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In all my years of practicing our mysterious craft, I have never once met anyone who possessed these two qualities at the same time – they didn’t believe in astrology and they knew a damned thing about it. Seeing this pair of conditions operating in the same person would be like finding a blind Uber driver or an astronaut with a big fear of heights. They’re unicorns. They don’t exist. 

Once we give astrology a chance to prove itself, its efficacy simply can’t be denied. 

Just this week I did a reading for a woman who teaches breastfeeding. Her chart shows a Cancer Midheaven. Chance? I just got a sad message about an old friend who died before her time. Saturn had just touched her Ascendant. Chance? As any astrologer knows from experience, the list goes on and on. All you need is an open mind. Give astrology the opportunity and it proves itself to you – or to anyone. In the right hands, it never fails. 

Many intelligent, thoughtful human beings disbelieve in astrology. I wouldn’t shame them for that. They come by their disbelief innocently. Some of it is just what they were trained to parrot from an early age, at least if they wanted to make A’s in 6th grade science class. Some of it is that strange shibboleth that we call “common sense.” After all, the premise that the planets “control us” does seem implausible – they’re millions of miles away, so how could they possibly affect anyone? Why would they? And so forth. 

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I never had kids. Other than my cats, the nearest thing to children in my life has been my books – and at last count, I’m the proud papa of sixteen of them. In one way, my books are even more like my kids than my cats are. That’s because they last a lot longer. You expect to outlive your cat, but you can at least hope for the opposite with your books (and of course, your children.)

My firstborn book – my first published book to be precise – was The Inner Sky, which came out in August 1984. That’s forty years ago this month. Some of you older readers have seen your child turn forty. I suspect that’s a sobering moment – or at least one that really puts you on the map in terms of the aging process. It’s similar with books. When The Inner Sky was born, I was just thirty-five years old. Now I’m seventy-five. Knowing the book is now five years older than I was when I wrote it rings some deep bells in me.

I’d signed the contract to write The Inner Sky – and collected half of my $10,000 advance – in summer 1981. My progressed Moon had just risen into the 7th house. Solar Arc Uranus was squaring my lunar nodes, while transiting Uranus was finishing up a conjunction with my Ascendant. My chart was locked and loaded for some big, empowering changes, in other words. I dived into the writing process which took a couple of years. I wrote the whole thing on a manual typewriter and eventually mailed a thick stack of paper to the publisher – that’s how long ago all of this was. Just to be clear with any of you younger folks, on the day I finished writing The Inner Sky I’m pretty sure there were no mastodons grazing outside my window. The saber-tooth tigers had finished them off. 

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Among conventional astrologers, trines are lucky aspects, period. The more of them you have, the luckier you’ll be. But to win the Gold Medal, what you really want is a Grand Trine – that’s three planets (or you can include the Angles) arranged in an equilateral triangle. You’re allowed a little slush – the triangle doesn’t have to be perfect, but it had better be close. What orbs to allow? There’s a lot of argument there – say, a few degrees, no more than seven or eight. As usual, if the Sun, Moon, or Ascendant are involved, you’re naturally a little more generous with the orbs. But even a wimpy Grand Trine will put you on the fast track to fame and fortune – that is, if we are to believe those kinds of astrologers.

Rather than labeling trines – and the Grand Trine itself – “lucky,” I prefer the word “easy.” Those two words don’t mean quite the same thing. Grand Trines do open doors and they can definitely roll out red carpets for you. That’s easily demonstrated. Do those doors and red carpets lead to good places and copacetic outcomes? Yes, sometimes. We won’t be completely dismissing the idea of simple good fortune in connection with this aspect pattern – we’ll just be looking at it a bit more cautiously. We must always recognize that like everything else in astrology, your own choices, be they wise or foolish, are always part of the equation.

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When I was sixty-one years old, I met one of the two or three wisest human beings I have ever encountered. His name was Robert A. Johnson. Our relationship had an enormous impact on me, one whose effects and treasures I am still sorting out fourteen years down the road. Astrology helps!

At age eleven, Robert lost a leg when he was hit by a car. He told me that his childhood ended that day. 

The year I was born – 1949 – he was in Zurich, Switzerland, studying psychology with Carl Jung and in analysis with Jung’s wife, Emma. 

He was the author of many books in a Jungian psychology vein, three million of which were sold. Most of them were on my bookshelf years before I met him. They never got dusty.

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None of what follows is medical advice. In fact, I believe that as medical advice it is mostly incorrect or, at best, misleading. But it’s still a true story . . .

When I was born, the doctor told my mother that she had a B-vitamin deficiency and that it was probably exacerbated by the fact that she was breastfeeding me. To correct the problem, he recommended that she drink a pint of Guinness Stout every day. It’s true that Guinness Stout contains Folate, which is a B vitamin necessary for the production of some of our genetic materials. The trouble with the theory is that a pint of the stuff provides only 3.2% of our necessary daily dose, which means we’d need to drink thirty beers per day to stay healthy – the devil is in the details, in other words.

Mom followed the doctor’s orders, which was no hardship for her. And, since I was breastfeeding, naturally that meant that I was following them too, albeit in second-hand fashion. Before I was three months old, I had drunk a lot of Guinness Stout via my mother. Without knowing it, I suspect I had quietly qualified for Irish citizenship.

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I doubt there’s an astrology fan anywhere in the world who doesn’t realize that Jupiter and Uranus will form a conjunction on April 20. The Internet is abuzz with it and well it should be – this event is a big deal, even though it’s not a terribly rare one. With Jupiter’s quick 12 year orbit and Uranus’s slow-boat 84 year orbit, Jupiter catches up about every 14 years. Still, this conjunction is a powerful force, always guaranteed to leave its mark on the world. It’ll leave its mark on your life too, especially if you have any kind of astrological sensitivity to 21 degrees of Taurus, which is where these two giant planets line up this time. That sensitivity of course includes any aspects that part of Taurus makes to the rest of your chart. In other words, if your Sun or Moon are in 21 degrees of Scorpio, Leo, or Aquarius, this conjunction has your name on it in a big way. And no matter what your chart looks like, we’ll all be feeling it in terms of the house it falls in and any other aspects it happens to form with your natal planets.

As you explore what the astrological community is saying about the Jupiter-Uranus alignment, you’ll encounter a lot of ideas about what it means for the world as a whole. As many of you know, that’s called Mundane astrology. I remember as a teenager seeing that word for the first time and thinking it must mean boring  astrology – and I have to say, my early reading experiences in the field often backed up that misinterpretation! But of course the term is based on the Romance language words for “the world” – mondo, mundo, or monde, depending on where you’re doing your listening. I have to say that at the Mundane level, the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction is incredibly powerful. It always leaves its fingerprints on the headlines. 

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Getting older is a weird business. I’m quite aware that some of you readers and listeners might have no idea who Monty Python was and in fact some of you may even think he was one person. They were actually six Englishmen who formed a hugely successful comedy troupe back in 1969. It’s been said that they did for comedy what the Beatles did for music – and, give an old guy a break, you’ve all heard of the Beatles, right?

In any case, before I go any further, let me reassure you that this newsletter will be about astrology – in fact a very serious branch of astrology. It won’t just be me strolling down memory lane. 

Please indulge me for a moment though. It’s December 1969. I’m twenty years old and watching TV with my parents, who were actually pretty cool. Python comes on doing a skit about a man returning a dead parrot to a pet shop. A hilarious argument ensues about whether the bird is actually dead or not, when it quite obviously is. I have tears of laughter running down my cheeks, while my parents are baffled – and probably concerned about my mental health. 

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What if, right before our eyes, something far beyond human intelligence and even human intention is working to forge a survival strategy for the planet? I’d be the first to admit those words sound like wishful thinking. Watch me prove them to you.

As we contemplate Pluto’s in-and-out entry into Aquarius this year, the Internet is dishing up a smorgasbord of predictions ranging from a progressive optimist’s wet dream down to a post-Apocalyptic landscape of extinction nightmares. I believe that either of those visions, and much lies in between, could potentially come to pass. Consciousness interacts unpredictably with a wide field of probabilities and possibilities. One of them will surely happen. Which one? The point is that you are not an inert ingredient in that question. We don’t need to chew our fingernails and hope for the best, but rather to keep our eyes and hearts focussed on the higher ground and how to get there. 

We all know what to wish for: world peace, justice for all, a sustainable environment, and so on. I agree, but I'm not going to harp on those obvious things. You already know them. Let’s go a little deeper into the real astrological mysteries here.

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There’s a fellow named Luis Gonzales Serra in Spain who has translated many of my books into Spanish. They’ve never been published – Luis does the translations simply as a way of studying them carefully. That’s dedication!

(By the way, if anyone out there has connections with Spanish language publishing, I could happily put you in touch with Luis. It’s one of the mysteries of my life that while my work is available in at least a dozen languages, it’s never appeared, at least legally, in Spanish, even though that’s the nearest thing I personally have to a second language.) 

Luis sent me an interesting question in December. Here are his words:

"You have already devoted a book (The Night Speaks) to dismantling the scientific objections to Astrology, which I translated, with greater or lesser artistry. Perhaps it would be good for you to devote at least one newsletter to dismantling the religious objections to Astrology."

Let me begin responding to Luis by saying that religious objections to astrology are far from universal, even within the Judeo-Christian framework. I’d also like to say that those Judeo-Christian traditions are what I will mostly be talking about here, although as we explore Old Testament issues, they overlap with Islam as well. Generally speaking, the Asian religious traditions have been friendlier to astrology than the western ones.

Cutting to the chase, what we will be discovering as I explore this potential minefield isn't that the Bible is pro-astrology or anti-astrology, but rather that it is totally ambivalent about the subject. We will also address the issue that Luis sees so clearly – and something that most of the rest of us have experienced very directly too: that mainstream religious people are often phobic about astrology and convinced of its Satanic origins. 

So is it impossible to simultaneously be a Christian and a Gemini? That is the question. 

By the way, in the Biblical quotes that follow, I’m using the King James version. It’s far from the most scholarly of the many Bible translations that exist, but it’s probably the one whose language has sunk deepest into the bones of English-speaking culture. 

Even people who’ve never been inside a church or a temple are familiar with this chilling line from the Book of Exodus, chapter 22, verse 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Most of us would debate whether astrologers are witches, but to the folks piling the wood around the stake, the distinction seems to be rather moot. Astrology and witchcraft are often lumped together. Accused that way, we astrologers might get off on a technicality – we’re not necessarily all witches, although let me be the first to say that Wiccan people are welcome at our table, so maybe we’re guilty by association.  

We don’t have a leg to stand on with Isaiah 47:11-14. Here is the text in all it’s raging King James judgment and sonorous glory:

"Therefore shall evil come upon thee; thou shalt not know from whence it riseth: and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know. Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth  . . . Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels. Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators, stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee. Behold, they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them; they shall not deliver themselves from the power of the flame."

Those lines are about as explicit as they come, and they obviously condemn astrology by name. With Isaiah, we astrologers have no wiggle room at all – and religious astrology-bashers love to quote those baleful lines.

But here’s another Bible story. This one is from chapter 2 of the Book of Daniel. Scholars think it was written around 165 B.C. For perspective, it’s helpful to realize that the Book of Isaiah comes from a very different time. It was probably written around 740 to 700 B.C. That’s almost six centuries earlier. The passage is long and wordy, so I’m going to summarize it here, only using some critical lines from Daniel itself. The story starts out during the time when the Jewish people were held in captivity in Babylon. King Nebuchadnezzar has a troubling dream. He summons “the magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers” to interpret the dream for him. They all fail. “For this cause the king was angry and very furious, and commanded to destroy all the wise men of Babylon.” 

The prophet Daniel, who was also held in captivity, “went in unto Arioch, whom the king had ordained to destroy the wise men of Babylon: he went and said thus unto him; Destroy not the wise men of Babylon: bring me in before the king, and I will shew unto the king the interpretation.” 

Daniel of course succeeds. Nebuchadnezzar is impressed. “Then the king made Daniel a great man, and gave him many great gifts, and made him ruler over the whole province of Babylon, and chief of the governors over all the wise men of Babylon.”

Note how here Daniel defends the astrologers. He actually saves them, and later even becomes “their governor.” In this context, of course Daniel represents virtue – the “word of God,” so to speak. And he stands up for the “magicians, and the astrologers, and the sorcerers.” This is obviously miles away from the attitude reflected in Isaiah. 

Next comes what to me is the most important Biblical reference of them all. Everything literally begins with the Book of Genesis. When was it written? There doesn’t seem to be a good answer for that question.

Traditionally, Genesis was written by Moses himself back around the time the Hebrew people were being released from bondage in Egypt. That would put it around 1400 B.C. Likely, at least some of it goes back that far, or perhaps even farther in oral traditions. The Book of Genesis appears to have been cobbled together from various sources and to bear the signatures of many different times. Still, a great many of us know the sonorous opening lines of the book – and really of the entire Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” By the time we get barely into it, just at verse 14, we read: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.”

And “let them be for signs” – that’s a clear reference to messages from God that are woven into the stars and planets! I’d challenge any Fundamentalist railing against our craft to try to separate those words from the most basic definition of astrology. And there it is, an affirmation of astrology as part of natural law, less than 300 words into the Bible. It is simply taken for granted.

Let’s move on to the New Testament. All of us raised in the Christian tradition – and many of us who weren’t – know the story of the “three wise men” visiting Jesus at his birth. In the second chapter of the Book of Matthew we read, “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” 

For this next step, I need you to visualize something with me. Picture the eastern Mediterranean world, where all these Bible stories originate. Basically you’re looking at a horseshoe standing on its side, with its open side facing left, or west. That’s the Mediterranean sea. Almost all of the action in the Bible occurs on dry land to the right of the horseshoe. (Bethlehem is only 33 miles from the coast.) According to Matthew, the wise men were ‘from the east’ -- that means further to the right on our map. 

Here’s the point – and I’ve got to say I’m kind of shocked I’ve never heard anybody else talk about it. If those wise men were already from somewhere east of Bethlehem and they followed a star “in the east,” they would have been heading for China, not Bethlehem!  

So what’s really going on here? What I say now is pure speculation on my part. It may be entirely wrong. But astrologers know that a planet conjunct the Ascendant of a chart has enormous power. Such a planet is literally “in the east” – it’s rising, in other words, just like the Sun rises in the morning. Does the Book of Matthew contain a vague reference to some forgotten astrological chart which these wise men had consulted? Were they not literally physically “traveling eastward to follow a star” – but rather following instructions in what astrologers today might call an horary chart? 

As I say, this is all speculative. We don’t have much to go on. But here’s Exhibit B, straight from the Book of Matthew, this time chapter 2, verse 7: “Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.” 

Of all Herod’s possible questions, why that one? Faced with a world-shaking moment, who but an astrologer would press anyone about exactly what time something happened? Herod – who so far as we know was not an astrologer – lived in a culture so immersed in astrology that he knew that was the right question to ask, that is, if we are talking about a chart which he wanted to reproduce. 

So where are we left in all of this? Confused might be the best answer. The point is that if we search the Bible without prejudice for its view of astrology, we find a diversity of opinions about it. The basic validity of astrology is often simply taken for granted, but the whole question stays in the background – the Bible never mentions that gravity pulls things downward or that cats chase mice either. Again, planetary influence is simply accepted as an obvious part of life that doesn’t need to be argued.

There are abundant cautions about the abuse of astrology – most of them well-taken, in my opinion. I actually believe that’s really what those lines in Isaiah are all about. But is astrology itself condemned? We do see Isaiah’s vociferous damning of how people were using astrology, but it’s juxtaposed with Daniel’s defense of the astrologers. I believe we even see pious and very skillful astrologers predicting the birth of Jesus – and perhaps more importantly, the story itself making it into the Gospel of Matthew. And then right in the opening lines of the Bible, we see the simple affirmation that “the stars” are there for signs.

So why is there such a vigorous contempt for astrology among many religiously-conservative people? The truth is that this cultural vitriol derives less from what is actually in the Bible and more from later developments in Christian theology. In a nutshell, Jesus came and went, but then the bureaucrats arrived and, mostly for political reasons, they didn’t like astrology.

This part of my little essay could get lengthy and tedious. I don’t want to do that, so I will spare you the details – they are available online or in libraries if you are interested. Suffice to say that early Christianity was very diverse. The book that we call “The Bible” was not fully  assembled, more or less as we know it today, until the Council of Hippo in 397 A.D. Before that, the situation was more like anyone today speaking of “spiritual literature in modern publishing” – then as now, it was a mixture of books, diverse teachers, and contradictory ideas.

There are actually astrological references in the Dead Sea scrolls, for example – they’re largely Christian writings and might easily have gotten into the Bible except that they had been lost, buried in a cave until recent times. Gnosticism in particular was a very astrological philosophy, dating from a bit earlier than Jesus’ time, but it soon blended vigorously with Christianity. It was viewed as a heresy by the people – mostly Romans – who eventually won the subsequent theology wars. In the battle against Gnosticism, astrology became a sort of “litmus test,” and the pro-astrology voices were the losers. 

Perhaps most importantly, let’s meet Saint Augustine. He codified and rationalized Christianity into a logical intellectual system that could be taught and administered – and against which we could judge other people’s worthiness of salvation or damnation. Augustine realized that, from a purely logical perspective, belief in free will was even more pivotal than Jesus in terms of creating a coherent Christian theology. If the planets controlled our behavior, there could be no free will. No one could choose between “Jesus or the Devil” – not if the planets made the choice for them. So astrology had to go. 

I remember learning about all of this fifty years ago as I was earning my degree in Religion at the University of North Carolina. I remember being heartily shocked to discover that I agreed with Saint  Augustine – I was with him in thinking that any form of purely deterministic astrology was antithetical to personal responsibility, and thus stood against the conscious, intentional  evolution of the soul. 

Did my belief in human freedom tempt me to give up astrology? Not for a minute – but it did light the fire of evolutionary astrology in me. I believe that today, even though many of the people who rail against astrology couldn't even spell “Saint Augustine,” that much of the religious resistance to astrology stems from his attitude and his profound influence on church teachings – many of which are actually not rooted in the Bible itself at all. 

Augustine lived three or four centuries after Jesus’s time, around the time the “official” Bible was being compiled. By the time that his serious cautions about “blaming the planets” for our sins filtered down to the masses, his theological reasoning had been stripped down to the folk belief that astrology was the work of the devil. Those masses were already piling wood around their witch-burning stakes. And they still are. 

If only they would read the Book of Daniel . . .

Listen to the podcast version 

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The bloody horror of the Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival and the ongoing bloodbath that followed it in Gaza – everyone with a heart or a soul is watching this nightmare unfold with disbelief. And of course there’s Ukraine and the seemingly endless, mindless brutality happening there. Then there’s the July 23rd headline from US News, “Six Months. 28 Mass Killings in the U.S.” Every idiot who wants one seems to have an AR-15, and nobody is safe to go bowling anymore and the kids are afraid to go to school – all because our great great great grandparents had single shot muskets, or something like that.

What’s going on? Why is everything so crazy? Astrologically, it’s a tough, multi-dimensional question. Certainly Pluto’s last gasps in Capricorn have a lot to do with it.

But then there are sunspots . . .

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