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Episode: Astrology as Divination, with Kirk Little
Author: Chris Brennan
Duration: 03:25:36
Episode Shownotes
In episode 463 astrologer Kirk Little joins the podcast for an in-depth discussion about the life and work of Geoffrey Cornelius, and his argument that astrology is a form of divination. Geoffrey passed away recently on August 27, and so Kirk and I got together to talk about his work
and the impact of his thinking on our understanding of astrology. One of the central themes of our discussion is Geoffrey's groundbreaking thesis that astrology should be understood as a form of divination rather than a science based on causal relationships. Kirk and I explore how this perspective shifts the way we approach astrology, emphasizing that the symbols and signs in a chart serve as omens rather than direct influences. This re-framing opens up a richer understanding of how astrology can provide insights into our lives. We also delve into the importance of symbolic thinking in astrology, particularly how it relates to the interpretation of horoscopes. Kirk shares how Geoffrey's work encourages us to think about astrology in a more fluid and dynamic way, where the meanings of symbols can evolve and resonate differently for each individual. This approach not only enhances our practice but also deepens our connection to the cosmos and the messages it conveys. Throughout our conversation, it becomes clear that Geoffrey Cornelius was not just an astrologer but a philosopher who continuously sought to understand the deeper truths of astrology. Kirk highlights how Geoffrey's commitment to exploring the philosophical underpinnings of astrology remains an unfinished journey, inspiring us to keep questioning and expanding our understanding of this ancient practice. His work encourages us to engage with astrology not just as a tool for prediction but as a profound means of self-discovery and reflection. Kirk is the author of a paper on Geoffrey's book The Moment of Astrology: Kirk Little, "Defining the Moment: Geoffrey Cornelius and the Development of the Divinatory Perspective" (2006) He hosts a website on astrology and divination that contains a number of other resources related to the subject: https://cosmocritic.com This episode is available in both audio and video versions below. Watch the Video Version of This Episode Watch the video version of this episode on astrology as divination on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oloBbcWwko - Transcript A full transcript of this episode is available: Episode 463 transcript Listen to the Audio Version of This Episode Listen to the audio version of this episode or download it as an MP3:
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_02
Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to The Astrology Podcast.
00:00:03 Speaker_02
In this episode, I'm going to be interviewing astrologer Kirk Little, and we're going to be talking about astrology as divination, and especially discussing the life and work of the astrologer Jeffrey Cornelius, who just passed away recently.
00:00:16 Speaker_02
And so we wanted to do an episode to talk about the impact of his work to discuss and celebrate his life and his life contributions. So hey, Kirk, thanks for joining me today. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah.
00:00:33 Speaker_02
So let's talk about this in terms of, I'm trying to figure out where to start, but you were the person that reached out to me a couple of weeks ago to let me know that Jeffrey had passed away.
00:00:46 Speaker_02
And you're somebody who was somewhat close to him in terms of working with him and helping
00:00:56 Speaker_02
I saw you as sort of like an expositor to exposit some of his thesis that he put forward in his 1994 book, The Moment of Astrology, where his central thesis was that he argued that astrology was divination.
00:01:08 Speaker_02
And I had interviewed him about that book before, almost 10 years ago in 2015, and I just recently re-released that this week. But about a year ago, Gary Phillipson reached out to me and said that Jeffrey
00:01:25 Speaker_02
wanted me to interview you about a website that you have called Cosmocritic, which is focused on talking about astrology as divination. And that was actually one of the last communications that I had from Jeffrey.
00:01:38 Speaker_02
So part of what I want to do today is to talk about you and to sort of fulfill that last request that he had to me. Yeah, so let me know. So tell me and tell the audience who you are and what's your background.
00:01:52 Speaker_00
So who am I? I'm Kirk Little. I am an astrologer. I've been an astrologer since 1980. And I entered astrology in a very interesting way, I think.
00:02:06 Speaker_00
In 1971, I was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, hitching home from college—yes, long hair, you know, thumb out—got picked up by a young woman, probably a couple years older than myself, And she said to me, oh, are you a son in cancer?
00:02:22 Speaker_00
And I'm like, you mean my son's side? And she said, yes. And I said, yeah, I am. And I said, how'd you know that? And she said, well, just by looking at you. She said, are you Scorpio rising? And I said, I don't know.
00:02:37 Speaker_00
I have no idea what you're talking about. She said, well, what time were you born? I said, well, 2.44 in the afternoon. Well, where were you born? Chicago.
00:02:45 Speaker_00
She starts doing this mental calculation in her head and says, oh, that probably puts her son in the eighth. Yeah, you're probably Scorpio rising.
00:02:54 Speaker_00
So she then spent the rest of her ride, I guess you could say, giving me a reading or talking about my son and rising sign, dropped me off at home. and promised to send me a reading—got my address, promised to send me a reading.
00:03:11 Speaker_00
Never heard from her again.
00:03:13 Speaker_00
About three years later, I'm working in a coffee shop, all-night coffee shop, filled with hippies and all kinds of alternative people, and one of the people in there was a graduate student in biophysics, of all things, who was studying astrology, and she said,
00:03:27 Speaker_00
Have you ever had your chart cast?" I said, no. So she basically sent away to Neil Mickelson's chart service. It was a computer chart service. I think it was one of the first major ones at the time.
00:03:38 Speaker_00
A few weeks later, my chart came back, and she says, well, here, you want me to tell you about it? I was like, sure, okay. And she said, well, here, you've got the sun and cancer. I'm going, yep, okay. And she said, and you've got Scorpio rising.
00:03:50 Speaker_00
I'm like, whoa, what do you mean? And I said, show me that. So she points this place on the circle and says, well, this is the rising sign. This is the sign that was coming up over the horizon when you were born. I said, well, how did she know that?
00:04:06 Speaker_00
She's like, who? I said, well, this woman that picked me up a few years ago told me I had Scorpio rising, but she didn't cast my chart. And she said, well, some people could just look at people and tell what their sun sign is.
00:04:20 Speaker_00
that really intrigued me, because up till then I'd had a very kind of rationalist view of the world. I had not really studied astrology. The following year, Uranus went over my rising sign. I dropped out of graduate school.
00:04:34 Speaker_00
I was a graduate student in history. began studying various occult things. I was studying the tarot. I was studying dowsing. I was studying—then I studied the I Ching, a bit of astrology.
00:04:47 Speaker_00
I still remember Ralph Metzger's book Maps of Consciousness became one of those things where I'm like, wow, there's this whole world I didn't know about. And so I start looking into it, and it still didn't quite sit right with me.
00:05:01 Speaker_00
But then I found out there's a local bookstore, the Elysian Tree Metaphysical Bookstore, run by a guy named Bob Mulligan, who was an astrologer, who is an astrologer. He still lives in Naples, Florida, a couple years older than me.
00:05:14 Speaker_00
and I began studying with him. And I did essentially a three-year apprenticeship with him. I don't know what else to call it. I took all of the classes he had.
00:05:23 Speaker_00
He would give these Saturday workshops on specific topics like progressions or transits or whatever.
00:05:30 Speaker_00
And he would have guest speakers come in from time to time, a number of people who, you know, were semi-well-known, I guess, within the field of astrology. But I think that my real
00:05:42 Speaker_00
introduction to the world of the larger world of astrology was in March of 1978, and my astrologer and myself and my brother and a couple other people drove to Tucson, Arizona, where the NASA astrology conference was being held, and the headliners were Dane Rudger,
00:06:01 Speaker_00
and Mark Edmund Jones. And then a guy named Henry Weingarten, who's still around, and a man named Ron Davison from the Astrological Lodge of London. I thought, well, this is an interesting lineup.
00:06:16 Speaker_00
So of course, I had just finished astrology of personality. I had Dane Rudger autograph it. But they were on their retirement tour, essentially. I mean, nothing, they were doing this essentially very radical or dramatic, but it was interesting.
00:06:30 Speaker_00
I kind of felt, wow, here's a line of succession here. These guys have been doing this a long, long time. Well, what can I say?
00:06:41 Speaker_00
Ron Davison, at the very point I met him, I only found out many years later, was the time that Jeffrey Cornelius was actually—this is March of 78, the very time that his first truly divinatory article on astrology was published, the Anti-Astrology Signature.
00:06:59 Speaker_00
talk about that later. But needless to say, so I finished this apprenticeship in 1980, opened a practice, and for the next five years made a very poor living as an astrologer. I was a counseling astrologer. I lived in Champ. As one does.
00:07:17 Speaker_00
Yeah, as one does, right? Continued to hold other jobs, you know, part-time jobs running a movie camera on a place that had weekend films for students and things like that. But yeah, So, but if anybody said, well, what's your practice?
00:07:34 Speaker_00
It was largely psychological astrology. So, Liz Green, I had read her book, Saturn, A New Look at an Old Devil. It had come out in 1977.
00:07:43 Speaker_00
So my entry into astrology was really kind of riding that crest of people like Liz Green and Richard Iteman and others who were bringing, and Stephen Arroyo, who were bringing this new kind of
00:07:58 Speaker_00
version of astrology in play here, which is blending the insights of psychology, not necessarily psychoanalysis, but well at least what Liz, Jungian astrology,
00:08:12 Speaker_02
In your paper defining the moment where you talk about the significance of Jeffrey's work from 2006, which is up on your website, Cosmocritic, actually you situated just the importance of Liz Greene's work.
00:08:27 Speaker_02
And in rereading it the other day, it really gave me more perspective on how groundbreaking Liz Greene's work was at the time as being one of the first depth psychologists to really truly synthesize depth psychology and astrology.
00:08:42 Speaker_00
Absolutely, and her books were well written. I think that's the other appeal. So anybody who's ever tried to make their way through Mark Edmund Jones, let's just say he's not a pro stylist. He's not an easy read.
00:08:56 Speaker_00
Dane Rudger has his own kind of style, I think somewhat elliptical, but at least it's fairly clear. But Liz Green felt very contemporary, it felt very fresh, and it felt like, wow, this is somebody
00:09:12 Speaker_00
who knows what it's like to kind of be alive now as a young person and express this view of astrology that was overtly psychological.
00:09:24 Speaker_02
Right. And that was really like the zeitgeist at the time?
00:09:29 Speaker_00
Well, it was because as I think, as I just wrote in this piece I've written for the Astrological Association, the journal about Jeffrey, In the mid-1970s, the model of astrology was largely unchanged, really.
00:09:47 Speaker_00
Now, new forces, new voices were coming in, as I said, the psychological astrologers that I've mentioned. Obviously, John Addy's work in harmonics was coming in. Certainly, cosmobiology seemed to give this certain kind of look to it.
00:10:02 Speaker_00
you know, the psychological testing was coming up. So there's a huge ferment going on. But for anybody who tried to make their living doing chart readings, which is what I was trying to do, you really wanted something that addressed people's needs.
00:10:20 Speaker_00
And so Liz Green's work, and I don't want to, I mean, she was the big one, but there were others as well. It's almost like it gave astrology this a legitimacy that it didn't feel like it had.
00:10:34 Speaker_00
It no longer felt like, well, we're just dusting off stuff from the late 19th century. Wow, this is some new thinking. And so- Right.
00:10:43 Speaker_02
Ironically, and something we'll come back to, ironically, part of what it was almost dusting off was the notion that astrology is just fortune telling,
00:10:52 Speaker_02
was part of the psychological pushback in some ways or something that was fresh about that movement at the time that astrology was more than that and that it had a deeper potential.
00:11:03 Speaker_02
Although that's kind of interesting framing it that way in terms of fortune-telling since as we'll talk about, fortune-telling has a very long history with divination.
00:11:14 Speaker_00
Right, right. I did not meet Liz Green until early in this century. I met her in 2004, and I can just mention that she was at an academic conference. So by the early 2000s, she had reinvented herself as an academic, and
00:11:33 Speaker_00
has written what I think of as a twin intellectual biography of Jung as an astrologer. I think they're two very important books. But she was trying to shake off an unsavory reputation she had of somebody who didn't have a real PhD. And
00:11:53 Speaker_00
That was making the rounds at that time in 2004.
00:11:59 Speaker_02
I mean, some of that was BS.
00:12:01 Speaker_02
I mean, I know one of the guys that was trying to push that narrative, and I always thought it was really not just unkind, but not well-founded because I was somebody that found myself in a similar situation having gone to Kepler College, which was a school for astrologers in an attempt to
00:12:19 Speaker_02
put astrology back in academia and give astrologers academic degrees focusing on their subject, including the history and philosophy of the subject, but it failed to get national or regional accreditation.
00:12:33 Speaker_02
So as a result of that, my degree from Kepler College isn't recognized and doesn't mean anything. And as far as I know, Liz found herself in a similar position with the school that she went to, and it didn't mean that she hadn't done the academic
00:12:46 Speaker_02
sort of legwork, but it just meant that the degree wasn't as widely recognized as it could have been?
00:12:54 Speaker_00
I think that's probably true. So she has now gotten a second PhD, if you will, in history, but from university, I think of Bristol. But in 1977,
00:13:10 Speaker_00
uh you know everybody if if you were an astrologer and you were trying to convince a non-astrological friend that there was something to this you would you would send people to Liz Green because they could read her and kind of go oh
00:13:25 Speaker_00
oh wow, there's something here, there's something to this. And it isn't just all squiggles and dots on a page I can't understand. It isn't people talking about sun trining this and Mars square, I don't even know what any of that means.
00:13:41 Speaker_00
But wow, when she talks about it, it gives me this feeling of this is somebody who understands human psychology and can speak to me.
00:13:51 Speaker_02
Right. Yeah. So that spoke to you and that was integrated as part of your practice when you were practicing astrologer in what the early 1980s you said?
00:14:01 Speaker_00
Yeah, 1980 to 1985 is basically I did five years of practice. And I traveled up size in Champaign, Illinois, which is about 120 miles south of Chicago. Most of my client base was in Chicago.
00:14:15 Speaker_00
And I'd go up there on almost a monthly basis, stay with a friend and do a series of charts over a weekend. And it was odd.
00:14:24 Speaker_00
I probably should have moved to Chicago because my client base then started to build up the way you would want it to, meaning one person would refer another who would refer another and so forth. But that's not what I did. I moved out to the East Coast.
00:14:39 Speaker_02
So in terms of what happened that led you to Jeffrey's work, because there was a period where you were disillusioned with astrology, or what happened in the late 80s?
00:14:54 Speaker_00
So what happened in
00:14:57 Speaker_02
What I like to say is I came into astrology with Uranus crossing my Ascendant by transit, and I— Which I love—sorry to interject—I love, by the way, when you mentioned that, because I also had Uranus crossing the Ascendant when I got into astrology.
00:15:11 Speaker_00
Right, I love when you told, you had mentioned that to me in an earlier communication. You know, that's an interesting thing, right? Because it's like just the broad symbolism of it. I think any astrologer could kind of go, oh, I kind of get it.
00:15:25 Speaker_00
Uranus, the great disruptor, the awakener, the, you know, the radical revolutionary, whatever, comes across and turns your life upside down. When Pluto crossed my ascendant, 1984, 85, between 83 and 85, I call these more of a process. My father died.
00:15:48 Speaker_00
I moved out to the East Coast, and I thought, I cannot make a living as an astrologer. I would have people send me charts, obviously to younger listeners, pre-internet, pre, you know, I wasn't going to be doing readings by phone.
00:16:05 Speaker_00
There was no way to communicate with people. And so I would do mail-away readings, which were read into a cassette tape. They were what are widely now called blind readings.
00:16:18 Speaker_00
I'd get the birth date of somebody, I'd get their name and their birth date, and say, please do my chart. No questions. Or they might say, I want to know about romance, or I want to know about my job, or I want to know what I should be doing in life.
00:16:32 Speaker_00
Kind of broad things like that, but nothing specific. So by mid-80s, I then went back and was taking courses in psychology, thinking I was going to go back to graduate school, which I did do.
00:16:47 Speaker_00
And so astrology got pushed to the wayside because all my clients were in Chicago. Yes, I do the occasional chart reading, but once I lived in Delaware and then I moved up to Maine by basically 1985-86, I no longer advertised doing astrology at all.
00:17:06 Speaker_00
And so it just kind of dropped away. But as I say in my paper, Defining the Moment, I walked away, but it never left me. I couldn't leave it.
00:17:18 Speaker_00
It was such a powerful frame of reference for me that I continued to think about people that way, and I guess you'd say to use it. So Jeffrey, So what happened?
00:17:35 Speaker_00
My introduction to astrology as divination was not Jeffrey's book, but Maggie's book, which preceded his.
00:17:42 Speaker_00
So to back up a little bit, I got married to a woman who was from England, another therapist like myself, and we made annual pilgrimages to England. And she had a sister in London. And I did what I've always done.
00:18:02 Speaker_00
I would go to bookshops and find these books, this Arcana series. It's like, wow, these are interesting. Nothing like this in the States.
00:18:11 Speaker_00
There were no occult bookstores in Maine where I was other than Weiser, but I didn't even know about it at the time. And so I found Maggie's book and I bought it. I thought, ooh, young in astrology. And in her book,
00:18:26 Speaker_00
I'm one of these people that reads footnotes. I read endnotes. I basically interrogate books. She was talking about the radical rethink of Geoffrey Cornelius, I thought. She kept referencing him.
00:18:39 Speaker_00
She thanked him in the front of her book, but she would make these references to him and to his work as divination. Her book's very appealing, and it has some astrology as divination or divinatory astrology within it.
00:18:54 Speaker_00
But a couple years later, so on one of my later trips, I basically saw his book, actually in Waterstones in England, and immediately bought it and consumed it. And it was a wake-up call to me because I knew that
00:19:14 Speaker_00
I felt like he was addressing people like me who are smart, who are well-educated, who are broadly educated within the field of astrology itself, and who are somehow or another dissatisfied with it as a complete frame of reference.
00:19:34 Speaker_00
And I think there's something about his take on it, you could call it English skepticism, but there was something about him that was wry, that was subtle, and that I think spoke to me in a way that no astrology book before that had quite done.
00:19:54 Speaker_00
And by that I don't mean I had read many books in astrology that I felt had been quite, you know, powerful, and I guess you'd say influential, but more influential in the practice rather than in the philosophy of or the thinking about astrology.
00:20:12 Speaker_00
And I guess you could say I was one of those people who was completely troubled by how poorly astrology showed up in the testing of astrology. And there's the Verdon-Clark, which I think we did reasonably well.
00:20:29 Speaker_00
But I'm talking about the kinds of tests that people were putting astrologers through that basically showed, if not a null effect, very slight effects.
00:20:40 Speaker_02
So- Right, because that was one of the, part of the context of Jeffrey's work is that in the 1970s and 80s, all of these different statistical tests had been done on astrology or other types of tests.
00:20:55 Speaker_02
But many of these scientific tests ended up coming out not in favor of astrology or negative or ended up, in like Oakland's case, being hotly debated. And
00:21:06 Speaker_02
disputed or debunked so that there were some people that were more scientific types in the astrological community that ran into a crisis of consciousness of like, what does this mean?
00:21:16 Speaker_02
And does this mean that astrology is not valid if we can't validate it scientifically or statistically? Absolutely, you got it exactly right.
00:21:24 Speaker_00
So, you know, because I had taken a class in the history and philosophy of science, one of my last undergraduate classes, and of course it's interesting, the three pseudosciences that one of the philosophers put forth was psychoanalysis, one of my deep loves, and astrology was one of the other ones.
00:21:47 Speaker_00
I thought, oh, this is interesting. Well, this is pre-astrology. This is between being picked up by the astrologer and before having my chart done. So it just confirmed my view of astrology. Okay, it's a pseudoscience, whatever.
00:22:00 Speaker_00
It doesn't have anything to do with me. But once I got involved with the practice of it, as I think you probably know, a lot of people, when they start talking to their non-astrological friends about it, kind of are incredulous.
00:22:15 Speaker_00
They say, oh, come on, you're a smart guy. You don't believe that nonsense, do you? And, you know, you end up with these endless debates that go nowhere, and nobody convinces anybody. At some point, I just thought, I'm not gonna keep doing these.
00:22:31 Speaker_00
I cannot keep doing these. They're destructive to my practice, but I can't say they didn't play on my mind that
00:22:41 Speaker_00
was no really good way to talk about astrology to a non-academic group that was reasonably intelligent in a way that spoke to them or made sense. So My friend Gary Phillipson has written an article called The Anatomy of Doubt.
00:23:03 Speaker_00
Gary's a Buddhist, and so he talks about the different ways that Buddhists think about the world, and one of them has to do with this notion that we have different ways that belief affects us and the way we move through the world.
00:23:18 Speaker_00
But one of the things that we need is a form of you will, skepticism or at least a question, is this so? But as he said, if You're completely governed by doubt, thus the anatomy of doubt. You're frozen in your tracks and you can't do anything.
00:23:40 Speaker_00
So to a Buddhist, they say you need to find the right path through the work that you do, whatever that work is, whether it's astrology or anything else.
00:23:50 Speaker_00
And if you are so doubting of it, if you have such skepticism about its efficacy, about its worthwhileness, you won't be able to function well doing it. And that made a great deal of sense to me when I read that and saw that in myself.
00:24:11 Speaker_00
So Jeffrey's book spoke to that part of me. Obviously, those couple of chapters, I think they're chapters three and four, that talk about basically
00:24:23 Speaker_00
astrology coming under the microscope, under the scientific scrutiny, that I thought, this guy totally gets it. He totally gets the drubbing that astrology has taken, and yet, not put off by that at all.
00:24:37 Speaker_00
In fact, if anything, he said, we need to listen to this. Yes, this affects our confidence as astrologers, but it should not affect the right practice of astrology. Now, I'm paraphrasing here.
00:24:53 Speaker_02
CB Right. Well, his central thesis of the book was to argue that astrology is a form of divination, even though astrologers aren't used to conceptualizing it that way.
00:25:06 Speaker_02
But also then he took that further and said, if that is true, then it's not going to be something that can be validated statistically because the basic nature of divination is something
00:25:21 Speaker_02
It has to do with because it's based on chance, but I don't know if he went into that point about chance.
00:25:29 Speaker_02
That's something that I've expanded on in my work, but that astrology, if it's divination, you're not going to be able to validate it statistically, and therefore all of these attempts to test it in that way are doomed from the start. Correct.
00:25:43 Speaker_02
Correct. But then, however, that doesn't mean that it's not real or not legitimate.
00:25:49 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Right. Right. So that's a tough line to follow. So, you know, those of us that like to think there's some regularity in what we do, you know, think, I guess you could call it, broadly speaking, an empirical approach.
00:26:05 Speaker_00
Oh, I've seen this aspect before and how it works out. We all talk that way. but nobody. And I mean, I've never met anybody that says, oh, by the way, this reading is based upon, you know, peer-reviewed journal results in astrology.
00:26:23 Speaker_00
I mean, you know, the problem was, like, if you looked at, you know, the work of the Gokulas, you know, if they supported something statistically, what did they support? Well, broadly speaking, planets had increased power at the angles, but
00:26:45 Speaker_00
When you dug down and said, well, what would Goklan allow us to use? What did he have the data for or the statistical backing of?
00:26:56 Speaker_00
Well, we had it for the Mars, we had it for Saturn, we had it for Jupiter, and I think the Moon, but the rest of it, no, certainly not the Zodiac. And so, you couldn't basically, if you cleave to a strong,
00:27:11 Speaker_00
scientific model, you couldn't do a horoscopic reading. Judicial astrology. So I want to make this point, because Jeffrey made this again and again.
00:27:21 Speaker_00
He said, look, he went back to the old order, the two orders of astrology, the astrology of causes and the astrology of signs. And the astrology of causes, the so-called stellar determinism that dates back to Ptolemy and maybe even before that,
00:27:38 Speaker_00
has to do with this notion that there's a causal factor here, whether it's due to some kind of rays or something, that is regular and that we should be able to test and see it working. That's a very different thing.
00:27:55 Speaker_00
And he says, look, there's an order of astrology, astrology of causes, that exists. And in no way does astrology as divination negate that. And in fact, he said, you know, have at it. But it's not going to allow you to do
00:28:12 Speaker_00
read charts to practice judicial astrology.
00:28:15 Speaker_00
So he made that emphasis or that distinction, and it's an important one, to say, you know what, if there are certain cycles that the planets show up that there's strong correlations with, and that they show statistical significance, okay, that's fine.
00:28:31 Speaker_00
But that does not enable us to practice judicial astrology. So
00:28:38 Speaker_00
his notion is that the practice of judicial astrology, the reading of horoscopes, whether that's an electional, whether that's a natal, whether it's a horary, whether it's a mundane map, that this has to do with something else.
00:28:53 Speaker_00
And that something else, yes, is is a process of divination.
00:29:00 Speaker_02
Right.
00:29:00 Speaker_02
Yeah, to me that was always his core argument, and that was the most powerful and persuasive part of his argument to me was that he was able to very forcefully argue the case that astrology, most of the technical apparatus of the astrology that we work with, that we're familiar with,
00:29:19 Speaker_02
is based on the planets acting as signs or omens of what is being indicated in the chart and not that they're actually causing things to happen.
00:29:30 Speaker_02
So for example, if somebody has like a Mars transit and they get angry one day that the Mars transit was acting as like an omen or a symbol that that would occur, but it was not actually Mars, the planet sending physical rays or forces that were somehow causing the person to be
00:29:49 Speaker_02
angry that day. So it's like a similar formulation of Carl Jung's various attempts to define something like that through synchronicity.
00:29:58 Speaker_02
But Jeffrey's access point that was the most compelling for me is that he pointed to horary astrology, which most astrologers would classify as a form of divination and
00:30:10 Speaker_02
that is clearly harder to make a causal case for how that works, where the astrologer casts a chart for the moment that a question is posed to them, and then the chart will both describe the nature of the question as well as the outcome.
00:30:26 Speaker_02
And that's very obviously a form of divination and is based on signs rather than causes. But then he flipped it around and he said, all of the other branches of astrology are also divination and based on signs rather than causes as well.
00:30:43 Speaker_02
even natal astrology, which sometimes through history we've developed these ideas of the planets maybe influencing the gestation of the native or different physiological, physical things like that perhaps.
00:30:58 Speaker_02
And he says, no, even natal astrology, that the moment of birth is sort of like the moment of a horary question, but it's just a question about the person's entire life. And that I think
00:31:12 Speaker_02
was what was so unique about his argument at the time in making that, and that he did it very, very persuasively.
00:31:18 Speaker_00
Yes. And so again, I'm going to go back to the mid-1970s when I was getting into astrology, beginning to study it, and then again, formal study in 1977. Horary was nowhere to be seen.
00:31:32 Speaker_00
Okay, I read the Noel Till 12-volume textbook series as one of my introductions to it, and he had a thing on horary in there, and I read it. But nobody was taking horary very seriously.
00:31:45 Speaker_00
In fact, if you look at what some of the major, some of the remarks, some of the major astrologers said about it,
00:31:53 Speaker_00
it was very dismissive, and they said, oh, this is fortune telling, this is nonsense, this is an embarrassment to astrology, it makes us look like charlatans, et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:06 Speaker_00
And, you know, so I knew of nobody practicing horary astrology, and indeed, in three years of studying with Bob Mulligan, not once did we ever do a horary chart. That's just not who Bob was.
00:32:21 Speaker_00
Again, his whole emphasis was on counseling and working with people, and he's been a very successful astrologer.
00:32:29 Speaker_00
In fact, I went back to him after I'd been in the field a few years, and I said, Bob, you taught me a lot of astrology, but you never taught me how to be an astrologer, how to make it work as a business.
00:32:41 Speaker_00
He said that that really struck him, and as a result of that, he restructured the way he taught courses and wanted to teach people about the business of it and the practice of it.
00:32:53 Speaker_00
I don't know if that's true, because I have not gone back to revisit that. Yeah.
00:32:57 Speaker_02
Well, he ended up being one of the early presidents then, or maybe even helped to found the Organization for Professional Astrologers later, which is now an organization that's still around today that kind of helps astrologers in that way of trying to encourage them how to practice it professionally.
00:33:14 Speaker_00
Yes, it was. And you know what? Nobody of all of, he said to me, of all of my students, you are the most thorough. Yeah, I stayed with him. I took every class, you name it.
00:33:26 Speaker_00
The books, I read my way through a great deal of the Anglo-American literature on astrology. I mean, you know, Charles Carter and Alan Leo and Ron Davison, who again, who I'd met, but William Franklin, who I've later found out to Jeffrey, you know,
00:33:43 Speaker_00
I saw as an interesting character. So I had those people, as well as the Americans, and so I felt like I had a good grounding.
00:33:51 Speaker_00
You know, I studied cosmobiology because that seemed so Teutonic and rigorous, and it appealed to that side of me that wanted to see this rather, I guess you could almost call it mechanistic
00:34:05 Speaker_00
I mean, what's more mechanistic than a midpoint, you know, of one planet following at the midpoint of two others? It just seemed like that such exactitude. And there's something very pleasing about that. And ditto with harmonics.
00:34:19 Speaker_00
There was something fundamentally pleasing about that to me when I saw this system that seemed to subsume or to explain other parts of astrology, whether it's the house system, whether it's the steins.
00:34:34 Speaker_00
You know, when I found out, oh, the ninth harmonic, oh, that's the Navamsa of Indian astrology, it's like, oh, that's intriguing.
00:34:41 Speaker_00
So again, Adi's work became, was another one of those things that appealed to me because I wanted it to be more systematic and more organized and more, what can I say, consistent than I often found it to be.
00:35:00 Speaker_02
Right. And so there's like this explosion of new techniques in 20th century astrology, and with some of those new techniques there became hopes that
00:35:11 Speaker_02
with greater technical proficiency or with some of these new insights, these techniques we're providing, that maybe this would be how astrology could be validated finally is through technical advancements.
00:35:23 Speaker_02
And that's one of the things that Jeffrey confronts directly in his book and says, no, that's not going to do it because you're still fundamentally misunderstanding what astrology is.
00:35:33 Speaker_02
If you think it can be tested in these wide-scale statistical studies and validated in that way, then fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of astrology. That's correct.
00:35:46 Speaker_00
So I'd read his book, I'd read Maggie's book, and I knew I was going to England in July. This is 1995. So I essentially wrote Geoffrey and Maggie what's a fan letter. Oh, I just expressed admiration for both of their books.
00:36:04 Speaker_00
And I said, you know, I had gone through the bibliographies of each of them, and there were a number of articles, and I'm wondering if they could help me secure them. There were various things that each of them had listed.
00:36:17 Speaker_00
And instead, I get, Maggie asked me for my phone number, and said, oh, well, why don't you come to Lily Day, outside of London, and meet us? And I'm like, okay. So I knew I was going to London anyhow. And so I did.
00:36:37 Speaker_00
And this was, Lily Day was basically in late July of 1995. And I met them,
00:36:48 Speaker_00
In one day, I met the Aries first, Pat Blackett, who came and picked me up in Blackheath, the southeast side of London, and we drove to Twickenham, which is where Geoffrey and Maggie had a house. It turned out to be the last day of their place
00:37:05 Speaker_00
their house in Twickenham. They were in the midst of packing, and they were moving to their house in Heard Bay the following day. So Maggie even apologized to me, saying, oh, it's a mess here.
00:37:16 Speaker_00
But I remember shelf reading their bookshelf, whatever was still up on the shelves. It's just a hodgepodge of philosophy and literature and other kinds of things, a few astrology books, but they had been packed.
00:37:28 Speaker_00
So we drive to Surrey, which is where Lilly ended his days, basically, as a member of the church, a church warden, basically, out there.
00:37:39 Speaker_00
And so Lilly Day was something that had been started by the Company of Astrologers to honor who they see as kind of the patron saint of horary astrology, William Lilly, 17th century astrologer. And so that's how I met them.
00:37:53 Speaker_00
And it was a beautifully hot day, and I was just flabbergasted at the level of discourse that was going on among these people, because I'd been to various astrological conferences by then, but nothing.
00:38:12 Speaker_00
They were asking me what my philosophy of astrology was. They're asking about which map I prefer for the U.S. They were asking me all kinds of things. They were so curious.
00:38:25 Speaker_00
there was both a forthrightness, but also kind of a modesty to what they were doing. I was completely taken by it because it was so in keeping with these two books I'd read.
00:38:37 Speaker_00
So, I mean, among, as well as Geoffrey and Maggie, who I met, Graham Tobin was there, and Vernon Wells. Patrick Curry happened to be there, too, because
00:38:50 Speaker_00
he was helping a friend who had just published a book on William Lilly and Geneva, William Lilly in the 17th century astrology. And so he is helping her and introducing her to this lot.
00:39:06 Speaker_00
So all of a sudden in one day, all these people whose books I'd read, I'm meeting them. And it was such a welcoming thing. And spent the day with them, and at the end, it's like my head's just kind of spinning, but then I rejoined my family.
00:39:19 Speaker_00
I could not stop thinking about them, like, oh, you're going to have to come and visit us in Heron Bay at some point.
00:39:25 Speaker_00
So the connection had been made, but whatever chart reading I was still doing was still largely what it had been, psychological natal readings.
00:39:38 Speaker_00
It was only when I began to visit them in succeeding years, 96, 97, 98, that I got more of a sense of them as diviners, as people for whom astrology was part of, a very important part, but a part of a worldview that include tarot,
00:40:00 Speaker_00
that included I Ching, and included omens, and included this notion that the world, or the cosmos as we find it, oftentimes has ways of messaging us or signaling us through things that happen, through people, through events, that if we know how to read them, can be taken as omens.
00:40:24 Speaker_00
And whether they're read astrologically or not might be another thing apart, but certainly this notion that the world was omen-laden, or was suffused with this other intelligence that expressed itself.
00:40:41 Speaker_00
But it expressed itself only to people who, I guess you'd say, with eyes to see. And so that, that I think, I could not have gotten from just reading their books. I had a sense that these people were different than a lot of other astrologers I'd met.
00:40:59 Speaker_00
I'd met Rob Hand by then. I'd met a number of people by then, you know, who were
00:41:06 Speaker_00
well-known astrologers—Noel Till, for all of his, well, wonderfulness—and, you know, these were people who, to my mind, had made an imprint at various conferences, at books, and so forth, but nothing struck me the way it did.
00:41:28 Speaker_00
Their books, I guess you could say, settled into my bones with the meeting of them and talking about what they had done.
00:41:37 Speaker_00
And I think that that is something that helped kind of transform my view both of astrology and what it means to practice it, but also I began to look at, well, what am I doing here? What am I doing when I sit down with people? Some.
00:41:57 Speaker_02
Right. Yeah. In rereading, I guess, two points,
00:42:02 Speaker_02
I have two reactions to what you're just saying and the story you're telling, but one of them is that I was struck in rereading and revisiting the interview I did with Jeffrey in 2015, just in reading his book from 1994, how widely read he was and how much of the history of astrology that he'd gone back and studied, but not just the history of astrology, but also the history of
00:42:28 Speaker_02
philosophy and thought, and that is something that's unique because this is like 1984. So this is really before a lot of the traditional and certainly before the Hellenistic revival had really gotten going, and yet he's already got a pretty deep
00:42:45 Speaker_02
insight into some of the ancient authors and what was going on back then, which allowed him to critique the contemporary conceptualizations of astrology because he could see how different the contemporary conceptualizations were compared to, if you take it back to the first century or so,
00:43:03 Speaker_02
And then the second point that I thought was interesting and that I'd forgotten about until I re-listened to the interview with him was that he actually started, he came into astrology with a background in divination already because his original focus had been things like tarot, the I Ching, and even having a background in magic.
00:43:25 Speaker_02
So that really informed how he came into and perceived astrology, already having this background in divination. And I think that's a really crucial point in his biography.
00:43:35 Speaker_00
It is. And it was one of the things that when he met me and asked how I got into it, and I told him that story, I told you about the astrologer picking me up. And of course, his immediate remark was, oh, well, she was your daemon.
00:43:49 Speaker_00
She's the one that brought you into astrology. But he loved the fact that I'd had this period of about two years of ferment where I'm looking at I Ching, I'm looking at tarot, I'm looking at other systems of divination, and
00:44:05 Speaker_00
Yeah, before I settled on astrology. Oh, he said, oh, that's very important. He said, it's very important because, you know, you were entering it through a lens of divination. I said, I didn't think so at the time.
00:44:20 Speaker_00
And it did appeal to me because it had this kind of mechanistic language that I think appeals to any beginning astrology. You kind of see this, you kind of go, oh, this kind of adds up.
00:44:31 Speaker_00
One of the first things I did, like a lot of astrologers do, once I had my chart, I was like, oh, wow, let me look at the day my mother died. Pluto was exactly, I mean, partile to a minute square of my sun.
00:44:44 Speaker_00
Now, this is the kind of thing that is kind of like, oh, Pluto, death, oh, oh, you know. And I look at that, well, so that's one of these things you think, oh, this is true. This is literally true, rather than this is a very powerful symbol
00:45:01 Speaker_00
of what was happening to me when my mother died in 1971, and the kind of change that I was going through, as in my last year of college, undergraduate year, and the profound impact that had.
00:45:19 Speaker_00
But yeah, so that notion of divination, and that he was so taken, not only by tarot, he said he had done tarot readings as a teenager,
00:45:30 Speaker_00
He got into I Ching, but that was a more serious pursuit, because then he began reading Taoist philosophy, and he began to read about the philosophy of the I Ching. So that was a more thoughtful engagement for him, and then he encountered Jung.
00:45:45 Speaker_00
He said at 20, and I'm thinking, holy shit, before the age of 20, he's already reading Taoist philosophy? He'd already done tarot readings, and now he's reading Jung? But he said Jung didn't appeal to him as an astrologer.
00:46:02 Speaker_00
He knew there's some astrological symbolism. It was more Jung as the symbolist, as somebody that dealt in symbols. So he thought that was important. But for Jeffrey, divination has to do with the reading of symbols. So
00:46:19 Speaker_00
of the first people to understand the significance of Jeffrey's work philosophically was Patrick Currie. He called it hermeneutical astrology in his radical astrology papers. These were written, very important paper by Patrick, and
00:46:36 Speaker_00
written in 1981, just prior to him going back to graduate school to do his history of science, where he basically wrote his first book on 17th century astrology. And in these papers, the radical astrology paper, they're privately printed.
00:46:56 Speaker_00
Most of them were completely abstruse, written by these kind of frustrated academic astrologers. Patricks was probably the most lucid, in which he said, look, there are these different schools of astrology.
00:47:07 Speaker_00
There's a scientific school, there's a psychological school, there's a structuralist school, and there's a hermeneutic school. And so he discussed the philosophy of each of those.
00:47:21 Speaker_00
He revisited those basically in one of his later books in which he basically got rid of structuralist astrology that nobody was actually using other than like three people or something.
00:47:32 Speaker_00
But the hermeneutics went to the heart of the matter because he knew that Jeffrey had studied Gadamer and had studied, you know, various people Heidegger, very importantly. And so
00:47:51 Speaker_00
He knew that Jeffrey had studied, if you will, the theory of interpretation or what it means to unpack an interpretation. So this was not just some guy who said, oh, cast a few charts and here's what I've found.
00:48:05 Speaker_00
This is somebody who was looking at astrology with a completely, completely different lens that had to do with what kind of deep truths could it yield to a person.
00:48:19 Speaker_02
Right. Yeah.
00:48:20 Speaker_02
And that notion of symbolism and symbolic thinking, and once you have that breakthrough that astrology isn't working through the planets causing things to happen, but instead it's acting as signs or omens of things that are happening, then you start to think about that and delve into the nature of symbolism and what that means and how it works and how fluid that can be.
00:48:46 Speaker_02
And that's where I think things get really interesting in terms of starting to lean into that conceptualization and see what you can do with it. And there's a lot of really interesting things there.
00:48:58 Speaker_00
Yes, there are. And it's not—here's what I'll say. Even at the end of his life, Jeffrey said, I'm still working on this. I really want to get this done. I mean, to those of us who knew what he had done, it was like, wow, you have done so, so much.
00:49:16 Speaker_00
But to him, there was always more to do. This was the great unfinished task. And to him, it had to do with, we need to look at different ways to understand what it is that we are doing when we interpret a horoscope. And so he used multiple approaches.
00:49:37 Speaker_00
So if you will, what's interesting, by the way, so you mentioned, yes, 1994, the substantial work for a moment of astrology had been done basically between
00:49:51 Speaker_00
1978 and 1986 is what he says, and I think the series of the Moment of Astrology series, which we do have posted on Cosmocritic, those six articles are really a deep read, but it's the first time really where he talks about not just the stellar determinism of somebody like Claudius told me, but then he also then looks at
00:50:19 Speaker_00
hermeneutics, basically, and looks at what it is that we're trying to accomplish. So this is his first attempt to put together a philosophy of astrology, and to him this was an ongoing
00:50:34 Speaker_02
I was really interested in that in your review of your paper that opened my eyes to something I didn't realize, because I always kind of date the moment of astrology to 1994 as this landmark publication. But in reality, it's partially what it is.
00:50:54 Speaker_02
There was a series of articles they published in the 80s which really outlined a lot of those views already, and then the moment of astrology to some extent represents him bringing some of those previous articles together into a singular book.
00:51:08 Speaker_02
I didn't realize that as fully as I could have until somewhat recently, but it made it more interesting to me realizing that his thought developed and he built it up over a period of time before it eventually culminated in the book.
00:51:22 Speaker_00
In my essay on him, Defining the Moment, I talk about the English astrological context, and I try to give credit to say, look, this is not some loner out here doing this all on his own.
00:51:34 Speaker_00
He did this in the context of a group of other people and other astrologers, but not just astrologers. There's Michael Shallis, who is a physicist, Angela Voss, who had a PhD in Renaissance music,
00:51:47 Speaker_00
certainly astrologers, a number of psychologists who are at the Philadelphia Association, but his first significant paper, divinatory paper, is the anti-astrology signature, which is 1978. That's a full 15 years
00:52:04 Speaker_00
before Moment of Astrology was published. So that 15-year period was the germination.
00:52:10 Speaker_00
But you truly see between 1978, that publication of that first paper, which, by the way, I deeply unpack in a forward I write to it on Cosmic Critic, because I look at that because it's such an important paper.
00:52:26 Speaker_00
It's the first time that he's kind of saying, look, This is not an astrology of causes. It can't be.
00:52:33 Speaker_00
I am looking at a chart that was picked at random in an attack on astrology in 1975, and it was published in the Humanist magazine, and I'm taking that map and showing how, through directions and through other astrological techniques, it times the attack itself.
00:52:57 Speaker_00
And it's like, whoa, so where's the causation here? Where is the, you know, what is, where's the thing that's making this happen?
00:53:08 Speaker_00
So the fact that by 1978, Jeffrey, in the lodge, reading, doing a lot of horary astrology with Derek Appleby, and using horary techniques to unpack this anti-astrology signature map, that to me is, the watershed moment.
00:53:27 Speaker_00
It's his time, if you will, of unbelievable kind of, when I say discovery, I don't want to put him in the line like an Einsteinist. This is somebody who had a different way of seeing what we're doing. And
00:53:43 Speaker_00
the importance of that paper is that if somebody goes back and looks at it, and then you look at what else was being published in 1978, there's nothing like it. It is hands and feet away from anything else that was out there.
00:53:59 Speaker_00
So Patrick's naming of it as hermeneutic astrology certainly gave it a nice label, one that Jeffrey did embrace. But what Patrick could not quite capture was just how unusual what he had done was. Patrick did understand that.
00:54:18 Speaker_00
It's interesting because Patrick had worked, as had Jeffrey himself, with John Addy on the Harmonics Project. A lot of people say, well, gee, was Jeffrey always like this?
00:54:28 Speaker_00
Jeffrey was helping John Addy sort through data on his Harmonics Project, sitting on the floor, sorting through things, counting up this.
00:54:41 Speaker_00
Jeffrey had a great interest in seeing if astrology could have some, quote, scientific or harmonic or other kind of foundation. He ultimately didn't think it did.
00:54:53 Speaker_00
he loved the fact that there are people out there theorizing and saying, there might be a different way of looking at what we're doing.
00:55:02 Speaker_00
And yet his, to my mind, is the one that I think is stand—when I say standing the test of time, we're still—it's very, very early on in this, in terms of this—but
00:55:16 Speaker_00
I talked about his work in terms of Thomas Kuhn's book, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that the way a new theory comes to prominence isn't because, you know, the old guard kind of goes, oh, this totally makes sense.
00:55:31 Speaker_00
It's because the old guard dies out and newer, younger people come in and say, oh, I'm not so wedded to the old ways of doing things. Oh, oh, this is interesting.
00:55:42 Speaker_00
So Jeffrey loved teaching beginner students, and he loved teaching non-astrologers how to see symbolism. And that's some of what he did at the University of Kent, was this notion of getting people to see symbolism at work.
00:55:59 Speaker_00
And when he could do that, nothing made him happier than to have a beginning student, a non-astrologer go, oh, I get it. Neptune in Taurus
00:56:10 Speaker_00
in this guy's chart he's an earth mystic oh you know that's the kind of seeing that jeffrey felt the astrologers needed to be able to do is to say what we're doing sometimes is very very basic but it's very profound because the way the the world or as we like to say it now the cosmos is speaking to us yeah i have a um
00:56:38 Speaker_02
I don't know if this would be a good time to mention it, but to illustrate what we're talking about, we're talking about it acting as an omen or a symbol. You know, this week, you're about to fly out in a couple of days.
00:56:54 Speaker_02
So we're recording this on Sunday, September 15, 2024. And in two days, on the 17th, you're going to fly out to the UK for the funeral and for Geoffrey's funeral, and you're going to give the primary eulogy there for him.
00:57:08 Speaker_02
And I was really struck by the fact that this is taking place the week of a lunar eclipse in Pisces that's happening on the 17th. And I was struck by that because I know he was born within 24 hours of a solar eclipse in Capricorn the day he was born.
00:57:28 Speaker_02
And it made me think of earlier this year, I did an episode on Proclus, who was a philosopher and astrologer. He was one of the last great leaders of the Platonic Academy in Athens around the 5th century.
00:57:48 Speaker_02
His biographer and his student, way back then after Proclus died, he has this story about how there was an eclipse that took place that year that was really conspicuous in that area.
00:58:02 Speaker_02
And that this eclipse was seen as an omen of the death of Proclus that occurred around the time that he died.
00:58:13 Speaker_02
Proclus or Marinus, his biographer actually has this statement about it where he says, when commotions such as this are seen to occur in heaven, they are said to be significant or signs of occurrences on earth, and we take them as portents of the deprivation, as it were, the eclipse of the light of philosophy.
00:58:37 Speaker_02
So what Marinus is saying is that the eclipse symbolically represented the light of philosophy being eclipsed or snuffed out when his teacher Proclus died, and that it was a loss for the world.
00:58:52 Speaker_02
And I thought that was really interesting because one could make a similar sentiment about Geoffrey, who's the astrologer and philosopher of our time in some sense,
00:59:03 Speaker_02
and this eclipse that's happening that's going to coincide with the week of his funeral.
00:59:10 Speaker_00
You know, I went back after you said that, and I cast the chart for the solar eclipse for January 14th, actually the day after, but yes, within 24 hours of Geoffrey's birth, for January 14th, 1945, set for London, which is his birthplace.
00:59:25 Speaker_00
And the map's extraordinary, because two of the outer planets, Neptune's at the midheaven, and Uranus is at the seventh cusp. So the fact that it kind of has this, you know, Goklan effect, but not with any of the planets.
00:59:43 Speaker_00
Goklan has anything to do with Neptune and Uranus. But what's important actually is Mars in Capricorn rises in this map. It's got 10 Sagittarius rising.
00:59:55 Speaker_00
Mars in Capricorn rises and makes an applying and a doubly applying square to this prominent Neptune. And because Neptune's retrograde, To my mind, that is a beautiful symbol for the energy and the work that Jeffrey did about divination.
01:00:16 Speaker_00
So Jeffrey, I don't think many people would think, oh, when they think of Jeffrey, he was such a saturnine figure, which there is that element to him, you know, double Capricorn, if you will.
01:00:27 Speaker_00
And that his writing for many people, I say, oh, it's dense, it's forbidding, it's whatever. When you got to know him, there's a lightness to him. And like I say, Neptune, he loved the notion of Neptune and divination.
01:00:42 Speaker_00
And if you look to Moment of Astrology, he has a couple of chapters in there in which he discusses psi, psi influence, and Neptune itself and its role in divination. So when I look at this map,
01:00:57 Speaker_00
I love the fact that we have this prominent Neptune at the midheaven. And if there's any message that Jeffrey brought to astrology and the world of astrologers is that
01:01:12 Speaker_00
Astrology is more peculiar, as he said, more irrational, more irregular than our woolly theorists would have us believe. And he loved that. He loved that about astrology, that it could not be pinned down to this nuts and bolts science.
01:01:31 Speaker_00
Oh, well, if you have this, then that. So when I look at this eclipse map, I think, oh, I think he would love that.
01:01:40 Speaker_00
And the fact that Uranus is at the seventh, if you will, in the map, so kind of his public, you might say, if he's the rising sun, if he's the Jupiter in this map, also up in the ninth.
01:01:54 Speaker_00
that I think he would actually appreciate that as an omen, if you will, for his influence. To anybody who, by the way, wonders if Geoffrey had much to do with eclipses, he had a wonderful talk on Genghis Khan.
01:02:08 Speaker_00
You'd have to go to the archives of the Astrological Association. He gave a talk about Genghis Khan and his rampage across Asia. And he talks about several eclipses at that time. And I do not have the particulars in my mind right now.
01:02:25 Speaker_00
I still have it on cassette tape. But it's a wonderful talk. And again, it's filled with the kinds of historical and philosophical kind of insights that Geoffrey is known for. But
01:02:38 Speaker_00
He was very impressed with how eclipses, as omens, seem to announce certain things to us, to a wider world. So this would not be something he'd go, oh, this has nothing to do with me.
01:02:54 Speaker_02
I think that's a good sort of access point for understanding notion of omens, because eclipses are probably one of the earliest things in our history.
01:03:07 Speaker_02
In some of the Mesopotamian literature, they say that there may have been a series of three kings who all died on eclipses, basically, and that this may have been a pivotal moment where the Mesopotamians started really paying attention to celestial omens and starting to record them, which then leads to the entire tradition of astrology eventually developing as a textual tradition.
01:03:31 Speaker_02
So, But to go back, because Jeffrey is not just rejecting the idea of causation, of planetary causation as being the root of astrology, but he starts getting into other critiques as well.
01:03:49 Speaker_02
He says that astrology is participatory, that he starts critiquing this notion of the moment of origin as well, and a number of other things as part of his critique.
01:04:04 Speaker_02
I guess I should explain part of my background where I got really into Jeffrey's work, in addition to just reading the book, is I got on this trip for a few years about researching the origins of horary astrology.
01:04:16 Speaker_02
I noticed this thing when I started reading the Hellenistic text, which is just
01:04:22 Speaker_02
we don't have almost pretty much any Hellenistic astrological texts that are dedicated to horary, even though horary became such a major part of the subsequent tradition in the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
01:04:36 Speaker_02
Even in modern period in the 20th century, when horary was often not emphasized and looked down on.
01:04:43 Speaker_02
You could still find a few texts like Ivy Goldstein Jacobson or other people like that who'd written something on horary, but in the Hellenistic tradition, it was noticeably absent.
01:04:56 Speaker_02
So I picked up on this, and I thought it was important because it impacted Jeffrey's work because he used horary as the access point to say that horary is the same as all other forms of astrology, including natal astrology.
01:05:12 Speaker_02
But what I realized later is, I think that horary did exist in a proto form in the Hellenistic tradition, because there are a few traces of it starting to emerge out of the electional tradition using the term katarki.
01:05:27 Speaker_02
But one of the points that I made to Geoffrey when I first met him in 2008 at the United Astrology Conference in Denver was that
01:05:35 Speaker_02
He didn't even need, from a historical perspective, to argue from the point of view of divination, even though that's the most compelling thing to us today.
01:05:43 Speaker_02
But it's easy to just go back to the Mesopotamian tradition prior to Ptolemy, where even natal astrology was explicitly practiced as a form of divination.
01:05:55 Speaker_02
so that you can make a similar argument just from that direction or use that way to make the same argument and you sort of get to the same place.
01:06:06 Speaker_00
Well, you know, to go back to what you said about the eclipses as omens, he would have loved, and I know he did this, the simplicity of, especially a solar eclipse, the sun being eclipsed.
01:06:19 Speaker_00
And if we think of the king, whether they have the sun, the sun sign in Leo, the king is a solar presence, right? So the eclipsing of a sun will be the darkening of a solar presence, or in this case, the king.
01:06:35 Speaker_00
So is that an omen that they will die, be deposed, whatever, that they raise important questions, right?
01:06:44 Speaker_00
Enough so that, what, by the time of the Romans, they began banning the use of astrology, certainly banning its use of, you know, casting the Caesar's horoscope or casting a leader's horoscope, because they said, well, whether it's
01:07:01 Speaker_00
true or not, it has great symbolic power for those who believe it. So to them, they felt like this is something that we do need to control, that we do need to kind of put some guardrails around. And
01:07:18 Speaker_00
So, but, yeah, I think, again, I'm getting a little lost here. I think the eclipse material is a nice entry into looking at astrology as a symbolic practice.
01:07:33 Speaker_00
I love the fact that you brought up Katarki, because that was one of those things that, of course, the initial moment he introduced that notion of Kotharki, to my mind, to modern astrologers.
01:07:45 Speaker_00
There might be a few specialists who say, oh, I knew that phrase. But he resurrected that. And of course, he said it had both technical meanings and then also kind of more everyday meanings. But to Geoffrey, it meant the sense of initiative.
01:08:00 Speaker_00
And of course, it had those connotations of beginnings and origins and whatever. And But for him it also had to do with this notion of participation and initiative, and maybe that's a lead-in to when you say about participatory astrology.
01:08:16 Speaker_00
He felt like all good astrology did require the participation of those who got involved with it, whether they were people having their horoscope read, or whether they were the readers of that horoscope.
01:08:31 Speaker_00
But what it did mean was that they needed to be, that they needed to, they needed to need each other, I guess is what I'd say about that.
01:08:40 Speaker_00
They needed to see this as what it is, which is a powerful frame of reference that potentially can shed light on a situation.
01:08:50 Speaker_02
CB Right.
01:08:51 Speaker_02
That's something I've always struggled with his work because that was one of the things he started trying to argue in the book that I don't know that I agree with because I think he took it to the point of saying that there is no objectively occurring astrology for the most part when it comes to most of the things that we're doing in the same way that
01:09:10 Speaker_02
with a tarot card reading. There is no tarot card reading until the two people sit down and the reader is asked a question by the client, and then they cast the cards at that moment, and then it becomes
01:09:27 Speaker_02
infused with symbolic meaning that's actually relevant to the two participants.
01:09:33 Speaker_02
And he made a similar case with Hori, for example, where most of the time, it's an astrologer receiving a question from a client, and then you cast the chart for that moment, and then it becomes symbolically significant as an omen at that moment, but it otherwise wouldn't exist without that participation.
01:09:51 Speaker_02
And I can see why he's making that argument coming into astrology you know, from the different fields of divination like tarot and I Ching, and then having horary becomes so important.
01:10:03 Speaker_02
But there's this tension that I have because it does seem like there is this difference with astrology where the planetary movements are objectively occurring out there regardless of whether we're paying attention to them, and that might become a key
01:10:21 Speaker_02
point of discussion and debate about Jeffrey's work and legacy is the extent to which... First, I guess I need to understand more to the extent to which he was saying that there's not an objective astrology occurring out there independent of participation, and then two, how astrologers feel about that and to what extent that's true versus to what extent one might argue that there is.
01:10:45 Speaker_00
So you might want to look. Gary Phillips did an interview with Jeffrey. I think it showed up in Mountain Astrologer. Is astrology divination, and does it matter? Again, we have it posted. It's an interesting interview. It was done in 1998. And
01:11:01 Speaker_00
You know, Gary, having a background in philosophy, decides to tweak his nose and say, well, gee, okay, so couldn't we just randomly pick any line in Ephemeris and say, well, this is it? Or do we even need a chart?
01:11:15 Speaker_00
Could we just kind of deal with chart cards or something? And Jeffrey said, look, that goes too far. We do need the structure that astrology provides us. So for him,
01:11:28 Speaker_00
It was very important that the, if you will, the objective, if you want to say the objective side of it, is the fact that the planets are out there whirling in the heavens, that we can cast a horoscope, and that all astrologers say, well, as long as the software is right, or the ephemerides and table of houses are correct, we will get a map that we agree on.
01:11:51 Speaker_00
Now, scientists might say, well, we agree with that, we just don't think you'd get any meaning from it. So, but he said, so there is this objective thing.
01:11:59 Speaker_00
But it's important for people to know that the moment of astrology is the moment the astrologer takes up the interpretation. So go back to the thing about horary. Is there, is every horary potentially useful? No, it's not. And in fact,
01:12:18 Speaker_00
He was one of those people that lamented the fact that when Horry started to, so Horry was no place in the late 70s. By the time, by the mid 80s, at least in the UK, Horry had come into its own.
01:12:34 Speaker_00
Then the journals started filling up with Horry articles that had these questions like, is AIDS—this is a horror question—is AIDS caused by man? That'd be the horror question. Or is the Bible the work of God, the words of God?
01:12:52 Speaker_00
And Jeffrey wrote a rejoinder, he's called Horrible Horror, I would encourage anybody to read, in which he said, this is a travesty. These people have no standing to ask these questions. Meaning, somebody who's asking, is the Bible the word of God,
01:13:09 Speaker_00
well, who are they to God? Who are they to the Bible? Or with AIDS? Who is this asking? So what he fundamentally rejected was this notion that there is this objective cosmos out there that had the right answer.
01:13:26 Speaker_00
What Gary Phillips had said, you know, the astrological version of Google. You type in a question and there's your answer. That, you know, Gary rejected that. Jeffrey certainly rejected it.
01:13:41 Speaker_00
So what he said is the horoscope by itself does is not a guarantee of anything. And just because somebody asks a question, well for one thing,
01:13:53 Speaker_00
because again this is something else that people got to know him were like wait a minute he called himself so he talked about two forms of astrology what he called open and closed forms and he was more of a closed form guy at the beginning and by closed form it meant he cleaved to held to the rules of for instance horary astrology that if there's strictures against reading the map
01:14:17 Speaker_00
whether it was the moon was void of course, whether the rising sign was in the first three degrees or the last three degrees of a sign, whether Saturday was in the seventh, these various strictures, the map should not be read, and that to read through a stricture was a mistake.
01:14:35 Speaker_00
He said, was there a time, would there be a time, a very good, experienced astrologer might do that, maybe, but he said the frame of reference must be respected.
01:14:48 Speaker_00
So for him, the astrology, the astronomy of it, if you will, the planets, where they were moving, where they were in the houses, where they were in the signs, where they were within relation to each other,
01:15:00 Speaker_00
that needed to be respected, and yet it needed to be framed as not...it might be objectively out there, but the astrology was not objectively out there. The astrology was the interpretation of
01:15:17 Speaker_00
the objective signs, and now it's been put into the world of people. So he would say, this is the moment of astrology, when you say, as I did a few minutes ago, you know that rising Mars in that eclipse map,
01:15:32 Speaker_00
wow, that's his work, that's his energy, squaring Neptune at the midheaven.
01:15:36 Speaker_00
Oh, so his reputation, a 10th house matter, well, it's technically in the ninth, but conjunct the midheaven, his reputation is one in which his work spreads the word of Neptune, of divination, of mysticism, of elusive weirdness about astrology.
01:15:54 Speaker_00
Be like, yep. So he might disagree with, particulars of my take on that. But he'd say, it's a reasonable take. I'll go with that.
01:16:05 Speaker_02
Right.
01:16:05 Speaker_02
So you were talking about like the considerations before judgment and underlying that is the notion, and different astrologists have different positions on how closely or not to adhere to those, but underlying it is an issue with horary of radicality and that
01:16:22 Speaker_02
moment of the divination and of casting a chart is supposed to be this important, somewhat pressing, charged moment. And if you meet those conditions with a horary, that it's a singular, unique moment in time that has
01:16:37 Speaker_02
personal, especially deep significance to the person, that the chart cast for that moment will speak to that moment for some mysterious reason.
01:16:47 Speaker_02
But if you start asking arbitrary or pointless or other types of questions or that there's sometimes rules to divination, and that's true for other forms of divination where it's like you can't just ask the same question 10 times in a row and expect
01:17:05 Speaker_02
each of those divinations to be useful or to give you something that's going to be valid, and that there's something similar in horary where there's this importance of having a uniqueness to the moment that's charged in some way and that it will speak to you if it meets that condition.
01:17:24 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Thank you so much for saying what you just did. It's so important, I think, that there is something about certain moments we know in our lives that become charged.
01:17:35 Speaker_00
And for astrologers, we might check or watch and go, wow, what's going on here? And we might later on cast a chart for it. He thinks the most important
01:17:47 Speaker_00
The most important work goes on when people have, he wouldn't say an emotional stake in the game, but I will, where people are moved by something, it matters. astrology is the Bible, the Word of God.
01:18:05 Speaker_00
Well, somebody might say, well, I'm deeply religious, I want to know. Well, that's fundamentally unknowable. He'd say, this is not the province of astrology.
01:18:12 Speaker_00
And anyhow, the question is poorly framed, and it's not impertinent, but it's just, the person has no standing to ask it. But if somebody says, you know, I opened the Bible,
01:18:26 Speaker_00
and I saw this passage and it had such deep meaning to me, he would say, now you might be onto something.
01:18:34 Speaker_00
So it has to do with you, that, if you want to call it a bit of bibliomancy, opening the Bible to a random passage and finding great relevance, he'd have no problem with that.
01:18:44 Speaker_00
He'd say, you know what, that's exactly how divination works, that when people have this need, it gets answered. Now, whether people can derive the correct answer correct, he would even hate my use of that.
01:18:58 Speaker_00
Whether they can get meaningful information from that is something apart again.
01:19:04 Speaker_00
So, Gary loved to ask people, William Lilly's favorite, one of those phrases, those that are near, I'm gonna paraphrase here, those who are nearer to God basically render more accurate judgments.
01:19:19 Speaker_00
I think what Gary was getting at, what Lily was getting at, and I think what Jeffrey would say is that sincerity, spiritual sincerity, I'd call it, is fundamental to doing good work. And
01:19:35 Speaker_00
I think one of the major ways that I've changed as an astrologer is when I'm sitting down with somebody, once I've cast their chart, and yes, I will go look at what Rob Han says, I will go look at even like some midpoint, I will go look at a lot of different things, what Arroyo might say, something, but then kind of sit with the chart myself and think,
01:19:57 Speaker_00
what is this person asking and how can I best be of use to them? That's how I see my role. And I don't want to make it sound grandiloquent, but I want to say that I am trying to act as a, I guess you'd say, step-down transformer from the cosmos.
01:20:14 Speaker_00
I mean, that's what we astrologers do. We're saying, the cosmos has meaning, which is in distinction, contradistinction to what the physicists say.
01:20:23 Speaker_00
We're in a universe of random matter, molecules moving around, there's no meaning to it, it's run on the laws of physics. And we have to say at some level there's some truth to that, but there's another level
01:20:38 Speaker_00
whether we want to call it behind that, beneath that, on top of that, wherever it is, but it's not there, that interpenetrates that, and it's our mission to basically find that juice, and to the extent we can, to put that in language that can be helpful to other people.
01:20:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, for sure. For sure. Well, and it goes back to, I think, something we're trying to articulate was that we're talking about moments of symbolic significance.
01:21:05 Speaker_02
And that's where we get back into that term, katarki, which he picked up and was so fascinated by and made such a central part of his argument that, for example,
01:21:17 Speaker_02
you know, when two people get married, it's like the moment they say, I do, is a moment of symbolic significance that is charged.
01:21:26 Speaker_02
And that sometimes people will cast a chart for that moment, for example, in the idea that that chart will act as an omen that has something significant to say for the future of the couple that got together at that moment.
01:21:40 Speaker_02
But it's the symbolic charge of that moment that's important in some ways.
01:21:46 Speaker_02
and that you have also a similar thing with the moment of birth, where sometimes people get caught up about issues of conception versus birth, but the importance of the moment of birth is that is the most symbolically significant moment where the individual, the baby, starts their life separate from the mother.
01:22:09 Speaker_02
and that astrologers since the 5th century BCE have been taking their omens from that moment in order to tell them something symbolically significant about what will happen in the person's life.
01:22:22 Speaker_02
And when you start understanding that that's what you're looking for, is these important moments of symbolic significance, then you really start to understand what you're doing, I think, a little bit more clearly than if you get into the weeds about
01:22:38 Speaker_02
looking for um different like like a causal nexus of things or something like that.
01:22:44 Speaker_00
Yeah exactly. You know yeah that that's such uh I mean all astrologers know that.
01:22:52 Speaker_00
I think this is one of the things that Jeffrey uh loved about astrology and astrologers is that regardless of whether they agreed with him he knew that anybody that engaged in astrology seriously not just some
01:23:09 Speaker_00
casual kind of thing, but that they were wrestling with these issues, whether they knew it or not, and that the more they practiced, the more they found that astrology had that mystifying, sometimes deceitful quality, but sometimes just almost revelatory quality.
01:23:26 Speaker_00
It's like, oh my goodness, the symbolism speaks so profoundly and so specifically here. And I think that's the thing that is, I think, maddening to people who read his book, who see it largely as a critique.
01:23:45 Speaker_00
and do not see a lot of the wonderful symbolism and chart work that is in that. And anybody who wonders that, his judgment about his aunt and the house that the tenant moved into and refused to move is such a powerful map.
01:24:05 Speaker_00
It not only led to the development of the company of astrologers, those group of people who counseled him on what to do and gave him advice about what to do.
01:24:14 Speaker_00
But as I pointed out in my defining, this is a map that was not cast at the beginning of an enterprise. The guy had already been living there for a while. It wasn't cast at the end. It was cast at a particular moment that Jeffrey found significant.
01:24:29 Speaker_00
And I think anybody looking at that map and reads it, there's multiple levels of symbolism in it. And in that way, he loved the multivalent quality of symbols, that they could operate at different levels.
01:24:45 Speaker_00
So Derek Appleby said, oh, well, your aunt's going to have to testify in court. she likes hats. And Jeffrey said, well, my aunt was a very theatrical woman in her younger days. Well, it turned out that Appleby was right.
01:24:59 Speaker_00
How he got that determination that she would have to testify in court, he doesn't specify. But this is the kind of thing, it's like, Jeffrey didn't think he was right. He was like, how can he possibly know that?
01:25:13 Speaker_00
that, but anybody looking at the moment of astrology should actually take some time and look at some of the horoscopes in there, and how he discusses them. Because I said that that situation of his aunt's house had a personal effect on him.
01:25:32 Speaker_00
It was his only primary inheritance that he was going to receive. And if this guy basically wrestled away more than half of that, well, Jeffrey was having none of it.
01:25:45 Speaker_00
What I love in A Moment of Astrology, he talks about that as the moment of sun and Saturn, you know, the moment of magic, the crisis of magic, he calls it. And it reminded me of what he had said earlier about Heidegger, being and time.
01:26:05 Speaker_00
Being was the sun, time was Saturn. So that's why Jeffrey saw him as an important hermeneutic astrologer. Not that he was an astrologer, but that he helped Jeffrey find a way in. So Jeffrey would look at these symbols on multiple levels.
01:26:22 Speaker_02
One of the things that keeps coming up, I feel like, that don't know if he talked about, but it seems like Jeffrey's understanding of the history of astrology and the history of ancient philosophy, it reconnected him.
01:26:36 Speaker_02
And one of the things he was trying to do was reconnect astrologers with this view of the cosmos that was animistic and which allowed for things like augury and other types of divination.
01:26:51 Speaker_02
Augury was like a common form of divination through the flight of birds in the ancient world that it could be symbolically significant in the right moment of indicating something about the future.
01:27:03 Speaker_02
And it seems like that's a large part of what he's tried to do with the book is just reconnecting people with some of those ancient views that allowed for a cosmos that was infused with meaning and with purpose in some ways.
01:27:18 Speaker_00
I'll give you, yeah, maybe I'm telling tales out of school. I don't think so. There's a woman named Alison Bird who wrote a thesis, a PhD thesis on astrology in education. She did this back in 2003 or four.
01:27:35 Speaker_00
Lovely, lovely dissertation that's on our site. And anybody who wants to see what astrology in education was like, I'd recommend it. But this just happened. So Jeffrey dies. And Alison said she got a notification. So her name is Alison Bird.
01:27:56 Speaker_00
Her father was a lover of birds. And recently, there was a bird who had been trapped somehow and was released and allowed to fly away. And Alison had become aware of this. The bird's name was Mr. Cornelius. So you can't make this stuff up.
01:28:18 Speaker_00
So this is within days of Jeffrey dying, she hears of this bird named Mr. Cornelius, who is set free and allowed to go to the heavens.
01:28:28 Speaker_00
And Allison is very aware, as I am, and I'll remind any of our listeners, that one form of augury was divination by birds.
01:28:38 Speaker_00
And indeed, Jeffrey talks about that, you know, that one of the fundamental ways of looking—we're screeing of livers, right, looking at liver divination, but divination through birds, which ways they flew and so forth, and what did that mean.
01:28:53 Speaker_00
I think Jeffrey would have been fundamentally touched by the fact that a bird that somebody has named after him who knows nothing about him,
01:29:03 Speaker_00
helped free a bird that's allowed to fly away to the heavens, and that Alison took as a gesture of the heavens, or of the world, if you will, saying goodbye to Geoffrey, with this bird being freed to find its own way.
01:29:23 Speaker_02
Yeah, and with things like that, it's incredibly charged for the person that experiences the symbol and experiences the omen in the moment. And I think that's what's important because subjectively, that's a very powerful
01:29:39 Speaker_02
thing that just happens within the person's field of view and within the person's consciousness that has the most power to them subjectively who's experiencing it.
01:29:49 Speaker_02
And there's like a second level of us hearing that story and it being kind of striking. So if somebody was to say, like a scientist was to come along and say, okay, well, does a bird die
01:30:04 Speaker_02
whatever that's symbolically significant every time somebody dies or something like that, then you see what the disconnect is of attempting to test things like divination scientifically, which you can't, versus that it's still this legitimate phenomenon that sometimes there are these omens
01:30:24 Speaker_02
sort of come out of nowhere that can speak to a person subjectively, and even if it's not something that's repeatable under a controlled environment that doesn't take away from the symbolic charge and importance of the moment, especially to the individual who's experiencing it at that moment in time.
01:30:42 Speaker_00
Right, so who was the moment for? In this case, it was for Alison Byrd, who had done a big study of astrology. She took an anthropological viewpoint, or sociological viewpoint, broadly speaking.
01:30:55 Speaker_00
Knew Jeffrey, found his work challenging and difficult, had sat in on some of the company's classes. Of course, she sat in on a number of classes, because she wanted to get this broad view of what how one gets educated as an astrologer in England.
01:31:11 Speaker_00
So she sat in on, you know, the various schools of astrology, and that's kind of what her dissertation's about. She clearly was touched by Jeffrey's work in a different way, and she knew that there was something different about him.
01:31:26 Speaker_00
So in that case, that omen was for Alison alone. She said, I'm getting choked up—brought a tear to her eye because it reminded her of him, and he had been important to her at that point, that point being 15, 20 years ago.
01:31:46 Speaker_00
And so that omen was for her, but I retell it to say that the world of omens It's more common than we know, and I think we all have them, but we tend to brush them aside.
01:32:04 Speaker_00
And what Jeffrey was saying is, and Maggie still says, is we need to pay attention to them because they tell us things not only about the world but about ourselves.
01:32:16 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm thinking of this quote I can't find right now from Cicero where he's trying to describe the Stoic approach to divination. And he says that certain signs precede certain events.
01:32:29 Speaker_02
And that's in the predictive function, obviously, but there's also a sometimes simultaneous function as well of it coinciding at the same time. And that's kind of where we get into some of what Jung was wrestling with when it came to synchronicity.
01:32:47 Speaker_02
But so this brings it back. One of the things I like, you mentioned that she struggled with his work a little bit, and that is interesting because I
01:32:56 Speaker_02
Jeffrey's book is important because it's one of those books, to me at least, that has a profound impact on you, but it's an ongoing impact because you revisit it periodically at different parts in your life, and you come to new realizations about it at different stages as you grow and develop in your thinking, and that you end up having a relationship with the book that goes through stages itself.
01:33:19 Speaker_02
And part of that is sometimes wrestling over parts of it that maybe you think are really compelling and other parts that you're not so sure about, and at different stages maybe agreeing or disagreeing with different arguments.
01:33:35 Speaker_02
But nonetheless, it still creates this intense relationship with the book itself that almost has a life unto itself.
01:33:44 Speaker_02
So going back to one of the things you were saying, though, that I thought that was interesting to me, it always struck me as a tension in the book, is that he did try to argue that astrology is participatory it's more subjective.
01:33:58 Speaker_02
There's a less objective component to it than we're used to thinking. But then on the other hand, he wanted to argue that it's not arbitrary and that it's not a situation where anything goes.
01:34:11 Speaker_02
And I think that's a central tension in the book and tension in his argument about divination because
01:34:16 Speaker_02
I think it's easy to think then, if you do accept some of those arguments about it not having an objective validity or needing to be participatory, that one could start to think that there must be some arbitrariness to it, or that anything could go to some extent.
01:34:35 Speaker_02
But I know that that's something that he would push back on, right?
01:34:39 Speaker_00
Right. Again, that interview with Gary in 1998 is interesting. I reread this just recently to remind myself of that. He said, look, I'm talking to you, Gary, that way, and to what I know will go to a group of astrologers.
01:34:57 Speaker_00
When I teach beginner astrologers, he said, of course I teach the signs and the planets and the houses. I want people to know how to do progressions, how to look at transits. He said, I act as if it has this kind of objective validity.
01:35:12 Speaker_00
He said, you can't proceed otherwise. You have to do that. One of the things that he, so in the moment of astrology, he has that argument of the hermeneutic circle, but it goes back to basically medieval theology and philosophy.
01:35:28 Speaker_00
But one of the houses that Jeffrey thought was completely underrepresented in astrology was the sixth house. So he called that the house of Technique, or Technē, to use Heidegger's term for that. And he said, you know what's really interesting?
01:35:48 Speaker_00
When we think of the mutable houses, of course everybody goes, oh, the third house is the lower mind, the ninth house is the higher mind, the twelfth house is the mystical mind, the sixth house is the what?
01:36:00 Speaker_00
oh, okay, it's the mind of, you know, craft. And he said that is such an important thing for people to have an education of astrology like it's a craft. Is it like shoemaking?
01:36:15 Speaker_00
I'm not a shoemaker, but he really felt like people needed to respect the framework and to treat it as something that needed to be studied and understood and not forgotten but kind of moved through, if you will, the hermeneutic circle.
01:36:32 Speaker_00
So everybody would go, well, so a third house understanding of astrology, oh, that's, that's, you know, Venus and Taurus means this. Oh, so the sixth house has to, oh, that's, what would the technique be that you'd use with Venus?
01:36:46 Speaker_00
Like, would you see what domicile it's in? Well, Yeah, what would you do? Would you look at when it's in its fall? What kinds of things would affect a reading? What's the ninth house? Oh, that's the higher side of it.
01:36:58 Speaker_00
So of course, Geoffrey saw astrology itself as a ninth house pursuit. Philosophy and astrology, he put it in the same boat, the same astrological house.
01:37:09 Speaker_00
But he thought that ultimately maybe what we're aiming toward is some kind of 12th house spiritualized astrology. He certainly thought Alan Lear was moving that direction. He thought most astrologers ultimately did.
01:37:23 Speaker_00
But he really felt like in the work we do, he said, am I a mystic astrologer? He said, well, I'm an astrologer that wants to help people in the here and now.
01:37:33 Speaker_00
He said one of the things, one of the issues he took with the Dane Rudger, with the humanistic school broadly, not just Dane, was this notion that, oh, well, we're not going to have any truck with helping people with their relationships or the messy little details of everyday life.
01:37:47 Speaker_00
To him, that was the stuff of astrology. The thing that made astrology matter for people is if you could come up with an interpretation, help him think through an issue using the symbols of astrology.
01:38:02 Speaker_00
So to him, that was not only, that was a justification for astrology, is that you were down in the everyday details of life, and that sometimes those details reflected very
01:38:17 Speaker_00
prominently or significantly in the symbolism itself, and that any astrologer you pointed out to would say, Oh, I see that. Oh, I get that. Yeah, I agree with you. Not sure if I take the next step with you, but I agree with that. So to him,
01:38:32 Speaker_00
The gift of astrology was this notion that you took something third house that you studied, that you might have a philosophy about, a ninth house thing, but you certainly had a craft aspect to it, a sixth house approach to it.
01:38:46 Speaker_00
And I remember when I pointed out to him some of Stephen Arroyo's comments about that in Astrology, Psychology, and the Four Elements, about the sixth house. He loved that, and he said, well, point me to that.
01:38:57 Speaker_00
Because he was always hungry for anybody that he might have overlooked or not seen something and said, oh, I should have known other people would see this. You know, he always wanted to find out who had seen what he had seen before him.
01:39:12 Speaker_00
So in that way, he was very willing. I want to go back to something else you said about the history of. So Jeffrey, I still remember when Project Hindsight came out, and he subscribed to that.
01:39:25 Speaker_00
And he was so excited by the work that, you know, that they were doing, the three Roberts were doing.
01:39:34 Speaker_00
And to him, he always felt like, wow, the work I did, as I said in my recent essay on him, it was done the old-fashioned way, libraries and stacks and friends lending him books.
01:39:48 Speaker_00
He would write to professors, not email, but write to them and say, I see you wrote this. Is this what you really think? And Yeah, so his work ethic was extraordinary. He did not bother with social media.
01:40:05 Speaker_00
He did not bother with, and yet to the end of his life, he became very fascinated with things like AI, very fascinated with the way the world was changing. But he was a fundamental believer that you needed to hit the books.
01:40:19 Speaker_00
You needed to think about, not just read, but you need to think about what you did. So I think your perception of him I think he'd like that, that you have a renewed appreciation that this man did the hard work.
01:40:33 Speaker_00
Will his future historians find refinements on that? Did you find refinements? He'd say, have at it, I'm all for that. You know, this is what I found in the 80s when I was doing this work. This is to the best of my knowledge what I could find.
01:40:48 Speaker_00
And yet, you know, Again, I think he was always very appreciative of the work that other people did and wanted to kind of knit that into whatever he had come up with, if he thought it had relevance.
01:41:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, for sure.
01:41:05 Speaker_02
It's something I have a greater appreciation of now that I've been in astrology for, what, 25 years now is appreciating what are the resources that a person had available to them at the time, and how well did they construct their argument based on that, and how well did they push the available resources that they had to their fullest extent.
01:41:29 Speaker_02
And with Jeffrey's work, I think you can see somebody who pushed
01:41:32 Speaker_02
every single available resource that he had at the time to its fullest extent and was able to draw some amazingly insightful conclusions, even though all of the Hellenistic astrological texts or all of the medieval astrological texts hadn't been translated at the time.
01:41:51 Speaker_02
that there was only a handful of them that had. And yet with that handful of texts, he was actually able to draw some conclusions that still stand up strikingly well to this day, and that have been borne out in some ways by subsequent translations.
01:42:07 Speaker_00
No, that's nice to hear. Yeah.
01:42:08 Speaker_02
Yeah. So that's one thing that I... I'm really impressed by in terms of that.
01:42:14 Speaker_00
Well, two of the people he drew to him, Vernon Wells and Graham Tobin, were both pretty decent Latin scholars. And Jeffrey and those two gentlemen, as well as Charles Burnett,
01:42:29 Speaker_00
and a couple other people were part of a translation group in the early 1990s looking at some of these texts.
01:42:35 Speaker_00
So of course Charles Burnett, you know, is one of the one of the deep scholars, right, of ancient astrology and ancient and up to Renaissance astrology, worked with Dorian Greenbaum on her dissertation, and yet so here even he
01:42:55 Speaker_00
appreciated what Jeffrey was doing, and what Graham was doing, and what Vernon were doing, you know, and helping them with this. And Jeffrey was always embarrassed about his lack of languages, if you will.
01:43:09 Speaker_00
So he'd meet these great professors of astrology. I mean, these are people who study astrology. They're not astrologers themselves, but who study it. And yes, they spoke German and they spoke French. And of course, they had Latin and they had Greek.
01:43:23 Speaker_00
And he's like, you know, who am I? Who am I? And I said, well, Jeffrey, who are you? You're somebody that's thought harder and longer about the actual nature of astrology more than these guys have.
01:43:35 Speaker_00
And, you know, he got invited by Dorian Greenbaum to an academic conference in Erlangen, Germany. And of course, there's all these, you know, the heavyweights there. And I won't name names here.
01:43:48 Speaker_00
And, you know, they wanted to do—oh, well, we got somebody who's proficient in Chinese astrology, here's somebody who's good in ancient astrology, here's somebody who's Renaissance.
01:43:58 Speaker_00
Let's have them stack up and see which one's the best, the most accurate. And Jeffrey's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute here. No, no. He said, I really—we're not—I'm not going to be party to that. He said, this is not what we're going to do.
01:44:16 Speaker_00
He said, I don't—that fundamentally goes against my understanding of divination. It's the unique case of interpretation. It's not, oh, well,
01:44:26 Speaker_00
We did better than Chinese astrology on predicting who's getting divorced, but we did worse than the Renaissance on which kings get a flop or something.
01:44:36 Speaker_00
To him, that was a complete misreading of the tradition, and to my mind, I think he was schooling them in that.
01:44:45 Speaker_00
And I said to him, I don't care how many languages they speak or have read these texts in, they have a fundamental misapprehension of the way astrology functions as divination.
01:44:57 Speaker_00
And I said, and that's why Dorian wanted you there, because you have an understanding through divination as praxis or practice that none of them can touch. You know, and I still hold to that. I still hold to that. And astrology is listing this.
01:45:19 Speaker_00
If I told you that Jeffrey Satterthwaite falls right on my, within a degree of my natal uranus, which is conjunct my son, they'd go, wow, he was always throwing. a limitation or a wet blanket on top of you.
01:45:32 Speaker_00
He would be—but I think he liked the fact that I would say these very Uranian things and say, come on, Jeffrey, please. And he'd be like, in that way of his, Kirk, Kirk, we've got to bring them along, bring them slowly along,
01:45:47 Speaker_00
develop a dialogue, and soon they will see. I'm like, God, Jeffrey, these guys are not gonna see. Anyhow, that's the kind of relationship that we had. He liked the fact that I'd push him, but I appreciated the fact that he would say, look,
01:46:04 Speaker_00
If you want to bring people along who do not share some of your fundamental assumptions, the key is a respectful dialogue, understanding where they come from and nudging them toward your point of view. And that's what he did.
01:46:22 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was impressed when I met him in 2008 because I had just published my paper on the origins of horary, and I partially challenged some of the assumptions that he was making about the prevalence of horary in the Hellenistic tradition.
01:46:35 Speaker_02
And he was remarkably humble and open to hearing those critiques and not getting defensive or anything like that, but genuinely had an open mind and was interested in hearing
01:46:46 Speaker_02
critiques of his work, I think maybe partially because he sometimes, I assume over the course of his history, would incorporate things like that. And that's something I can tell
01:46:56 Speaker_02
the interview that I did with him in 2015, is that sometimes he would take criticisms seriously in the sense of something he needed to pay attention to and factor into his thinking, and sometimes maybe even alter his thinking in order to better account for, and that's something I really respected him for.
01:47:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, I always meant to do outline. I think I told him at one point I was going to outline some of the critiques that I had with the book, and that was something that he encouraged me to at the time, but I never got around to it.
01:47:31 Speaker_02
Although doing that interview with him in 2015 was one of the I've already said it's one of the most important interviews I've done in the entire 400-episode series, but it was also one that I intended to do from day one.
01:47:45 Speaker_02
I had a few books that were so important and impactful to me that I knew I wanted to interview and do a really good treatment to outline and share that with my audience to help pass that forward to the next generation.
01:47:57 Speaker_02
And doing that interview with him was one that I was glad I got to do in episode 53. Right, right.
01:48:05 Speaker_00
That was such, yeah, that was a very key, key interview. And again, to your readers or listeners rather, on Cosmocritic, we have an hour long interview of Jeffrey by, it's a, I guess you'd say an interrogation by Patrick Curry.
01:48:21 Speaker_00
And at this point, this is late 2022, we did this. Patrick had engaged with Jeffrey 45 years earlier, back in the Lodge days. So it was a really wonderful completion of the circle.
01:48:34 Speaker_00
But anybody listening to that will also not only hear him, but actually see him and see his thoughtfulness through this whole thing, that when he receives a question that's challenging, he really thinks about it.
01:48:49 Speaker_00
That other thing that you mentioned, he said, if you know some really good criticism of what I've done, I really need to hear this. It's really important for me. And he was always encouraging that.
01:49:04 Speaker_00
So, for instance, John Addy, the last piece he ever wrote for the Astrological Journal, which in one of these strange little twists of fate was actually shepherded into existence by Patrick Curry.
01:49:24 Speaker_00
John died in 1982, but it was his he, John Addy, attacking astrology as divination, and Geoffrey said in his book and afterwards that it was the most significant critique that astrology as divination has taken on to date.
01:49:44 Speaker_00
And he thought it was very important. So anybody could go read that article. We've again got a post on Cosmocritic. But once again, Jeffrey was not like, oh, well, this is John Addy who has done harmonics and we're not subscribed to that.
01:50:00 Speaker_00
It's like, no, this is a guy who's been an astrologer for a long, long time, who broke away from the Lodge and helped found the Astrological Association, a deeply philosophical guy. I don't agree with him, but he definitely bears listening to.
01:50:17 Speaker_00
And so that's who he was.
01:50:21 Speaker_02
I think one can recognize the importance of a book and laud its importance and impact on your thinking without necessarily agreeing with all the conclusions.
01:50:31 Speaker_02
In some ways, that's actually the hallmark of a great book and argument when you acknowledge how much it influences and challenges your thinking and challenges you to wrestle with the arguments in order to define your own position.
01:50:43 Speaker_02
I think that's actually one of the greatest things about it, as well as just his openness and attitude towards hearing those challenges and adapting to them. Right.
01:50:54 Speaker_00
One of the things that Gary Phillips had said to me afterwards was, I think the practice of astrology, or the practice of astrology by astrologers who have written, read Jeffrey's book, will probably get worse before it gets better.
01:51:14 Speaker_00
And I said, you know, Gary, you put your finger on something. Because I said, after reading his book, I thought, should I even be doing natal readings?
01:51:22 Speaker_00
know, because Jeffrey did not, and again I'll turn people's attention to that interview with Gary, is astrology divination, does it matter? And he asked him that question, and Jeffrey's like, I don't do straight out natal readings.
01:51:36 Speaker_00
He said, I look, I cast a natal chart, but My most effective way to be with somebody is to consult with them around a problem or a question where he can use horary, and yes, tie it back to the natal.
01:51:50 Speaker_00
So he thought the natal was very important in that way. He did not believe in just sitting with somebody and saying, here's a reading of your horoscope for all time. He just didn't think that was necessarily an effective or useful thing to do.
01:52:07 Speaker_00
So it did make my readings worse for a while because it undercut my confidence as to the fundamental nature of what I was doing. It's like, well, God, I've been doing this for 15 years. Maybe I should stop. But that's not what he said.
01:52:21 Speaker_00
And that's not what he meant. And I had to rethink that. So yes, it did get worse before it got better.
01:52:29 Speaker_02
Right. I mean, yeah, his approach is definitely most uniquely suited for horary and maybe electional.
01:52:38 Speaker_02
Because one of the things he emphasizes philosophically, I mean, one point actually I would make is where astrology is at today actually in terms of the contemporary discourse, especially with younger astrologers, has never been more suited to his work because he was light years ahead of
01:52:55 Speaker_02
He was talking about astrology and magic, which has become popular over the past decade. He was talking about astrology and diamonds, which has become popular, and jinn, which has become popular over the past decade.
01:53:07 Speaker_02
He was very focused on astrology as participatory, potentially magical, but also rejected determinism. I was actually in rereading some of his stuff. I was really interested in the extent to which he rejects determinism.
01:53:26 Speaker_02
of fate-oriented or fatalistic thinking and really emphasized, and he even took it back to the Mesopotamian tradition in pointing out rightly that the purpose of astrology as divination in Mesopotamia was to find out the omens or find out what the future was so that you could change it or so that you could attempt to mitigate it in some way.
01:53:47 Speaker_02
The right action, yeah. that seemed really core to his philosophy.
01:53:52 Speaker_02
One issue, though, is in doing some of that, I think, for example, one of my critiques is that he tries to reject what he calls the doctrine of origin, and I think he conflates that a little bit too much with the causal and naturalistic model of astrology
01:54:10 Speaker_02
that is attributed to Ptolemy. But in fact, going back at the very least to the 5th century BCE in Mesopotamia with the invention of natal astrology, they're already taking their omens from the moment of birth.
01:54:26 Speaker_02
So even though it's explicitly still a type of astrology that was being practiced as a type of divination, this is part of sort of a challenging thing is not everything is Ptolemy's fault.
01:54:39 Speaker_02
I think he was right to put a lot of the causal approach to astrology on Ptolemy, but a lot of the focus on time and the focus on time and the starting point of things having an objectively symbolically significant moment of origin
01:54:59 Speaker_02
is something that predates him and maybe goes further back in our tradition. And some astrologers might argue it was more fundamental to what astrology is than it might seem at first, especially if one's focusing primarily on horary.
01:55:14 Speaker_00
I think the transmission of astrology, what Geoffrey, I think, would have said is there's Ptolemy, and there's the way that Ptolemy got wedded to or welded to Aristotelian kind of notions of the world and Aristotelian physics.
01:55:30 Speaker_00
And I think by the time of the Renaissance, people like Ficino and Pico della Manderola are able to see this stellar determinism and kind of what they call the petty ogres of astrology. And so I think that for Geoffrey, it was that by the time
01:55:53 Speaker_00
of the Renaissance, when astrology is coming back into the West in a big way, that it was hard to see beyond—nobody was talking about Platonic astrology.
01:56:05 Speaker_00
Well, the Neoplatonists were, but they didn't kind of come back till later, so, I mean, till like 3rd or 4th century AD. But that when astrologers look back, they go, well, it's really, you know, the Tetrabiblos. That's the Bible.
01:56:20 Speaker_00
That's the book we all go back to. And so to him, I think that Doctrine of Origins gets hooked in with, yes, with Ptolemy, with the things that he said, and with how his astrology then got transmitted to the West.
01:56:37 Speaker_00
Yes, through the Arabs somewhat, but, you know, by the time of Lilly, you know, I mean, you know, Jeffrey's one of those people that thinks that Lilly, he does a rereading of Lilly and says, you know, I don't think he was a determinist astrologer.
01:56:52 Speaker_00
The fact that horror is one of his main contributions to Western astrology. So he gives Lilly a divinatory reading that some people could take issue with.
01:57:02 Speaker_00
But I think his point was that people needed to unhook themselves from this idea of stellar determinism and that if X happened and touched Y, then Z would inevitably result. And I think that was the challenge that he made.
01:57:19 Speaker_00
I'm very intrigued by you, because I don't keep up with what younger astrologers do. I'm reading charts of some younger people, but I don't keep up with what they do. I don't follow astrology on the internet.
01:57:31 Speaker_00
And so in that way, I'm a typical boomer dinosaur. But uh you know I think uh I I think he'd be heartened by that because he kind of wondered what future does astrology as divination have.
01:57:47 Speaker_00
And one of the last the last email I wrote to him basically about a month before he died was to say for people for whom it matters will always be those people, and you have to trust that.
01:58:01 Speaker_00
I'm going to appeal to the historian, and these things go out, they go in and out, there's these trends, you know, and sometimes things come to the surface, and sometimes they ride in the background, but they remain
01:58:16 Speaker_00
There's a connection, a golden thread, I think is how somebody described it.
01:58:23 Speaker_02
To bring that back around to something we're talking about and something you made me realize is that part of what he's arguing is that astrology is not just an extension of physics,
01:58:33 Speaker_02
And that's why he's rejecting the causal model, and that's partially why he's rejecting the machine of destiny, as you said, but instead that it's evidence of an animistic cosmos that speaks to you. And it seems like that's really his core thing.
01:58:47 Speaker_02
But his rejection of determinism was a very core characteristic thing for him. And he was especially rejecting the notion that everything's fated or predetermined and that you can't do anything about it.
01:59:01 Speaker_02
and rejecting that, especially that the planets are causing or forcing that to happen.
01:59:07 Speaker_02
There is a bit of an issue where even before Ptolemy, there was a strong Stoic element in astrology where a lot of astrologers did view everything as predetermined, but the Stoics themselves still used divination.
01:59:21 Speaker_02
And in fact, they would point to divination and point to it as evidence of their thesis that that everything was predetermined through a providential ordering of events, and that sometimes the cosmos would show signs or omens of these future events.
01:59:37 Speaker_02
And that's one of the reasons how you know that things are predetermined. And I think that's one area where I think it's important to unhook the notion of
01:59:49 Speaker_02
the doctrine of origin from Ptolemy because it's something that is not just restricted to the causal view, but is also potentially something that people could be using even in a divinatory standpoint.
02:00:01 Speaker_02
And I think one of Geoffrey's primary objections is that he didn't think that everything was predetermined.
02:00:07 Speaker_00
Right, right. No, he did not. Yeah. Boy, there's so many ways to go with that.
02:00:13 Speaker_00
But, you know, I mean, obviously the Stoics, I mean, the Stoic philosophy says that even when we call somebody a Stoic, right, they bear the burden that the world has, you know, is putting them through.
02:00:27 Speaker_00
And so in that way, you know, was Geoffrey a Stoic? I'm not sure. I think he, clearly felt like astrology could lighten the burden for people if was, would I say, done properly. It's odd because, you know, again,
02:00:48 Speaker_00
his view of things was, he's one of the most thoughtful astrologers I've ever met, and yet there was part of him that was open to the anarchic quality of a symbol showing itself unexpectedly, that we could call Uranian, that I think he appreciated, or sometimes would be Neptunian, that made its way, you know, through the crevices.
02:01:13 Speaker_00
I think many people would be stunned to find out that Jeffrey had a group called Spirituality and Gambling with the company, and they used to bet on racehorses, which is really big in England.
02:01:24 Speaker_00
And, you know, he had a couple of times, they had a couple of times where they picked a winner. Well, was it done through precise astrological technique? No, it was done through something much more
02:01:37 Speaker_00
like, oh, well, this is a horse with a strange name, and this astrological signature even suggests that name. So we're going to go with that horse. And they won a 50 to 1 odds, and y'all got a payout.
02:01:48 Speaker_00
Well, to him, the payout wasn't that they won, though he liked that. But it was the fact that this weird, you know, bit of omenology, if you will, kind of manifested in the world.
02:02:03 Speaker_00
So he would have never said, oh, by the way, stick with me and I'll make you a rich person. Win or lose, he thought it was an important thing for diviners to sometimes test their mettle, if you will, against the world as we find it.
02:02:19 Speaker_00
But mostly, I think that had to do with helping people with what I just call the problems of being human.
02:02:28 Speaker_02
CB Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, that goes back to some of the horary stuff I think we were talking about earlier about when is a horary valid if a person's using it for an emotionally charged moment of importance in a person's life versus when is somebody trying to apply it
02:02:48 Speaker_02
to something that's not that important and not that significant? And when is the astrology going to work and be resonant versus in what instances is it not?
02:02:57 Speaker_02
And different horary astrologers have widely different opinions on that view or on that issue because some say that horary always works and it never stops working no matter how
02:03:14 Speaker_02
seemingly insignificant the question and then others say, no, it has to be restricted to a certain set of criteria in terms of how important the question is or other things like that.
02:03:26 Speaker_00
Right.
02:03:27 Speaker_00
So, you know, from his background in the I Ching, he thought that was a misuse of the I Ching to kind of say, oh, should I throw an I Ching, should I throw the Euro sticks to determine whether I should have eggs or cereal this morning for breakfast?
02:03:44 Speaker_00
I mean, he's kind of the trivialization of divination. He felt like oftentimes just they just didn't show anything. Same thing with horror. He thought, you know, if people say, oh, should I buy this house? And the horror, he had a stricture.
02:04:01 Speaker_00
Then he said, then they would say, oh, well, when does, when's the stricture over? I'll ask again. And he was like, no, just, you know, when, when, when it moves you again, why don't you ask?
02:04:16 Speaker_00
he felt like it was an important thing for astrologers, again, to respect that frame and to say, I can't give an answer to that. I cannot give an answer to that. Well, why? Well, why? Well, the chart just won't allow me to do that.
02:04:35 Speaker_00
And so to somebody who does not share a divinatory framework, who has the celestial form of Google, oh, what's there on tap, I turn it on. This is going to be a mystery. But to somebody who thinks that we need to respect
02:04:55 Speaker_00
certain times and places as, this is not the time for that, this is not the place for that, or you don't have the standing to ask that question. Secondary horror is, oh, my friend's girlfriend is thinking of leaving him. Do you think she will do it?
02:05:10 Speaker_00
Well, what does that matter to you, right? And so, you know, to him, part of our education with people is to say, well, tell me how this matters to you. How does this matter to you? Because could you read a chart like that through derived houses?
02:05:27 Speaker_00
I'm sure you could. But to him, I think he bridled against people that treated divinatory frameworks, whether it's tarot, whether it's I Ching, whether it's astrology, whether that was dowsing, which he did, by the way, as a misuse of those practices.
02:05:47 Speaker_00
And So, you know, again, that's just kind of who he was. You want to call out a Capricornian hard-nosed guy about it? I guess you could call it that.
02:05:57 Speaker_00
I would just say this is somebody who was into a philosophical framework that he felt needed to be honored, that if you looked into the tradition and you embraced that tradition and you studied it, you needed to honor it.
02:06:12 Speaker_02
That makes sense. One of the things I wanted to mention that I've been thinking about for a long time is that I think is important and tied in with this notion of divination is the element of chance.
02:06:24 Speaker_02
So every form of divination, most of the major ones in history,
02:06:31 Speaker_02
they all have this element of chance that's built into them where with tarot cards, for example, you shuffle up the cards and then at the moment of the inquiry, the cards are pulled and there's this element of randomness to it.
02:06:48 Speaker_02
But that in seeming acts of randomness, that there's actually meaning and purpose and
02:06:56 Speaker_02
significance to the cards that are drawn at that moment that will both speak to the moment and what the person's inquiry as well as potentially speak to the future or speak to whatever they're inquiring about in terms of that.
02:07:09 Speaker_02
So that's an element that's true in tarot. It's also true in, for example, the I Ching where you cast the yarrow sticks or the coins and then It's random, it's seemingly random, but out of that randomness, there's actually meaning and purpose.
02:07:31 Speaker_02
I don't remember if he goes into this, I don't think he does, but I think that's the element that I've been
02:07:38 Speaker_02
dwelling on for about 10 years now about how astrology is tied in with divination is to the extent that it is, it's that element of chance that's really important. And the element of chance is obviously there with horary, for example, where
02:07:56 Speaker_02
the chart is cast for a random moment, and the random moment is the moment that the astrologer receives the question from the querent, whether that's the querent coming to them and asking the question at a certain moment.
02:08:10 Speaker_02
And then the randomness is that the astrologer
02:08:16 Speaker_02
essentially takes a snapshot of the sky in that moment, which is constantly turning with all of the planets moving, sort of like a lottery ball where you have all the little balls bouncing around, and then you pull out a ball that has a number at that moment.
02:08:34 Speaker_02
In the same way, a horary chart is freezing things at that moment and then saying this moment and the alignment of the planets in it is symbolically significant for this moment and for what's being inquired about and for the future.
02:08:48 Speaker_02
with horary, that's really obvious. But I think there's an element of that in natal astrology as well, because most of the time throughout history, that moment is random and it's not controlled.
02:08:59 Speaker_02
It's just the moment that a person is suddenly born after obviously gestating for a certain number of months, But even today, doctors, for the most part, don't know exactly. They can't predict the exact moment that a person's going to be born.
02:09:15 Speaker_02
There's an element of it most of the time that's outside of anybody's control, and it just happens at a more or less random moment in time.
02:09:25 Speaker_02
And then an astrologer can cast a chart for that moment, and the chart will speak to the nature and the quality of the person's life as well as their future.
02:09:36 Speaker_02
So I think this is important because if that element of chance is built into things as a core component, then that also becomes one of the reasons why astrology may not be able to be tested scientifically because it's based on this notion of randomness having a meaningful component.
02:09:57 Speaker_02
But randomness is something that scientific studies try to control for and try to exclude because they're trying to test something else. They're trying to test things that stand out from randomness and that are meaningful in a different order.
02:10:15 Speaker_02
I've been trying to figure out how to articulate that for a decade now, and I don't fully have it down.
02:10:20 Speaker_02
But I think there's something there that gets to the heart of some of the issues that Geoffrey was bringing up and some of the issues of why the question of astrology is divination, why that's still ongoing and important, especially recently where there's still occasionally studies coming out about astrology and still astrologers discussing this question of whether astrology can be validated scientifically.
02:10:43 Speaker_02
Do you know if the element of chance in divination ever came up in Jeffrey's work?
02:10:48 Speaker_00
Chance in divination. What I do know, and again, the interview with Gary in 1998, he talked about in the early days, he would cast arrow sticks and then do a chart reading for the time the arrow sticks were cast.
02:11:05 Speaker_00
Similarly, he did similar kind of tests or confirmations, or whatever you want to call them, with tarot. he did not find those productive, and he said it was not helpful. He was mixing his metaphors, if you will, divinatory metaphor.
02:11:22 Speaker_00
One would think, wait, if there's something to this, shouldn't they both, shouldn't they all say the same thing? But nobody thinks that a visual
02:11:30 Speaker_00
form of divination like tarot with its pictures of different type, different imagery, is the same thing as Mars squared Neptune in the heavens. You know, so there's a different kind of a dialogue that's going on.
02:11:46 Speaker_00
So, and similarly with the I Ching and the hexagram, there's a fundamental beauty to that, kind of almost a mathematical austere beauty to the I Ching and the 64 hexagrams and how they relate to one another.
02:12:01 Speaker_02
Right. I did an episode recently with Benebel Wen on astrology and the I Ching. And one of the things she argued was that divination that you create, that people create a construct for divination and then things are projected onto it. And I had a
02:12:19 Speaker_02
disagreement about whether we debated whether astrology fit that because there, in my opinion, is sometimes an objective component to astrology that is occurring out there regardless of our awareness of it, and that this becomes the most clear in natal astrology or studying eclipses in history or long-term historical cycles or things like that.
02:12:44 Speaker_02
And I think that's a real area of
02:12:47 Speaker_02
discussion and debate, which is what is the extent to which divinatory systems do create a structure, a framework, and then imbue that with meaning, but that it's not something that's otherwise objectively occurring out there before it's created?
02:13:04 Speaker_02
And to what extent does astrology truly represent that, or is that just part of astrology? Something I think about with astrology is in ancient astrology, it used to be associated with the planet Mercury,
02:13:17 Speaker_02
And Mercury always plays this vacillating role where it always has one foot in each side of an issue, where if there's a binary issue, then Mercury is always both. So that's true with
02:13:33 Speaker_02
gender, for example, with Mercury, that it can be masculine and feminine or with sect that it can straddle the line between day and night or between benefic and malefic.
02:13:44 Speaker_02
And for me, that realization has led to a sort of guiding has been like a guiding light over the past several years in realizing that when you come into these issues with astrology, where you have a question of is it this or is it that the answer is often that it's both.
02:14:02 Speaker_00
Exactly. So, you know, interesting, Mercury, right? Hermes, hermeneutics, right? The company of astrologers, they loved referring to Mercury as the trickster, right? The trickster is this person who changes guises. Who are they? We're not sure.
02:14:21 Speaker_00
They are who you need them to be in this circumstance, in a different circumstance, they might appear differently. So I think Jeffrey would say that to the degree that astrology is a hermeneutic art,
02:14:34 Speaker_00
trickster is at play, thus when he said it's sometimes more deceitful than we think.
02:14:40 Speaker_00
Tricksters deceive people and that's part of their mission, but part of their mission is to deceive people to help them see a different truth or maybe a larger truth. So this issue of do we live in a fated cosmos? Or do we have free will?
02:14:57 Speaker_00
Or is it something in between? Well, it's a bit of both, right? We see that. I mean, Jung has that famous line, you know, that free will is basically doing what we're fated to do willingly, which could just be wordplay.
02:15:10 Speaker_00
But it's that knife's edge between, did we have to do this? Did the world do this? So in a completely determined world, there is no chance. And then that takes that out of the equation, right? There is no chance.
02:15:25 Speaker_00
So somebody does something trivial with the I Ching or with a horary reading or whatever, and it's just like, well, this is a silly person who does not understand what they're playing with. Be like a child playing with some matches and we say, here,
02:15:40 Speaker_00
I need to take this away, you might burn yourself." Well, Jeffrey was never one of these, oh, somebody's going to really burn themselves. But he did think people could mislead themselves with the wrong use of divination by that.
02:15:54 Speaker_00
So this issue of fate and free will is always at the heart of astrology, right?
02:16:00 Speaker_00
somebody you could almost say that the divinatory viewpoint might be that we act as if it's a deterministic world in which we are breaking those bonds of determination to express or to give a client free will.
02:16:15 Speaker_00
Now that's like I can already hear the scientists of philosophy, oh you just want to have it both ways, you just want to have it both ways.
02:16:21 Speaker_00
When the going gets tough you're going to pull out the old escape hatch and it's free will and when things get really bad and Somebody's got a terminal illness, well, you know, yes, it's a fated world we live in. Well, it is kind of both, right?
02:16:36 Speaker_00
I mean, you know, never for a moment would Jeffrey, at the end of his life, have said there's some kind of free will card he's going to pull that's going to get him to escape from a terminal illness.
02:16:46 Speaker_00
Nobody, you know, anybody who thinks that is just engaging in kind of wishful thinking. So these are very, very profound issues, and he wrestled with them constantly. And
02:16:59 Speaker_00
he would frequently counsel me and other people against what he called an equation of orders, the two orders of astrology, fate and free will, determinism versus the signs, and say, you can't equate them.
02:17:16 Speaker_00
We have both, and we shuttle back and forth between them. Sometimes the universe seems like a very fated, deterministic kind of place that gives us a message that's completely unpleasant, if you will, spoken like Saturn.
02:17:32 Speaker_00
And sometimes it's like, wow, we look at people getting away with murder, not literally, but maybe even that, and say, how do they do that? I mean, I'll just, you know,
02:17:43 Speaker_00
Again, I'm trying to avoid talking about people in the news, but you take somebody like Trump and people say, how's that guy keep getting away with it? Somebody would say, well, it's all in his chart. Just look at his chart.
02:17:54 Speaker_00
This guy has that slippery ability to slip out of things. So these questions he deeply wrestled with He counseled against an equation, what he called the equation of orders. He counseled against a premature synthesis.
02:18:12 Speaker_00
Oh, well, he thought harmonics was a premature synthesis. Oh, you know, he is going to explain it all here. He's going to explain the vampses, and he's going to explain, you know, the signs and the houses, and how it's all part of harmonic circles.
02:18:30 Speaker_00
You know, lovely, appealing idea that just does not, I don't think, pan out. So Jeffrey, again, was classically Capricornian in terms of saying we need to respect the tradition, we need to respect the limitations of what divination can do for us.
02:18:51 Speaker_00
And when we start thinking that it's an anything-goes approach, we're off on the wrong foot right away. We're off on the wrong foot. We're not going to get where we want to go if we think, oh, well, I didn't like that horary.
02:19:07 Speaker_00
Let me wait five minutes until Saturday's no longer in the seventh, and I'll ask again. You know, to him, that was just like, it's not that it was cheating fate.
02:19:16 Speaker_00
It was somebody who was fundamentally not respecting divination as a fundamentally human activity. Yes, we all like to think we want our escape hatches when things aren't going our way. But he was like, you know what? Sometimes, sometimes,
02:19:39 Speaker_00
the message from divination is a Saturnian one. It's, you can't do this, or this won't happen. You're not going to get that boyfriend or girlfriend. You're not going to buy that house. And to him, that was all part of it.
02:19:52 Speaker_00
It wasn't, oh, well, this is exactly what the client wants. Fantastic. It's like, what does the divination potentially show?
02:20:02 Speaker_02
Right. In the ancient world, divination was wrapped up and part of the context was notions of fate, that fate existed as a concept.
02:20:13 Speaker_02
There were different views on how extreme fate was in terms of complete determinism versus just partial determinism, but that it existed in that context of believing that there was
02:20:24 Speaker_02
some sort of potential for fate or some sort of potential plan for the world or for people's lives or a narrative that we were following in some ways.
02:20:36 Speaker_02
So it's interesting, you mentioned death, for example, and death predictions, and it made me think of some of his statements about Pico Mirandola and how Pico was like a Renaissance guy or philosopher who put out a big attack on astrology, and then some astrologers in retrospect who
02:20:56 Speaker_02
were kind of being assholes, then predicted that he would die young in his early 30s. There's a pretty tacky response to a criticism of astrology, but then Pico did end up dying very young at the age of like 33 or something.
02:21:11 Speaker_02
But one of Jeffrey's points in his exploration of that and how weird and messed up it was, was in putting that out there, did the astrologers themselves influence the course of events in some way?
02:21:25 Speaker_02
Not in that they had a direct hand in killing Pico per se physically, but he almost seemed to imply whether the intentionality of putting out a prediction like that had any sort of almost magical influence on the course of things.
02:21:42 Speaker_00
Right. Which then goes to that whole notion of, can somebody be cursed? Lily dealt with that. Lily still lived in a world that had witches. And if you look at some of his horrory judgments, they have to do, was the gentleman bewitched? And to Geoffrey,
02:22:01 Speaker_00
you know, the pre-modern world, which again, is that Pico and Ficino in 1500? Or is that, you know, basically the 1780, 1783? Because he, Geoffrey Salmonio Kant, and
02:22:19 Speaker_00
you know, which coincides with the discovery of Uranus, as that fundamental sundering of the world where divination could no longer be could be supported religiously or philosophically or scientifically. That's how he looks at
02:22:37 Speaker_00
basically modern rationalism, you know, coming out of the enlightenment, the enlightenment project as he calls it. So to go back to a pre-enlightenment world, the question Jeffrey asked was, can astrologers
02:22:52 Speaker_00
can we inhabit a pre-enlightenment world with our thinking about magic, about divination, and so forth, and yet still honor modern science? I mean, after all, we fly in planes to astrological conferences. We use computers to cast charts.
02:23:13 Speaker_00
We use all kinds of scientific products and the products of scientific thinking. to help navigate and make our way through the world. He said, of course we must do this. Of course we must.
02:23:26 Speaker_00
We're not living in 1500, or we're not living in 2000 BC, or 500 BC, or whatever. We're living now. And so to him, these questions begged the question. We have to live in the world as we find it. But as he said, the idea that because modern
02:23:48 Speaker_00
philosophy, because science could not find divination, he made that the object of his PhD dissertation, to explore different types of divination, to say, here in the temple of rationality, the modern university, I want to explore this topic.
02:24:09 Speaker_00
I'm gonna use participation mystique. I am going to talk about the work of African shamans and witchcraft people and definers. I am gonna be talking about the cognitive continuum of Barbara Tedlock.
02:24:25 Speaker_00
I am gonna be talking about anybody that I think could possibly shed light on divination. But what I won't accept is that divination does not exist. He says it's one of the most prevalent things. It's everywhere and yet
02:24:37 Speaker_00
recognized nowhere by science or by religion. And that was one of his tasks, really, of the last 15 years of his life, was to see that it was taken seriously by non-astrologers as a fundamental truth of the world we live in.
02:24:56 Speaker_02
Yeah, it's really striking that pretty much every culture develops some form of divination so that it becomes this universal thing.
02:25:05 Speaker_02
And yet, in modern times, it's very unrecognized to some extent for the important role it played in human history and is usually looked down upon in different ways. It's like superstition, basically, like superstitious nonsense that's been redirected.
02:25:22 Speaker_02
But I think that was part of what was so impactful about the moment of astrology is even reconnecting astrologers with the idea that what they might be doing is practicing a form of divination,
02:25:34 Speaker_02
was very shocking and controversial to some extent at the time because there's a large part of the astrological community that was used to thinking of it essentially as an extension of physics that would be validated at some point in time as a natural phenomenon in that way.
02:25:56 Speaker_00
So the other thing that Jeffrey did with the death prediction those astrologers made to Pico is he unpacked it technically and said technically they were off, the symbolism was off, if you went back and looked at the maps that they used as to when he died.
02:26:12 Speaker_00
Having said that, as you put it, they put it out there, and to him that exemplified astrologers being the petty ogres of that world who needed to be condemned for that act. Oh, so astrology is nonsense, therefore I'm going to predict your death.
02:26:30 Speaker_00
You know, to him, that was exactly where astrologers went off the rails at that point to say, well, if you don't accept our stellar determinism, well, you know, a pox on your house and you're going to die soon.
02:26:44 Speaker_00
And, you know, to him, and so by the way, in The first issue, the first volume, the first edition of Moment, not the second one, he talks about a death prediction that was made by another astrologer for a person, and a woman brought it to him.
02:27:08 Speaker_00
They brought it to him on his birthday. He said, he's like, it's the last thing I wanted, but I knew I had to take it up.
02:27:15 Speaker_00
And I talk about it in the Astrological Journal review, not in detail, but to say it's fascinating to me that he felt like this death prediction that he thought was done by an astrologer who was totally out of his depth needed to be answered. Why?
02:27:34 Speaker_00
Because it reminded him of what had happened with Pico and with the astrologers who opposed him, who made a death prediction. He felt like he needed to undo that to the person.
02:27:45 Speaker_00
And so I really wish he had carried that into, I do not know why he didn't put that in the 2003 Wessex edition, but it's a fascinating little thing that I followed down to thought, wow, that is fascinating, this death prediction.
02:28:05 Speaker_00
He could not let that drop. He had to take that up. Call it his son in the eighth, you know?
02:28:11 Speaker_02
And that's definitely a broader issue about, ethics of astrology and what is ethical and what is not and different things like that.
02:28:19 Speaker_02
Although it's interesting, the broader topic of astrology and death is actually a really important one, and it's one astrologers have a specific relationship with sometimes because the way that astrologers use astrology to look at the world and how it gives them this unique perspective on the world when a death does occur in an astrologer's life
02:28:46 Speaker_02
they often will look at it from that vantage point, from the vantage point of astrology in addition to just subjectively experiencing it, but sometimes looking at it and understanding the astrological timing of things.
02:29:02 Speaker_02
I've seen astrologers go through a process that's part of their grieving process in some ways and their way of processing death, but also a way of situating it within the broader context of the person's life and fate and understanding their life story.
02:29:17 Speaker_02
I mean, even us in this episode, we've talked about the symbolic significance and our own subjective
02:29:26 Speaker_02
significance that we're ascribing to that Jeffrey's funeral is taking place this week on the day of an eclipse or the week of an eclipse and the resonance of that. It's interesting how that is such an important thing in astrology at the same time.
02:29:43 Speaker_00
But he would point out that you picked that up and saw that. Nobody else has said that to me. Nobody else has talked to me about Jeffrey being born near an eclipse or dying near another one. You did.
02:29:55 Speaker_00
So you're the one that brought that omen, if you will, to prominence here. It caused me to go cast the chart and then talk about it here. And I really appreciate that you did that. Because without that, It's like, I would not have seen that.
02:30:13 Speaker_00
And believe me, I've looked at his chart, and I've looked at transits, and I've looked at progressions, and you know, the usual things that we astrologers do when we see, you know, our astrological friends going through things.
02:30:24 Speaker_00
So, as I'm sure he had done for me. So yeah, so that is important. You know, death is, it's interesting. One of the big,
02:30:34 Speaker_02
Hold on, let's stick on that eclipse thing for a second. Part of the reason I brought that up is because I've made a special study of eclipses over the past year.
02:30:43 Speaker_02
A year ago, when a bunch of big world events started happening during a set of eclipses last October, I wanted to go back and I did a Google search for what are other times in history that eclipses have coincided with major events?
02:31:00 Speaker_02
Because I think we have this vague idea as astrologers that that's happened in the past as one of the most visible astronomical omens that happens.
02:31:08 Speaker_02
But I was surprised that I didn't find as many articles or people that had actually gone through and researched this. So I actually started going through history and researching eclipses, and I found just this
02:31:21 Speaker_02
incredible set of different major events in history and different people in history that were oftentimes what I found is they would be born near an eclipse, and then some of the most pivotal events in their life would happen around the same time as eclipses, and that there seemed to be this one-week window before and after an eclipse where the eclipse was active and relevant.
02:31:45 Speaker_02
And so I made a special study and have done multiple episodes on that over the past year, so it's become my thing. But then, yeah, so now it's again eclipse season, and that's one thing that I noticed. But to me, there's a subjective
02:32:02 Speaker_02
observational component to that in the moment of the symbolic charge that has to be right now, especially in how valuable Jeffrey Cornelius' work was to me and seeing his death as a major loss to the community.
02:32:17 Speaker_02
But then there's also this objective component to me where I feel like I have done
02:32:22 Speaker_02
sort of level of empirical research of seeing that this may be something that has happened in history many times in the past that can be noticed as an objective correlation.
02:32:34 Speaker_02
And therein is something I'm struggling with a little bit, where I do feel like there is this objective component to astrology, and somehow that needs to be reconciled with the divinatory and symbolic component to astrology at the same time.
02:32:49 Speaker_02
And that's something I would like to find a way to reconcile.
02:32:53 Speaker_00
I wonder if it ever can be reconciled.
02:32:55 Speaker_00
I think that is one of the, why astrology is one of the mystery school professions, if you will, because it has, it provides us with a number of these conundrums, philosophical and very practical as well, that, so for instance, our omens, our eclipses,
02:33:19 Speaker_00
an objective event in the world? Yes, they clearly are. Are they omens? Only to people who take them as omens. I think Geoffrey would be the first to say that. As an astrologer, you do.
02:33:29 Speaker_00
But then you look and you say, so what has happened around times of eclipses? And of course, somebody would say, well, for many, many people, nothing at all. But for this certain people, these very important things have happened, right? And this is,
02:33:44 Speaker_00
of what Charles Carter called the seven great problems of astrology. You know, this notion of at what level do things happen on the mundane level, on the individual level, on the community level. What is that? And what does a map speak to? So
02:34:01 Speaker_00
Nobody could have said, oh by the way, we have an eclipse coming up here in August of 2023, probably be the death of a number of astrologers, maybe including Jeffrey Cornelius. Maybe somebody could have said that. I doubt anybody did. But
02:34:17 Speaker_00
The fact that you saw that retrospectively, retroactively, does not diminish its importance. I think we as astrologers oftentimes see things after the fact, which of course is subject to critique by the scientists.
02:34:35 Speaker_00
They say, well, of course, after the fact, everybody can see these things. Hindsight's 20-20 and so forth.
02:34:42 Speaker_00
I think what you're saying is very important, which is that poor Jeffrey, he came in on an eclipse, he's leaving on one, and to astrologers who see eclipses not just as celestial phenomena that are phenomenal to watch if you're around one, but that they speak to us, they say something else to us.
02:35:08 Speaker_00
And so your study of eclipses is getting you to think they must have some kind of meaning in the world, right? They clearly do. So for now, I don't know if this eclipse that is coming up on Tuesday we'll have other events connected to it.
02:35:27 Speaker_00
We're not there yet, but clearly in advance of it, knowing that Jeffrey's funeral's within a day, because the eclipse doesn't go partial in England until Wednesday, funeral's Thursday, again, day after, but well within range, as you say. So,
02:35:45 Speaker_00
Clearly this has, I think, has an omen sense to it with Jeffrey's funeral. Will I mention that at the funeral? I'm not sure if I will, because I'll be sitting among some non-astrologers as well who are going to say, what are you saying here?
02:36:02 Speaker_00
What are you saying about our friend Jeffrey and how he came into and left this world? Of course, the scientists said, well, he didn't die in an eclipse. He died days before the eclipse. He died on August 27th. This is the funeral three weeks later.
02:36:19 Speaker_00
They could have just set that up so it fell on the eclipse. You can already hear the rationalist critique of that, right? Yeah.
02:36:30 Speaker_02
But as astrologers and people used to paying attention to omens and symbolism, we know how hollow those critiques are ultimately. And I guess part of what I'm getting to is just one of the things I've struggled with over the years in both
02:36:47 Speaker_02
loving and advocating Jeffrey's book and work and viewpoints because of how groundbreaking and how pivotal it was for me.
02:36:56 Speaker_02
There's also still being attention when it comes to classifying astrology as divination, which I'm willing to accept to a certain extent.
02:37:04 Speaker_02
But I think there's a limitation on that where there's something that sets astrology apart because it's basing itself off of objective
02:37:14 Speaker_02
astronomical phenomenon that are constantly occurring out there regardless of our participation and our awareness of it, and yet is still lining up with important world events.
02:37:25 Speaker_02
And that element of it is different from tarot and I Ching because tarot and I Ching, those cards and those coins are not objectively occurring out there until the moment that they are cast.
02:37:39 Speaker_02
So I think there's some sort of mercurial component here where there is a subjective participatory element to astrology, especially things like horary or electional astrology, and even a participatory component to some extent to natal in this sense that we're all making choices about our lives, and we're participating in the unfolding of our life and the direction of our own fate to some extent.
02:38:04 Speaker_02
But there's also this other component where there's something out there objectively occurring that's been coinciding with and mirroring the development of events in humanity over the course of our history for thousands of years, and that can be tracked to some extent with planetary cycles.
02:38:25 Speaker_02
And somehow we've got to find a way to take into account both of those two things, if that's possible, in order to deal with the totality of what astrology represents.
02:38:37 Speaker_00
Right. So natural versus judicial, right? So Geoffrey never denied the existence of natural astrology, which could be, you look at omens,
02:38:47 Speaker_00
You look at eclipses, or you look at any kind of astrological phenomena, and you connect them up to events in the real world.
02:38:54 Speaker_00
He thought that was a fundamentally different thing, very real, something that could be measured, and if people wanted to do that, fine. And he was all for that. But to him,
02:39:06 Speaker_00
judicial astrology, the reading of horoscopes, whether, again, I said this before, electional, natal, horary, whatever, something fundamentally different was happening there. I think that's the trickster aspect of it. That's the hermeneutic aspect.
02:39:22 Speaker_00
That's the Mercury flipping one way. I'm real. I'm here. I'm Mercury in Virgo. I'm planted in the Earth. I'm wheat growing up. Mercury and Gemini? No, no, it's just, that's just a theory. That's just a theory.
02:39:38 Speaker_00
Mercury and Pisces, let's write some poetry about that, right? I mean, you know, we look at this and we kind of go Mercury through the signs. And I think people have written some books on this, you know, has this, what is it?
02:39:51 Speaker_00
What, how do we interpret the world? And so I guess I would say it always comes back to, I think, being very clear. Are we in the world of signs, or in the world of causes?
02:40:06 Speaker_00
Are we in the world of astrology being a natural phenomenon that can be measured and looked at, or in the world
02:40:16 Speaker_00
of divination, of judgments, that you get people intervening between the symbol and the expression of the astrology, again, the moment the interpretation is rendered or made. And I think if people keep that in mind,
02:40:37 Speaker_00
I think astrology is both, but the stuff that I do, sit with people who I've never met or maybe met once or online or something, and read their chart, I don't think that comes out of an astrology of causes. I just don't.
02:40:57 Speaker_00
But, you know, somebody could say, well, you're not saying anything objectively true or real anyhow, so it doesn't matter. So I try not to get too involved with whether that's true or not.
02:41:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, I was surprised in listening to my old interview that he did make room for that.
02:41:16 Speaker_02
He said there may be some kind of natural astrology and causes that could exist, but he thinks that the majority of astrology and what astrologers actually do falls under the medieval category of judicial astrology and that that's divination, most of the apparatus of Western astrology.
02:41:37 Speaker_02
and makes a lot of that distinction. And I think that's important because there's questions about that distinction because natural versus judicial astrology isn't a distinction that always existed.
02:41:49 Speaker_02
It was kind of like a medieval distinction that was brought up in order to designate the type of astrology that was permissible under the Christian church essentially, which is
02:42:02 Speaker_02
idea that the Sun and other planets may have some impact on life on Earth that's almost like biological or physical.
02:42:15 Speaker_02
So there's that distinction versus judicial astrology, which is the act of using astrology to make judgments about things and predictions as a form of divination essentially through the use of symbolic thinking and things like that.
02:42:32 Speaker_02
So that medieval distinction was made and was very important for a long time because that's part of what allowed astrology to survive and persist in a largely Christian context where astrology was looked down upon and divination was rejected as either a form of superstition at best case or a worst case as an act of evil or of the devil or demons or something like that.
02:42:57 Speaker_02
Right, right.
02:42:59 Speaker_00
So, wow, there's so much here. you know, people continue to practice so-called natural astrology, the astrology of causes into the 18th century.
02:43:13 Speaker_00
Well, people continue to do up to the present time, but it was even accepted, you know, by certain scientists, like when the Royal Academy was developed in 1660, they at first would look at astrological ideas and say, well, maybe, let's look at this, let's test this out.
02:43:30 Speaker_00
And you had your first great reform of astrology around that time, saying, oh, well, we need to refine or rationalize astrology. So you've always had those people that will do that.
02:43:43 Speaker_00
Mundane astrology was an area, it's an interesting thing, one of the few times Geoffrey ever got angry with, angry, yeah, he was frustrated with me, was I had raised the question, is there such a thing as a, divinatory mundane astrology.
02:43:59 Speaker_00
I have a background in history. I wrote a long thing, this long piece about the European Union with these time charts, you know, showing the development of the European Union through
02:44:13 Speaker_00
you know, different treaties that had been signed over about a period of 30 years. I felt like the symbolism in the charts was very radical in that sense, meaning they basically well fit, they aptly described what was going on at the time.
02:44:30 Speaker_00
And he said, wonderful. He gave me this, he gave me all this feedback. And six months later, he says, so what have you done with that? I said, well, nothing. He said, you mean I did that for nothing?
02:44:43 Speaker_00
I gave you all that feedback, and he had given me a lot of specific feedback. I said, Jeffrey, I just couldn't push it through. He said, like Myers and Capricorn, that's what you need to do. You needed to push it through. Why didn't you push it through?
02:45:01 Speaker_00
I said, why? Because I got Mars, you and Detriment, and Libra? You tell me. It was beyond my pay grade? It's too hard? There's no such thing? I don't know.
02:45:11 Speaker_00
But I just remember that he thought somehow I could fulfill that promise of mundane divinatory astrology, because he liked this article that I had written. Nobody would publish it.
02:45:25 Speaker_00
And it took on Nick Campion's thing as mundane astrology as a perfect manifestation of cycles in an astrology as causes model. And so You know, is anybody ever doing mundane divinatory astrology? Well, not me, not yet, nobody else.
02:45:46 Speaker_00
But if anything, it showed his ambition. It showed that he wanted that. Did he have reservations about it, that it was nothing more than astrology of causes? Perhaps. you know, why else would he have been so upset? But you know what?
02:46:04 Speaker_00
I took his anger with me as, look, he took me seriously, maybe more seriously than I took myself, gave me, spent all his time giving me feedback, and then hoped that I'd take it away and create some ongoing, you know, contribution to astrological theory.
02:46:21 Speaker_00
I didn't do it. But, you know, I look back on that and think, wow, did I miss an opportunity there? Or, you know, did I just have other things that I felt like I needed to do? I don't have a good answer to that.
02:46:38 Speaker_00
I do know it hurt me that I let him down in that way, but I'm not sure that anybody else had any better an answer than I did, is all I can say. That's a pretty pathetic excuse, and that is what it is.
02:46:52 Speaker_00
But so these questions he wrestled with, and as I said, never had final determinations on, but he was very
02:47:01 Speaker_00
determined on, what do we call it, pushing the envelope, they used to say, with the space mission, pushing the envelope, always taking an idea and pushing it till it could go no further.
02:47:12 Speaker_00
And if that takes taking on the arguments of your enemies and your opponents, so be it. Where else are you going to find, you know, more honest evaluation than people who fundamentally disagree with you?
02:47:24 Speaker_02
Right. Yeah, about that. I mean, I don't think that mundane astrology has to be causal in order to exist or be valid. I think there can be a type of, let's say, acausal, omen-based or at least sign-based form of mundane astrology that can exist.
02:47:44 Speaker_02
In Mesopotamian astrology, that was how astrology originated in the first place.
02:47:48 Speaker_02
It was purely in a mundane context where the celestial omens were viewed as applying to the populace or to the city as a whole, or maybe to the ruler as a representative of the city.
02:48:04 Speaker_00
And looking at plagues, looking at floods, looking at these events that in the ancient world, and really up until modern times, and still devastate countries, devastate populations, kill people, and so forth, have become very important parts of human history and human experience.
02:48:23 Speaker_00
So yes, there is that.
02:48:25 Speaker_02
So one of the things about that, though, is there was a type of empiricism about that because they would record what would happen when a certain celestial omen would show up and then what would happen on Earth.
02:48:37 Speaker_02
And then they started putting together those observations over centuries because
02:48:43 Speaker_02
not that there would always be an exact one-to-one correspondence anytime the same celestial movement would repeat, but that there could be, broadly speaking, a similar symbolic or archetypal correspondence to what would happen when the same positions repeated.
02:49:01 Speaker_02
And that does create a sort of empirical approach to doing astrology that has an objective component to it and that you're looking for the recurrence of the same
02:49:13 Speaker_02
celestial placements or movements, but then there's also a malleability there in understanding that you're talking about symbolism.
02:49:21 Speaker_02
And therefore, the symbolism can be multivalent and can manifest in different ways that in the specifics are different and unique, but broadly in terms of the overarching archetype can be in the same range or in the same realm.
02:49:37 Speaker_00
So I'm thinking of, in 1524, the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Pisces, and many astrologers forecast great floods in advance of that, which did not happen.
02:49:50 Speaker_00
But what's interesting about that is that this is the time in which Luther's ideas were having an impact, and something was happening with the Christian world that began to fracture. and that you could look at that way.
02:50:04 Speaker_00
No astrologer said, oh, by the way, a new expression of Christianity will manifest itself. It had manifested itself in 1517, but Luther's ideas didn't get any traction until probably the 1540s. But it is But Jeffrey loved that.
02:50:22 Speaker_00
Again, as you said, the multivalence of the symbolism. So Jupiter, Saturn, and Pisces. Certainly Pisces, oh, the oceans, oh, flooding, oh, yes, Jupiter, great flood, Saturn, great devastation. And yet it didn't work out that way.
02:50:36 Speaker_00
It didn't work out physically that way, and yet it's very hard to say that that wasn't a very profound shift that was happening in Western Christian culture in the early first to the second quarter of the 16th century.
02:50:57 Speaker_02
There's always an issue with astrologers to predict things and to correctly interpret the symbolism ahead of time because they're dealing partially with such a complex system, and they're also approaching it from their own vantage point.
02:51:09 Speaker_02
In that context, a lot of those predictions would have been made by Christian astrologers who
02:51:15 Speaker_02
who grew up in a cultural context of stories about Noah's Ark and the great floods and things like that, and viewing that as a potential natural disaster if they saw a lot of indications in the chart that represented water.
02:51:31 Speaker_02
More recently though, we have more recent comparisons where, for example, in the early 1980s, the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that occurred and the explosion of the AIDS epidemic, for example,
02:51:43 Speaker_02
And then more recently, we had then a recurrence of the Saturn-Pluto conjunction in early 2020 and the explosion of the COVID pandemic.
02:51:55 Speaker_02
So it's like there is a symbolic relevance between having two pandemics occurring that are really centered around the time chronologically or temporally around that conjunction so that we can see the symbolic or resonance of that, or similarity.
02:52:12 Speaker_02
But then at the same time, obviously, they were much different pandemics that had much different impacts at the same time.
02:52:18 Speaker_00
And the French astrologer, Andre Barbeau, actually forecast the 2019 and 2020 pandemic in what, 2011, 2012, in a paper he wrote that came out that Geoffrey I know was aware of. So again, Geoffrey would not—
02:52:36 Speaker_02
Yeah. And that was from going back and studying those conjunctions.
02:52:39 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Absolutely. And so again, what was it that enabled him to do that? Is, was it purely an empirical thing? Possibly, certainly that plays a role, but it also has to do with the symbolic seeing of the planets involved
02:52:55 Speaker_00
and saying, this is how this could work out. And of course, with a modern knowledge of the fact that we had a great pandemic in 1919, we've had the AIDS epidemic, now we had the COVID epidemic.
02:53:06 Speaker_00
These are a fact of biological life in the world, but the timing of them becomes very significant. You know, astrologers do not—we don't acquit ourselves well in the world of prediction. I mean, I'm just thinking of the 2016 presidential election.
02:53:21 Speaker_00
All the astrologers lined up and predicted that Hillary Clinton would win, and then there was all the face-saving shuffling after the fact.
02:53:32 Speaker_02
Jeffrey— That is true, but I do want to say everyone was using the wrong birth time for Hillary in that election.
02:53:40 Speaker_02
It turned out that her true birth certificate came out years later, and it turned out that virtually nobody was using the right time for whatever that's worth.
02:53:51 Speaker_00
the petty ogres of astrologers had to go in there. So we go with the data that we have.
02:53:55 Speaker_00
So what Jeffrey would have said, so if we didn't have our correct time, we did have a time of birth that we moved with, in the same way Trump's had two different birth times, at least two that are floating around.
02:54:08 Speaker_00
Astrologers felt this need to show their relevance and importance to make this public prediction, and they got egg on their face.
02:54:16 Speaker_00
I mean, unfortunately, and I've heard some of the apologias that some of these people have made, it's just not convincing. And again, Jeffrey stayed away from public predictions.
02:54:27 Speaker_00
He was very fascinated with that possibility for it, but felt like astrologers needed to conduct themselves differently
02:54:36 Speaker_00
when it comes to the public, especially the non-astrological public, when these things go into the press, we become the laughingstock. It's like, oh my goodness. When I lived in Delaware in 1980,
02:54:49 Speaker_00
And I had opened my practice there to no effect, really. But I did get a call from a newspaper man in Delaware, where Biden was a senator at the time. But they said, oh, well, do you have a prediction for the 2020 election? And I declined to give one.
02:55:08 Speaker_00
And this is before meeting Jeffrey, and they're like, oh, well, you don't have an opinion on it? I said, look, it's a 50-50 thing anyhow, right? A close race.
02:55:17 Speaker_00
It's like, if I get it right, somebody will say, well, it's just a one out of two chance anyhow. If I get it wrong, I will be piled on. I said, it's just not something I'm going to engage in. And the guy was okay with that.
02:55:30 Speaker_02
Yeah, and there's something there, and I didn't get to reread these chapters, but I remember Rob Hand responding to some part of this astrology and divination, this piece of Geoffrey's argument, because Rob Hand was also a great proponent of Geoffrey's work.
02:55:47 Speaker_02
But I think at some point in his arguments, Geoffrey made the case that
02:55:54 Speaker_02
almost like the exact time doesn't matter, that whatever chart you end up with is the chart that you were supposed to, and then it will speak to things symbolically whether it's an accurate chart or not becomes part of his argument.
02:56:10 Speaker_02
And I forget his access point on that. I'm blanking it out at the moment. I know it's a whole chapter on that. But I know at one point, Rob Hand had a response to that where he said, while also greatly embracing and promoting Jeffrey's work.
02:56:26 Speaker_02
He said something to the effect of, I've never had a chart where the correct birth time, once it became known, did not speak to the person's life more than the arbitrary time that was used up until that point, and that he thinks the objective
02:56:47 Speaker_02
correct birth time will always actually match the person's life better. Yeah. I've read those comments by Rob. Yeah. Yeah.
02:56:57 Speaker_02
So what were these things like discussed within Jeffrey's school or where did he, am I, am I characterizing that because that's where some of the maybe uneasiness with the astrology is divination argument come down to of that question of, um,
02:57:12 Speaker_02
the importance of the subjective moment of whatever is presented in the moment being important symbolically versus this issue of there being an objective astrology and the tensions between those two different viewpoints or poles to some extent.
02:57:31 Speaker_00
Possibly, you know what's interesting? Let's just say Hillary's correct time had been available to those astrologers in the fall of 2016. You know, we had the Trump, the tape.
02:57:45 Speaker_00
I mean, he had a series of unbelievable things that should have been the political death of a quote, normal politician. But what Jeffrey, I think, would have looked at is the soup that we're all swimming in
02:57:58 Speaker_00
was this feeling that this interloper, Trump, a braggadocio, a serial abuser of various people, a pathological liar that there's no way this guy's gonna win. The feeling was, come on, Hillary, you might not like her.
02:58:17 Speaker_00
She didn't seem like a likable person, but she's a serious politician. She knows her foreign affairs. She was very well-versed in, quote, the facts of the case. he'd say, the facts don't really matter to people necessarily, right?
02:58:37 Speaker_00
That's not what lost her the election, that she was better schooled than Donald Trump in various things, whether it was the economics or the foreign affairs or whatever. That wasn't it, right? So the question is, could the astrologers
02:58:54 Speaker_00
you know, have risen above this and said, you know what, she's not going to make it. I think everybody at the time, and even the pollsters, were saying, she's got a pretty good chance of winning.
02:59:05 Speaker_00
And I think a lot of astrologers were probably, either consciously or unconsciously, affected by that. You know what, most of the polls say she's going to win. Therefore,
02:59:15 Speaker_00
I'm going to go with that also because I like the idea of her winning better than the idea of this guy winning. I don't know.
02:59:23 Speaker_02
Yeah, there was certainly, as one of the people that was involved in that and was well-documented and was very open about that, because I actually ended up taking part in some of those predictions. and getting it wrong.
02:59:37 Speaker_02
There was, on the one hand, definitely a failure of imagination because especially most astrologers tend to be more left-leaning and couldn't imagine that he would win.
02:59:48 Speaker_02
So there was a failure of imagination, I observed, on a number of astrologers' parts where they just didn't think it was plausible from a practical standpoint.
02:59:57 Speaker_02
And that, as well as their personal views, may very well have influenced his prediction or their predictions.
03:00:03 Speaker_02
But on the other hand, I also have a unique position of one of the only astrologers where I, before the 2016 election, went to a book signing to ask Hillary Clinton her birth time directly. And I did ask her her birth time.
03:00:20 Speaker_02
She told me she was born around 8 PM. However, there was a rumor that was told to me by an older data collector in the astrological community that Hillary was actually born at 8 a.m.
03:00:33 Speaker_02
and that she was giving people the wrong birth time to throw them off because she didn't want her true birth chart to be known. And I took that literally, and I believed that that was true because it looked like the 8am chart was more prominent.
03:00:49 Speaker_02
And if that was the correct chart, it looked like from the timing techniques that I thought she would win. So to me, that wasn't just an abstract thing when her birth time later came out and it turned out she was born closer to 8 p.m.
03:01:05 Speaker_02
It was actually more like 6.45 or 7 p.m. so that I was using almost the diametrically opposite chart from what was true. So to me, that's not just an abstract thing, but it was actually something that happened that I was very personally involved with.
03:01:21 Speaker_02
And I do think that did play some role as well, because when I looked at the later chart, once we finally got it, the same timing techniques that I used to predict career peaks showed her peaking earlier in her life, especially around the 1990s when her and Bill Clinton were in the White House versus the other chart, which indicated a career peak
03:01:42 Speaker_02
in the mid-2010s. So, I don't know, obviously, you know, we're talking— She was Secretary of State in the 2010s, right?
03:01:50 Speaker_00
So she was—it wasn't like she was, as she said, a little lady at home baking cookies that famous. She said a number of things, but in any event, it is fascinating that you went to her and asked that, whether she lied to you or deceived you.
03:02:08 Speaker_00
Talk about the trickster right there. So she's Scorpio. So somebody would say, well, wait a minute, was this a woman's vanity? No, it wasn't like what year she was born. It's the time of day. Somebody had said to her, Scott, you know what?
03:02:19 Speaker_00
Anybody asks you your time as an astrologer, do not give them the right time because they're going to publish some stuff and it could be influential. Let's not take any chances. I mean, who knows what really happened, right?
03:02:30 Speaker_02
Well, ironically, she did end up telling the truth, which was what was the surprise in the end. And then it was my mistake to think that she wasn't based on what turned out to be conspiracy theories that were floating around up to that point.
03:02:45 Speaker_02
And then there was other astrologers that were using a completely different time based on a false time that had been circulated by another astrologer.
03:02:54 Speaker_02
So there's a lot of issues there, but the central point here for our discussion is I do think, and this is one of my objections, is I do think there is something objectively true about the actual alignment of the planets and the position of the Ascendant and the cosmos at the moment that a person is born that does have important symbolic resonance that tells you something about that person's future.
03:03:22 Speaker_02
I think that if you have the correct chart, in all cases, it's going to be more accurate than some other chart, even if it's symbolically charged for some reason, in terms of having some sort of alternative rectification.
03:03:37 Speaker_02
That's something, I think, for those of us that
03:03:42 Speaker_02
engage with this argument of astrology as divination and even agree to it up to a point, that's the point where there's still some things that have to be worked out about this issue of an objective astrology that's objectively occurring out there versus a participatory astrology that requires our involvement in it in some way, if that makes sense.
03:04:02 Speaker_00
Yes, it does. And so, I know Geoffrey stands on that, was if you had a birth chart, you know, a birth time, a recorded birth time, why wouldn't you use that? Of course you should. You know, was that always the determinative chart?
03:04:16 Speaker_00
Well, he said he thought it mostly was, right? It's interesting, it's a man who would not share his own horoscope publicly, so you got to take that into account. So yes, I think he would say the, you know, an authenticated birth time
03:04:32 Speaker_00
is an important thing to have and to use. And he certainly would have said it in fairness to these astrologers who got it wrong. Yes, if there was a correct time for Hillary, then certainly they should have had that.
03:04:46 Speaker_00
I think he might have questioned whether they still might not have bungled it as a public prediction. He thought there was something about the nature of public predictions that astrologers tended to bobble them, because a lot was on the line.
03:05:02 Speaker_00
and that we live in a world that no longer thinks. I mean, again, when astrologers get public predictions right, what do the rationalists say? Well, it's a 30% chance, or the odds are, or whatever.
03:05:15 Speaker_00
There's always an explanation that diminishes the magical or just the uncanny nature of astrology. There always is that. And so, you know, I think his point was a broader one.
03:05:30 Speaker_00
We live in a world that no longer recognizes divination, no longer recognizes divinatory arts as ways to give us meaningful information about ourselves and the world, and therefore when we use them on a world that doesn't believe those things,
03:05:46 Speaker_00
we are actually speaking a language that's no longer spoken. Well, spoken among a tiny number of people. It's kind of like some little, you know, African dialect that was spoken in this part of Africa, but not over here.
03:06:00 Speaker_00
Oh, so people, if you go there, they understand what you're talking about. But anyplace else, they kind of go, well, that's a bunch of gibberish. So I think
03:06:08 Speaker_00
We astrologers are in a very small boat, relatively speaking, and we don't control the levers and gears of public discourse. We just don't. And so when we engage them, as he said, we must engage them with humility, and we should really use discretion.
03:06:27 Speaker_00
He loved Lilly's phrase, you know, discretion with art. That's what the astrologer must use, you know. So there's an art to astrology, and there's judgment or discretion that needs to be used.
03:06:42 Speaker_00
And so for him, public predictions are a singular lack of discretion by astrologers. Why are they doing it? Because they want to be lauded as prophets or as people that it vindicates or validates what they do. And he says we cannot let our validation
03:07:04 Speaker_00
be the broad public that says, oh, that guy got that prediction about Hillary, right? Therefore, he must be a good astrologer. I better make an appointment. Probably never going to happen.
03:07:15 Speaker_02
Right. There's definitely an issue with that. And certainly that's not going to be the way that astrology is validated.
03:07:22 Speaker_02
And it's always so highly context-specific and tied in with the subjective views, even in that instance, political views of the astrologer, as well as other things that are going on.
03:07:35 Speaker_02
That being said, I was never comfortable doing mundane predictions because I always thought astrology, and especially timing, was so tied in with the natal chart and transits to the natal chart that I wasn't comfortable looking at mundane transits without a base chart like that.
03:07:56 Speaker_02
So 10 years ago, I started doing monthly forecast episodes with a couple of friends, my friends Austin Coppock and Kelly Surtees. And each month, I eventually created a format where each month for the first hour, we would review
03:08:13 Speaker_02
major news stories that had happened over the previous month and what their astrological correlations were.
03:08:18 Speaker_02
And this would sometimes allow us to check in with things we had said the previous month when we were looking forward to certain planetary alignments and how we would describe them symbolically or archetypally, and then how it ended up playing out.
03:08:30 Speaker_02
And then in the second half, we will look ahead at the next month and we'll do the same process of saying, these are the planetary alignments and these are some of the ways that that might play out archetypally.
03:08:42 Speaker_02
So that process I found to be incredibly valuable and has grown almost like a muscle that didn't exist or was atrophied up to that point because it does push you to do the best you can as an astrologer to interpret the symbolism of the astronomical alignments as well as you can if you're putting it out there, if you're actually putting pen to paper, so to speak.
03:09:13 Speaker_02
It does push you to try to do the best job you can and to dig very deep, not just in terms of the symbolism, but also in terms of historical or empirical research or other things like that.
03:09:24 Speaker_02
And I think that has the same value as I think about 50% of learning astrology is book learning, but there's another 50% that only happens when you sit down with a client in front of them and attempt to read their chart.
03:09:39 Speaker_02
And you'll apply the principles at that point.
03:09:42 Speaker_02
You'll also get feedback simultaneously, and you'll hear from the client how those placements actually work out, and they'll actually come alive in a way that's much more vivid and that you'll learn so much more from than just what you read in the books.
03:09:58 Speaker_02
But that container of doing it within the context of the consultation puts a certain amount of pressure on you to perform as an astrologer, which can be for early students very stressful. But over time, it's something that's necessary to grow.
03:10:14 Speaker_02
your astrological muscles, so to speak. To a certain extent, I agree with that. There can be an egoic component to prediction that's right to identify that can be a pitfall that's problematic. But then on the other hand,
03:10:29 Speaker_02
know, in ancient times, predicting the future was the primary purpose of astrology. And when you have that pressure to perform that function, it does make you strive to achieve more than you might otherwise if you're just
03:10:45 Speaker_02
muttering to yourself all the time about what a symbol or omen might look like, but never telling somebody.
03:10:52 Speaker_00
Absolutely, which is why Jeffrey remained to his days a consultant astrologer.
03:10:59 Speaker_00
He felt it was important to practice, not just write his books and the theory, and he did a lot of that too, but to actually look at horoscopes and to teach classes in them, and to argue over them, and to shed light on them.
03:11:17 Speaker_00
And, you know, so he wasn't just a theoretician. And I think other people have kind of accused him of that, an armchair theoretician who could sit back and say these terrible things about the practice of astrology. He actually practiced astrology.
03:11:32 Speaker_00
And as did Maggie. And that was incredibly important to him, as he called it, divination in praxis, right? The fancy word for practice, the Latin. So that was a big belief of his, that astrologers needed to practice the art
03:11:53 Speaker_00
And like you said, they learned through the doing of it. It wasn't that they were always right, but that they had to put themselves out there. Yeah.
03:12:00 Speaker_02
Yeah.
03:12:00 Speaker_02
And that was something that was incredible about Jeffrey is that while he was one of the people that was part of a movement that happened in the 1990s and 2000s, where a number of professional astrologers went back to college, went back to university, and got advanced degrees, like master's and PhD degrees, oftentimes in history.
03:12:21 Speaker_02
that in some instances, those practitioners would strip themselves of the practice of astrology and become full academics or not acknowledge that they, or in some instances, not even continue to practice astrology and become full-fledged academics just for the love of talking about astrology in a historical context, which is perfectly valid and is a perfectly
03:12:49 Speaker_02
worthwhile thing to do because the study of the history of astrology is worthwhile and interesting in and of itself. But what I was saying is that Jeffrey is unique in that he never
03:13:02 Speaker_02
gave up the practice of astrology, and he continued to be quite open about that, even while moving in academic circles, from my understanding, which made him very unique and very impressive as somebody who bridged the gap between both of those worlds.
03:13:16 Speaker_00
That first conference that Bath Spa University College did and issued their papers Jeffrey's article in that, his paper in that, was the only one that contained a horoscope that he unpacked for the group.
03:13:33 Speaker_00
It was the opening of the conference, and he made a number of very pertinent points, but one of them was that
03:13:42 Speaker_00
astrology in the university, if it becomes an arm's length study, you know, dissecting the the bug of astrology on on the slide, that that was never going to be sufficient.
03:13:54 Speaker_00
And that indeed he knew that astrology going to the university was not the teaching how to do astrology, but he felt that if their mission was anything, it was to understand the practice of astrology. And his Ph.D.
03:14:09 Speaker_00
dissertation is many different—and other things since then—there are many ways to shed light on what that practice actually is. So I'd encourage anybody to go and read that BASPA paper of his, because it's just a very powerful thing.
03:14:25 Speaker_00
At the opening of astrology, he was going back to the academy, as he called it, and he's addressing this group, and he said, Let's keep in mind why we're doing this. This has to do with the practice.
03:14:38 Speaker_02
I think that's really important then, because I think that brings into focus another great contribution that he made, and perhaps one of the greatest contributions that he made with his work is that he brought a level of academic and intellectual rigor to everything he did, and he showed that
03:14:55 Speaker_02
can be an astrologer and you can be a diviner and somebody that views the world in this animistic or magical sense, but still be a top-level academic or a top-level intellectual at the same time and bring all of the same intellectual tools from the academy into your practice and into the thinking of astrology at the same time.
03:15:22 Speaker_02
And that's something he demonstrated I don't want to say more than anyone else, but at the highest level. And that's one of the reasons why.
03:15:31 Speaker_00
Absolutely.
03:15:33 Speaker_02
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I said in my statement about him, my tribute to him when he passed away, when I heard about that from you that day, that his work was one of the most important books on the philosophy of astrology in the past century because he brought that level of intellectual and academic rigor.
03:15:53 Speaker_02
Absolutely, yeah.
03:15:56 Speaker_00
By the way, I just realized the significance of this. So
03:16:03 Speaker_00
conference I talked about, of Geoffrey talking about Genghis Khan, was actually, I just realized just looking at this as you stepped away, was the 1999 eclipse conference, the August 1999 eclipse that happened, that you saw the full eclipse in the very south of England.
03:16:22 Speaker_00
And indeed, that's where the conference was, right, in the south of England. And I got, I went there with Jeffrey and Maggie and a couple other people from the company. And it was extraordinary.
03:16:35 Speaker_00
And I pointed out to him at the conference hall that we're in at this university, University of Southampton, There are two other conferences going on.
03:16:46 Speaker_00
One was a conference of astronomers who were gathered because of the eclipse to talk about the science of the eclipse.
03:16:54 Speaker_00
The other were these religious fundamentalists who had gathered to say that the eclipse was showing basically how doomed the world was and why they needed to promote their ideas. I said to Jeffrey, you realize
03:17:10 Speaker_00
historically our two greatest enemies, the scientists to the left and the religious fanatics to the right, we're all here in one. And he loved that, right?
03:17:20 Speaker_00
So at that eclipse conference, he did a talk called The Khan, K-H-A-N, The Khan, the Sage, and the Eclipse of 1221. And so that was about Genghis Khan. And that was through the Astrological Association.
03:17:36 Speaker_00
And anybody who wants, I have it on a cassette tape, but who has cassette tape players anymore? But it's probably still available. I think they make their cassettes available historically. So if somebody wanted to find it, it's a wonderful talk by him.
03:17:52 Speaker_00
And a good example of how he saw the conferences about eclipses. And so he prepares a talk about historical eclipse and about Genghis Khan.
03:18:02 Speaker_02
Nice. I love that. Yeah. Although that was one of the things I discovered was that people that were born around the time of an eclipse tend to have important events happen in their life.
03:18:13 Speaker_02
And I bet actually if you went through and studied Jeffrey's chronology, you would see eclipses coinciding with other important turning points in his life and probably his work in developing his thesis of astrology as divination.
03:18:28 Speaker_02
It would probably be an interesting study to do someday.
03:18:30 Speaker_00
That might be a paper you could write.
03:18:33 Speaker_02
I mean, I would do that with your help because you know so much about his life that you could help me put together a chronology. So that would be interesting.
03:18:43 Speaker_02
And yeah, I know his dad is not public, but it would be interesting to see how that would play out just because of that weird thing that I discovered over the past year and that I've been trying to develop and expand and see how far it can go.
03:19:01 Speaker_00
I really have appreciated the dialogue that we've had. And again, and by the way, this is all part of me saying goodbye to Jeffrey.
03:19:09 Speaker_00
I have been obviously thinking about him a lot, reading about him a lot, but having this conversation with you has allowed me to kind of get some clear thinking about the kinds of things I need to say in the eulogy.
03:19:25 Speaker_02
I appreciate that. CB Yeah, I'm really glad to have this conversation. And I always just try to recreate what it's like when two astrologers meet up.
03:19:35 Speaker_02
You'll sit there sometimes for an afternoon and just talk astrology and bounce ideas back and forth, and that can last for a long time.
03:19:43 Speaker_02
And obviously, from a viewer standpoint, sometimes people want things to be more concise or short, but I like sometimes when you can sit with a person and find the conversation as you go and see where it takes you.
03:19:56 Speaker_02
So thanks for sitting down and talking to me about Jeffrey's life and work, and as well as sharing your own story and how it was intertwined with his.
03:20:04 Speaker_00
Well, thank you very much, yeah. You know, one of Jeffrey's lovely papers that he wrote for the Lodge Journal was called The History of the Astrological Lodge from Al and Leo to the Present Day.
03:20:16 Speaker_00
And the present day was 1986, which was really the launching of the company as an independent enterprise. And since then, I've been thinking, I feel like I need to write the history of the company of astrologers, you know, from,
03:20:31 Speaker_00
1986 to the present day, you know, because it would be almost like a, again, a closing of that.
03:20:37 Speaker_00
Jeffrey was such a traditionalist that saw himself in line with Alan Leo and with Charles Carter and with Ron Davison and, you know, and so in many ways I see him as both a
03:20:52 Speaker_00
a fundamental traditionalist, and as that rarest things, kind of a—not a reactionary, but a conservative revolutionary, a conservative revolutionary, that he saw what he did, he admired it, and he fundamentally overturned many of the assumptions.
03:21:12 Speaker_00
And I think that is—I hope that is how he's remembered, not as a homewrecker, but as somebody that loved astrology and wanted to see it for its true self.
03:21:23 Speaker_02
CB Yeah, well, so much of the zeitgeist of the 1980s and 1990s was about going back to the past and reviving the technical practice of ancient astrology.
03:21:34 Speaker_02
And what I think Jeffrey accomplished more than anyone else was going back and reviving the philosophy of ancient astrology. and bringing some major pieces of the past back into the present.
03:21:49 Speaker_02
But it's interesting that he was also very much part of and tied in with the modern tradition as well.
03:21:54 Speaker_02
Like you said, being the president of the Astrological Lodge of London at one point, and that very much placed him in the context of a lineage of not just ancient astrologers, but also modern ones as well.
03:22:08 Speaker_00
Absolutely. Absolutely. Good place to stop. I really appreciate the conversation, Chris. So thank you so much.
03:22:16 Speaker_02
Awesome. So your website is CosmoCritic.com, right? And people can find... Yes, it is.
03:22:21 Speaker_00
If they just put, if they put CosmoCritic, yes, it's on WordPress now, but yes, CosmoCritic.com should bring anybody to the site. That's correct.
03:22:30 Speaker_02
Excellent. Well, I'll put a link to that in the description below this video and on the podcast website for this episode. So thanks a lot for joining me today. You're very welcome. All right. Take care. All right.
03:22:42 Speaker_02
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03:22:48 Speaker_02
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03:24:42 Speaker_02
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03:24:50 Speaker_02
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03:24:59 Speaker_02
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03:25:11 Speaker_02
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