assumptions that he was making about the prevalence of horary in the Hellenistic tradition, and he was remarkably humble and open to hearing those critiques and not getting like, defensive or anything like that, but genuinely had an open mind and was interested in hearing critiques of his work, I think maybe partially because he sometimes I assume over the course of his history would incorporate things like that. And that’s something I can tell in the interview that I did with him in 2015 is that sometimes he would take criticisms seriously in the sense of that like, something he needed to pay attention to and factor into his thinking and sometimes maybe even alter his thinking in order to, you know, better account for, and that’s something I really respected him for. Yeah. I always meant to do outline – I think I told him at one point I was gonna outline some of the critiques that I had with the book, and that was something that he encouraged me to at the time, but I never got around to it. Although doing that interview with him in 2015 was one of the – I’ve already said it’s one of the most important interviews I’ve done in the entire 400-episode series, but it was also one that I intended to do from day one is I had a few books that were so important and impactful to me that I knew I wanted to interview and do a really good treatment to outline and share that with my audience to help pass that forward to the next generation. And doing that interview with him was one that I was glad I got to do in episode 53.
KL: Right, right. That was such – yeah, that was a very key interview. Again, to your readers or listeners rather, on Cosmo Critic we have an hour long interview of Geoffrey by – it’s, I guess you’d say, an interrogation by Patrick Curry, and at this point this was late 2022 we did this. Patrick had engaged with Geoffrey 45 years earlier back in the Lodge days. So it was a really wonderful completion of the circle. But anybody listening to that will also not only hear him but actually see him and see his thoughtfulness through this whole thing that when he receives a question that’s challenging, he really thinks about it.
That other thing that you mentioned – he said, “If you know some really good criticism of what I’ve done, I really need to hear this. It’s really important for me.” And he was always encouraging that. So for instance, John Addey – the last piece he ever wrote for The Astrological Journal, which in one of these strange little twists of fate was actually shepherded into existence by Patrick Curry – John died in 1982, but it was his – he, John Addey, attacking astrology as divination, and Geoffrey said in his book and afterwards that it was the most significant critique that astrology as divination has taken on to date. And he thought it was very important. So anybody, you know, could go read that article; we’ve again got it posted on Cosmo Critic. But once again, Geoffrey was not like, “Oh, well, this is John Addey who has done harmonics, and we’re not subscribed to that.” It’s like, no – this is a guy who’s been an astrologer for a long, long time, who broke away from the Lodge and helped found the Astrological Association, a deeply philosophical guy. I don’t agree with him, but he definitely bears listening to.” And so —
CB: Yeah —
KL: — that’s who he was.
CB: — I think that’s, I think one can recognize the importance of a book and laud its importance and impact on your thinking without necessarily agreeing with all the conclusions. And in some ways, that’s actually the hallmark of a great book and argument when you acknowledge how much it influences and challenges your thinking and challenges you to wrestle with the arguments in order to define your own position. I think that’s actually one of the greatest things about it, as well as just his openness and attitude towards hearing those challenges and adapting to them.
KL: Right. One of the things that Garry Phillipson said to me afterwards was, I think the practice of astrology or the practice of astrology by astrologers who have written – written – read Geoffrey’s book will probably get worse before it gets better. And I said, you know, Garry, you put your finger on something, because I said after reading his book, I thought, “Should I even be doing natal readings?” You know, because Geoffrey did not – and again, I’ll turn people’s attention to that interview with Garry – “Is Astrology Divination? Does it Matter?” – and he asks him that question, and Geoffrey’s like, “I don’t do straight out natal readings.” He said, “I’d look, I cast a natal chart, but my most effective way to be with somebody is to consult with them around a problem or a question” where he can use horary and yes, tie it back to the natal. So he thought the natal was very important in that way. He did not believe in just sitting with somebody and saying, “Here’s a reading of your horoscope for all time.” He just didn’t think that was necessarily an effective or useful thing to do. So it —
CB: Right. I think —
KL: — did make my readings worse for a while, because it undercut my confidence as to the fundamental nature of what I was doing. It’s like, well, god, I’ve been doing this for 15 years; maybe I should stop. But that’s not what he said, and that’s not what he meant. And I had to rethink that. So yes, it did get worse before it got better.
CB: Right. I mean, yeah, his approach is definitely most uniquely suited for horary and maybe electional, and he really emphasized – because one of the things he emphasized is philosophically. I mean, one point actually I would make is where astrology is at today, actually, in terms of the contemporary discourse especially with younger astrologers has never been more suited to his work because he was like, lightyears ahead of – he was talking about astrology and magic, which has become popular over the past decade. He was talking about astrology and daimons, which has become popular, and djinn, which has become popular over the past decade. He was very focused on astrology as participatory, potentially magical, but also rejected determinism. I was actually in rereading some of his stuff I was really interested in the extent to which he rejects determinism of like, fate or fate-oriented or fatalistic thinking and really emphasized – and he even took it back to the Mesopotamian tradition in pointing out rightly that the purpose of astrology as divination in Mesopotamia was to find out the omens or find out what the future was so that you could change it, or so that you could attempt to mitigate it in some way. And —
KL: The right action, yeah.
CB: That seemed really core to his philosophy. One issue, though, is like, in doing some of that, I think for example one of my critiques is that he tries to reject what he calls the doctrine of origin, and I think he conflates that a little bit too much with the causal and naturalistic model of astrology that is attributed to Ptolemy. But in fact, you know, going back at the very least to the 5th century BCE in Mesopotamia with the invention of natal astrology, they’re already taking their omens from the moment of birth. So even though it’s explicitly still a type of astrology that was being practiced as a type of divination, this is part of sort of a challenging thing because not everything is Ptolemy’s fault. I think he was right to put a lot of the causal approach to astrology on Ptolemy, but a lot of the moment – the focus on time and the focus on time and the starting point of things having an objectively symbolically significant moment of origin is something that predates him and maybe goes further back in our tradition, and some astrologers might argue was more fundamental to what astrology is than it might seem at first, especially if one’s focusing primarily on horary.
KL: I think the transmission of astrology – what Geoffrey, I think, would have said is there’s Ptolemy, and there’s the way that Ptolemy got wedded to or welded to Aristotelian kind of notions of the world and Aristotelian physics. And I think by the time of the Renaissance, people like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola are able to see this stellar determinism and kind of what they called the petty ogres of astrology. And so I think that for Geoffrey, it was that by the time of the Renaissance, when astrology is coming back into the west in a big way, that it was hard to see beyond. Nobody was talking about Platonic astrology. Well, the Neoplatonists were, but they didn’t kind of come back until later, so – I mean, until like 3rd or 4th century AD, but – that when astrologers look back, they’d go, “Oh, it’s really, you know, the Tetrabiblos. That’s the bible; that’s the book we all go back to.” And so to him, I think that doctrine of origins gets hooked in with, yes, with Ptolemy, with the things that he said, and with how his astrology then got transmitted to the west. Yes, through the Arabs somewhat, but you know, by the time of Lilly, you know – I mean, you know, Geoffrey’s one of those people that thinks that Lilly, he does a rereading of Lilly and says, “You know, I don’t think he was a determinist astrologer, the fact that horary is one of his main contributions to western astrology.” So he gives Lilly a divinatory reading that some people can take issue with, but I think his point was that people needed to unhook themselves from this idea of stellar determinism, and that if X happened and touched Y, then Z would inevitably result. And I think that was the challenge that he made.
CB: Right.
KL: I’m very intrigued by – because I don’t keep up with what younger astrologers do. I’m reading charts of some younger people, but I don’t keep up with what they do. I don’t follow astrology on the internet. And so in that way, I’m a typical boomer dinosaur. But you know, I think he’d be heartened by that, because he kind of wondered what future does astrology as divination have? And one of the last – the last email I wrote to him basically about a month before he died was to say for people for whom it matters, there will always be those people, and you have to trust that the – I’m gonna appeal to the historian in you – that these things go out. They go in and out. There’s these trends, you know, and sometimes things come to the surface and sometimes they ride in the background. But they remain. There’s a connection – a golden thread, I think, is how somebody described it.
CB: To bring that back around to something we were talking about and something you made me realize is that part of what he’s arguing is that astrology is not just an extension of physics, and that’s why he’s rejecting the causal model and that’s partially why he’s rejecting the machine of destiny as you said. But instead that it’s like, it’s evidence of an animistic cosmos that speaks to you, and it seems like that’s really his core thing. But his rejection of determinism was a very core characteristic thing for him, and he was especially rejecting the notion that everything’s fated or predetermined and that you can’t do anything about it, and rejecting that especially that the planets are causing or forcing that to happen. There is a bit of an issue where even before Ptolemy there was a strong Stoic element in astrology where a lot of astrologers did view everything as predetermined, but the Stoics themselves still used divination. And in fact, they would point to divination and point to it as evidence of their thesis that everything was predetermined through a providential ordering of events, and that sometimes the cosmos would show signs or omens of these future events and that’s one of the reasons how you know that things are predetermined. And I think that’s one area where I think it’s important to unhook the notion of the doctrine of origin from Ptolemy, because it’s something that is not just restricted to the causal view but is also potentially something that people could be using even in a divinatory standpoint, and I think one of his – Geoffrey’s – primary objections is that he didn’t think that everything was predetermined.
KL: Right. Right. No, he did not. Yeah. There’s so many ways to go with that, but you know, I mean, obviously the Stoics – I mean, the Stoic philosophy says that and even when we call somebody a Stoic, right, they bear the burden that the world is putting them through. And so in that way, was Geoffrey a Stoic? I’m not sure. I think he clearly felt like astrology could lighten the burden for people if – when I say “done properly,” it’s odd because, you know, again… His view of things was, well, he was one of the most thoughtful astrologers I’ve ever met, and yet there was part of him that was open to the anarchic quality of a symbol showing itself unexpectedly that we could call Uranian that I think he appreciated. Or sometimes would be Neptunian that made its way, you know, through the crevices. I think many people would be stunned to find out that Geoffrey had a group called Spirituality and Gambling with the Company, and they used to bet on racehorses, which is really big in England. And you know, they had a couple of times where they picked a winner. Well, was it done through precise astrological technique? No, it was done through something much more like, oh, well, this is a horse with a strange name, and this astrological signature even suggests that name, so we’re gonna go with that horse. And they won a 50-to-one odds and they all got a payout. Well, to him, the payout wasn’t that they won, though he liked that. But it was the fact that this weird, you know, bit of omenology if you will kind of manifested in the world. So he would have never said, oh, by the way, stick with me and I’ll make you a rich person. You know, win or lose, he thought it was important thing for diviners to sometimes test their mettle, if you will, against the world as we find it. But mostly I think that had to do with helping people with what I just call the problems of being human.
CB: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think yeah, that goes back to some of the horary stuff I think we were talking about earlier about, you know, when is a horary valid if a person’s using it for an emotionally charged moment of importance in a person’s life versus when is somebody trying to apply it to something that’s not that important and not that significant, and when is the astrology going to work and be resonant versus in what instances is it not? And different horary astrologers have widely different opinions on that view or on that issue, because some say that like, horary always works and it never stops working no matter how seemingly insignificant the question. And then others say no, it has to be restricted to, you know, a certain set of criteria in terms of how important the question is or other things like that.
KL: Right. So yeah. From his background in the I Ching, he thought that was a misuse of the I Ching to kind of say, “Should I throw an I Ching, should I throw the yarrow sticks to determine whether I should have eggs or cereal this morning for breakfast?” I mean, these kind of – the trivialization of divination he felt like oftentimes just – they just didn’t show anything. Same thing with horary. He thought, you know, if people say, “Oh, should I buy this house?” and the horary had a stricture, then he said then they would say, “Oh, well, when is the stricture over? I’ll ask again.” And he was like, no. Just, you know, when it moves you again, why don’t you ask?
He felt like it was an important thing for astrologers again to respect that frame and to say, “I can’t give an answer to that.”
“Well, why?”
“Well, the chart just won’t allow me to do that.” You know? And so to somebody who does not share a divinatory framework who has the celestial form of Google, oh, what’s there on tap? I turn it on. This is going be a mystery. But to somebody who thinks that we need to respect certain times and places as this is not the time for that; this is not the place for that; or you don’t have the standing to ask that question; secondary horaries – “oh, my friend’s girlfriend is thinking of leaving him. Do you think she will do it?” Well, what does that matter to you? Right? And so, you know, to him, part of our education with people is to say, well, tell me how this matters to you. How does this matter to you? You know, because could you read a chart like that through derived houses? I’m sure you could. But to him, I think he bridled against people that treated divinatory frameworks, whether that was tarot, whether that was the I Ching, whether that’s astrology, whether that was dowsing, which he did, by the way, as a misuse of those practices. And so you know, again, that’s just kind of who he was. You wanna call that a Capricornian, hard-nosed guy about it? I guess you could call it that. I would just say this is somebody who was into a philosophical framework that he felt needed to be honored. That if you looked into a tradition and you embrace that tradition and you studied it, you needed to honor it.
CB: That makes sense.
KL: Yeah.
CB: One of the things I wanted to mention that I’ve been thinking about for a long time that I think is important and tied in with this notion of divination is the element of chance. So every form of divination, most of the major ones in history – they all have this element of chance that’s built into them where with tarot cards, for example, you shuffle up the cards and then at the moment of the inquiry, the cards are pulled and there’s this element of randomness to it. But that in seeming acts of randomness that there’s actually meaning and purpose and significance to the cards that are drawn at that moment that will both speak to the moment and what the person’s inquiry as well as potentially speak to the future or speak to whatever they’re inquiring about in terms of that. So that’s an element that’s true in tarot that’s also true in, for example, the I Ching where you cast the yarrow sticks or the coins and then it’s random, it’s seemingly random. But out of that randomness, there’s actually meaning and purpose. So that’s something I don’t know, I don’t remember if he goes into this; I don’t think he does. But I think that’s the element that I’ve been dwelling on for about 10 years now about how astrology is tied in with divination to the extent that it is, it’s that element of chance that’s really important. And the element of chance is obviously there with horary, for example, where the chart is cast for a random moment, and the random moment is the moment that the astrologer receives the question from the querent, whether that’s the querent coming to them and asking the question at a certain moment, and then the randomness is that the astrologer essentially takes a snapshot of the sky in that moment, which is constantly turning with all of the planets moving sort of like a lottery ball where you, you know, you have all the little balls like, bouncing around, and then you pull out a ball that has a number at that moment in the same way like, a horary chart is freezing things at that moment and then saying, “This moment and the alignment of the planets in it is symbolically significant for this moment and for what’s being inquired about and for the future.”
So with horary, that’s really obvious. But I think there’s an element of that in natal astrology as well, because most of the time throughout history, that moment is random and it’s not controlled. It’s just the moment that a person is suddenly born after obviously gestating for a certain number of months. But even today, doctors for the most part don’t know exactly, they can’t predict the exact moment that a person’s gonna be born. There’s an element of it most of the time that’s outside of anybody’s control, and it just happens at a more or less random moment in time. And then an astrologer can cast a chart for that moment, and the chart will speak to the nature and the quality of the person’s life as well as their future.
So I think this is important because if that element of chance is built into things as a core component, then that also becomes one of the reasons why astrology may not be able to be tested scientifically, because it’s based on this notion of randomness having a meaningful component. But randomness is something that scientific studies try to control for and try to exclude, because they’re trying to test something else. They’re trying to test things that stand out from randomness and that are meaningful in a different order. And I’ve been trying to figure out how to articulate that for like, a decade now, and I don’t fully have it down. But I think there’s something there that gets to the heart of some of the issues that Geoffrey was bringing up and some of the issues of why the question of astrology as divination why that’s still ongoing and important, especially recently where there’s still occasionally like, studies coming out about astrology and still astrologers discussing this question of whether astrology can be validated scientifically.
Do you know if the element of chance in divination ever came up in Geoffrey’s work?
KL: Chance in divination – what I do know, and again, the interview with Garry in 1998, he talked about it in the early days, he would cast yarrow sticks and then do a chart reading for the time the yarrow sticks were cast. Similarly, he did similar kind of tests or confirmations or whatever you wanna call them with tarot. He did not find those productive, and he said it was not helpful. He was mixing his metaphors, if you will, divinatory metaphors. One would think, “Wait, if there’s something to this, shouldn’t they all say the same thing?” But nobody thinks that a visual form of divination like tarot with its pictures of different imagery is the same thing as Mars square Neptune in the heavens. You know, so there’s a different kind of a dialogue that’s going on. And similarly with the I Ching and the hexagram, there’s a fundamental beauty to that, kind of almost a mathematical austere beauty to the I Ching and the 64 hexagrams and how they relate to one another.
CB: Right. I did an episode recently with Benebell Wen on astrology and the I Ching, and one of the things she argued was that divination that you create, that people create a construct for divination and then things are projected onto it. And I had a disagreement about whether – we sort of debated whether astrology fit that, because there, in my opinion, is sometimes an objective component to astrology that is occurring out there regardless of our awareness of it, and that this becomes the most clear in like, natal astrology or studying eclipses in history or long term historical cycles or things like that. And I think that’s a real area of discussion and debate which is what is the extent to which divinatory systems do create a structure or framework, and then imbue that with meaning, but that it’s not something that’s otherwise objectively occurring out there before it’s created. And to what extent does astrology truly represent that, or is that just part of astrology? Like, something I think about with astrology is in ancient astrology, it used to be associated with the planet Mercury. And Mercury always plays this vacillating role where it always has one foot in each side of an issue, where if there’s like, a binary issue, then Mercury is always both. So like, that’s true with like, gender, for example, with Mercury, that it can be masculine and feminine, or with sect that it can straddle the line between day and night or between benefic and malefic. And for me, that realization has led to a sort of guiding – has been like, a guiding light over the past several years in realizing that when you come into these issues with astrology where you have a question of, “Is it this or is it that?” The answer is often that it’s both.
KL: Exactly. So you know, interesting – Mercury, right? Hermes – hermeneutics, right? The Company of Astrologers – they loved referring to Mercury as the trickster, right. The trickster is this person who changes guises. Who are they? We’re not sure. They are who you need them to be in this circumstance, and in different circumstance, they might appear differently. So I think Geoffrey would say that to the degree that astrology is a hermeneutic art, the trickster is at play. Thus when he said it’s sometimes more deceitful than we think, tricksters deceive people, and that’s part of their mission. But part of their mission is to deceive people to help them see a different truth or maybe a larger truth. So this issue of do we live in a fated cosmos or do we have free will, or is it something in between? Well, it’s a bit of both, right? We see that. I mean, Jung has that famous line, you know, that free will is basically what we’re fated to do willingly, which could just be wordplay, but it’s that knife’s edge between “Did we have to do this? Did the world do this?” So in a completely determined world, there is no chance and then that takes that out of the equation, right? There is no chance, so somebody does something trivial with the I Ching or with a horary reading or whatever, and it’s like, well, this is a silly person who does not understand what they’re playing with. It’d be like a child playing with some matches and we say, “Here. I need to take this away; you might burn yourself.” You know? Well, Geoffrey was never one of these, “Oh, somebody’s gonna really burn themself,” but he did think people could mislead themself with the wrong use of divination by that. So this issue of fate and free will is always at the heart of astrology, right, and somebody – you could almost say that the divinatory viewpoint might be that we act as if it’s a deterministic world in which we are breaking those bonds of determination to express or to give a client free will. Now that’s like, I can already hear the scientists, the philosophers, “Oh, you just wanna have it both ways. You just wanna have it both ways. When the going gets tough, you’re gonna pull out the old escape hatch, and it’s free will, and when things get really bad and somebody got a terminal illness, well, you know, yes it’s a fated world we live in.” Well, it is kind of both, right? I mean, you know, never for a moment would Geoffrey at the end of his life have said there’s some kind of free will card he’s gonna pull that’s gonna get him to escape from a terminal illness. Yeah, anybody who thinks that is just engaging in kind of wishful thinking.
So these are very, very profound issues, and he wrestled with them constantly. And he would frequently counsel me and other people against what he called an equation of orders – the two orders of astrology, fate and free will, determinism versus the signs, and say you can’t equate them. We have both, and we shuttle back and forth between them. Sometimes the universe seems like a very fated, deterministic kind of place that gives us a message that’s completely unpleasant, if you will, spoken like Saturn. And sometimes it’s like, wow, we look at people getting away with murder – not literally, but maybe even that – and say, “How do they do that?” I mean, I’ll just, you know, again I’m trying to avoid talking about people in the news, but you take somebody like Trump and people say, “How does that guy keep getting away with it?” You know? Somebody would say, “Well, it’s all in his chart; just look at his chart. This guy has that slippery ability to slip out of things.” You know. So these questions he deeply wrestled with, he counseled against what he called the equation of orders, he counseled against a premature synthesis – oh well, he thought harmonics was a premature synthesis. Oh, he is gonna explain it all here; he’s gonna explain navamsas and he’s gonna explain, you know, the signs and the houses and how it’s all part of harmonic circles. You know, lovely, appealing idea that just does not, I don’t think, pan out.
So Geoffrey again was classically Capricornian in terms of saying, “We need to respect the tradition, we need to respect the limitations of what divination can do for us.” And when we start thinking we can just – that it’s an anything goes approach, we’re off on the wrong foot right away. We’re off on the wrong foot. We’re not gonna get where we want to go if we think, “Oh, well, I didn’t like that horary. Let me wait five minutes until Saturn’s no longer in the 7th and I’ll ask again.” You know, to him, that was just like, it’s not that it was cheating fate, it was somebody who was fundamentally not respecting divination as a fundamentally human activity.
Yes, we all like to think we – we want our escape hatches when things aren’t going our way. But he was like, you know what? Sometimes the message from divination is a Saturnian one. It’s “You can’t do this,” or “This won’t happen. You’re not gonna get that boyfriend or girlfriend. You’re not gonna buy that house.” And to him, that was all part of it. It wasn’t, “Oh, well, this is exactly what the client wants – fantastic.” It’s like, what does the divination potentially show?
CB: Right. That was something, you know, in the ancient world, divination was wrapped up and was part of the context was notions of like, fate – that fate existed as a concept. There were different views on how extreme fate was in terms of like, complete determinism versus just partial determinism, but that it existed in that context of believing that there was some sort of potential for fate or some sort of potential plan for the world or for people’s lives or a narrative that we were following in some ways.
So it’s interesting you mentioned death, for example, and death predictions, and it made me think of some of his statements about Pico Mirandola and how Pico was like, a renaissance guy or philosopher who put out a big attack on astrology and then some astrologers in retrospect who were kind of being assholes then predicted that he would die young —
KL: Right.
CB: — in his early 30s, which is a pretty tacky response to a criticism of astrology. But then Pico did end up dying very young at the age of like, 33 or something. But one of Geoffrey’s points in his exploration of that and how kind of weird and messed up it was was in putting that out there, did the astrologers themselves influence the course of events in some way? Not in that they had like, a direct hand in killing Pico per se physically, but he almost seemed to imply whether the intentionality of putting out a prediction like that had any sort of like, almost like, magical influence on the course of things.
KL: Right. Which then goes to that whole notion of can somebody be cursed, right? Lilly dealt with that. Lilly still lived in a world that had witches and if you look at some of his horary judgments, they have to do – was the gentleman bewitched, or you know. And so, you know, to Geoffrey, you know, the premodern world – which, again, is that Pico and Ficino in 1500, or is that, you know, basically the 1783? Because he – Geoffrey – saw Immanuel Kant, which coincided with the discovery of Uranus as that fundamental thundering of the world where divination could no longer be supported religiously or philosophically or scientifically. That’s how he looks at basically modern rationalism, you know, coming out of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment project, as he calls it. So to go back to a pre-Enlightenment world, the question Geoffrey asked was, “Can astrologers – can we inhabit a pre-Enlightenment world with our thinking about magic, about divination, and so forth, and yet still honor modern science?” I mean, after all, we fly in planes to astrological conferences. We use computers to cast charts. We use all kinds of scientific products and the products of scientific thinking to help navigate and make our way through the world. Of course we must do this; of course we must. We’re not living in 1500 or we’re not living in 2000 BCE or 500 BCE or whatever; we’re living now.
And so to him, these questions begged the question – we have to live in the world as we find it, but as he said, you know, the idea that because modern philosophy, because science could not find divination, he made that the object of his PhD dissertation to explore different types of divination to say, “Here in the temple of rationality, the modern university, I want to explore this topic. I’m gonna use participation mystique; I am going to talk about the work of African shamans and, you know, witchcraft people and diviners. I am going to be talking about the cognitive continuum of Barbara Tedlock; I am going to be talking about anybody that I think could possibly shed light on deviation. What I won’t accept is that divination does not exist.” He said it’s one of the most prevalent things. It’s everywhere, and yet it’s recognized nowhere by science or by religion. And that was one of his tasks, really, of the last 15 years of his life was to see that it was taken seriously by non-astrologers as a fundamental truth of the world we live in.
CB: Yeah. It’s really striking that pretty much every culture developed some form of divination so that it becomes like, this universal thing, and yet, yeah, in modern times it’s very unrecognized to some extent for the important role it played in human history and is usually looked down upon in different ways as like, superstition basically. Like, superstitious nonsense that’s been redirected. But I think that was part of what was so impactful about The Moment of Astrology is even reconnecting astrologers with the idea that what they might be doing is practicing a form of divination was very shocking and controversial to some extent at the time because they were almost used to – there’s a large part of the astrological community that was used to thinking of it essentially as an extension of physics that would be validated at some point in time as like, a natural phenomenon in that way. Yeah. And then —
KL: So the other thing that Geoffrey did with the death prediction those astrologers made to Pico was he unpacked it technically and said, “Technically they were off.” The symbolism was off, if you went back and looked at the maps that they use as to when he died. Having said that, as you put it, they put it out there and to him, that exemplified astrologers being the petty ogres of that world who needed to be condemned for that act. Oh, so astrology’s nonsense, therefore I’m gonna predict your death. You know, to him, that was exactly where astrologers went off the rails at that point to say, “Well, if you don’t accept our stellar determinism, well, you know, a pox on your house and you’re gonna die soon.” And you know, to him – and so by the way, in the first volume, the first edition of Moment, not the second one, he talks about a death prediction that was made by another astrologer for a person, and a woman brought it to him on his birthday. He said, he’s like, it’s the last thing I wanted, but I knew I had to take it up. And I talk about it in the Astrological Journal review – not in detail, but to say it’s fascinating to me that he felt like this death prediction that he thought was done by an astrologer who was totally out of his depth needed to be answered. Why? Because it reminded him of what had happened with Pico and with the astrologers who opposed him who made a death prediction. He felt like he needed to undo that to the person. And so I really wish he had carried that into – I do not know why he didn’t put that in the 2003 Wessex edition, but it’s a fascinating little thing that I followed down to thought, wow, that is fascinating this death prediction he could not let that drop. He had to take that up. Call it —
CB: Sure.
KL: — his Sun in the 8th, you know?
CB: And that’s definitely a broader issue about the ethics of astrology and like, what is ethical and what is not and different things like that. Although it’s interesting the broader topic of astrology and death is actually a really important one, and it’s one astrologers have a specific relationship with sometimes because the way that astrologers use astrology to look at the world and how it gives them this unique perspective on the world, when a death does occur in an astrologer’s life, they often will look at it from that vantage point – from the vantage point of astrology in addition to just subjectively experiencing it, but sometimes looking at it and understanding the astrological timing of things. I’ve seen astrologers go through a process of – that that’s part of their grieving process in some ways and their way of processing death, but also a way of situating it within the broader context of the person’s life and fate and understanding their life story. I mean, even us, you know, in this episode, we’ve talked about this sort of symbolic significance and our own subjective significance that we’re ascribing to that Geoffrey’s funeral is like, taking place this week on the day of an eclipse or the week of an eclipse and the resonance of that. It’s interesting how that is such an important thing in astrology at the same time.
KL: But he would point out that you picked that up and saw that. Nobody else has said that to me. Nobody else has talked to me about Geoffrey being born near an eclipse or dying near another one. You did, so you’re the one that brought that omen, if you will, to prominence here. It caused —
CB: Right.
KL: — me to go cast the chart and then talk about it here, and I really appreciate that you did that. Because without that, it’s like I would not have seen that, and believe me, I’ve looked at his chart and I’ve looked at transits and I’ve looked at progressions and you know, the usual things that we astrologers do when we see our astrological friends go through things, as I’m sure he had done for me. So yeah, so that is important. Death is interesting; one of the big —
CB: Hold on, let’s stick on that eclipse thing for a second because —
KL: Yeah.
CB: — part of the reason I brought that up is because I’ve made a special study of eclipses over the past year because a year ago when a bunch of big world events started happening during a set of eclipses last October, I wanted to go back and I did a Google search for like, what are other times in history that eclipses have coincided with major events. Because I think we’ve had this like, vague idea as astrologers that that’s happened in the past as one of the most visible astronomical omens that happens, but I was surprised that I didn’t find as many articles or people that had actually gone through and researched this. So I actually started going through history and researching eclipses, and I found just this incredible set of different major events in history and different people in history that were – often times what I found is they would be born near an eclipse and then some of the most pivotal events in their life would happen around the same time as eclipses, and that there seemed to be this one week window before and after an eclipse where the eclipse was active and relevant. So I made a special study and have done like, multiple episodes on that over the past year, so it’s become my thing. But then yeah, so now it’s again eclipse season and that’s one thing that I noticed. But to me, that’s both subjectively – there’s a subjective observational component to that in the moment of the symbolic charge that has to be right now, especially in how valuable Geoffrey Cornelius’s work was to me and seeing his death as a major loss to the community. But then there’s also this objective component to me where I feel like I have done a sort of level of empirical research of seeing that this may be something that has happened in history many times in the past that can be noticed as an objective correlation. And therein is something I’m struggling with a little bit where I do feel like there is this objective component to astrology and somehow that needs to be reconciled with the divinatory and symbolic component to astrology at the same time. And that’s something I would like to find a way to reconcile.
KL: I wonder if it ever can be reconciled. I think that is one of the why astrology is one of the mystery school professions, if you will, because it provides us with a number of these conundrums, philosophical and very practical as well. So for instance, are omens or eclipses an objective event in the world? Yes, they clearly are. Are they omens? Only to people who take them as omens. I think Geoffrey would be the first to say that as an astrologer, you do. But then you look and you say, so what has happened around times of eclipses? And of course some of you would say, well, for many people, nothing at all! But for certain people, these very important things have happened, right? And this is what Charles Carter called the seven great problems of astrology – you know, this notion at what level do things happen? On the mundane level, on the individual level, on the community level? What is that? And what does a map speak to?
So nobody could have said, “Oh by the way – we have an eclipse coming up here in August of 2023. Probably be the death of a number of astrologers, maybe including Geoffrey Cornelius.” Maybe somebody could have said that; I doubt anybody did. But the fact that you say that retrospectively, retroactively, does not diminish its importance. You know, I think we as astrologers oftentimes see things after the fact, you know. Which of course is subject to critique by the scientists – “Well, of course, after the fact everybody can see these things. You know, hindsight’s 20/20 and so forth.” But I think what you’re saying is very important, which is that for Geoffrey, he came in on an eclipse, he’s leaving on one, and to astrologers who see eclipses not just as celestial phenomena that are phenomenal to watch if you’re around one, but that they speak to us, they say something else to us. And so your study of eclipses is getting you to think, they must have some kind of meaning in the world, right? They clearly do. So for now, this – I don’t know if this eclipse that is coming up on Tuesday will have other events connected to it. We’re not there yet. But clearly in advance of it, knowing that Geoffrey’s funeral’s within a day – because the eclipse doesn’t go partile in England until Wednesday. Funeral’s Thursday. Again, day after, but well within range as you say. So clearly this has, I think, has an omen sense to it with Geoffrey’s funeral. Will I mention that at the funeral? I’m not sure if I will, because I’ll be sitting among some non-astrologers as well who are gonna say, “What are you saying here? What are you saying about our friend Geoffrey and how he came into and left this world?”
And of course the scientists will say, “Well, he didn’t die on an eclipse; he died days before the eclipse. He died on August 27th; this is the funeral three weeks later. They could have just set that up so it fell on the eclipse.” You can already hear the rationalist critique of that, right? Not the —
CB: Yeah.
KL: Yeah. You know.
CB: I mean, but astrologers and people used to paying attention to omens and symbolism, we know how hollow those critiques are ultimately. And I guess part of what I’m getting to is just one of the things I’ve struggled with over the years in both loving and advocating Geoffrey’s book and work and viewpoints because of how groundbreaking and how pivotal it was for me, there also still being a tension when it comes to classifying astrology as divination, which I’m willing to accept to a certain extent. But I think there’s a limitation on that where there’s something that sets astrology apart because it’s basing itself off of objective astronomical phenomena that are constantly occurring out there regardless of our participation and our awareness of it, and yet is still lining up with important world events. And that element of it is different from tarot and I Ching, because tarot and I Ching – those cards and those coins – are not objectively occurring out there until the moment that they are cast. So I think there’s some sort of mercurial component here where there is a subjective participatory element to astrology, especially things like horary or electional astrology – and even a participatory component to some extent to natal in this sense that we’re all making choices about our lives and we’re participating in the unfolding of our life and the direction of our own fate to some extent. But there’s also this other component where there’s something out there objectively occurring that’s been coinciding with and sort of mirroring the development of events in humanity over the course of our history for thousands of years and that can be tracked to some extent with planetary cycles. And somehow we’ve gotta find a way to take into account both of those two things if that’s possible in order to deal with the totality of what astrology represents.
KL: Right. So natural versus judicial, right? So Geoffrey never denied the existence of natural astrology, which could be you look at omens, you look at eclipses, or you look at any kind of astrological phenomena, and you connect them up to events in the real world. He thought that was a fundamentally different thing – very real, something that could be measured, and if people wanted to do that, fine. And he was all for that. But —
CB: Right.
KL: — to him, judicial astrology – the reading of horoscopes, whether again, I said this before, electional, natal, horary, whatever – something fundamentally different was happening there. I think that’s the trickster aspect of it. That’s the hermeneutic aspect. That’s the Mercury flipping one way – I’m real, I’m here, I’m Mercury in Virgo, I’m planted in the earth. I’m wheat growing up. Mercury in Gemini – no! No, that’s just a theory. Mercury in Pisces wants to write some poetry about that, right? I mean, you know, we look at this, and we kind of go Mercury through the signs, and I think people have written some books on this. You know, has this – was is it? How do we interpret the world?
And so I guess I would say it always comes back to I think being very clear – are we in the world of signs or in the world of causes? Are we in the world of astrology being a natural phenomena that can be measured and looked at? Or are we in the world of divination, of judgments that you get people intervening between the symbol and the expression of the astrology? Again, the moment is the moment the interpretation is rendered or made. And I think if people keep that in mind, they can – I think astrology’s both. But the stuff that I do – sit with people who I’ve never met or maybe met once or online or something and read their chart – I don’t think that comes out of an astrology of causes. I just don’t. But you know, somebody could say, well, you’re not saying anything objectively true or real anyhow, so it doesn’t matter.
So I try —
CB: Right.
KL: — not to get it too involved with whether that’s true or not.
CB: Yeah, I was surprised in listening to my old interview that he did make room for that he said there may be some kind of natural astrology of causes that could exist, but he thinks that the majority of astrology and what astrologers actually do falls under the medieval category of judicial astrology, and that that’s divination – most of the apparatus of western astrology – and makes a lot of that distinction. And I think that’s important, you know, because there’s questions about that distinction because natural versus judicial astrology isn’t a distinction that always existed. It was kind of like a medieval distinction that was brought up in order to designate the type of astrology that was permissible under the Christian church, essentially, which is the idea that the Sun and other planets may have some impact on life on earth that’s almost like, biological or physical —
KL: Of course it does, right?
CB: Right. Yeah.
KL: Yeah.
CB: So there’s that distinction versus judicial astrology, which is the act of like, using astrology to make judgments about things and predictions as a form of divination, essentially, through the use of symbolic thinking and things like that. So that medieval distinction was made and was very important for a long time because that’s part of what allowed astrology to survive and persist in a largely Christian context where astrology was looked down upon and divination was rejected as either a form of superstition at best case or at worst case as an act of like, of evil or of the devil or demons or something like that.
KL: Right. Right. So wow, there’s so much here. You know, people continued to practice so-called “natural astrology” – astrology of causes – into the 18th century. Well, people continue to do it up to the present time. But it was even accepted, you know, by certain scientists. Like, when the Royal Academy was developed in 1660, they at first would look at astrological ideas and say, “Well, maybe, let’s look at those. Let’s test this out.” And you had your first great reform of astrology around that time saying, “Oh, well, we need to refine or rationalize astrology.” So you’ve always had those people that will do that.
Mundane astrology was an area; it’s an interesting thing. One of the few times Geoffrey ever got angry – angry? Yeah, he was frustrated with me – was I had raised the question, “Is there such a thing as divinatory mundane astrology?” I have a background in history. I wrote a long thing, this long piece, about the European Union with these timed charts, you know, showing the development of the European Union through, you know, different treaties that had been signed over about a period of 30 years. I felt like the symbolism in the charts was very radical in that sense, meaning they basically well fit, they aptly described what was going on at the time. And he said, “Wonderful.” He gave me all this feedback, and six months later, he says, “So what have you done with that?” I said, “Well, nothing.” He said, “You mean I did that for nothing? I gave you all that feedback.” And he had given me a lot of specific feedback. I said, “Geoffrey, I just couldn’t push it through.” He said, like Mars in Capricorn, “That’s what you need to do. You needed to push it through. Why didn’t you push it through?” I said, “Well, because I got Mars, you know, in detriment in Libra? You tell me! It was beyond my paygrade; it’s too hard; there’s no such thing – I don’t know.” But I just remember that he thought somehow I could fulfill that promise of mundane divinatory astrology because he liked this article that I had written. Nobody would publish it, but it took on Nick Campion’s thing as mundane astrology as a perfect manifestation of cycles, you know, in a astrology as causes model. And so you know, is anybody ever doing mundane divinatory astrology? Well, not me, not yet. Nobody else. But if anything, it showed his ambition. It showed that he wanted that. Did he have reservations about it that it was nothing more than astrology of causes? Perhaps. You know, why else would he have been so upset? But you know what, I took his anger with me as, look, he took me seriously, maybe more seriously than I took myself. Spent all this time giving me feedback and then hoped that I’d take it away and create some ongoing, you know, contribution to astrological theory. I didn’t do it. But you know, I look back on that and think, “Wow. Did I miss an opportunity there,” or you know, did I just have other things that I felt like I needed to do? I don’t have a good answer to that. I do know it hurt me that I let him down in that way, but I’m not sure that anybody else had any better an answer than I did is all I can say. That’s a pretty pathetic excuse, and that is what it is, so. But so these questions he wrestled with and, as I said, never had final determinations on, but he was very determined on – what did we call it – “pushing the envelope” they used to say with the space mission. Pushing the envelope. Always taking an idea and pushing it until it can go no further. And if that takes taking on the arguments of your enemies and your opponents, so be it. Where else are you gonna find, you know, more honest evaluation than people who fundamentally disagree with you?
CB: Right. Yeah. About that, I mean, I don’t think that mundane astrology has to be causal in order to exist or be valid. I think there can be a type of, let’s say, acausal omen-based or at least like, sign-based form of mundane astrology that can exist. I mean, you know, in Mesopotamian astrology, that was how astrology originated in the first place was purely in a mundane context where the celestial omens were viewed as applying to the populace or to the city as a whole or maybe to the ruler as a representative of the city —
KL: Absolutely. And looking at plagues, looking at floods, looking at these events that in the ancient world and really up until modern times and still devastate countries, devastate populations, kill people and so forth, right, become very important parts of human history and human experience. So yes, there is that. And —
CB: So one of the things about that, though, is there was a type of empiricism about that because they would record what would happen when a certain celestial omen would show up and then what would happen on earth, and then they started putting together those observations over centuries because not that there would always be an exact one-to-one correspondence any time the same celestial movement would repeat, but that there could be, broadly speaking, a similar symbolic or archetypal correspondence to what would happen when the same positions repeated. And that does create a sort of empirical approach to doing astrology that has an objective component to it in that you’re looking for the recurrence of the same celestial placements or movements, but then there’s also a malleability there in understanding that you’re talking about symbolism, and therefore the symbolism can be multivalent and can manifest in different ways that in the specifics are different and unique, but broadly in terms of the overarching archetype can be in the same range or in the same realm.
KL: Right. So I’m thinking of in 1524 the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Pisces. And many astrologers forecast great floods in advance that which did not happen. What’s interesting about that is that this is the time in which Luther’s ideas were having an impact, and something was happening with the Christian world that began to fracture and that you could look at that way. No astrologer said, “oh, by the way, a new expression of Christianity will manifest itself.” It had manifested itself in 1517, but Luther’s ideas didn’t get any traction until probably the 1540s. But it is, but Geoffrey loved that. Again, as you said, the multivalence of the symbolism. So Jupiter-Saturn in Pisces – certainly Pisces, oh, the oceans, oh, flooding, oh, yes. Jupiter – great floods. Saturn – great devastation. And yet it didn’t work out that way. It didn’t work out physically that way, and yet it’s very hard to say that that wasn’t a very profound shift that was happening in western Christian culture in the early first and second quarter of the 16th century, you know. And —
CB: Right.
KL: Yeah.
CB: There’s always an issue with astrologers to predict things and to correctly interpret the symbolism ahead of time, because they’re dealing partially with such a complex system, and they’re also approaching it from their own vantage point. In that context, a lot of those predictions would have been made by Christian astrologers who grew up in a cultural context of like, stories about like, Noah’s ark and the great floods and things like that and viewing that as like, a potential natural disaster if they saw a lot of indications in the chart that represented water. More recently, though, we have more recent comparisons where for example in the early 1980s, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that occurred and the explosion of like, the AIDS epidemic for example. And then more recently we had then a recurrence of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in early 2020, and the explosion of like, the covid pandemic. So it’s like, there is a symbolic relevance between having two pandemics occurring that are really centered around the time chronologically or temporally around that conjunction so that we can see the symbolic resonance of that or similarity. But then at the same time, obviously, they were much different pandemics that had much —
KL: Right.
CB: — different impacts at the same time.
KL: And the French astrologer Andre Barbault actually forecast the 2019 and 2020 pandemic in, what, 2011, 2012 in a paper he wrote that came out that Geoffrey I know was aware of. So again, Geoffrey would not —
CB: And that was from his —
KL: Yeah.
CB: And that was from going back and studying those conjunctions —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: — historically.
KL: Absolutely. And so again, what was it that enabled him to do that? Was it purely an empirical thing? Possibly. Certainly that plays a role. But it also has to do with a symbolic seeing of the planets involved and saying, “This is how this could work out.” And of course with the modern knowledge of the fact that we had a great pandemic in 1919, we’ve had the AIDS epidemic, and now we had the covid epidemic, these are a fact of biological life in the world. But the timing of them becomes very significant.
You know, astrologers do not – we don’t acquit ourselves well in the world of prediction. I mean, I’m just thinking of the 2016 presidential election. All the astrologers lined up and predicted that Hillary Clinton would win, and then there was all the face-saving shuffling after the fact. Geoffrey —
CB: I mean, that is true, but I do wanna say everyone was using the wrong birth time for Hillary in that election, and it turned out that her true birth certificate came out years later and it turned out that virtually like, nobody was using the right time, for whatever that’s worth.
KL: Okay. Right. But the petty ogres of astrologers had to go in there. So we go with the data that we have. So what Geoffrey would have said, so if we didn’t have her correct time, we did have a time of birth that we moved with in the same way Trump’s had two different birth times, at least two, that are floating around. But —
CB: Right.
KL: — astrologers felt this need to show their relevance and importance to make this public prediction, and they got egg on their face. I mean, unfortunately. And I’ve heard some of the apologias that some of these people have made; it’s just not convincing. And again, Geoffrey stayed away from public predictions. He was very fascinated with that possibility for it, but felt like astrologers needed to conduct themself differently when it comes to the public – especially the non-astrological public. When these things go into the press, we become the laughingstock. It’s like, oh my goodness. When I lived in Delaware in 1980 and I had opened my practice there to no effect, really, but I did get a call from a newspaper man in Delaware – where Biden was a senator at the time. But they said, oh, well, do you have a prediction for the 2020 election? And I declined to give one. And this was before meeting Geoffrey, and they’re like, oh well, you don’t have an opinion on it? I said, “Look, it’s a 50/50 thing anyhow, right? A close race.” It’s like, if I get it right, somebody will say, “Well it’s just a one-out-of-two chance anyhow,” and if I get it wrong, I will be piled on. I said, “It’s just not something I’m gonna engage in.” And the guy was —
CB: Yeah.
KL: — okay with that.
CB: Yeah. So and therein there’s something there, and I didn’t get to reread these chapters, but I remember Rob Hand responding to some part of this “Astrology and Divination” – this piece of Geoffrey’s argument – because Rob Hand was also a great proponent of Geoffrey’s work. But I think, like, at some point in his arguments, Geoffrey made the case that almost like, the exact time doesn’t matter. That whatever chart you end up with is the chart that you were supposed to, and that it will speak to things symbolically whether it’s an accurate chart or not becomes like, part of his argument. And I forget his access point on that; I’m blanking it out at the moment. I know it’s like a whole chapter on that. But I know at one point Rob Hand had a response to that where he said, while also, you know, greatly embracing and promoting Geoffrey’s work, he said something to the effect of, “I’ve never had a chart where the correct birth time, once it became known, did not speak to the person’s life more than the arbitrary time that was used up until that point,” and that he thinks the objectively correct birth time will always actually match the person’s life better.
KL: Yeah.
CB: And I —
KL: I’ve read those comments by Rob, yeah.
CB: So were these things like, discussed within Geoffrey’s – where did he – am I characterizing that? Because that’s where some of the maybe uneasiness with the astrology as divination argument come down to of that question of the importance of the subjective moment of whatever is presented in the moment being important symbolically versus this issue of there being an objective astrology and the tensions between those two like, different viewpoints or poles to some extent?
KL: Possibly. You know what’s interesting – let’s just say Hillary’s correct time had been available to those astrologers in the fall of 2016. You know, we had the Trump, the tape – I mean, he had a series of unbelievable things that should have been the political death of a “normal” politician. But what Geoffrey I think would have looked at is the soup that we’re all swimming in was this feeling that this interloper, Trump, a braggadocio, a serial abuser of various people, a pathological liar, that there’s no way this guy’s gonna win. The feeling was, “Come on.” Hillary – you might not like her; she didn’t seem like a likable person, but she’s a serious politician. She knows her, you know, her foreign affairs. She was very well-versed in “the facts of the case.” And he would say the facts don’t really matter to people necessarily. Right? That’s not what became the – that’s not what lost her the election that she was better schooled than Donald Trump in various things, whether it was the economics or the foreign affairs or whatever. That wasn’t it, right? So the question is, could the astrologers, you know, have risen above this and said, “You know what? She’s not gonna make it.” I think everybody at the time, and even the pollsters, were saying, “She’s got a pretty good chance of winning,” and I think a lot of astrologers were probably, whether consciously or unconsciously, affected by that. “You know what? Most of the polls say she’s gonna win, therefore I’m gonna go with that. Also because I like the idea of her winning better than the idea than this guy winning.” I don’t —
CB: I mean, yeah, there was certainly, you know, as one of the people that was involved in that and was well-documented and was very open about that, because I actually ended up taking part in some of those predictions and getting it wrong. There was, on the one hand, definitely a failure of imagination because especially most astrologers tend to be more left-leaning, and couldn’t imagine that he would win. So that there was a failure of imagination I observed on a number of astrologer’s parts where they just didn’t think it was plausible from a practical standpoint, and that as well as their personal views may very well have influenced their predictions. But on the other hand, you know, I also have the unique position of one of the only astrologers where I – before the 2016 election – went to a book signing to ask Hillary Clinton her birth time directly, and I did ask her her birth time. She told me she was born around eight PM. But however, there was a rumor that was told to me by an older data collector in the astrological community that Hillary was actually born at eight AM and that she was giving people the wrong birth time to throw them off because she didn’t want her true birth chart to be known. And I took that literally and I believed that that was true, because it looked like the eight AM chart was more prominent, and if that was the correct chart, it looked like from the timing techniques that I thought she would win. So to me, that wasn’t just like, an abstract thing when her birth time later came out and it turned out she was born closer to eight PM – it was actually more like 6:45 or seven PM – so that I was using almost like, the diametrically opposite chart from —
KL: Right.
CB: — what was true. So to me, it wasn’t just, that’s not just like, an abstract thing but it was actually something that happened that I was very personally involved with, and I do think that did play some role as well, because when I looked at the later chart once we finally got it, the same timing techniques that I use to predict career peaks showed her peaking earlier in her life, especially around the 1990s when her and Bill Clinton were in the White House versus the other chart, which indicated a career peak in the mid 2010s.
KL: Right.
CB: So I don’t know. Obviously, you know, we were talking – since we’re talking about —
KL: She was Secretary of State in the 2010s, right? So it wasn’t like she was, as she said, a little lady at home baking cookies, that famous. She said a number of things. But in any event, it is fascinating that you went to her and asked that. Whether she lied to you or deceived you – talk about the trickster right there. So she’s Scorpio, so somebody would say, “Well, wait a minute – was this a woman’s vanity?” No, it wasn’t like what year she was born; it’s the time of day. Somebody had said to her, “You know what? Anybody asks you your time, it’s an astrologer. Do not give them the right time because they’re gonna publish some stuff, and it could be influential. Let’s not take any chance.” I mean, who knows what really happened, right? Talk about —
CB: Well, I mean, ironically she did end up telling the truth, which was what was the surprise in the end, and then it was my mistake to assume that, to think that she wasn’t based on what turned out to be conspiracy theories that were floating around up to that point. And then there was other astrologers that were using a completely different time based on a false time that had been circulated by another astrologer. So there was a lot of issues there, but the central point here for our discussion is I do think – and this is one of my objections – is I do think there is something objectively true about the actual alignment of the planets and the position of the Ascendant and the cosmos at the moment that a person is born that does have important symbolic resonance that tells you something about that person’s future. And I think that that’s, if you have the correct chart, in all cases is gonna be more accurate than some other chart, even if it’s symbolically charged for some reason in terms of having some sort of alternative rectification. And that’s something I think for those of us that engage with this argument of astrology as divination and even agree to it up to a point, that’s the point where there’s still some things that have to be worked out about this issue of an objective astrology that’s objectively occurring out there versus a participatory astrology that requires our involvement in it in some way, if —
KL: Right.
CB: — that makes sense.
KL: Yes it does. And so I know Geoffrey’s stance on that was if he had a birth chart, you know, a recorded birth time, why wouldn’t you use it? Of course you should. You know. Was that always the determinative chart? Well, he said he thought it mostly was, right? It’s interesting, it’s the man who would not share his own horoscope publicly, so you gotta take that into account. So yes, I think he would say the, you know, an authenticated birth time is an important thing to have and to use, and he certainly would have said it. In fairness to these astrologers that got it wrong, yes, if there was a correct time for Hillary, then certainly they should have had that. I think he might have questioned whether they still might not have bungled it as a public prediction. He thought there was something about the nature of public predictions that astrologers tended to bobble them, because a lot was on the line. And we live in a world that no longer thinks – I mean, again, when astrologers get public predictions right, what do the rationalists say? “Well, it’s a 30 percent chance,” or “the odds are” or whatever. There’s always an explanation that diminishes the magical or just the uncanny nature of astrology. There always is that.
And so, you know, I think his point was a broader one. We live in a world that no longer recognizes divination. No longer recognizes divinatory arts as ways to give us meaningful information about ourselves and the world, and therefore when we use them on a world that doesn’t believe those things, we are actually speaking a language that’s no longer spoken. Well, spoken among a tiny number of people; it’s kind of like some little, you know, African dialect that was spoken in this part of Africa but not over here. So people if you go there, they understand what you’re talking about, but any place else, they kind of go, “Well, that’s a bunch of gibberish.”
So I think we astrologers are in a very small boat, relatively speaking, and we don’t control the levers and gears of public discourse. We just don’t. And so when we engage them, as he said, we must engage them with humility, and we should really use discretion. He loved Lilly’s phrase, you know, “Discretion with art. That’s what the astrologer must use.” You know, so there’s an art to astrology, and there’s judgment or discretion that needs to be used. And so for him, public predictions are a singular lack of discretion by astrologers. Why are they doing it? Because they want to be lauded as prophets or as people that it vindicates or validates what they do. And he says we cannot let our validation be the broad public that says, ‘Oh, that guy got that prediction about Hillary right, therefore he must be a good astrologer. I better make an appointment.’ Probably never gonna happen.
CB: Right. There’s definitely an issue with that, and certainly that’s not gonna be the way that astrology is validated, and it’s always so highly context specific and tied in with the subjective views, even in that instance political views, of the astrologer as well as other things that are going on. That being said, it’s like, there’s still a value to observing the – something – I was never comfortable doing like, mundane predictions because I always thought astrology and especially timing was so tied with the natal chart and like, transits to the natal chart that I wasn’t comfortable looking at mundane transits without a base chart like that. So 10 years ago I started doing monthly forecast episodes with a couple of friends, my friends Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees, and each month – I eventually created a format where each month for the first hour we would review major news stories that had happened over the previous month and what their astrological correlations were. And this would sometimes allow us to check in with things we had said the previous month when we were looking forward to certain planetary alignments and how we would describe them symbolically or archetypally, and then how it ended up playing out. And then in the second half, we will look ahead at the next month and we’ll do the same process of saying, “These are the planetary alignments and these are some of the ways that that might play out archetypally.”
So that process I found to be incredibly valuable and has grown almost like a muscle that didn’t exist or was atrophied up to that point because it does push you to do the best you can as an astrologer to interpret the symbolism of the astronomical alignments as well as you can if you’re putting it out there, if you’re actually, you know, putting pen to paper so to speak. It does push you to try to do the best job you can and to dig very deep not just in terms of the symbolism, but also in terms of historical or empirical research or other things like that. And I think that has the same value as – I think about 50 percent of learning astrology is book learning, but there’s another 50 percent that only happens when you sit down with a client in front of them and attempt to read their chart. And you’ll apply the principles at that point and you’ll also get feedback simultaneously, and you’ll hear from the client how those placements actually work out, and they’ll actually come alive in a way that’s much more vivid, and that you’ll learn so much more from than just what you read in the books. But that container of doing it within the context of the consultation puts a certain amount of pressure on you to perform as an astrologer, which can be for early students very stressful. But over time, it’s something that’s necessary to grow your sort of astrological muscle, so to speak.
So to a certain extent, I agree with that – that there can be an egoic component to prediction that’s right to identify that can be a pitfall that’s problematic. But then on the other hand, you know, in ancient times, predicting the future was the primary purpose of astrology. And when you have that pressure to perform that function, it does make you strive to achieve more than you might otherwise if you’re just muttering to yourself all the time about what a symbol or omen might look like but never telling somebody.
KL: Absolutely. Which is why Geoffrey remained to his days a consultant astrologer. You know, he felt it was important to practice, not just write his books and the theory, and he did a lot of that too. But to actually look at horoscopes and to teach classes in them and to argue over them and to shed light on them. And you know, so he wasn’t just a theoretician, and I think other people have kind of accused him of that – an armchair theoretician who can sit back and say these terrible things about the practice of astrology. He actually practiced astrology, as did Maggie. And —
CB: Yeah.
KL: — that was incredibly important to him. As he called it, divination in praxis, right – the fancy word for practice, the Latin – so that was a big belief of his that astrologers needed to practice the art. And like you said, they learned through the doing of it. It wasn’t that they were always right, but that they had to put themself out there.
CB: Yeah. And that was something that was incredible about Geoffrey is that while he was one of the people that was part of a movement that happened in the 1990s and 2000s where a number of professional astrologers went back to college, went back to university and got advanced degrees – like master’s and PhD degrees oftentimes in history – that he was in some instances those practitioners would strip themselves of the practice of astrology and sort of become full academics or not acknowledge that they, or in some instances not even continue to practice astrology and become full-fledged academics just for the love of talking about astrology in a historical context, which is perfectly —
KL: That’s right.
CB: — valid, and is a perfectly worthwhile thing to do, because the study of the history of astrology is worthwhile and interesting —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: — in and of itself. But what I was saying is that Geoffrey was unique in that he never gave up the practice of astrology and he continued to be quite open about that, even while moving in the academic circles from my understanding, which made him very unique and very impressive as somebody who bridged the gap between both of those worlds.
KL: That first conference at Bath Spa University College did and issued their papers, Geoffrey’s article in that, his paper in that was the only one that contained a horoscope that he unpacked for the group. It was the opening of the conference, and he made a number of very pertinent points. But one of them was that astrology in the university, if it becomes an arms-length study, you know, dissecting the bug of astrology on the slide, that that was never gonna be sufficient, and that indeed he knew that astrology going to the university was not the teaching how to do astrology, but he felt that if their mission was anything, it was to understand the practice of astrology. And his PhD dissertation is many different – and other things since then – are many ways to shed light on what that practice actually is. So I would encourage anybody to go and read that Bath Spa paper of his, because it’s just a very powerful thing at the opening of astrologers going back to the academy, as he called it, and he’s addressing this group and he said, “Let’s keep in mind why we’re doing this. This has to do with the practice.”
CB: I think that’s really important, then, because I think that brings into focus another great contribution that he made and perhaps one of the greatest contributions that he made with his work is that he brought a level of academic and intellectual rigor to everything he did. And he showed that you can be an astrologer and you can be a diviner and somebody that views the world in this animistic or magical sense, but still be, you know, a top level academic or a top level intellectual at the same time and bring all of the same intellectual tools from the academy into your practice and into the thinking of astrology at the same time. And that’s something he demonstrated I don’t wanna say more than anyone else, but at the highest level, and that’s one of the reasons —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: — why he might —
KL: Absolutely.
CB: Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons why I said in my statement about him, my tribute to him when he passed away when I heard about that from you that day, you know, that his work was one of the most important books on the philosophy of astrology in the past century because he brought that level of intellectual and academic rigor.
KL: Absolutely. Yeah.
CB: Yeah.
KL: By the way, I just realized the significance of this. So the conference I talked about of Geoffrey talking about Genghis Khan was actually – I just realized this looking at this as you stepped away – was the 1999 eclipse conference, the August 1999 eclipse that happened that you saw the full eclipse in the very south of England – and indeed that’s where the conference was. Right in the south of England. And I went there with Geoffrey and Maggie and a couple other people from the Company, and it was extraordinary. And I pointed out to him at the conference hall that we were in at this University of Southampton there were two other conferences going on. One was a conference of astronomers who were gathered because of the eclipse to talk about the science of the eclipse. The other were these religious fundamentalists who had gathered to say that the eclipse was showing basically how doomed the world was and why we needed to, why they needed to promote their ideas. I said to Geoffrey, “You realize historically our two greatest enemies – the scientists over to the left and the religious fanatics to the right – we’re all here in one.” And he loved that, right. So at that eclipse conference, he did a talk called “The Khan” – K H A N – “The Khan, the Sage, and the Eclipse of 12/21,” and so that was about Genghis Khan, and that was through the Astrological Association. And anybody who wants – I have it on a cassette tape, but who has cassette tape players anymore? But it’s probably still available. I think they make their cassettes available historically, so if somebody wanted to find it, it’s a wonderful talk by him and a good example of how he saw the conference was about eclipses and so he prepares a talk about historical eclipse and about Genghis Khan.
CB: Nice. I love that.
KL: Yeah.
CB: Yeah. Well, that was one of the things I discovered was that people that were born around the time of an eclipse tend to have important events happen in their life – and I bet actually if you went through and studied Geoffrey’s chronology you would see eclipses coinciding with other important turning points in his life and probably his work in developing his thesis of astrology as divination. It would probably be an interesting study to do someday.
KL: It might be a paper you can write!
CB: I mean, I would do that with your help, because you know so much about his life that you could help me put together a chronology. So that would be interesting, and yeah, I know his data’s not public, but it would be interesting to see how that would play out just because of that weird thing that I discovered over the past year and that I’ve been trying to develop and expand and see how far it can go.
KL: I really have appreciated the dialogue that we’ve had, and again – and by the way, this is all part of me saying goodbye to Geoffrey. I have been obviously thinking about him a lot, reading about him a lot, but having this conversation with you has allowed me to kind of get some clear thinking about the kinds of things I need to say in the eulogy.
CB: Yeah. So you’re flying —
KL: I appreciate that.
CB: Yeah. I’m really glad to have this conversation, and I always just try to recreate, you know, what it’s like when two astrologers meet up. Like, you’ll sit there sometimes for an afternoon and just talk astrology and bounce ideas back and forth, and that can last for a long time. And obviously from a viewer standpoint, sometimes people want things to be more concise or short, but I like sometimes when you can sit with a person and find the conversation as you go and see where it takes you. So thanks for sitting down and talking to me about Geoffrey’s —
KL: You’re very welcome.
CB: — life and work and as well as sharing your own story and how it was intertwined with his.
KL: Well, thank you very much. Yeah. You know, one of Geoffrey’s lovely papers that he wrote for the Lodge journal was called “The History of the Astrological Lodge from Alan Leo to the Present Day,” and the present day was 1986, which was really the launching of the Company as an independent enterprise. And since then, I‘ve been thinking, I feel like I need to write the history of the Company of Astrologers, you know, from 1986 to the present day. You know, it would be almost like, again, a closing of that. Geoffrey was such a traditionalist that saw himself in line with Alan Leo and with Charles Carter and with Ron Davison, and you know, and so in many ways I see him as both a fundamental traditionalist and as that rarest things, kind of a – not a reactionary, but a conservative revolutionary. A conservative revolutionary that he saw what he did, he admired it, and he fundamentally overturned many of the assumptions. And I think that is – I hope that is – how he’s remembered. Not as a homewrecker but as somebody that loved astrology and wanted to see it for its true self.
CB: Yeah. Well, so much of the zeitgeist of like, the 1980s and 1990s was about going back to the past and reviving the technical practice of ancient astrology and what I think Geoffrey accomplished more than anyone else was going back and reviving the philosophy of ancient astrology and bringing some major pieces of the past back into the present. But it’s interesting that he was also very much part of an tied in with the modern tradition as well, like you said being the president of the Astrological Lodge of London at one point and of that that very much placed him in the context of a lineage of not just ancient astrologers but also modern ones as well.
KL: Absolutely. Good place to stop. I really appreciate the conversation, Chris, so thank you so much.
CB: Awesome. So your website is CosmoCritic.com, right? And people can find —
KL: Yes, it is.
CB: — different articles —
KL: If they put Cosmo Critic – yes, it’s on WordPress now, but yes. CosmoCritic.com should bring anybody to the site. That’s correct.
CB: Excellent. Well, I’ll put a link to that in the description below this video and on the podcast website for this episode —
KL: I really —
CB: So thanks a lot —
KL: — appreciate that.
CB: Thanks a lot for joining me today.
KL: You’re very welcome. All right, take care!
CB: All right. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of The Astrology Podcast, and we’ll see you again next time.
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