The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 502, titled:
An Astrological Librarian, with Philip Graves
With Chris Brennan and Philip Graves
Episode originally released on August 3, 2025
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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 August 31st, 2025
Copyright © 2025 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey. My name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is astrologer Philip Graves, and we’re gonna be talking about his work as an astrological librarian as well as the publication of the new book that he just came out with, which is the first in a new series that’s titled Technical and Planetary Developments in Astrology as part of his series, Graves’ Studies in the History of Astrology, Volume One. So hey, Philip. Thanks for joining me today.
PHILIP GRAVES: Hey Chris. Thank you for inviting me on your show.
CB: Yeah. I’ve been wanting to interview you for many years, and we’ve talked about it off and on over the years, but we were always waiting until your book came out. And now the day has finally arrived, so congratulations on the release of the book!
PG: Thank you. Yes, it’s been quite a long wait, but worth waiting for, I hope.
CB: Absolutely. I love the book; it’s really great, and it really showcases the importance and the value out of what you’ve been building over the course of the past I think 30 years now in that you’ve been building what I believe is probably the largest astrological library and collection of astrological texts in the world. Would you say that’s probably a fair assessment?
PG: I can only be sure that it is one of the largest recorded ones; I don’t know the exact extent at this point in time of Jenn’s CAELi Institute collection, for instance. And that’s probably going to continue to grow quite rapidly. And I’m content with it being one of the largest in the world and one of the largest in Europe. More than that, I can’t be certain.
CB: For sure. Well, as far as I know, it’s definitely one of the most comprehensive ones. And so tell me a little bit about yourself. So you have been – when did you start building this library, and when did you first get into astrology?
PG: I first got interested in astrology more casually in 1994, and that was just one of the usual roots to discovery in one of Linda Goodman’s books and finding her psychological portraits of the Sun signs and their synastic interactions quite startingly insightful based on my personal experience of people I knew well. And so that was what really initially prompted me to investigate astrology more seriously. And a year later, so I began with proper books which covered more than just the Sun signs, and towards the end of 1995, so it’s almost 30 years ago now.
CB: Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah, so it’s almost a full Saturn return at this point. And so you started collecting books, and at this point your library consists of you have a massive library which covers modern astrology books, but also books going back to, what? What are some of the earliest books in terms of your range to the Renaissance and earlier?
PG: Well, yes, if you include modern editions of ancient works, then I really cover all time periods, including the ancient Mesopotamian and Babylonian period before the ancient Greek and Roman period. But obviously, printed books didn’t exist then. Ancient manuscripts are priceless, and so that’s completely out of the question. So one has to get over the modern editions for those kinds of books, but I do have some originals as early as the 16th century. And those are chiefly books that haven’t been translated into English yet; they’re mostly Latin originals from the late Renaissance.
CB: Okay. Excellent. And you have a printed edition of all of the earliest books that were written in English from the 17th century like William Lilly’s Christian Astrology and a lot of his contemporaries, right?
PG: That’s right. I wouldn’t say all of them, but the majority and certainly important ones by Lilly and Gadbury, Partridge, William Salmon and Jon Goad, Joseph Blagrave, Nicholas Culpeper, people like that. And obviously Lilly had many minor works, and when I looked at the prices of those and they were sort of a thousand dollars plus for copies in ropey condition of pamphlets which were just, you know, a few dozen pages long, I decided that wasn’t worth it for me; that’s too specialist an area. So I contented myself with John Ballantrae’s reprints of those, which he did very well.
CB: Nice. Okay. So part of this that’s an interesting like, subsection is the sort of area – this whole area of book collecting and book collectors and especially collectors of antique books of different sorts, and that this is a whole world that people specialized in in terms of like, the appraisal of different books and especially first editions and like, the quality of the book and different things like that, right?
PG: Yes, certainly. Well, actually initially I was much more interested in just gaining access to all the material. I sort of fell into collecting original editions more or less by chance when I came upon booklists on medical astrology, which I was interested in researching quite thoroughly, and that included books that were not available at that time in any modern reprint. And so one of the very first originals I bought from before 1800 was – or just before 1800 – was the Key to Physic and the Occult Sciences by Ebenezer Sibly, because that appeared on a shortlist of historically important medical astrology works. And there simply weren’t reprints available at that time. And then I rather liked the old print and the quality of it compared with modern facsimiles that have been pushed through digital crunching and so on; they just don’t look as nice with the text. And so I then, as opportunities presented, I then got more into collecting original editions. But that wasn’t before 2005, the first one, so I’d been studying astrology for 10 years before I bought any books before 1800 in original editions.
CB: Okay. Got it. Yeah. I mean, nowadays with digital scans of so many things or so many reprints that have been done by different people, I think it’s hard for astrologers – maybe let’s say newer, younger astrologers today – to conceptualize this period not that long ago where we were limited in terms of what you could study by what was available like, in print or sometimes in very bad scans or reprints. But that in different eras of astrology, astrologers always draw on the source texts that are available to them, but not all source texts are typically available in all eras.
PG: Absolutely right, Chris. And you’ve made a good point there about poor quality scans as well. There was, of course, the early English books online series, which had been widely leaked and various people had pirated it or some probably had permission to sell versions of it, but there were quite a lot of astrological texts in there that really had been copied in such low quality that they’re almost unusable if you want the whole text. There are problems such as text missing from the begins and ends of lines, because the whole page has not been put properly on a scanning surface. And sometimes there are reprints as well where an elective decision has been taken by the reprinter to skip tables that they didn’t think were going to be of key interest to the target audience, and so we have a lot of reprints of books like Henry Coley’s Clavis Astrologiae Elimata kicking around that have large parts of the content missing. So they’re not really complete or satisfactory as reference material if you want to really understand what Coley was writing.
CB: Right. And so you wouldn’t know that until you actually get a copy of the actual original book and compare it and then realize that there were things missing.
PG: Exactly. Or you wouldn’t know the extent of it. I mean, you can see from the reprints of Coley, for example, that there are huge jumps in the pagination which suggest something’s off for a start, but you just don’t know exactly what. And there’s a very similar story with Al-Biruni’s Elements of the Art of Astrology. When the original edition was published in 1934, it was in a limited edition of a hundred copies, and that was with the full Arabic text and the full facing translation. However, a lot of reprints of just selected astrological contents have been kicking around, and while those are good to have perhaps for practical astrologers who just want a few tips from Al-Biruni, they don’t give you the full context of his work.
CB: Yeah. I can’t believe how rare that particular book is and how few copies were printed.
PG: Yes, well, it’s sort of a sign I suppose of how little real interest there was in academia even, or in the history of astrology in 1934. At least there was a perception that it was so niche that it was a risk to produce more than a hundred copies of this book, which now has created a chronic shortage. And so if originals do appear on market, well, certainly whatever 500 pounds a copy.
CB: Right. If not more in some instances. So and then there’s a whole thing also about like, preservation of some of these old books, because one of the things when I started like, learning about it a few years ago was that there can be differences like because of the natures of books and opening and closing them, that sometimes a lot of the older like, 17th books would have a image – like, an illustration, a picture – of the author, but oftentimes those are missing just due to like, wear and tear so that certain books are more valuable if it contains that, or if it contains all of the pages and isn’t missing anything.
PG: Absolutely right, Chris. Yes. It’s really going back to your original point about how the condition of books varies quite a lot and there’s a whole group of people who specialize in appraising books for their value and so on who would be chiefly the expert antiquarian book dealers who really know what references to look up how to check for whether or not a copy is complete and what impact and all the different condition issues that may be found should have on value. And it is, as you say, quite common that a portrait will be missing sometimes. In the case of Coley’s book, for example, there are actually two portraits in a full copy of that book, but you very rarely see them both. And I think sometimes it may be that they fall out through wear and tear; sometimes I think when the book’s been rebound, somebody has decided, oh, that looks like a nice picture – let’s have that framed. And so it’s just permanently been lost from a book.
CB: Okay. Yeah, the rebinding of the books is like, another whole factor as well, because sometimes in rebinding it, they’ll like, cut the spines a little bit so a lot of the books at this point the margins are extremely condensed because they’ve been rebound like, a few times.
PG: You’re absolutely right, Chris. And sometimes it’s so bad that you really have to strain the pages even to see the innermost text. In extreme cases, you’ll even find text which you can’t see at all because the binding has cut through where it should be.
CB: Okay. Right. And in terms of like, the handling of old books, like, let’s say from the 17th century, I always thought that you would have to wear like, gloves or something like that. But I was surprised to learn that most antiquarian booksellers just say you just need to wash your hands to get the oils off, but otherwise it’s best not to wear gloves because you run the risk of damaging the book more actually by wearing something.
PG: Yeah, I’ve come across that as well. There have been different opinions on this, and I just make sure personally that I have very clean hands when I handle old books, and as you say, oil is an enemy of the conservation, particularly of material such as leather. And if it’s overdone, that is. And there are also other forms of corrosion to the paper of books. You can probably come across this term “foxing,” where you see these little rust stains, and as books were exposed to more sources of oxidation, and certain elements of the paper – I’m not sure of the exact technical details because I’m not a specialist of this, but – they produce these little brown marks everywhere. And while quite often I think that looks absolutely harmless, there are quite severe cases where you end up with the whole page turning brown, and you know, kind of dark brown so that then reduces the contrast with the text, which is not ideal, and you can even get brittleness to the edges of the pages of old books where they’re on thin paper that’s had a lot of wear and tear over the years.
CB: Right. There’s even – I was surprised to find that the issue of like, worms is actually a thing. That sometimes you will get older books that do have like, holes in them at different points from like, worms eating through the pages.
PG: That’s right. It’s called worming, but I think they are little boring insects of some kind. Worming is just the technical term. And it is actually, as you say, very common. Another thing that’s common is damp staining, and that can make books really ugly if you’re trying to read a book and you see this massive tide mark covering half the page and staining part of the page a different color from the rest. But they’re overwhelmingly common, those issues, particularly damn staining on older books because almost every book that’s been around for hundreds of years has had at least one liquid spill, it seems.
CB: Right. Yeah. I mean, it’s surprising sometimes the books that do make it through and the different qualities really run the full gambit in terms of like, ones that are in very bad shape or ones that were taken care of surprisingly well after like, three or four hundred years.
So you have built up this whole library, and one of the biggest and most important things I guess to bring things around in terms of your library is that you’re able to use it as a massive research source because you have not only books, but also you’ve collected journals and astrological magazines and periodicals, or even almanacs which are like, more regular publications by astrologers that have a shorter timeframe than books, but they give you a real feel of what astrologers were talking about at different points.
PG: Absolutely, Chris, and that’s a very important point, because I often think that at least historically – it’s not so much the case now when you have self-publication and print on demand, but in the past – when you had to clear the commercial challenge of a publisher to get anything published at all, that limited quite a lot what could be said in a formal book. And it’s often only when you look at the correspondence and the articles in periodicals that you get a much deeper sense of all the debates and discussions that were going on about particular astrological techniques and points of interest at particular points in time. And it can actually bring otherwise dry authors to life as characters as well, so you learn much more about what they were thinking and feeling than you would do just from reading their list of aphorisms or their delineations, for instance, many of which are fairly standard in the older texts.
CB: That makes sense. Yeah, you can see more also when they’re like, experimenting with something or when they’re experimenting with new techniques or speculating. I was reading one portion of your book last night that I wanna talk about in a little bit where the early English astrologers within a few decades of the planet Uranus being discovered are starting to talk about it and starting to throw out speculations about what it might mean or different things like that or just starting to place it in charts and see what happens. And it’s interesting to see some of their early speculations about that being published in these journal articles.
PG: Absolutely. And that’s been one of the points of particular fascination for me has been researching how and when astrologers came to give either particular significations to or particular rulerships in connection with the newly discovered outer planets, and three of the essays in my book focus on each, on Uranus and Neptune and Pluto in that respect.
CB: Right. So those are three of the chapters in your book or the essays in your book. Some one of them is one astrologers essentially in the first 50 or 60 years after the discovery of Uranus and how they started to develop the significations of Uranus, which I was really surprised at how quickly they actually started figuring out the significations of Uranus and how quickly significations that we commonly would associate with that planet today or that astrologers commonly associate with it were in place like, relatively early by it seemed like, the 1820s and 1830s.
PG: Exactly. Yes, it does start to take on a very familiar feel by the time you get into the 1830s. Certainly where you see it associated with accidents and with fires and just sudden mishaps of various kinds.
CB: Yeah, and even eccentricity or like, weirdness. Like, I was surprised that they were already picking up on that that early on as a thing that was coming up prominently when they were studying Uranus both in its transits but also in the charts of people.
PG: Yes. I suppose it boils down to the fact that although Uranus was discovered in the 1780s, by the 1820s or 1830s, there had been quite a lot of studious astrologers who had probably been doing a lot of quiet research on their own at home as well as attending in some cases societies such as the various societies of London astrologers that existed in the 1820s and 1830s and exchanging ideas on that basis. And also when they had magazines running, which wasn’t all the time; there were quite a few that started and stopped within a small amount of time – either a year or possibly two or three years – in the early 19th century. But even then that gave plenty of opportunities for the exchange of ideas and on this basis, I think there were enough astrologers studying trying to work out what impact Uranus truly had for this kind of consensus to start coalescing by the 1830s.
CB: Yeah. There were two quotes in particular I wanted to read, because I was just surprised at how well they had already started to develop the significations. The first one was from The Spirit of Partridge from 1824, and then the second one was from Robert Cross Smith who was the first Raphael in 1828. What’s the context for The Spirit of Partridge? This is a journal?
PG: Yes, it was a journal which was edited by somebody called Mr. Dixon, and he was… Kim Farnell’s looked into this quite a bit. He was a rival of Robert Cross Smith. So during the time that The Straggling Astrologer in which Robert Smith became a leading contributor, though he didn’t find it, while that was active, a rival weekly, The Spirit of Partridge, was started, which took a conscientiously different approach. It was almost as though Mr. Dixon felt that The Straggling Astrologer was much too populist in tone, and what he wanted was to go back to the spirit of how the late John Partridge practiced astrology, which was very, very serious and following certain technical and formulae. And he didn’t really have time for the kind of popular veneer that was slapped onto astrology by the rival magazine, so as you say, it was a journal.
CB: Okay. And yeah, so it was a journal, and in the – let me share a screenshot from your book. And this shows the value of it, because you’ve collected so many journals that if you have a research question like – and so many publications – that if you have a research question like, “When did astrologers figure out what Uranus means?” then you can literally go through and search through all of the publications for the first few decades, which is what you did in this essay in your book and literally report what the different astrologers were saying about Uranus at different points. And so that really, that among other essays that you have in this is really a demonstration of the value of your library, because it allows us to actually investigate questions that might be not as answerable otherwise.
PG: Absolutely. And that thought was precisely one of my motivations in collecting a lot of historical material was the desire to fully explore the timelines, the transmission and the initiation in some cases of particular schools of thinking. And I also mention in I think probably in the introduction to the book how when the late Maurice McCann, who I think you met once when you were both speaking in London when he was still just alive, he was researching for his MA dissertation in particular how the aspect orbs were changed. And he had this working hypothesis that a lot of things had been blamed on Alan Leo, rightly or wrongly. That it was all Alan Leo’s fault. And when he actually got all the references he could, including some by asking me, he realized there was a much more complex and nuanced picture than that, and these are the kinds of historical narratives that can end up having to be completely rewritten in the light of the primary source evidence. And I think it’s absolutely vital to have access or for somebody to have access, at least, to all the relevant primary sources so that questions like this can be investigated and get an accurate historical picture of what really happened rather than just a kind of a whitewash that implies that it was these big, famous names like Alan Leo who changed everything, which is absolute nonsense.
CB: Right. Or another topic that you address in one essay in the book is the emergence of Sun sign astrology and the Nick Campion who wrote the foreword to your book points out that it’s now been disproven. There was this myth for quite a while that Sun sign astrology began with this specific astrology R. H. Nailer in 1930 or so, but now through the research and the work of people like Kim Farnell and now through the work that you’ve done in this book, you’ve pushed the history back and shown how there was this much earlier precedent.
PG: Exactly. And I think that is an absolutely fascinating topic in itself, even if one is basically has sympathies more with the serious and technical side of astrology, the history of Sun sign astrology how it came to become such a big thing in astrological culture is something that’s important to understand for astrologers as well, I think certainly for practicing astrologers, because there’s this whole question of the interplay between how accessible and simple something is, and how well known and popular it can become. And on the other hand, the more simplified something is, the more the serious practitioners will tend to object that it actually isn’t the true spirit of the subject at all. But if the simplistic versions didn’t materialize, what impact would have that had on the marginalization of astrology in the 20th century, for instance? How has it done so well to outlast the scientific revolution and everything that’s followed?
CB: Right. Yeah. Those are really good questions. So okay, so going back to – wait, when did Sun sign astrology originate then, roughly?
PG: Well, it depends on your definition of Sun sign astrology, but I find that the newspaper Sun sign forecasts which is probably what most people are particularly thinking of when they talk about Sun sign astrology – Kim Farnell has found quite recently, which I mention in my book and she was kind enough to let me know before it was finally published, a 12-paragraph Sun sign column from 1926. But prior to this, there were prototypes of what became that kind of column with these American newspaper columns that were just called “The Daily Horoscope,” and they didn’t differentiate by Sun signs, but they did give a general forecast of what people might call the astrological weather for everybody. And they were absolutely proliferating in the local and regional press in the United States from 1911 onwards. And that was a very, very important point, because that was a popular product – a popular feature, I should say – that those newspapers could include to sell more newspapers. And I think that the slightly more nuanced version of that way, differentiated by the Sun signs, was a kind of natural evolution from that.
CB: Okay. That makes sense. And that, you know, the history of like, astrology in America is really interesting. It’s something I’ve been thinking about more recently because of going back and researching, I had a question of when did astrologers start to develop this association of the Uranus return of the United States and Uranus going through Gemini being associated with wars? And I was tracing that back to Luke Broughton in the middle of the 1800s, and I thought it was really interesting how he was actually from the UK and he came over to the United States and then eventually set up a practice for astrology and became a very influential astrologer. But that already it was through looking at some of his journals from the early 1860s just as the Civil War is about to break out that you can already see him talking about that concept and being what I think was probably like, the first to introduce it.
PG: Yes, probably. Now there’s a little bit of complication in the question of where he learned his astrology, because I believe James Holden had interpreted a quotation as implying that he learned from his father but actually found there was no evidence for that in Broughton’s own words or publication, because I think he said that he learned from his brother or possibly from a family friend. I don’t actually remember; it’s a few years since he wrote that essay. But I think certainly he had studied quite a lot. He was also, I believe, a practicing homeopath. He had studied in the United States at a herbal college of some kind. And so he was part of the current of astrologers who also practiced forms of popular medicine, which was quite a big thing, I think, in the United States in particular in the 19th century where you get all these kind of health advice focused almanacs. And sorry, I’m probably straying a little bit from the point you were asking.
CB: No, that’s fine. I just thought – I was interested by also in his text how well developed the significations of Uranus are already in some of his journals already in the 1860s. But then when I was reading your book and seeing that astrologers in the UK and some of their journals had already started developing it by the 1820s and 1830s, it started to make a little more sense that maybe he had already been exposed to or could have had some exposure to some of those traditions already.
PG: I think so, and he was also from I believe a part of Yorkshire where there was a little circle of astrologers, one of whom was Israel Holdsworth, who created an important set of ephemerides which was eventually then edited and republished by W. H. Chaney in 1977 as Chaney’s Ephemeris from 1800 – sorry, 1877, rather – from 1800 to 1876. So there was quite a lot of interchange between British and American astrologers. I believe Thomas Hay also had originally moved from the UK to the United States; I don’t recall the source of that offhand, but that’s what I remember, so another example. And then of course later on we had Llewellyn George who was one of the most famous British-born astrologers to make it big in the USA In the early 20th century, so. And there was also cultural exchange between astrologers in the UK and the United States during the 19th century. We find examples within Broughton’s Monthly Planet Reader and Astrological Journal of friendly correspondence that he held with Richard Morrison, the first Zadkiel. I believe he must have subscribed to Zadkiel’s almanac, which was possible through the sea freight networks that they had in those days. You know, it was sold in the United States, and I presume that Broughton wrote in to Zadkiel and they struck up a correspondence that way. So there was a lot of transatlantic exchange going on, much more than you might assume based on how limited modern communications were at the time.
CB: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. So let me share this quote that you found from the first journal, from The Spirit of Partridge, from 1829. So here’s just an image of the book. And part of the context is the name of Ouranos – it’s interesting – was still up for debate, and we can see the author using the three different names that were then in use, basically, the first one being Herschel, which is the name of the discoverer and is partially the reason why the glyph for Uranus is still basically like, an H. And then the other was Georgium Sidus or George’s Star, which is named after – the discoverer attempted to name it after King George III, but that didn’t really stick. And then finally, we can see already in 1824 this other name, Uranus, which has been proposed by another scientist at the time, right?
PG: Yes, and actually astrologers carried on quite stubbornly using the name Herschel for a number of decades after Uranus was the official scientifically accepted name. I imagine it was because they had already been calling it Herschel for some time; it just stuck with them. And perhaps there was a bit of a break in this tradition when there was a lull in astrological publications after the 1840s. Around the 1860s was a kind of low point in astrological publishing in the UK certainly, and it sort of picked up again later in the century. And so it could be that the kind of tradition around referring to Herschel died out at that point.
CB: One of the things that’s interesting I saw you mention a point you made in another interview that I saw you did with Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro a few years ago was that there’s this narrative in the history of astrology that astrology just dies out in England in the 17th century and doesn’t exist until it’s like, revived in the late 19th and early 20th century with the theosophists. But one of the points that you made is that’s really not true, because there were astrologers practicing and writing about and publishing these journals in that interim period for the entirety of that period, even if it was less widely practiced or even if had fallen more into disrepute that it had fallen into from prior to that point. Is that correct? Is that a good way to articulate it?
PG: Absolutely correct, Chris. Actually you only need to look back to the 1990s and this received view that there was almost no astrology after 1700 until Alan Leo’s time. It was quite standard. And this was just a kind of common ignorance really of the history of astrology between 1700 and 1890, which is quite perhaps it used to be, at least, more difficult to access because of the poor availability of texts from that period, which of course isn’t so much a problem now. But there has been a tendency for historians to oversimplify the history of astrology, and I think when I was researching for my current series of articles in The Astrological Journal for which I called “From Sibley to Zadkiel,” which basically is looking in detail at all the major published astrologers from 1784 to 1863. And I discovered that, in fact, there had been an academic narrative put forth strongly by people like Keith Thomas in his book Religion and the Decline of Magic in I think it was published in 1971, which very simply stated that astrology died and it was considered a joke. But of course, they are looking at it from the point of view of a certain stratum of formal society which did tend to look down on astrology anyway and would have done so even more in the light of certain scientific developments, which doesn’t say anything about status of astrology amongst practitioners and those who continued to study it.
CB: Got it. Okay. So and we can see the vibrancy of it still, to some extent, through these journals and through these excerpts that you’ve collected about different topics.
So all right, so I’ll finally share it; it’s like, the third time I’ve almost shared the quote. So let me – third time is a charm. All right, so this is from 1824 from The Spirit of Partridge; it says,
“We shall now proceed to treat of the effects of the most remote planet in our system, called Herschel, Georgium Sidus, or Ouranos. His nature is similar to the combined influence of Saturn and Mercury, and he infuses into the constitutions of those persons in whose nativity he is most powerful a remarkable degree of eccentricity. He is decidedly malefic, and whatever he does of evil is always in the most strange and unexpected manner; if well configured to Jupiter in a nativity, or a good direction, he will not unfrequently give a legacy, but it will always be from a quarter the least expected. This star appears particularly inimical to the fair sex, and frequently leads them to those connections which ensure disgrace and ruin. His evil aspects to the Hyleg, though not sufficient to terminate life of themselves, very materially contribute to hasten the effects of other malignant directions. He frequently causes the sudden death of some relation according to his position in the radix. If placed in the Ascendant, the native will be very remarkable for odd and eccentric actions. We have known a person in this case to suddenly walk out of a room when surrounded by his most intimate friends without taking leave of anyone, or even knowing himself the reason of his conduct. Persons under his influence are generally of a romantic, roving, unsettled disposition, much addicted to traveling, meeting with many strange adventures, seldom experiencing much matrimonial felicity, subject to sudden reversals of fortune, and often terminating their lives far from their native land. When we consider how much this planet must have baffled the judgment of ancient astrologers and when we also reflect that there may be others yet undiscovered, we cannot help remarking the folly and ignorance of those persons who require from the astrologer what they expect from no one else, infallibility.”
So I thought that was just an amazing quote, because I’m just, yeah, shocked at how many core significations that this astrologer at least already has identified that it becomes so commonplace now – what – almost exactly two centuries later, and that Uranus was only discovered in 1781, so this is only a few decades after that. This is like, 40 years later.
PG: That’s right. And at that time, that was quite soon, given how traditional astrology still was for the most part and there was quite a lot of holding onto the existing methods being the norm. Not so much coming up with new techniques or methods. But obviously, in the light of the discovery – the proven discovery – of new celestial bodies, astrologers were minded to study their influence and attempt to incorporate them into the astrological pantheon. When you compare that however with 20th century and the amount of time it took for people to start writing about the influence of Pluto after its discovery, it’s incomparably longer. And when you get onto my Pluto essay, I was looking a little bit about how it was anticipated by astrologers before its discovery, because it was also widely anticipated by astronomers. But as soon as it was discovered, there was almost a rush to accord significations and initially they were leaning quite heavily on myth. And I do not see the evidence for that approach nearly so much with Uranus and Neptune, because this predates theosophy. It predates the idea that – at least the widespread idea that – you can judge the influence of a newly discovered celestial body according to the mythological associations of its name. But instead, there was a lot of empirical study going on, seeing many nativities, directions, trying to identify what happened under certain directions of Herschel or Uranus, and over time building up a picture of its nature. So I think that was the empirical proof, which really dominated still that time.
CB: Right. That’s really interesting. And you know, it makes sense also because if it’s not even being named initially after a god, if some of the astrologers are referring to it as Herschel or to George, then you don’t even have that mythological like, substratum to start with, so you almost are forced to start empirically. And even if, you know, they would have done that anyways as a matter of practice, but you can see how it wasn’t even necessarily like, an option from the start.
PG: That makes sense, certainly in terms of the name that was chosen. But I do think something culturally had shifted quite dramatically by the time Pluto was discovered, because even if you look in the pages of, for instance, the early issues after 1930 of Astrologers Quarterly, which obviously did have some theosophical leanings anyway because it was the official paper of the Astrological Lodge of London which had spun out as a theosophical lodge. But you see quite a lot of people like Mabel Baudot writing in these very detailed, mythological analysis with Pluto and trying to reason on the basis of myth as to what rulership Pluto should have. And even in the United States, Llewellyn George was doing exactly the same thing, despite not being obviously a theosophist; he was more a New Thought person. He was quite interested in New Thought and that whole culture. And he wrote almost a definitive early assessment in one of the late 1930 issues of the Astrological Bulletina, his quarterly – as it was then – magazine, which was a very detailed analysis of the myths associated with Pluto and judging on that basis that it should be the ruler of Scorpio. And that was within nine months of the discovery of the planet.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So there’s more of a jumping into doing things based on abstract conceptualizations, which has become much more common now especially with things like asteroids and other newly discovered bodies, too. Which is interesting, because it’s partially also based on the assumption that that’s how it always has been, although that was something that’s been interesting for me as a research project over the past few years where Demetra and I went back and did an episode on how the Greek astronomer and astrologers initially assigned the names of the gods to the planets in imitation of the Mesopotamian assignments, and that this probably actually happened in Plato’s school, because Plato and his student, Philip, are the two first Greeks we know of to use those names. But that they had to make certain like, judgment calls when they picked the name deliberately, and sometimes that left out information from the earlier names that were associated with the Mesopotamian gods. Like, with Mars, which they picked Ares, which was the god of war which picked up on one part of the god Nergal in the Mesopotamian tradition who was also a god of war. But in the Mesopotamian tradition, Nergal was also a god of the underworld, and that sort of gets left out in the naming of Ares or Mars as assigned to the planet. So there was a deliberateness to the original choosings in some sense.
But so going back to Uranus, though, instead we have this deliberately empirical component where astrologers are putting it into birth charts; they’re looking at its transits, and they’re looking at event charts as well. I think you record one person who noted a fire when Uranus was activated.
PG: At least one such case; it was quite a common theme in the astrological press – the association with fires. I think once the idea was raised, it just kept being repeated that more fires were linked to whatever Uranus was doing at that time. And I don’t recall exactly because it’s been a while since I wrote that article now, but I think there were multiple cases certainly.
CB: Right. And there’s that famous – isn’t there that famous statement about John Varley or one of the early astrologers that Patrick Curry records about him developing the signification of Uranus and that he’d figured out what it meant, and then he saw a really bad looking transit coming up in the future. And so he shut himself inside his house, but then at the time that the transit went exact, his house caught on fire, and he was so excited that he went outside and like, was writing it down as his house burned down or something like that.
PG: Yes, I remember that one. That’s a classic anecdote, isn’t it?
CB: Yeah. It’s one of my favorites.
So that was one quote, but there was another quote by an author just a few years later – four years later – in 1828 by Robert Cross Smith where he also writes about Uranus. And Robert Cross Smith was important, because he published a very important astrological periodical, right?
PG: Well, he edited The Struggling Astrologer towards the end of its run. He didn’t initiate it, but he started Raphael’s Prophetic Messenger as the editor, which is a very, very long-running almanac later changed its name gradually and became Raphael’s Almanac and it carried on right through to the early 21st century. I think it’s finally stopped now, probably, but it was very long-running certainly. But he also wrote an important book called The Manual of Astrology, which was published in 1828, and that was a series of astrological textbooks. So he kind of straddled two sides of astrology – the popular side and the serious side. Perhaps the popular side he felt there was more money in it, but he really wanted the serious side to be what was promoted.
CB: Got it. Okay. So here’s what he wrote. Do you wanna read it, or should I? I don’t know if —
PG: I’m happy to read it.
CB: Yeah, why don’t you do it. If you can —
PG: From where?
CB: Here, I’ll zoom in a little bit more. Why is that not working? I’d start from —
PG: I can read from the screen, but if you tell me where to start from, please?
CB: I believe from the top.
PG: Top of the first page?
CB: First page, yeah. First paragraph.
PG: “Herschel, having been so recently discovered, that no one living has seen more than one half his celestial revolution through the fields of space, it cannot be expected that a complete system of his astrological effects could possibly be given; but from the author’s own experience, aided by what other observations he could gather from men of skill and science in celestial philosophy, this planet is peculiarly unfortunate in his nature. And of course his influence, when brought into action by aspecting the various significators in a nativity, is replete with evil, also. He may be compared to the combined effects of Saturn and Mercury. He is in nature extremely frigid, cold, dry, and void of any cheering influence.
“His effects are truly malefic, but what he does of evil is always in a peculiarly strange, unaccountable, and totally unexpected manner. He causes the native born under his influence to be of a very eccentric and original disposition. Those persons are generally unusually romantic, unsettled, addicted to change, and searchers after novelty. If the Moon or Mercury and Herschel be well aspected, they are searchers after nature’s secrets, excellent chemists, and usually profound in the more secret sciences. He gives the most extraordinary magnanimity and loftiness of mind, mixed with an uncontrollable and intense desire, for pursuits or discoveries out of the ‘track of custom.’
“In marriage, if in the 7th house or afflicting the Moon, he causes everything but happiness, want of order, and of sociability in domestic concerns, listlessness and coldness between man and wife, discord from the most entire, strange and unusual causes, death of relatives, et cetera. He is equally evil in love and particularly inimical to the fair sex. His evil aspects to the Hyleg have also a tendency to materially lessen the space of life.
“As yet, there are no peculiar houses assigned to him, but we have reason to think from several thousand observations that the sign Aquarius is one wherein he much delights; that he is fortunate in the airy trigon, Gemini, Libra, and Aquaries [sic], and unfortunate in fiery, earthy, or watery signs.”
CB: All right. So yeah, there’s just so many significations that became so commonplace that they are already starting to get down. The notion of eccentricity, of unexpected things, of so many like, basic concepts like that are already clearly in part of the discussion at this point in the 1820s.
PG: Yes, and you probably also noticed that he’s taken some of the ideas that were in the earlier quote that you displayed. And I think… I don’t remember from writing, but I think this is the later on, right?
CB: Yeah. This is the later one.
PG: So I think he was also reading what other people had written already about it and adding to that. He was attempting a synthesis of all the existing lore on the influence of Uranus. Some of the comments he makes are very, very similar to the earlier one.
CB: Yeah. So it’s like, there’s the potential he’s getting influenced by the earlier author who published four years earlier, but then also he is adding like, a few additional things. So it’s interesting how you can see it start to develop and the sort of like, accretion of meanings, like, relatively earlier. And we say “relatively early” because one of the things is they didn’t have ephemerides for Uranus immediately, and they may not even had accurate ephemerides for Uranus initially. So there were like, different generations of ephemerides and then improving ones that came out over the decades.
PG: I think that’s probably true, and I also think that in the early 19th century, to be a skilled astrologer, well, first of all you had to for the most part you had to know how to calculate primary directions, which requires, as you know, a lot of mathematical expertise in the first place. But I think some even went further than that and actually calculated the positions of the planets.
CB: Okay.
PG: They didn’t have a printed source otherwise, using tables and so on.
CB: Got it. So they would do everything from scratch; that’s really impressive.
PG: I think so, yes. Well, certainly from our point of view as moderns, it’s remarkable the skill that must have gone into that. And it probably also limited the number of astrologers who had the skill to practice at that level at all.
CB: Right. Absolutely. Yeah. So that becomes part of the origins of the significations of Uranus that develop and that you can see some of those same significations today in any basic textbook on astrology that discusses the planet or its transits or any forecasts or predictions that do so still today. So it’s interesting seeing how that developed and that that’s something that you document by going through these collections of not just books, but also journal articles and almanacs and other things like that. And then starting to see the narrative emerge by having access to a variety of whatever sources still survive that will allow us to piece together a picture of what was happening during different time periods.
PG: Exactly. And that is one of my major aims with the whole collection as I think you alluded to right at the beginning of our talk this evening, Chris, which is that without access to a full spectrum of primary source material, you are simply going to be ending up guessing and missing vital cogs in the change of events that caused these ideas to be passed down or even in some cases where they first came from and who first actually put them in print at all.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Or drawing mistaken conclusions just based on limited evidence or other things like that.
PG: Exactly.
CB: Yeah. So all right, so that’s one essay in the book is tracing the early develops of Uranus for the first few decades after its discovery. And then you have other essays like you said on Neptune and Pluto and the early treatments of those in the astrological tradition.
PG: That’s right, and with those two, I actually worked on them before the Uranus essay. They were a little bit shorter, and I was more narrowly focused in the first instance on the development of the modern rulership traditions around Neptune and Pluto. Whereas when I came to do the Uranus essay, I allowed myself more latitude to explore the entire chronology of the development of its meaning, so it’s actually a broader, more thorough essay you could say. But I still think that the development of ideas on the rulerships of the sign rulership associated with Neptune and Pluto is also a fascinating historical case study, and all the more so when we get to Pluto because there were so many speculations about its rulership before it was discovered and using the correct name of the planet besides.
CB: Okay. So in terms of you traced it because it wasn’t immediately agreed upon, but there was like, lots of debate between astrologers over assigning the outer planets to signs of the zodiac?
PG: That’s right. In Pluto’s case in particular, there was a fairly even split before it was discovered between astrologers arguing that it should rule Aries and that it should rule Scorpio. And after its discovery, very very rapidly opinions more or less converged around Scorpio, but there were still outliers. There were still people writing into Astrologers Quarterly and proposing completely different signs that weren’t either Aries or Scorpio; so it was quite a confused time really until it sort of settled around the idea that Pluto ruled Scorpio.
CB: Okay. And as that gets settled, what, by like the 1970s or somewhere around there?
PG: Well, the ultimate settlement might be more around then, but I think other than Carl Payne Tobey, there was virtually nobody after around 1935 who was still holding out the idea that Pluto rules Aries. And I think Toby was just an exceptional kind of eccentric in that respect when he put forward his concept that Pluto rules Aries right through to the 1950s, so he was just very much an outlier at that point. But I think when you consider Llewellyn George in the United States and Fritz Brunhubner in Germany, they were just two of the leading lights who proposed Scorpio with such strength of conviction that I think a lot of other people followed. But in many cases, people independently came to the same conclusion. And I think a lot of it was based on myth.
CB: Okay. On taking the myth of Pluto and because of the nature of that myth, of Pluto as the god of the underworld, and then associating that with Scorpio which had become associated with the 8th house and death and other things like that?
PG: More or less. I mean, there’s – I don’t recall the exact arguments now, because again, I wrote this particular essay probably 2016, around then, so it’s quite a few years now, but if you look through some of the quotations in the Pluto essay, you can see exactly how the different astrologers were reasoning. And Llewellyn George is one I quoted quite extensively from that, because I think it’s just a very good example of how the use of reasoning from myth had become normalized already in 1930, long before the asteroids were – not discovered, I should say, because obviously the first asteroids had already been discovered. But when asteroid astrology really took off, it was in the mid-1970s; there was very little of it before then. I think reasoning from myth became a kind of mainstay of method very, very rapidly after that for most of the astrologers who used the asteroids at all.
CB: Right. And I had always associated that with like, Jung and the integration of Jung into astrology starting with Rudhyar in the 1930s. So that’s interesting if some of that tendency towards myth and focusing so much on myth started coming in a little earlier.
PG: Yes, quite a bit earlier. And the fact that the articles that became Rudhyar’s book The Astrology of Personality which was published in 1936, I think the first articles towards that appeared probably two or three years earlier in an American astrology magazine. So Llewellyn George was reasoning completely from myth in 1930, and so I don’t think this had anything to do with Jung because I don’t think Jung’s works had even reached people like Llewellyn George. There was a completely different lineage for how that reasoning was coming through, and I think a lot of it was theosophical. There was also this New Thought movement in the turn of 20th century America, for which there’s been a kind of revival in the early 21st century with things like law of attraction, which was all part of New Thought a hundred years earlier. So I think there were multiple reasons why astrologers have used myth and Jung was just one of them; he wasn’t the first.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s really interesting. And that approach, you know, differs so starkly compared to Uranus, where they’re approaching it clearly because that’s one of the things that Tarnas, for example, points out is that the myth obviously has little to do with the significations that astrologers tend to associate with Uranus, which is quite unique in some ways. What was the case with Neptune? Was it again approached more empirically in the same way that Uranus was, or how did that develop?
PG: I think it was probably mainly empirical because for one thing, there was very little written about astrological Neptune at all in the first few decades after its discovery. And this was partly due to the fact that there was a slight reduction in the size of the active astrological community between the very busy ‘20s and ‘30s time and the 1850s and 1860s. I think a lot of the leading astrologers had ceased to write new books. By 1850, there were about two in England who were still doing so; one was William Joseph Simmonite, and the other was Richard James Morrison – Zadkiel – they were probably the two leading ones who were still going at that time. But I think they were both barely much of the mindset that you had to practice astrology based on a combination of tradition and empiricism. And I think it took certainly decades until the late ‘70s – I think in Alfred Pearce’s journal published in 1880, his first one, which was called Urania; it lasted for less than a year. I think there was initial series of ideas about Neptune that appeared in that. And you know, we’re talking 34 years from 1846; that’s quite a long time period when very little was written. I think if astrologers had been reasoning mythologically about Neptune, then there would have been nothing to stop people like Zadkiel and Simmonite from immediately pronouncing on its meaning in the late 1840s, but there was very, very much more a case of restraint and a wait and see approach and let’s study it and find out what it actually does. So I think this was very similar to the approach for Uranus, and it’s not really until we get to the early 20th century that we see this approach revolutionized or changed to one of immediately making associations based on the names of the bodies.
CB: Right. Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s also interesting, especially with Uranus, how much they are developing and studying it within a largely traditional context, because these are still astrologers that are drawing directly on that 17th century stream of astrology with authors like William Lilly and other authors like that that were still very influential on the astrologers of the early 1800s so that when you look at how they’re trying to investigate its meaning empirically, they’re largely doing it in that late traditional framework.
PG: Exactly, Chris. And this is one thing where I think the sort of schism between modern astrology and traditional astrology has been artificially expanded since the late 20th century, and it’s almost become a point of pride for traditional astrologers – “Oh, we don’t use the outer planets.” In many cases – I’m not saying all cases, because there are, as you know, there are astrologers who use the outers but use traditional methods. But this was just a natural and obviously logical seeming approach to astrologers who lived through the times when planets like Uranus were discovered. They weren’t wedded to tradition singularly to the extent they weren’t to consider that a newly discovered planet should have some value and some astrological significance.
CB: Right. Which is just an obvious, logical conclusion, because they weren’t far enough removed from “traditional” astrology to fetishize it yet, and I think that’s part of the difference that we see today. Because then there was that change in the tradition in terms of whatever astrology became in the 20th century and however you would wanna characterize that, and then we had the arising of that back to traditional movement that started in the 1980s and 1990s where there were a recovery of some of the earliest source texts which were doing astrology differently compared to what it had turned into by like, the 1970s and 1980s.
PG: Absolutely. And I can totally understand why astrologers who were particularly focusing on rediscovering earlier techniques wanted to put them to the test in as pure a petri dish I should say as possible. Because if you start contaminating those techniques with modern techniques of any kind, you’re not going to be using the exact same set of techniques that the astrologers who originally used those techniques were using. So I can totally understand that as an approach. Believe me, I have a lot of sympathy with Rob Hand’s view as he has expressed a number of times in the past, and I haven’t spoken to him recently; I assume he still thinks along these lines, which is that we need to synthesize the best of the techniques from the past that actually work with our modern knowledge of celestial bodies and possibly even other techniques that have been put to good use in modern times. And we will then end up with a sort of post-modern astrology that incorporates the best techniques from all eras.
CB: Yeah, absolutely. Because astrology – that’s what happens with astrology in every great era of astrology is that it gets synthesized with whatever the ancient traditions are that are received and passed forward at that point with whatever some of the contemporary traditions are. And it creates a new synthesis, which is then passed forward for the next few centuries. And that’s true of like, every major tradition of astrology at different points down through history. It’s never been this singular, unchanging system that some people develop this mistaken notion when you start to over-idealize ancient or traditional astrology that it was this one, singular thing that was unchanging. But it’s never been that, and that was something I ended actually the very last page of my book on Hellenistic astrology with, because I was aware of the tendency towards fundamentalism that can sometimes come when astrologers start to idealize or over-idealize the past. And I ended it with a call for not fundamentalism for that reason, by simply pointing out that astrology’s always been growing and changing.
PG: Yeah. I can totally relate to your point of view on that one. You probably noticed as well in my lecture on the changing significations accorded to the astrological places or houses that I pointed out that there was considerable diversity within both the ancient Greek astrological period or among ancient Greek astrology I should say and also in the medieval period where a lot was carried forward from one astrologer to the next, but quite a few of the meanings were changed or modified as well. And this really proves your point that there was no singular, fixed tradition. Every astrologer even in ancient times who was practicing for a long time and who actually saw fit to write a book tended to have their own take and their own innovations or in some cases perhaps their local traditions which they had received through teachers which the teachers might not have even left any recorded work. So we find this considerable variation and of course a lot of debate on why the ideas of Marcus Manilius are so different in many respects from those of other astrologers, and that’s just one example of this. Other ancient astrologers, I should say.
CB: Yeah. So let’s talk about that, because that’s actually the first essay in your book, and I think it’s the largest one, which is that you do a survey of the significations of the houses starting with the earliest sources in the Hellenistic tradition and then working your way all the way forward until I think the 17th century, right? Or even further?
PG: Mainly to the 17th century, but I do also cover Alan Leo just to show how much his ideas differed from everything before, and also partly to show the fact that he was using an intellectual system to try to justify the house significations he accorded. And in that respect, curiously enough, he had something in common with Morin. They both tried to intellectualize the whole rationale for why there should be houses and allowed that to influence their ideas by putting them into groups of the various kinds. And so curiously enough, Leo comes out as actually a kindred spirit with Morin on that one particular point.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So what you do in that is you take all of the resources that you have available to you, which is almost 2,000 years of astrological textbooks that give the meanings of the 12 houses. And then you go through and record, you know, what such-and-such astrologer like, starting with Thrasyllus and other astrologers around the first century, and then going through the Hellenistic tradition and then the medieval traditions and then the Renaissance traditions and just listing those significations that they give and quoting them directly from either translations or from the original texts. And there’s something incredibly illustrative and educational about seeing the development and both the continuity, since there is quite a bit of continuity actually surprisingly over the course of that 2,000 year tradition. But then also the instances of changes or innovation or divergence for different reasons.
PG: Exactly, Chris. And that was one of the things I set out to illustrate was just how complex the overall picture was. As you said yourself, there was no singular tradition of astrology; there were all these variant forms of it that were developing at different times and through the filter of the minds of individual astrologers. And I think ultimately, it’s virtually impossible to completely separate astrology from the astrologer in that any astrologer who has a mind is not just going to copy what others said before. I mean, some might; some might be quite happy just to have a professional practice where they say, “This is what my teacher has said,” or “This is what the book I studied from has said; I’m going to use this method, and I think my clients will like it.” I mean, you can adopt a very simple approach; I don’t think most astrologers do that, though. I think most astrologers think for themselves much more deeply than that. And that has happened throughout history; it’s not just moderns who have been diverging from tradition. Traditional astrologers of the past who in their day would have thought of themselves as moderns because they were existing in the present, as it was for them, they diverged from each other in just the same kind of way.
CB: Sure. Yeah. And there was some continuities due to sometimes technical structures. Like, for example, the planetary joys scheme that assigned the seven traditional planets to specific houses did result in a lot of continuities, actually, across the traditions for about a thousand years in terms of associating Venus with the 5th house and different things that derived from that. Or associating Jupiter with the 11th house or Saturn with the 12th and things that they then derived from that. But I think one of the differences is that because astrologers – there’s a tension between passing on the inherited tradition which astrologers usually try to do pretty well and giving what to them are the traditional significations from their teachers or the books that they read. But then the difference is that astrologers are also practitioners that are applying the techniques in the chart of clients and their own chart and family members constantly, and they’re actually noticing variations come up, which are sometimes like, archetypally similar to the inherited significations let’s say of the houses. But they’re like, a slight variation of it in their own time, which they’ll then sometimes add to their observations about what a house means.
PG: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely right, Chris, and I think anybody who has had a busy professional practice for quite a few years is almost certain to have developed some of their own insights into astrology. And if they’re motivated to write a book, they will include those insights in their book then. That is pure empiricism, really, and one can’t necessarily call it scientific in the strictest modern definition of science that requires large sample sizes and so on. But it’s still a kind of empiricism based on experience of a number of cases where it seemed to the astrologer to be the case that the particular placement was having a particular effect.
CB: Right. Yeah, exactly. So in terms of that, one of the things that we discussed is that you talk about early on how there were these two traditions – the two earliest traditions – of assigning significations to the 12 houses after that concept was introduced, which in my book I argue that there was one text that probably introduced the initial set of significations for the 12 houses, which was attributed to Hermes Trismegistus and was cited by a number of later Hellenistic astrologers. And then there was another set of significations in a later text that was attributed to another mythical author named Asclepius that just gave a set of significations for the first eight houses. And those eventually get synthesized and combined in later authors by Vettius Valens, but one of the things that you point out is how those were treated as separate sets in some of the earliest authors like Thrasyllus and Antiochus so that you initially set it up as two separate sections for the dodecatropos, the 12-fold system, and the octotropos, which is the eightfold or eight turning system.
PG: Yeah, because in the texts which have come down to us, there are at least four examples I came across where there are meanings assigned to just the first eight places. Now, as you say yourself, I think probably most if not all astrologers used that system alongside the 12-fold system. But the fact is that it was an alternative method that existed in the tradition for a number of centuries, but I think as you said did eventually sort of fizzle out. And I’m not aware of any sources beyond the late classical period where people were still using significations only from the first eight places. Are you?
CB: Well, it just gets subsumed because it was just like, an additional set of significations that somebody —
PG: Yeah.
CB: — added to the already existing 12-fold system. And so it’s not that it ceases to exist, because actually we still use some of the modifications that that author proposed, which is one of the modifications he made is he said in the original system by Hermes, death was assigned to the 7th house where the Sun sets each day. But the author of the Asclepius text and the eight-fold system said that death should be assigned to the 8th house for his own internal logic and rationale, and that’s actually the one that became the dominant approach and that subsequent astrologers decided to go with for the most part down to the present day. So there’s interesting ways that that later system modified the early one, and in some instances, astrologers followed that instead of the original proposal.
So one of the things you and I talked about, though, and that you mention in the book is that in the 20th century when some of these ancient texts were rediscovered, there was what I believe and I think most academics believe to be this misconceptualization at this point in some of the early academic texts that these were two different ways of dividing up the entire chart and that there was somehow a way of dividing the houses into 12 sectors as we know today, but that there was somehow a separate system for dividing the entire chart into eight sectors or eight sets of houses. But in some of the early academic texts like Bouche-Leclercq state this and thought that that was the case, and some of the early astrological texts thought that this was the case. But in more recent decades, most of the researchers that I’m aware of have pointed out that starting with I think as early as an academic who wrote on Manilius who I’m having trouble remembering his name —
PG: Housman?
CB: — Housman, yeah, pointed out at one point that it was never a separate eight-fold house division; it was just a set of significations that were being proposed for the first eight houses of the 12-fold system. And one of the things that it did is it introduced a set of assignments for family members for saying that, like, siblings is the 3rd house, parents is the 4th house, children is the 5th, and so on and so forth. So this was something we were talking about, because then it becomes the point of not debate because I don’t think it’s debated that much anymore, but that there were depending on if you read some older texts in the 20th century a stronger belief that this represented a separate system of eight houses instead of 12 at one point.
PG: Yeah. Absolutely, Chris. And we’re very much on the same wavelength here, because I did look into this, and I read what Goold – G. P. Goold – who was one of the great, later scholars on Housman had to say as well as what – sorry, on Manilius, I should say, as well as what Housman said, and they were absolutely in agreement that when Manilius described significations in eight places, it was eight of the 12. Now I think what must have happened is that translators and scholars like Bouche-Leclercq didn’t have all the background of academic knowledge of what astrologers were saying at all to draw on, so they kind of just made assumptions. They saw eight places listed; they just assumed, “Well, he must be dividing into eight.” And —
CB: Right.
PG: — without further evidence, without further checking, you can sort of understand why they made that mistake. But as you say, it was comprehensively dismissed by academics such as Housman and Goold who read the texts with a much sharper eye. And Housman was writing actually between 1903 and the early 1930s; I think his five volume critical edition of Manilius was published originally in the first edition between 1903 and 1930, and then the second edition appeared in 1937, so it was actually very early in the 20th century that this tradition, the idea, I should say, this notion – it’s not tradition, it’s a false notion – was being challenged by scholars. But I think shreds of the idea just remained set in the literature so people kept reading the wrong texts and being persuaded by them.
Now obviously, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but I did mention briefly in my text that the late Patrice Guinard who ran the wonderful CURA website, the Centre Universitaire por la Recherche Astrologique, on his website for many years, he actually was of the personal view that there was an eight-fold house system, but I don’t know why he thought that. I don’t believe he had any real evidence for that; it may just have been more of his intuition, an idea that appealed to him. But he was writing —
CB: Yeah.
PG: — quite recently.
CB: I think it’s just one of those things where he became really attached to the idea really early in his career, and he staked a lot of his reputation on it. But then the more and more evidence came out that there’s, for example, one of the things I point out is there’s hundreds of charts that survive from the Hellenistic tradition, but there’s not a single chart that divides the entire chart into just eight houses. It’s always divided into 12 houses, so that there’s no evidence of an eight-fold house division in ancient astrology basically. And I think he, after staking so much on that, he just had a hard time letting go of that as a theory or a hypothesis, and maybe that was partially coming from, you know, because he was a French author being influenced by Bouche-Leclercq’s writing which wrote this massive tome which until my book was one of the primary reference texts for Hellenistic astrology. But it was written in 1899 when the CCAG project was just getting going around that time where a group of academic scholars went around Europe collecting up all the surviving manuscripts of ancient astrological texts. And that took about 50 years to complete the CCAG project, and then after that time, you have other scholars like Neugebauer and Van Hoesen who go around and collected all of the Greek horoscopes they could find and then tabulated those and published it in the book Greek Horoscopes so that you could actually see what all the charts were that survived and how there was no eight-fold charts. So that’s one of the tricky things just about, you know, publishing a book sometimes based on historical research and historical scholarship is it’s always based on your understanding up until that point in time. But things can always change based on the availability of later research or new findings or new interpretations or other things like that. Like, even in the past century, for example, or past decade, until recently we always assumed that the terms or the bounds were invented in the Hellenistic tradition. But as a result of a recent discovery of a text, a cuneiform tablet, we now know that the supposedly Egyptian concept of the terms or the bounds actually goes back to the Mesopotamian tradition and was inherited from that earlier tradition, which changes what historians have been writing about that for several decades up to this point. So you always have to be aware that things can change.
PG: Yes, I totally agree, Chris. And particularly when you’re dealing with the ancient period, the very paucity of evidence of pre-Hellenistic astrological practices in the form of texts are so limited that I think historically there’s been quite a lot of guesswork involved. But you can go back to the Hellenistic period, as you say, Bouche-Leclercq’s book, Greek Horoscopes, the first edition was published in – sorry, L’astrologie Grecque – but was probably published in 1899, which means it was written prior to that. And I think the CCAG project you mentioned was published in installments starting in 1903, so it hadn’t even begun publishing yet. Actually, no, it might have started in 1898, actually. I think the very first bit might have been 1898, but it was very, very shortly before Bouche-Leclercq’s work was published. And he may already have written it years before that, before the first installment.
Prior to that, the only thing I think that was really going on of significance was the Teubner series at the Bibliotheca Teubneriana of critical editions of as many a possible of the ancient Greek and Latin texts, without particular specific preference for astrology but including some astrological texts was still the first of those I think by Manetho published in 1860. So there was some scholarship already going on, but it was very, very limited. It’s not really surprising in that situation that Bouche-Leclercq hurried over that point and made the wrong judgment call.
CB: Sure. Yeah. So but it brings up an important point, which is that sometimes astrologers can sometimes new techniques can be invented based on a misinterpretation or a misreading of an older text. And I’ve seen a few instances of that in the astrological tradition. You know, that’s an instance of that with the octotropos, but even like, draconic astrology, for example, is something that was proposed based on a misreading of a newly translated text in the middle of the 20th century. But then subsequent research once more texts had been translated, we’ve never found any reference to draconic astrology in any ancient astrological texts, which shows that it was actually just a misinterpretation of something which has spawned an entire technical structure which, to be fair, like, sometimes even a misinterpretation of something could still generate potentially a valid technique. So we have to be open to that necessarily not fully negating something if it’s not part of the tradition, but as historians of astrology, that’s one of the things that’s been eye-opening for me is once we’ve gotten access to more sources really being able to be more careful about being able to say what the earlier astrologers were doing versus what they weren’t doing.
PG: I think for a historian, it’s much more important to tell the truth than to say something that would be popular or practical for astrologers to use today. That’s not what motivates historians or academics, full stop, and certainly academic historians are motivated mainly by the desire to give an accurate account of history. And I think that gives them great satisfaction. And some have tended to err perhaps little on the cautious side and the conservative side towards even considering astrology to be worthy of study until relatively recently. If they do study it, then they want to do it properly and to give an accurate account. And now going back to what you were saying a moment ago about draconic astrology, well, an example that came to me which I actually mention in my book Technical and Planetary Developments in Astrology of how a misreading spawned a whole new technique is in my chapter on Lilith where the French astrologer who was very, very popular in Paris running his own College Astrologie de France – Maurice Rougie was his real name, but he wrote as Dom Neroman, sometimes Dom Necroman in his first books, but he shortened it to Neroman. Well, he misread the English references to the hypothetical planet – the hypothetical second Moon – Lilith, and thought that some ephemerides he came across were actually relating to something quite different from what they were meant to be. So he came up with this idea that Lilith must be the second focus of the lunar orbit, as it’s sometimes known as, because that seemed to make the most sense to him based on his reading of these ephemerides without having actually read all the debates with people like Sepharial and the contributors to Modern Astrology magazine or even understanding the origins of the concept in the claims made by the astronomer Georg Waltemath who claimed that there had been numerous sightings of this second Moon of the earth going back centuries, which is what persuaded Sepharial that it was something real in the first place. Well, anyway, Neroman didn’t understand any of that, so he came up with this completely new concept for Lilith, which is now known as Black Moon Lilith, but actually, that concept is the one that in Europe has come to dominate. And there are numerous French authors who have written whole books on this so-called Black Moon Lilith which only came into being because Dom Neroman misread the English edition.
CB: Wow, okay. So that’s one of the three – because there’s like, three different things called Lilith at this point that astrologers refer to, right?
PG: That’s right. There’s also the asteroid Lilith which had really virtually no use, I would say, prior to the asteroid use boom of the mid-’70s and then perhaps partly because of its interesting name and all the mythological resonances, it became more important after that.
CB: Okay. And yeah, so that’s interesting. So that’s another example of that. And it also leads to there’s just a thing I’ve noticed over the years of studying the history of astrology, which is that once somebody establishes a basic astrological concept, even tentatively as a speculation, after a certain number of years, that becomes part of the inherited tradition and then astrologers start building on and elaborating on that foundation. And then oftentimes, the astrologers on a long enough timeline will take that basic concept and they’ll elaborate it to the fullest possible extent that it could be. And I’ve seen many different variations of this during the course of the tradition. Like one of them is the very humble origins of like, assigning the signs of the zodiac to the houses and saying that there was a connection there, which starts off kind of basically I think with body parts, of assigning very generally the signs of the zodiac – like, let’s say Aries to the first house, and then by extension saying that it connects the first house with the head. And that it sort of starts basic like that, but then eventually that becomes the framework so that the sign equals house equation becomes really the cornerstone for late 20th century astrologers for interpreting all of the house significations within that framework, rather than the older let’s say traditional framework that connected them more with things like the planetary joys or other things like that.
PG: Yeah. I think there are two things to say there, one of which is that obviously there was Zip Dobyns’s astrological alphabet, which was partly I think intended more as a teaching technique because it would simplify the teaching of the concepts around 12 basic vibrations or archetypes that could be expressed in a number of ways and that it was a distortion of astrological tradition, for sure. And then we also have partly under the influence of then Jungian psychological astrology the idea that astronomical precision is almost irrelevant when we’re dealing with a symbolic system. And you find a lot of books from the ‘70s onwards that give lengthy psychological interpretations of planets in either a named sign or the corresponding numerical house, but without differentiating between them at all. And I don’t think —
CB: Right.
PG: — that existed before the 1970s as a system.
CB: Okay. Yeah. Well, and it’s just, it’s because astrologers with each generation will elaborate on the inherited framework that they inherited from the previous generation or from their sources, and that they keep taking it further basically with every generation once one step has been taken towards that idea. Because even a concept that when it’s first introduced tentatively or is a speculation and with some trepidation to an astrologer’s peers, you know, after a few decades, that astrologer becomes established and the next astrologers that come in treat that astrologer with more reverence. Like, I saw that happen when I went back and tried to study the history of the nodes and traced the attribution of concepts of like, past lives and future lives to Rudhyar being as far as I can tell the first astrologer to introduce that. But he does so very tentatively as like, a speculation in his book The Astrology of Personality in the 1930s. It’s interesting like, how tentative he is in sort of like, outlining this, but then that book is around for a while, and then when that new generation of astrologers came in in the 1960s and ‘70s, they really started treating Rudhyar with great respect because he was a very esteemed astrologer at that point and taking that idea and sort of running with it even further to some extent than he did.
PG: Definitely, Chris. In Rudhyar’s career, and really his book writing career, his book publication career went in two distinct phases, though. His early works were published between around 1931 when the first part of his series, Harmonic Astrology, appeared which is now very rare, and through to books like The Pulse of Life and The Moon: The Cycles and Fortunes of Life, and The Pulse of Life was probably published in 1943 and The Moon in 1946. So there’s that early phase of his work, and during that time, he writes extensively for magazines. He’s sort of star contributor to magazines like American Astrology and also Horoscope managed to poach him for quite a long time. He stops writing for American Astrology. And he writes for various others when he’s probably invited particularly to write for them. And so there’s this whole background I imagine of people who were subscribing to those magazines but perhaps weren’t necessarily senior astrologers themselves at that time but who grew up reading his articles. So I think there was a lot more than just his early books that was there in the cultural background when the major sort of New Age revival of astrology in America happens from the late ‘60s onwards where you see this sudden massive increase in the rate of new books being published in the United States on astrology. Well, Rudhyar was one of the sort of influences whose work was out there already, so his existing books like The Astrology of Personality were reprinted. That was reprinted for the first time in 1963, which is, you know, almost 30 years after first publication. And then it was reprinted again in 1970, and never sort of out of print after that. And then his book on the Moon was modified into The Lunation Cycle, so you did see this major revival of his work. And I think if you look at his whole career, all his articles going back to the sort of ‘30s and ‘40s, he was very much a conceptual thinker where he would develop a new concept of looking at something astrologically. And it was almost as if he was playing with theories and seeing what he could do with them, because that was who he was. That was what made him tick. He didn’t necessarily expect them all to tick – to stick, rather, I should say – but some of them did.
CB: Right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he was a very original and deep thinker, but yeah, it’s just interesting seeing over the scope of a few decades how certain ideas take off the longer that idea is around in the astrological tradition. And while we focused on some modern instances of that, there’s ancient instances of that as well. Like, for example, that distinction I mentioned earlier where you had this first author that probably – like, I think there was this original early text on the houses that somebody wrote anonymously and attributed to Hermes where it put forward this concept of these are what I think these 12 houses mean and a basic set of significations and, you know, assigning death, for example, to the 7th house. But then you have this later astrologer that comes along who also writes a text anonymously and attributes it to a legendary figure, Ascelpius, and he says, I think based on his own internal rationale, we should add some significations to this framework of 12 houses and that we should say that siblings is in the 3rd house and parents in the 4th and children in the 5th and death should be moved from the 7th to the 8th, and then pieces of that system sort of stuck and like, eventually took off as a modification of the earlier one.
So and then, you know, at different points during the tradition, we have changes that happen due to either astrologers deliberately innovating or accidentally innovating. Like, there’s a debate about whether the mother I think being assigned to the 10th house was a result of a misreading of Ptolemy, for example, and what he says about looking at like, the culminating sign relative to the Lot of Fortune or something like that; I forget all the details. But there are so many things like that, and to bring this full circle to you and the importance of your work and your library, the only way you can sort through this is by actually having access to the original texts and reading through them and comparing them. And through that process, you can actually start to reconstruct what the actual history of astrology was and what that looks like across different astrologers and their textbooks.
But also as in the case of Rudhyar that you were just talking about, what that looks like for a single astrologer to be able to study the evolution of their thinking from early in their career to later in their career based on not just their books but also their articles and essays and other things like that.
PG: Yeah, no, I totally agree, Chris. And on the point you were making just a little bit before that about how ideas take off because other people after a while accept them as part of that tradition, I think that can also be influenced significantly by how popular people’s books are at a particular time. You may end up somebody who’s come up with some completely novel ideas, but because so many people buy the books on that and then some of them go on to become professional astrologers themselves, that then creates critical mass, perpetuates those new ideas. And there are also people, of course, who actively teach astrology and who still do even now, and you know, there are thriving schools as well as individual teachers. And I think that can create a disproportionate influence in the direction of those particular schools. Now obviously, it isn’t – we’re not discriminating. We’re not saying here that one or another technique shouldn’t be practiced because it’s just a modern innovation, because you could even factor in the traditional astrology movement. On the one hand, just to take two examples that are very different from each other, we have seen evolutionary astrology proliferate in recent decades because I think it’s been very, very popular starting probably within the books of Jeff Green, and then we’ve had Steven Forrest’s extremely popular and influential teaching of similar but not identical methods too. And that has created a situation where we now have possibly 30 to 40 percent of American astrologers are using evolutionary methods; it’s now one of the standard practices. I don’t have precise figures, but certainly I’ve seen surveys where it has increased very, very much on where it was even 25 years ago.
And then on the other hand, we’ve seen the traditional astrology revival movement take off pretty strongly too to the point that we now have quite a lot of specialists in traditional practice who only really practice that and far more than there would have been certainly prior to Project Hindsight and prior to Olivia Barclay’s teaching in the 1980s.
CB: Right. Yeah, absolutely. So the influence of different teachers, the influence of different astrological organizations or publications at different points in time, the availability of translations of certain texts in different languages and how that can influence things sometimes. Like, I saw a post recently on Reddit asking why Andre Barbault who’s such a famous and influential French astrologer in the 20th and early 21st century until he died not that long ago, why he wasn’t more influential in the English-speaking world. And I was thinking about it, and part of my answer was that not a lot of his texts have been translated from French into English, and so that really has limited the influence of his texts even though he’s done very high level work on mundane astrology for much of the 20th century.
PG: Yeah, I absolutely agree with your assessment there. And that is actually quite an important distinction from what we were talking about earlier with the transatlantic influences between British and American astrologers, because they did at least speak the same language. So even when you had limited communications even before the telephone, before electricity, you still had British astrologers influencing American astrologers and vice versa. We had Hiram Butler influencing Alan Leo, which is one of the things I point out in my book. Leo didn’t invent half the ideas he’s credited with; he was actually a listener. He tapped into a wide community of thought. He was quite Leonine in the sense of almost being like, a kind of king who liked to keep advisors around him, and he would listen to all of them and let them do their thing and make their own contributions. And he would allow some of their ideas to influence what he wrote himself; others, he would just publish, but without particularly commenting on them. But to put on the example you mentioned with Barbault, yes, absolutely. He has, I think, written about 30-plus books – about as many as Noel Tyl did. But because very few English-speaking astrologers can read French, and because they weren’t translated and for the most part I think a couple of the very late ones were translated and published by the Astrological Association as a special project, which I doubt was really commercial; I think that was more a labor of love. But the vast majority of his work hasn’t been published, and the same is true for many other continental European astrologers of the 20th century, both French-speaking and German-speaking. I mentioned Dom Neroman earlier, and he was huge in France in the ‘30s and ‘40s. He had this monthly magazine, Sous le Ciel, meaning “under the sky,” that ran for I think it got up to issue number 80 before he died. And some of his followers tried to keep it going after that, but he also wrote a dozen or more esoteric books, including this great work, Traite d’astrologie rationelle – treatise on rational astrology – published in 1943, which is kind of several hundred pages long and almost a folio-size book with dual columns; it’s huge! And these things English-speaking astrologers just don’t know about. It’s the language barrier, pure and simple.
CB: Right. Yeah. So that’s an interesting thing that can shape the astrological tradition or occasionally when a singular translation of something does make it through and is wildly influential for some reason, I know in the 17th century there was a translation of like, a French astrological text on the houses. Maybe it was like, an excerpt from Morinus or something like that? The Cabal of the 12 Houses?
PG: Yes, I think that was something that probably George Wharton translated – one of the quite well-known but relatively minor 17th century English astrologers – I think he translated that and had it published. And that was just a short work by Morin. I don’t think any of Morin’s other work was translated into English before the 1970s apart from that. So it was a very, very long time waiting.
There were bits and pieces that were worked on at the very start of the 20th century. Obviously there was Henri Selva, whose real name I think was Arthur Vles or something like that; he spelt his name backwards to give himself a funny pseudonym. But he wrote La Theorie des Determinations or something like that according to Morin, which was published by 1902 and was a sort of precis of Book 21. But also there was this manuscript kicking around for many years which I finally bought in the end of a translation of Books 22 to 24 into French, and that’s absolutely fascinating because that was dated around 1902 or 1903. It was only a year or so after Selva’s work on Book 21 appeared, but because it was a manuscript it was never published. So I think there has been periodic interest in translating Morin into French for quite a long time, and Book 25 was also translated and published in 1946 by Jean Heiroz, I believe, the mundane book. And the English followed later. I imagine because Morin was French, that gave French astrologers particular interest in what he’d actually said. Obviously, by the early 20th century, not a lot of French astrologers could read Latin anymore, though a few could at least make a passable go at translating it.
CB: Right. You mentioned funny pseudonyms and that was something I was gonna ask you about is there’s a lot of astrologers writing anonymously or using funny pseudonyms in like, the 1800s, and I was wondering if you know what the deal was with that?
PG: I think it may have been partly reputational if they had professions where there was a kind of cultural and social stigma against astrology. Particularly in London, I imagine in high London society and in scientific circles probably astrology was frowned upon at that time. And there was some truth in what Keith Thomas said; astrology did lose its reputation in parts of high society, but it doesn’t mean it disappeared, of course. It just went underground more. And so I think there were certain people who have practiced astrology in secret for that reason.
But then there also have been legal risks attached. You probably are aware of the case of Thomas White who is recorded as having met his death around 1813, 1814, just three years after his great astrological work, The Celestial Intelligencer, was published in 1811, because he was entrapped by police officers supposedly visiting his home on the Isle of Wight and asking for a reading for money. Or rather asking him to give them a reading and then throwing coins down, although he didn’t want any money, but they entrapped him that way. And so he was sentenced to a year at Winchester jail, and it was in such squalid conditions in those days that he died before he was released; that is the story that’s come down to us, and that was actually mentioned by a correspondent who wrote into one of Zadkiel’s publications, The Horoscope, which was published in 1841, the monthly version. There was a weekly version in 1834; then they revived it seven years later to the monthly. It was in one of those anyway that this letter was written in telling the story of what happened to Thomas White. So I think there was a real fear that if you are identified as a practicing astrologer, you could be prosecuted; you could lose your freedom.
And Thomas White wasn’t the only case, of course. Something happened to Alan Leo that was very similar a hundred years later, which probably hastened his death from a stroke after he was trying to recover from a second sort of brutal court battle. And he died before he was 60. I think he was late 50s?
CB: Right. Yeah, and that’s a good point. That brings up, you know, other – like, Evangeline Adams had to deal with the law and issues with that, or Luke Broughton recently I was interested in, he seemed like he was dealing with some very heavy anti-astrology stuff that he talks about very frequently in his books. And even in the revised edition of his book that I just got from you the other day – which thanks, by the way. I’m so glad to have picked that up. It was like, his son or nephew or somebody wrote the foreword to that, and even mentioned that as being like, a signature of his life – having to deal with anti-astrology things. So yeah, that was a major concern for astrologers for a long time.
PG: Definitely, and a valid one. I think Broughton’s story is fascinating, because he was based in Philadelphia in the early 1860s where he started his magazine. But then there was regressive anti-fortune telling legislation of some kind; I don’t remember the details offhand, but that changed the climate for astrologers practicing there. And that’s why he moved to New York around 1863, I think. I don’t have the exact date in my head, but it was around then. But then even in New York, by the late 1860s you see this fascinating evidence trail in his monthly Planetary Reader and Astrological Journal which kind of limped on with occasional issues. It became quarterly after first being monthly, and then the final period you sort of get a whole year’s gap before the next issue. And so it sort of limped on to 1869. It was this fascinating tale of how W. H. Chaney had become his sort of personal assistant in the late 1860s, which is obviously well before Chaney’s Primer of Astrology and American Urania was published in 1890. Chaney was relatively, I imagine, sort of relatively young man in the late 1860s. And he got involved in a terrible legal mess that landed him in prison, and I think Broughton had to actually help get Chaney out of jail.
CB: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So that makes much more sense, then; there was a real reason potentially why you might use a pseudonym when you were writing about astrology due to the potential legal ramifications and that while this has dropped off a lot in recent decades in the past decade or two, for much of astrology’s history, astrologers have had to worry about being persecuted or being prosecuted for simply practicing the subject – for practicing astrology.
PG: Yeah. And there are much older examples of this too, of course. If you go back to Italy in the Renaissance, there was so many cases there of astrologers who actually wrote with their real names, and a new pope comes along and the climate for tolerance of astrological books is more limited. And they can have their existing work scrutinized and found fault with. And we found that happened to Cardano; he ended up being thrown in prison decades after he published The Horoscope of Christ and the first and second editions of his commentary on Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos in 1554 and 1555. And he ends up in jail some time around the late 1570s when all this is discovered as the climate becomes more repressive.
CB: Okay. Yeah. A listener, you know, things have been – as recently as actually like, two or three decades ago, I had been told a story about the police raiding like, a local metaphysical bookstore and pressing charges against people for fortunetelling so that in many places in the western world, there’s still laws on the books against fortune telling. They just usually aren’t enforced at this point, especially in the US due to free speech issues ultimately. But that somebody – a listener, actually – sent me a news story recently about somebody in New York or somewhere that sounded like they were scamming people under the premise of fortune telling out of lots of money, but that the authorities decided to instead of prosecuting them for fraud or something like that, they actually prosecuted them for fortune telling, which I thought was a unique and somewhat disturbing development just because it’s been a while since seeing things like that. So but that, you know, in terms of the long history of astrology, it’s much more commonplace than the period that we’ve been in over the past few decades.
PG: Definitely it has a very long history. And I think that is also a fascinating quite rare book, which you might have heard of, called State Laws Regarding the Regulation of the Practice of Astrology, which was published in the United States around the 1920s or 1930s. And that listed the individually applicable regulations enforced at that time that were being used to govern the response to the practice of astrology and all the different states in the USA. And that was, you know, I think probably pretty well researched for its time. So there are historical documents which just give numerous examples of what you were saying at different points in history.
CB: Yeah. That’s incredible.
Okay, so redirecting and backing up, because I know we’re getting towards the end of our time having talked for two hours. But I wanted to touch on a couple more pieces. One of them is one other major study you did in the book, which is on the development of minor aspects or harmonic aspects or whatever one prefers to call them, starting with Johannes Kepler and then moving forward and tracking some of the discussion and adoption at different points of some of those other aspects.
PG: Yeah, that was one of the major studies in the book, so I’m glad you mentioned that, because we can talk about so many different topics, it hadn’t occurred to me to bring it up. But yes, I’ve been fascinated by aspects actually since I was a very young student of astrology and the different theories around them, and I wrote this article attempting to address the harmonic theory of aspects and to rationalize it into a coherent system for calculating orbs, because it seemed to me that there was a lot of arbitrariness in the modern orb assignations. This was before I had come across any traditional texts, by the way. This was back in 1996, and I’d been only studying astrology for about a year properly, so I’d only had access at that time to modern texts. But they included, for example, Harmonic Charts by David Hamblin, and I don’t remember if I had an original of Harmonics in Astrology by John Addey just yet, but I was trying to make some sense of the fact that, for instance, so many modern texts would give orbs of eight degrees equally for the square and the trine and the conjunction, the opposition, and they’d suddenly give six degrees for a sextile. And they would suddenly jump to two degrees or two-and-a-half degrees for a semisquare and a sesquiquadrate. And this just seemed to me to be totally arbitrary, because you’re suddenly jumping quite significantly depending on the type of aspect that it’s not an even – in terms of the orb you’re allowed, it’s not done in an even way. And so I was reading the harmonic theory, and I was thinking, well, actually, if astrology is a natural phenomenon, shouldn’t there be some kind of mathematical order here?
Now obviously, from a traditional astrology perspective, a lot of harmonic theory is just abstract nonsense because it doesn’t tie in with the traditional way certainly the ancient astrologers calculated aspects at all. But putting that consideration aside, well, perhaps you can correct me, but putting that consideration aside for the moment, I think that it was an important bit of research for me personally to try to discover how the modern harmonic theory had developed and how the modern aspect orbs had developed. And really I wanted to build on the research that Maurice McCann did for his MA dissertation when he was focused more narrowly on a period of change from traditional orbs to modern orbs, because it seemed to me there was probably a much more deeply nuanced and layered history than that. So I really wanted to place it right back to Kepler for that reason, because it seemed to me that Kepler was at the origin of the kind of radical change in the way aspects were looked at. And although his ideas didn’t immediately catch on widely beyond obviously astrologers like William Lilly; even in Christian Astrology they give passing mention to the Kepler’s new aspect. They don’t really do very much with them. And right at the end of the 19th century still, there’s a lot of skepticism. And I mentioned Chaney earlier, I seem to recall Chaney was one of the most skeptical about Kepler’s new aspects. He thought they were basically completely fanciful. So there were wide differing views. But gradually, more and more astrologers did start to include these harmonic aspects, and they went beyond Kepler. Kepler came up with about eight aspects and a few he called “borderline,” but already in the early 19th century, Zadkiel around 1833 proposed that if there be any truth in Kepler’s geometrically formed aspects theory, there should also be one which is based on a nine-sided figure – a nonagon, which Kepler had not mentioned at all. He had not even considered that, at least in any of his published texts that are famous that deal with harmonic aspects. So this was a departure from Kepler. So gradually, you see from 1833 onwards, the foundations Kepler had laid being built on. But it was a very gradual process. You had Zadkiel suggesting tentatively the nonagon, and then you had Simmonite in the late 1840s actually experimenting with the nonagon and trying to use it a bit. And then you had at the very start of the 20th century, astrologers such as George Wilde who had a student called Mr. Kruse or K-R-U-S-E, I believe, who had proposed to him what were in effect much more intricate harmonic aspects such as those that are based on the division of the circle into 16 parts. So the multiples of 22-and-a-half degrees. And again, I don’t think that was something that Kepler covered at all. And this was around 1911; you see it in the third edition of Wilde’s Primer of Astrology. And then you also have the modern German revival that started in the – or it sort of gathered pace in 1910 onwards, though it had seeds before then, with astrologers like Karl Brandler-Pracht. And Brandler-Pracht, he also proposed the use of nonagon, which had been last used by Simmonite, you know, like, 60 years earlier. And then we had in the 1920s the Hamburg school starting and the suggestion among their followers, including A. Frank Glahn who wrote in the very first edition of his book, his major work of 1924, as covered in – it’s the one that’s cited in Holden’s History of Horoscopic Astrology. I can’t give you the German title off the top of my head, but Erklärung und Systematische Deutung des Geburtshoroskopes – it’s something like that. You know the one I mean. Anyways, it was first published in 1924, and it reached its third edition in 1930. And from the 1924 edition onwards, he proposes that all multiples of 15 degrees should rate a meaningful aspect. And this was in parallel with what the Hamburg school were doing in the mid-1920s, so all these changes are gradually building up. And without going to the primary sources to the original texts in different languages from these different periods, we would not have that picture. So that was a very satisfying research assignment for me personally, because I was kind of brought up with the illusion that pretty much John Addey invented a modern take on harmonics and there was pretty much no one before him since Kepler. And it turns out to be completely untrue! It had been gradually building up for a very long period of time. Even before Addey, Walter Koch had tried to synthesize the harmonic theory in one of his books that was published at least 25 years before Addey’s book.
CB: Oh wow. Okay. Yeah, so that’s another one of those examples, I think, of what we talked about before where I did a whole episode on minor aspects with Rick Levine, and we talked about how Kepler was primarily motivated by – he didn’t think that the, he didn’t like the zodiac, and he didn’t think that was a good concept. But he thought the concept of aspects really made sense to him, and that it did work, but he elaborated on the concept because once you break the concept of aspects free of the zodiac, you lose part of the reason why it was originally limited to the five essentially aspects that it originally was from the Hellenistic tradition. And he introduced new aspects in his work, but then as you said, they start showing up a century or two later in the works of authors like William Lilly, although they’re not like, used that much. But then it’s like, the longer and longer the concept is around, people start elaborating on it, and they start adding new aspects and sort of taking the basic framework and then sort of taking it to its fullest extent essentially. That’s actually another really good example of what I was talking about earlier.
PG: Absolutely. And also because Kepler was such a famous person in the scientific world, he was very establishment. He was regarded as a great. You know, even if you weren’t an astrologer, he was considered very important for his numerous works on astronomy and probably on mathematics, too. Obviously, I haven’t read widely his work beyond the astrological bits and pieces. But his opera omnia – very, very extensive. And so I think some astrologers such as William Lilly, you quite often see during the period when astrology was officially in disfavor, you see defenses of astrology being put forward quite often in the prefaces by the author to their own books, particularly in the early 19th century we see these apologias for astrology. You know, you almost had to write a very eloquent apologia to justify why you’re bringing out a book on astrology at all. And quite often among the arguments that these would use would be how great people practiced astrology, and Kepler’s a kind of prime example where astrologers would find him somebody useful to cite, who they felt was on the side of astrology. Now, even if they didn’t actually think that what he said about aspects was right, they would still feel that it was to astrology’s credit to give Kepler the passing mention. And I think that motivated people like William Lilly to shortlist Kepler’s new aspects. So you see them sort of paying lip service to this kind of great scientific type who had some time for astrology. But then this happened so often, and it becomes so well known that eventually you see modern astrologers who actually try to really use Kepler’s aspects more, and even as you say build on Kepler’s theory and go beyond the shortlist of eight or so aspects he probably accepted as being new aspects.
CB: Right. That makes sense. So that becomes another factor then for why certain astrologers’ works or certain techniques or traditions can become more influential in the later tradition based on like, having a really prominent proponent who – especially if they’re recognized outside of the field of astrology as like, being a prominent scientist, then that could have much greater weight to it and much great influence in the same way, you know, Ptolemy is another great example of that from the 2nd century in terms of the oversized influence of his work on some later astrologers because of his eminence outside of the field of astrology in astronomy and geography and other areas.
PG: Definitely, Chris. That’s a very good parallel. Very valid, indeed. I totally agree that the view of Ptolemy as having been a great – I think it let a lot of early modern astrologers into eras of judgment, really, because they felt that if anything wasn’t in the Tetrabiblos, it was suspect.
CB: Right. They started trying to remove things that weren’t – there’s periodically like, throughout history like, a back-to-Ptolemy movement or back to the earlier tradition movement that happens every once in a while. But the problem is that Ptolemy as a scientist was trying to do a somewhat stripped down, more what he saw as scientifically plausible approach and presentation of astrology in his time. But it was a little bit different than what the mainstream of astrology looked like in authors like Valens or Dorotheus so that when later astrologers, like the ones you mentioned, would try to go back to Ptolemy and just do astrology following him and get rid of other stuff, which for example they would see some of the medieval Arabic-speaking astrologers practicing astrology differently, they would assume that those were innovations among the Arabic astrologers and try to remove some of those things and go back to the original system of Ptolemy, not realizing that actually the Arabic-speaking astrologers were the ones that were more closely passing on the mainstream tradition as represented by authors like Dorotheus and Valens.
PG: Exactly, Chris. Yes, that’s well documented now. But it was something that wasn’t known nearly so closely before those other ancient texts were widely available in translation, I would say.
CB: Right. Yeah. But that’s the value now of having translations of all these works or having access —
PG: Yeah.
CB: — to all these works in libraries such as your own is just the ability to truly go back. And there’s never been a time in the history of astrology quite like right now where we have access to so much of the previous astrological tradition at this point and where so much of it has been recovered that you can really get a viewpoint that encapsulates or encompasses so many different astrologers over the past 4,000 years at this point. It’s truly amazing, and it’s a massive undertaking. Like you more than anybody know at this point what a huge undertaking that is to try to understand the entirety of the astrological tradition, which is so massive, but this is like, one of the first times in history that we truly have the option to even attempt to do something like that.
PG: Yeah. I would say there’s definitely too much material for one lifetime, but it’s good that as astrologers and as historians, we can kind of club together and each take our own specialist topics and areas, and we can collectively build up a true understand with this like, collaborative approach which really advances understanding of history.
CB: Absolutely. I love that. Well, you’ve made really great strides in this first book in this collection of different essays on different topics, and then this is actually the first part in a series of books that you’re planning, right?
PG: That’s right. Basically, they are mostly essays or lectures that have already been published or given, but there are some which are new. Some which were planned, but had not got to the stage of being published in the original publications either because they shut down or because other priorities intervened. So there are still a few essays which I’m working on. But basically, most of the work towards volumes two and three is done.
If you go to the About page on my website – am I allowed to give it a plug?
CB: Please.
PG: On Astrolearn.com, there’s an About page, and there I’ve got a list of all my published articles. And at the end, it states which of those have been reprinted in the first volume. Obviously, these are all articles on the history of astrology because I’m only counting those as that’s what I’m specializing in for this series. So there’s certainly enough material to fill two more volumes, and as I said, there are still just a few things I want to complete. For instance, I started a specialized series on the history of astrological journals, of which the first part was published in The Astrological Journal in the UK around 2015, possibly 2016. And I wrote parts two, three, and four, which haven’t been published, so they will appear in one of the later volumes. I’m going to take the timeline forward even beyond then. The first part, I think, covered only up to around 1830; the first part that was published in The Astrological Journal, that is. And I’m going to take the timeline right up through to around 1903, if possible.
I’ve also got a previously published essay on the history of French astrological journals in the early 20th century, which is a fascinating period in itself, and lots of journals that English-speaking astrologers wouldn’t even have heard of but it kind of really sheds a light on how rich the astrological society was in France in the early 20th century. And I’m going to try and do the same for German publications of the early 20th century as well, and those will all then come together to form a major section of one of the subsequent volumes. So it will be really kind of looking in depth at how the genre of astrological periodicals developed particularly in English after 1903, but also in European languages up to around 1939.
CB: Wow. That’s beautiful. So yeah, because that’s an important part of your work is that while your library primarily consists of English works, you also collect works on different astrological traditions and from different languages.
PG: That’s right. I have about seven bookcases – seven-shelf bookcases if you count the tops – which have only German material in, and probably five or six would have only French material in. So a lot of it is older material, because I think to understand the history, it’s important to get as many as possible of the sources from when the astrological culture was really undergoing its kind of peak renaissance in those countries, which was to a large extent between certainly in France from around 1890 through the 1950s, and in Germany more from 1910 through to 1950s. I think those were the periods which were very, very important for the astrological literature that developed separately in those countries at that time, so that’s been a major collecting focus of mine. While I tend to find that the deeper you get into the 20th century, the more derivative and the more likely material is to be simplified for a kind of modern, popular publishing market. It’s not all like that, of course, though. There have been important publications and serious astrological publishing houses in the German-speaking and French-speaking countries right through to the present day. But I think the more you understand about the earlier origins of the modern revival of astrological culture in a particular country, the clearer the impression you get that allows you to understand how it’s developed since then as well.
CB: Makes sense. Yeah. Well, that’s a massive undertaking. And one of the things that’s important about it that you do as both a service to the community as well as a way of continuing to generate income so you can continue building the library and building your collection is you sell scans of many of the older works from like, the 17th century and 18th century that are obviously not in copyright anymore. And you sell those through your website, right?
PG: Yeah. It’s a little venture I started when I was living in Sweden in 2013, and I thought it could generate some useful income. But more importantly, I was totally dissatisfied with the scan quality of the EEBO scans of 17th century texts that were kicking around, all of which as I’m sure you’re aware are monochrome; they’re quite low res, and they have condition issues where not much attention to detail has been paid. So I undertook to use my original sources from the first editions or early editions which had the complete text and take the highest quality images that I could of them and make those into PDF files. So at first, I sold them through DVD collections. But when computers stopped having DVD drives in them, I moved to downloads, so they’ve been available at downloads for the last few years. And the pricing is not very high, but I do have to charge a little something partly just for the cost of keeping the website going on the server hosting and so on. But it sort of starts at five pounds and goes up to 30 pounds for the longest and oldest books per item.
CB: Nice. That’s really valuable. The quality of the scans is like, incredibly high quality, so it’s been really valuable for me getting some of those scans from you. And then —
PG: Thank you.
CB: Yeah, so you also have a more recently, I feel like, a bustling secondhand bookselling market on your website where you’re selling older and used astrological texts – sometimes ones that are very hard to find that you already have copies of in the library.
PG: Yes, that’s right. Well, over the course of buying lots – because quite often I increase my collection by buying lots, which have included duplicates of books I already had, and sometimes I’ve started with an okay copy but then I spotted a better condition copy and I’ve replaced it. So I built up quite a lot of duplicates, and I have very limited space remaining in my house, and so it just made sense to me to sell off the duplicates. And I thought that if I’m going to do this in a sustainable way that is gonna generate a little bit of income and keep me going in my research and not having to work so much of my time as I used to on outside jobs – I used to work full-time in an office job a few years ago, which I don’t anymore – then that would be worthwhile. So I’ve actually actively invested in what I call cherry-picked copies of important out-of-print editions. Now, some of them are books that are available as reprints, but there’s always a little bit of added charm and historical interest to the earliest editions, even if it’s just the cover design, which if you think about how an author would have been consulted and would have given their approval for a particular cover design, it just kind of brings their spirit a little closer. It brings the spirit of the work a little closer to how I imagine the author would have wanted it, if you had the original look of the book. And I think there are quite a lot of collectors of books who feel much the same way, so I do specialize in out-of-print editions. Not only out-of-print titles, but certainly out-of-print editions, which includes, of course, the second edition of Luke Broughton’s book you’ve just acquired, so. Thank you for that, too!
CB: Yeah! Thank you so much for that; I’ve always wanted to get a copy of his book in print, but it’s kind of hard to find, so I was super excited to find that on your site and get it from you recently when I was doing that research.
So you – yeah, and that’s something that was crazy is you have been, until very recently, like, working full time in a day job and then just putting all of your resources and any funds that you have into building your astrological library for much of the past at least two decades essentially, right?
PG: Not for the whole time. I mean, there was a time in Sweden when I was doing other things. I was writing with my Swedish ex; I was writing a series of children’s novels with her at one time. So it hasn’t always been a full-time job, but when I came back to the UK in 2016, I needed that income. I needed basically to have a dependable income whereby I could secure a suitable property which would be a permanent property for the library, for one thing. So that then became my priority for the next few years. I thought, well, I can still – if I can fund keeping up this library and basically housing it again because it was all in storage for two years when I moved back from Sweden until I secured the place I got in 2018, which I deliberately chose a city where there was reasonably large housing capacity for the money you would pay at that time, because it was my priority to have the space that I would need to accommodate enough bookcases. So yes, I did keep that full-time job up until around the covid period. I went part-time then, and I finally quit about 18 months ago. But during the time I was doing that job, it did allow me to keep collecting and filling in some quite significant gaps. During the time I had that job, for instance, I bought the first editions I now have of works by Luca Gaurico and Johannes Gartze and two of the most important 16th century original Latin texts that have never been translated into English and they were kind of high priority to me. So I was really glad to keep in my job long enough to do that. But now my priority – I’m getting older. My priorities are now to have more time, less income, but more time to actually make use of the resource I built up. And ideally get into a situation where I can rally other astrologers around creating a permanent long-term home for it beyond my lifetime, because you know, as you know, nobody lives forever, and we never know how long we’ve got, so I have to think about the future. I don’t want my library just to have to go through some clearing company and end up being frittered away to local booksellers and then that resource would lose its integrity permanently, so I really want to make it a permanent institution. But it’s just been a case of getting into the position of being ready for that, getting the library itself to an advanced enough stage where I feel it’s really got enough to justify that next step, and also myself to the stage of no longer being so focused on earning and more on just maintaining the resource which I’ve already built up.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And I guess my point earlier with the day job is just, you know, so people spend money on, I don’t know, going on cruises or cars or things like that. You have really – as far as I can tell – like, put every resource you have into building this library over the years, and this has become your life’s work at this point, I think, right?
PG: That’s pretty much the case. I do have other interests. I probably can’t help it, having Mars in Gemini natally, for instance. But like, music, for instance. But on the whole, major sums of money, yes, I have put into the collection, and I’ve been very, very economical in my personal life. I’ve almost never gone on a holiday; I’ve never even traveled to the United States, believe it or not, which that’s probably true of quite a lot of people. But for an astrologer, it’s probably a little bit unusual these days not to have gone at least once, but I haven’t because I’ve saved up money for books instead. So I’ve made sort of social sacrifices that way. Now I would have loved to have been to NORWAC every year, for instance, but I hadn’t because I made the personal choice that I wanted to build up this collection. So it’s one of those things which it wouldn’t be a choice that would suit everyone, certainly not people who really need the social company more than anything. I do like social company, but I can perhaps live a little bit less of it than some people.
CB: Yeah. Well, I think when you’re like, truly passionate about something, you know, that becomes the thing that you’re focused on, and that becomes the reward in and of itself. And you’ve been able to build like, a beautiful, lasting resource which you’re now able to draw on and include some of the fruits of in this book and in some of your future books. So I’m really excited that this book is finally out. And you know, thanks to Jenn Zahrt and Revelore Press for helping to bring this out, who has also – you know, besides you – has one of the largest libraries, I think, at this point in North America in terms of astrological texts. So very similar spirit as you.
PG: Absolutely. I first met Jenn in 2012 when she was at the Sophia Centre Conference in Bath, which I also attended from Sweden. I was visiting my mother in the summer in Bristol; Bath’s just a stone throw away from there, so it made sense to go to that one. So that’s where I met Jenn. And I had read already about her research and the fact that she had been researching the early 20th century German astrologers, including but not limited to Elspeth Evertine, which she’s very passionate about, as we both know. And because I had been mainly focused on French astrologers from the same period, I felt we had a strong common bond of interest in that kind of area of continental history. So I quite deliberately went up to and talked to her, and tried to sort of introduce myself to her and what my interests were because she didn’t know anything about me back then. But we’ve been kind of good friends and colleagues ever since, you might say, so that’s – what is it? 13 years now? And when she offered to publish what originally was gonna be one long volume, and we made the joint editorial decision, both agreed to split it into three shorter ones because that would be more palatable in the marketplace. And I was very grateful to her. And as you say, she has now developed her own wonderful library in the Pacific Northwest somewhere between Seattle and Portland, I believe. Sort of maybe midway between them? I’ve never been there, so these things are very abstract to me, the geography, but I have a sort of approximate concept. And I’m so impressed by everything she’s done with the CAELi Institute, and I think that’s going to go for a very long time into the future. I like to believe that there’s significant advantage in there not being a single sort of unipolar focus to anything in astrology in the world. I think there’s space to have a major center of librarian work and research in Europe, and another one – or more than one – in the United States, because that just facilitates things for people who live in the different continents. I don’t think we should have to travel across the Atlantic every time you want to research a piece of history; that shouldn’t really be necessary. So you know, I’m all in favor of Jenn continuing to build up the CAELi Institute and to make it into a resource which I’m quite sure it will be as permanent and as big and useful as I hope mine will be in the future, and the two things will exist in parallel. And they will both have their individual strengths and weaknesses, of course. They will almost certainly both have texts that are unique to them which are not found in the other, because some of them are so rare. I mentioned earlier the manuscript translation of Books 22 to 24 of Morin de French from 1902, which I believe is completely unique because that was the only copy in existence. And I’m sure Jenn has some unique items or will get more at CAELi as well. And these are the kind of – the rarities like that, I think, are what draw people from further afield to a particular place. But I think the future for astrological research is exciting, and it will encompass not only the research interest of astrologers but also academics. And there is going to be an increasing convergence of the two around areas of common interest. That’s already happening to a large extent. But I think it’s probably true to say that there’s been a tradition of reluctance in academia to engage more deeply with professional astrologers who aren’t necessarily and formally academically qualified. But we now have a situation in which those boundaries are blurred because people who started out as professional astrologers have become academics with PhDs. Obviously, Kepler College is one of the things that encouraged that with a lot of very experienced astrologers taking PhDs so they could teach there when that was going to be a requirement. But it goes further than that, and I think the old idea that you can’t be an academic and a practicing astrologer is already passe.
CB: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, that’s a great point that it’s just about astrologers stepping up and doing quality work, even if that means working outside of the university or the academic setting, that you can still do high quality research and academic work or librarian work as you’re doing like, collections like that. You just have to consistently strive to put out quality work.
PG: That’s right. And preferably also get a bit of peer review along the way. One of the reasons I was very keen to have somebody academically qualified to edit my book was that I wanted a sort of a stamp, because I don’t have a PhD. I did a BA, and I then didn’t pursue further degrees because I had other priorities. And although the idea occurred many times that I perhaps should do one, I thought, well, actually, that’s going to cost quite a lot of money and time that I could be using on further improving the collection. So I just decided not to bother. But I think having the validation of, you know, people like Jenn Zahrt and Nick Campion who have read my book before it was published and have given it their sort of nod of academic approval – because they both have PhDs – that’s very important to me, because that kind of validates my work as an independent scholar. And I think probably, Chris, you and I are in a somewhat similar bracket in that respect; you’ve done a lot of very, very in depth, high quality research on Hellenistic astrology. Much like me, you’ve taken it very seriously. You’ve researched from primary sources. And I think that getting recognized for the quality of that work is something which is very satisfying when you don’t just have a piece of paper saying that, you know, you’ve passed a PhD, but you are getting your work peer reviewed and accepted by PhD-qualified colleagues. Obviously, you’ve done quite a lot with Demetra, for instance, who has a PhD, and that tells its own story. You know, she wouldn’t be associating with you if she didn’t think you did quality work.
CB: Sure. Yeah. I mean, Demetra has a masters in classics. But I definitely, you know, was in a similar situation with you where at least I went to Kepler, but then when they failed to get full regional accreditation after I’d been there for a few years, I looked into and had the option of going back to college in order to get the degree. But I was already writing my book; I was already writing what would be a PhD dissertation on the history and philosophy and techniques of ancient astrology, and I decided just to do that and just do the work and then let it speak for itself instead of going back and having to take a bunch of undergraduate classes just in order to get to the end goal that I was already working on. And yeah, and now the book is already being cited in some academic papers and other texts because of the quality of what I did in terms of the research and in terms of having high standards. And I have no doubt that your book similarly will be cited in academic treatments of the history of astrology in the future as well because of what you’ve pulled together and accomplished here, and the attention to detail and diligence and everything else that you’ve had in going about doing that. So yeah, good job doing that —
PG: Thank you, Chris.
CB: And thanks for doing that as part of the, you know, a contribution to the community.
PG: You’re welcome, and thank you for acknowledging that. And you know, I think we understand each other because we’ve come from similar positions in approaching the study of the history of astrology very seriously but without going through a formal, academic structure to do it.
CB: Yeah. Well, it’s like, you and I have an interest in reading both academic texts on the history of astrology and a love and passion for the history of astrology just on its own terms, because it’s something that’s genuinely interesting whether you believe in astrology as a legitimate phenomenon or not. And then we also have a genuine interest in reading astrologers’ texts and their techniques and discussions and everything else. And in reading academic texts, you can understand better how to approach things and how, you know, what you need to do in order to do something to that level and then you just do it. And I think that’s what we’ve both done, and then it’s fun to collaborate with and talk with and have these very wide-ranging discussions that you and I have just had today between you and I or between other people like Jenn who also has had a similar approach, although she has actually gotten a degree. She’s done the hard work and then also built the library. But it allows for these type of discussions that we’ve had today, and I really enjoy that.
Speaking of, do you share your data – do you share your chart? I’m sure people might be interested in what your chart looks like, if you feel like sharing it, or if you —
PG: It’s —
CB: — don’t wanna go into it, we don’t have to.
PG: I don’t mind either way. I’m not a very introspective person on the whole. I don’t kind of navel gaze much, but you know, if it’s something that you think will be interesting to your listeners, then, you know, feel free to go ahead. My birth data was collected for Astrodatabank many years ago, so.
CB: Okay. Yeah. I just asked you earlier, and I was interested in the collectors of astrology books and the astrological library and librarians that have a heavy – have a 9th house emphasis in their chart. And I know Jenn has a large 9th house emphasis; I know other early book collectors and publishers like David Rowell had a major focus on the 9th house. And you do as well with Mercury and Jupiter in your 9th house, I believe. Let me share the chart really quick for those watching the video version. So —
PG: Mercury conjunct Jupiter in the 9th in Pisces.
CB: Yeah, that’s pretty good! So you were born March 26th, 1974, at 1:05 PM in Oswestry, England?
PG: Correct. Yeah. It’s a small town right on the border with Wales.
CB: And that’s like, an accurate birth time? It’s not rectified?
PG: No, it’s accurate. It was actually noted by my father in a diary from that year. I found the entry myself, and he wrote “around five past one.” I then checked with my mother, “Was I born at night or in the day?” And she very clearly remembered that she was in hospital and it was the middle of the day, so it was obvious that I was born in the afternoon and not at night.
CB: Nice. That’s really fortunate to have the birth time recorded just because it’s not always.
So you were born with late Cancer rising —
PG: Yeah.
CB: At this time, it has about 28 degrees of Cancer rising. And the Sun in Aries in the 10th house. I have it in whole sign houses just for the purpose of this and in terms of my approach, but I think quadrant-wise, it would probably be very similar, right?
PG: It’s not far off. Obviously, there was a little bit of distortion of the houses, but I don’t think very much changes.
CB: Okay. So —
PG: There are some quadrant house systems where I think one or two or my planets change house, but… It’s not a major thing in any case. And I’m happy to use this for the purposes of today.
CB: Okay. Yeah. So you’ve got just that Mercury-Jupiter conjunction in Pisces in the 9th whole sign house, which I really appreciated, as well as the ruler of the Ascendant being the Moon exalted in the 11th house sextiling those two planets. So I appreciate the both 9th house focus in terms of the books and astrology and building a huge library, as well as to some extent the community role that that’s playing, both in impacting our larger community in terms of the 11th house, but also you have specific connections with the Astrological Association of Great Britain, which is one of the main astrological organizations in the UK and in terms of their library, right?
PG: That’s right. That’s something which has arisen more recently since my return to the UK, because I used to post a lot about what I was doing with my private life when I was out in Sweden for 12 years. And people like Nick Campion knew about it, and obviously I’d met him at the Sophia Centre Conferences a couple of times, too. And when Trudie Charles, the AA’s previous librarian, and her husband decided it was time for them to downsize after volunteering 10 years of selfless service to looking after the library, which was a completely voluntary role within the AA, and she had to downsize. Sort of panic stations went in a bit at the AA board, and they had to look around for an alternative solution, and at first Roy Gillett was thinking, well, actually we’re gonna have to put this into storage and pay for lock-up storage. But Nick Campion and Chris Mitchell both recommended me as somebody for Roy to contact, and I didn’t really know Roy yet then because all the time I was in Sweden, I hadn’t been to any of the AA conferences. I’d just stayed out in Sweden. Again, as I mentioned with NORWAC before, I was just kind of keeping my costs low by not traveling abroad to conferences so I could put more into the collection. But anyway, Roy kind of took it up with me on the phone, and I thought about it, and although I had planned to keep the upstairs of my house as living space and only have the library downstairs which was already getting quite full, I actually thought, well, actually, no we can’t allow the AA’s library just to go back into lock-up after 10 years. It was languishing in lock-up for I think probably almost 10 years before Trudie rescued it. And just for it to return to that state, it just seemed too sad. I thought, well, you know, I’ve got this recommendation from Nick and Chris; I’m not gonna let them down. So I freed up space upstairs and so I have to say, in some ways, it’s been a little bit life-limiting from a practical point of view, because I have only one proper living room now, which is my bedroom. And this room that you see in the background here – this is actually the AA archive room. The books behind me are parts of the Astrological Association collection; this is upstairs. And obviously, upstairs because of the weight of bookcases, you can’t put tall bookcases in the middle of old floors or you risk everything collapsing. So there’s a relatively limited amount of space you can use more around the walls of upstairs room without damaging the joists and the timbers and so on. And that’s why this room isn’t quite as full as you would see in the downstairs rooms where it’s all kind of narrow alleys and so on. But yeah, so I’ve taken on that role since Trudie retired. And I hope – I really hope – and I think some of the AA board at least are in agreement with me on this, that eventually it will be possibly to secure a permanent combined building that will keep both the AA’s collections and mine together, which would be – if it happened – it would be somewhat similar to what Jenn has already undertaken on her own by combining multiple collections from different sources such as Kepler College library and also Michael Erlewine’s collection of spares, of which he had many, into a single center. The difference is that I think it’s quite likely that the AA collection will remain legally separate from mine, because neither the AA nor myself have any kind of, you know, massive savings to buy the other collection out. And I think if I did offer – even if I could, and I offered to buy out the AA’s collection, that would be against the whole spirit of the AA, which is an educational charity. You’re not meant to do those kinds of things. So I think they will stay legally separate. But if in the long run, there could be a permanent building that was afforded by the astrological community collectively that could house both collections, I think that would be the best way to stop them just ending up being dissipated to all corners of the earth in future.
CB: Okay. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, that’s exciting, and yeah, I hope that you’re able to set up something more permanent and long-term like that at some point in the future. But that’s great that you’re able to play that role for the community to make that – so that all of those books aren’t just in storage somewhere as well.
Yeah. So all right. So people should check out your website, which is AstroLearn.com. That’s where they can get the PDFs or check out the books that you have for sale. They can buy your book on Amazon or any online retailers at this point. It’s called Technical and Planetary Developments in Astrology. And they can check out Jenn’s library by searching “the celestial arts education library,” and they’ll find the CAELi website.
PG: Correct, yes.
CB: Cool. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today for this episode and having this discussion with me. Congratulations on the book, and yeah, let’s do it again at some point when some of the next volumes come out.
PG: Thank you very much, Chris. I’m really grateful to you for hosting me and as you say at the beginning, we’ve been talking about this for years. And I thought – I kept putting you off because I said, well, actually, you know, it would be better when I’ve got a kind of a book which is a focus so I’m not just, you know, just a librarian, which anybody could claim to be a librarian. It doesn’t necessarily mean much unless you do something with the library. Nothing against librarians; librarians do a fine service, but in terms of the interest to your listeners, I thought it would be a more interesting presentation once at least one book had been published and that’s why I kept putting you off. And thank you for bearing with me through all that!
CB: Yeah, no, absolutely. It was absolutely worth it. And I think this was the perfect timing, so I’m glad we waited until now. And yeah, thanks a lot for joining me today!
PG: You’re welcome, Chris. Thanks again!
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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