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.

He spent four years in a Christian monastery in Michigan. 

As a young man, he had a job as a watchman in a lonely fire tower in the Pacific Northwest – a time that he described as one of the happiest periods of his life.

He traveled to India every year for many years and absorbed much of the wisdom of that culture. Once while about to give a lecture in India, he was introduced in a language he didn’t speak. He asked the emcee what had been said about him. Turns out he had been described as an enlightened being – a claim Robert never would have made himself. He asked why the emcee thought that. The answer he got was one of my favorite Robert stories of all time: “You don’t eat much, you don’t say much, and you don’t do much.”

Robert A. Johnson “had the silence in him” – that’s a line I first heard many years ago from an Indian woman named Vanaja, and one of the best summaries I can think of when it comes to characterizing Robert. A quiet depth of mystery radiated from him. I suspect that radiant inner silence was what the emcee was actually reacting to.

Here’s his birthchart – and by the way, the 6:18 AM time of birth is the result of a rectification. Robert had told me that he was born “around six in the morning,” and he gave me a list of turning-point dates in his life. I came up with 6:18 that way. The combination of a 12th house Sun and the Cancer Ascendant really rings true – there’s a solid astrological signature for that “silence in him.” 

OUR FIRST MEETING: THE PREQUEL

They say when the student is ready, the teacher appears. That was certainly true for me in this case. My life had begun to unravel, so I was ready. Not quite two years before our first meeting,  in summer 2008 I’d left my established astrological practice and my beloved community in North Carolina. My wife and I had moved to the southern California desert for the sake of her respiratory health. I knew no one in our little town of Borrego Springs and no one knew me. I didn’t realize it yet, but my marriage was falling apart. She asked me for a divorce just a few months after I met Robert. I’ll spare us all an account of the gory details, but let’s just say the plot was not very original. Naturally it was a painful time for me – losing a nearly-thirty year relationship definitely pulls the psychological rug out from underneath you.

The forces that led to me meeting Robert had a “hand of God” feeling about them. Here’s how it happened. In January 2009, before everything in my life blew up, there was a knock on my door. It was the minister from my mother-in-law’s church up in Washington state. He and his wife were visiting Borrego Springs. Unbeknownst to us, my mother-in-law had invited them. 

The minister and his wife were nice people. I was happier with the situation than was my more introverted ex-. The minister and I went for a walk and he mentioned that “the great Robert A. Johnson” lived part-time in our little desert town. (Robert’s main home was in San Diego) I knew Robert’s work quite well – but that he had a home in our tiny little desert town was totally news to me. I didn’t know what to do with the information – I’m not the type to knock on someone’s door unannounced to ask for an autograph, nor did I even know exactly where his door was. Borrego Springs only has a population of 4000, but it’s spread out over more than forty square miles.

I filed it all away as interesting but presumably useless information.

A couple of months later I was on email setting up an astrological reading for a Jungian analyst I had known from my North Carolina days. He was a friend and a peer, so we got to chatting. I mentioned that I now lived in a tiny little place that no one had ever heard of – Borrego Springs. He said that he actually had heard of the place and that he had a friend “named Robert” who lived there. 

Knowing that my client was a Jungian analyst, I said “Robert Johnson by any chance?”

You know the answer. It was that analyst who finally arranged our meeting – although without the visit from the minister, I wouldn’t have known to ask him if it was actually Robert Johnson he was talking about. The universe works in mysterious ways.

 

OUR FIRST MEETING

On April 22, 2010, I drove up Tubb Canyon Road – a dirt track two miles long – and knocked on Robert’s door. One of the richest – and best-timed – mentoring relationships I have ever experienced was about to begin. I say “mentoring” and that’s really true. But I also have to say that Robert and I were simply friends as well. After that initial meeting, we saw quite a lot of each other. He finally passed away eight years later on September 12, 2018 at the tender age of ninety-seven. 

Robert always spoke of “the slender threads” life presents for us to follow. This was certainly one of the most golden ones for me. 

What was going on for me astrologically on the day I met Robert? Have a look at the chart of our first meeting. The time is accurate to within a few minutes.

Perhaps the single most striking feature of the chart is the exact – to the minute – conjunction of the transiting lunar north node with my natal Sun. Remembering that the Moon’s nodes take 18.6 years to make a circuit of the chart, I am still awe-struck by the sheer precision of this conjunction.

Meanwhile, there’s another nodal connection – when I knocked on Robert’s door, the transiting Sun was conjunct my own natal north node. That aspect was very close to exactitude too, although not as spectacularly so as the transiting node’s perfect alignment with my Sun. (The Sun/node conjunction had been precise early on the previous day.) 

Perhaps even more importantly, by solar arc the nodal axis was only about a month away from squaring my natal Moon – six more arc-minutes and that aspect would be exact too.

For me, it was Node City, in other words. 

When the lunar nodes leap out of the astrological mixture that way, you can count on having reached some kind of evolutionary crossroads in your life. The south node carries the scent of the past into the present. One effect of that energy is that often you meet people who seem “strangely familiar” – figures from prior lifetimes, in other words. Robert Johnson certainly felt that way to me. 

Natally, Robert’s late Capricorn Moon squared my own natal nodes. That suggests that in a prior life, he had presented some kind of nurturing lunar face to me. Often in practice that kind of Moon/node interaspect suggests a previous parental or familial relationship between two people – but his Moon was also almost exactly conjunct my natal Mercury too, so I suspect that in the past he was a nurturing teacher to me of some sort. That is certainly what he felt like in this life.

There was more. Remember that the transiting Sun was entering my 6th house and conjuncting my north node. Commonly, the sixth house is called the House of Servants and the usual interpretations are typically built around work and responsibilities. It’s helpful to remember that a servant serves a master – and that simple insight opens the door into a rich, and largely forgotten dimension of the 6th house: the idea of mentorship. Not all servant/master dynamics are built on domination. Think of a spiritual master nurturing or guiding the disciples. Think of a master craftsperson passing on a set of skills to the next generation. Or think simply and sweetly of the bond between a niece and her beloved aunt or a nephew and his beloved uncle – those are traditional sixth house relationships too.

If I had told Robert Johnson that he was my guru, it only would have confused and embarrassed him. And, truth said, he didn’t actually feel like my guru. There was too much of a peer relationship between us for that. Still, there is one feature of 6th house relationships that has a guru/disciple ring to it. That’s transmission – what happens when  something is passed from teacher to student via some kind of mysterious psychic resonance. For one example, after spending time with Robert, I felt I understood Jungian analysis far better than I ever had before – or, more accurately, I felt I understood his own unique approach to the process. From my time with Robert, I also experienced a vivid sense of having a direct lineage with Carl Gustav Jung. I learned from one who had learned from him. In such a lineage, something precious – call it a sacred flame – is passed down from one generation to the next. Underlying this idea, you can see the polar relationship between the sixth house and the mystical twelfth.

Sixth house fashion, I sat at Robert’s feet and felt privileged to be there. I was humbled by his wisdom. Here was a soul who was beyond me in the eternal journey. His footprints lay ahead of mine, but now I at least knew where they were. I could follow them. Something in his presence accelerated my own progress. The tuning fork of his soul set mine vibrating in a new way.

Those are the true bottom lines. I will always be grateful to Robert for those gifts. And again in pure 6th house fashion, the only way I can ever pay him back is by passing on those gifts to others as best I can.

LONG ODDS

There are 21,600 minutes of arc in the zodiac. What are the odds against the Moon’s north node being in the exact minute of my natal Sun when I first drove up Tubb Canyon Road to knock on the door of Robert A. Johnson? Of the three nodal activations happening around the time of that meeting, that’s perhaps the most spectacular one. 

Another way to say the same thing is that the transiting south node was exactly opposite my Sun at the same time – and the south node is really where all of our understanding truly begins. That’s the karma that is ripening.

With my transiting south node in Cancer and the 8th house, my own ripening karma at that time was symbolized by issues around sexual bonding (the 8th house) and home and family (Cancer). As I mentioned, my marriage was already foundering and soon to sink. (The solar arc nodal axis squaring my 4th house Moon echoed the same themes, perhaps even more loudly. And naturally there were other things going on in my chart that lie outside the scope of this little essay.) 

The north node always shows us the way forward. With the transiting north node in Capricorn and the 2nd house, my soul needed to learn something about solitude and self-sufficiency – that’s Capricorn. Robert Johnson had those qualities in abundance. He had never married. He’d lived as a monk. He radiated the very medicine that I needed to find in myself in order to get myself through a tough time.

With the transiting north node on my Sun, I needed to learn something about standing up for myself – and more than once I had seen Robert react fiercely to anything he deemed to be inappropriate behavior. There was gentleness in him, but I wouldn’t characterize him as “a gentle man.” I needed some of that energy too.

What about the 2nd house? The transiting north node was there as well. Classically, that’s the House of Money. Well, with divorce looming, obviously I was soon to learn some painful lessons about how much lawyers cost, along with what it meant to have built our dream house one year before the biggest economic collapse of a generation – hard, practical financial lessons, for sure. More deeply, the 2nd house is about dignity, loving yourself, and feeling as if you “have what it takes.” 

As many of you readers doubtless know from your own experience, divorce is an ego-shattering experience. Robert helped me get through it without losing faith in myself. His respect for me and my work was contagious – that was part of his gift to me. Here’s what is perhaps the best illustration of that gift. I did a birthchart reading for him. Afterwards, he wrote to a friend about the experience and she shared his words with me. They came at a time I really needed to hear them.

My three hours with Mr. Forrest was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I hope you will hear it some time. In the last hour, the story broke off into a survey of my last incarnation, which was very sober and full of darkness that has lapsed over into my present life and has accounted for the difficult things I have lived with presently – such things as amputation and loneliness. 

Robert later wrote directly to me, “I have had several charts done in my lifetime, but none of them but yours have escaped the astrologer mistaking so much of the chart as a sounding board for his own ego.” 

This hurtful, fertile chapter of my life happened a long time ago now. Nowadays, my life feels like it’s on track and my ego is quite well-fed – but back then, with the north node on my Sun and my life falling apart, Robert’s kind words about the work I did with him around his birthchart were exactly the medicine I needed. Over the years, people have generally been appreciative of my work. Praise and gratitude for it are blessedly not rare experiences for me, and I am always grateful to hear them. But naturally such praise counts for even more when it comes from a Great Soul – a mahatma – like Robert A. Johnson. 

A FINAL REFLECTION

The great Gothic southern novelist William Faulkner once wrote, “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” In evolutionary astrology, we constantly live in the shadow of that mysterious awareness. As the nodes make their passage around the chart – and as moving planets trigger them – we are constantly invited to re-experience unfinished, unresolved situations from long ago. We meet old friends, old lovers, and old antagonists. It’s as if we are saying to the universe, set it up again – I want another look at it. Acts of selfishness come back to haunt us. So do acts of kindness, forgiveness, and charity – although those loftier actions haunt us in far more pleasant ways.  

Robert left the Earth on September 12, 2018. One never knows, but I doubt he will be back. Knowing him as a neighbor, a friend, and a teacher for eight years is one of the finest treasures I have known in this life. 

So thank you for throwing me a lifeline when I needed one, Robert – and gratitude to the mysterious nodes of the Moon for bringing us together – again. 

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