Modern Living: Astrology: Fad and Phenomenon

EQUALLY mindful of his aged bones and exalted station, Berosus the High Priest slowly mounted the stone ramp that spiraled seven times around the great ziggurat and brought him into the presence of the Beings. They blazed and glittered in the night sky above the sleeping city of Babylon far below—imperceptibly wheeling in the ancient celestial dance that contained the secrets of the future of the kingdom. The signs, he saw, were good. Zibbati was well advanced in the Way of Enlil, supported by glowing Ishtar, which favored success in arms. On the morrow, he would tell the king that the time was opportune to move against the Assyrians.

In the basement of the Shambala Bookstore on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue near the university’s campus, 20-year-old Sheila O’Neil looked up from her calculations on the chart before her and shook her head. “We’d better postpone the organization meeting until next week,” she said. “Mercury’s going into opposition with Saturn in the 3rd House, which will mean bad communicating. But next Tuesday all systems will be go.”

Figures in the Ascendant

Berosus would have understood perfectly what Sheila was up to. Indeed, Sheila’s astrological calculations would be one of the few things he would find familiar in the modern world after 50 centuries. It is one of the stranger facts about the contemporary U.S. that Babylon’s mystic conceptions of the universe are being taken up seriously and semiseriously by the most scientifically sophisticated generation of young adults in history. Even the more bc.cult arts of palmistry, numerology, fortunetelling and witchcraft—traditionally the twilight zone of the undereducated and overanxious—are catching on with youngsters. Bookshops that cater to the trend are crammed with graduate students and assistant professors.

Isn’t astrology just a fad, and a rather absurd one at that? Certainly. But it is also something more. The numbers of Americans who have found astrology fun, or fascinating, or campy, or worthy of serious study, or a source of substitute faith, have turned the fad into a phenomenon. Astrologers insist that since their art is actually a science, its renascence was foreordained. The world, they contend, is just entering the Aquarian Age. The movement of the vernal equinox westward at the rate of about 50 seconds a year is bringing it from 2,000 years in the zodiac’s sign of Pisces —characterized by skepticism and disillusionment—to the next 2,000 in Aquarius, an airy sign that will influence the world toward aspiration and faith. The highly successful Broadway musical Hair, which lists a staff astrologer in the program credits and includes another astrologer, Sally Eaton, in the cast, opens with the song:

When the moon is in the Seventh

House

And Jupiter aligns with Mars Then peace will guide the planets And love will steer the stars.

Carroll Righter, the best-known and most successful of U.S. astrologers, puts it into a Christian context. “The Piscean Age,” he says, “was an age of tears and sorrow, focused on the death of Christ. In 1904, we entered the Age of Aquarius, which will be an age of joy, of science and accomplishment, focused on the life of Christ.” Righter is already counting his accomplishments and measuring his joy. The dean of America’s public astrologers has a byline that is carried by 306 newspapers each weekday into some 30 million homes. He refuses to brag about his earnings, but they are obviously well into six figures, and in the ascendant.

Righter is only one of about 10,000 full-time and 175,000 part-time astrologers in the U.S. Moreover, like almost everything else, astrology is being computerized. A company called Time Pattern Research Institute, Inc. has programmed a computer to turn out 10,000 word horoscope readings in two minutes; it expects to be doing 10,000 a month by June.

The astrology boom is made up of many elements—including merchandising, show business and crass exploitation of people’s credulity. Department stores across the U.S. are mounting astrological promotions. Woolworth’s is pushing a full line of zodiacal highball and cocktail glasses and paper napkins. Bulls, goats, crabs and scorpions are beginning to embellish everything from children’s clothes to writing paper; St. Crispin in Manhattan is offering its Park Avenue clientele “astronotes” for invitations. One Manhattan beauty parlor boasts a resident astrologer and twelve special hairdos, one for each sign of the zodiac. A perfume manufacturer is doing well with twelve zodiac scents.

Show business everywhere is dabbling in astrology and more or less related arts. Seeress Sybil Leek’s Diary of a Witch is already in its second printing, though her alleged witchcraft seems mainly a device to distinguish her from such colleagues in the prophecy business as the redoubtable Jeane Dixon and British Seer Maurice Woodruff, who does his predicting on a syndicated TV show hosted by Robert Q. Lewis. To lend a little magic to public entertainments, Los Angeles enjoys the services of an official County Witch—a title conferred by the County Supervisor on Mrs. Louise Huebner, a thirtyish “third-generation astrologer and sixth-generation witch.” Sorceress Huebner, who affects clinging outfits of silver for her increasingly frequent broadcasts and public appearances, made her official debut last July at a folk festival in the Hollywood Bowl, at which everyone was supplied with red candles, garlic and chalk and instructed to repeat after her three times: “Light the flame, bright the fire, red the color of desire.” The spell was supposed to increase sexual vitality, and some reported that it did.

The young, too, are exploiting the boom, although less cynically. A California rock group called The Fool has recorded several zodiacal songs—not because they believe only in astrology, but because they feel generally tuned in to the entire occult world (the Fool is the card in the fortunetelling Tarot deck that stands for Man). “This is a very brilliant generation,” says Kiyo, a young half-Japanese astrologer who works mostly among pop groups and folk singers. “They’re interested in astrology because they’ve found the material things failing them, and they’re trying to find their souls.” In Manhattan, one of the brightest young astrologers is 28-year-old Barbara Birdfeather, who is writing a column for Eye magazine and draws private clients from the under-30 set.

Spells for Love and Money

Along with pot and fascination with Eastern mysticism, astrology has made itself at home in the radical “free colleges” for dropouts that are being established across the country. California’s Midpeninsula Free University, for instance, offers no fewer than five courses in the subject: Jungian Astrology, Advanced Astrology, Out of the Aquarium and into the Aquarian, Occult Things and the New Age, and an Occult and Astrology Workshop. When the University of South Carolina recently offered Witchcraft as a non-credit voluntary course, an astounding 247 people signed up—though Professor Sidney Birnbaum expects many of them to drop out when they discover that he is going to teach only history of, not how to.

A how-to course in witchcraft, though, is offered by San Francisco’s Heliotrope Free University. At a recent lecture in the seamy Fillmore district of the city, the door was opened by the presiding witch—young and tall, with flowing golden hair. “I’m Witch Antaras Auriel,” said the white-gowned figure softly. This barefoot witch clearly has magic, especially considering that Antaras Auriel is a boy, born Dennis Boiling, 19 years ago in San Jose.

Beyond such folderol, astrology has been taken seriously by serious students. They believe that the ancient religion and superstition from which it springs are embedded in the unconscious of modern man. Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung referred to it as a “scientia intuitiva,” and often had horoscopes cast for his patients. The idea was not to predict their futures but to call attention to elements that might or might not lie in their personalities. A horoscope showing excessive fatherlove and tendencies toward sadism, he realized, could be used to provoke talk, self-analysis and perhaps insight. “Today,” wrote Jung, “rising out of the social deeps, astrology knocks at the doors of the universities, from which it was banished some 300 years ago.”

So—at the moment—it seems. Dr. Ralph Metzner, a psychologist with Stanford University’s counseling and testing center, uses astrology in a quarter of his cases in the same way Jung did. He thinks that it will soon be “an adjunct to psychology and psychiatry,” not because it is truer but because it is “much more complex and sophisticated than present psychological maps or systems.” Graduate Student Michael Katz led a weekly astrology class last semester as part of Stanford’s introductory psychology course, and New York University recently invited Astrologer Shirley Spencer to lecture.

Predictive astrology, like divination and occultism generally, tends to take hold in times of confusion, uncertainty and the breakdown of religious belief. Astrologers and assorted sorcerers were busy in Rome while the empire was declining and prevalent throughout Europe during the great 17th century waves of plague. Today’s young stargazers claim to be responding to a similar sense of disintegration and disenchantment. This fact disturbs social activists and reformers like crusading Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who fulminates: “The growing interest in astrology is a beautiful example of the lobotomized passivity that results from the alienating influence of modern technological society.”

Marshall McLuhan, the noted medium, is far less pessimistic. “The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no coincidence,” he feels. “Psychic communal integration, made possible at last by the electronic media, could create the universality of consciousness foreseen by Dante when he predicted that men would continue as no more than broken fragments until they were unified into an inclusive consciousness. Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today.”

Mercurial, Martial, Jovial

Preposterous as it may be, the astrology cult suggests a deep longing for some order in the universe—an order denied by modern science and philosophy. This is expressed by Danny Weiss, a 24-year-old partner in an astrologically hip music-recording outfit called Apostolic Studios, which is guided by top-ranking Astrologer Al Morrison, president of the Astrologers’ Guild of America. Danny Weiss believes that the uptrend in astrology is a result of “an awakening of religious consciousness. People have lost faith in their old beliefs,” he says. But “if you believe in the order of the universe, then you’ll believe in astrology because the order of the stars expresses that universal order.”

The search for such order goes back to the beginnings of man. Notches cut in reindeer bones and mammoth tusks from the Upper Paleolithic period may be records of the cycles of the moon as much as 25,000 years ago. Modern astrology, in the Western Hemisphere at least, derives from the Chaldeans of the Babylonian Empire who sent Berosus and his fellow astromancers up the ziggurats to study the stars for clues to human destiny. The assumption was only natural. The influences of the sun on the earth and the moon on the seas were obvious, and it was easy to suppose that those other bright deities, the planets—which seemed to be advancing, receding, moving up and down and backward among the fixed stars—should be concerned with wars and governments and the destinies of men on earth.

The characteristics of some of these planet-gods, which were thought to be actual superbeings, could be inferred from their appearance and movement. Mars’ bloody color made it the martial god of war; Mercury’s quick motion near the sun gave it a nervous, mercurial quality; big, bright Jupiter suggested power, success and the joviality that goes with them; bright-burning Venus, seen so often in the beauty of evening, suggested love.

The origin of the constellations of the zodiac is more problematic. Their number, twelve, is obviously an approximation of the number of moon cycles in a year, and the system probably began as a way of measuring time and relating it to agriculture. But how the twelve signs came to be identified with specific creatures (the Greek word zodiakos means “pertaining to animals”) is obscure. Only two of the zodiacal signs bear any visible relation to actual arrangements of stars in the sky. One is Gemini (the Twins), which consists of two principal bright stars (Castor and Pollux) of almost equal magnitude. The other is Scorpio, with a grouping of 15 stars reminiscent of the stinging tail of that dangerous insect, common in the Middle East.

Planet means “wanderer” in Greek, and as these gods wandered through the narrow belt of the zodiac, they exhibited changes of mood that are still important elements in the astrology of today. The ancients were convinced that the earth was the center of the universe, fixed and unmoving. When the earth’s actual motion, relative to the motion of the rest of the planets, made the others seem to slow down or reverse direction (retrograde), the gods were thought to be irritated and therefore “malefic.” The sun is said to “rejoice” in Leo (July 23-Aug. 22) because it is summer and because the king of beasts resembles him in splendor and strength. The sun is “exalted” in Aries (March 21-April 19) because Aries is a fiery sign associated with the coming of spring. For corresponding reasons the sun is said to be “in exile” in autumnal Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 23) and “in his fall” in winter’s Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). The other planets (in astrology the sun is treated as a planet of the earth) exhibit similar fluctuations of temperament, though for less obvious reasons.

Other astrologies developed among stargazers in China, India and what were to become the Americas; the Babylonians’ system moved, with many modifications and name changes, to Egypt, Greece, Rome—and eventually to Christian Europe. The New Testament’s Wise Men from the East were, of course, astrologers who had discerned a convergence of planets in the heavens that signified the birth of the Messiah. In the second century A.D., the Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, codified astrological tradition in his Tetrabiblos, which is the source book for all modern astrologers.

Caruso, Pickford, Mr. X

Condemned by the church, astrology lay dormant during the Middle Ages, flowered in the Renaissance—when Nostradamus worked for Catherine de Medici—and receded almost to the vanishing point with the Age of Reason and the advance of science during the 19th century. So it was that in the 1890s, when a Boston girl named Evangeline Adams began studying the subject, it seemed a very strange preoccupation indeed.

Evangeline’s horoscope told her to move to New York City in mid-March 1899, and she arrived just in time. She put up at the Windsor Hotel on March 16, and that very evening consulted the stars of the hotel’s proprietor, Warren F. Leland. As she wrote later, she hastened to warn him that he “was under one of the worst possible combinations of planets—conditions terrifying in their unfriendliness.” The next day the hotel burned to the ground, and Leland’s daughter and other members of his family perished in the fire. Leland told the newspapers about the prediction, and Evangeline’s success was assured.

So, too, under this potent lady’s influence, was the success of astrology in the U.S. To Miss Adams’ studio above Carnegie Hall came the rich and respectable—King Edward VII (Scorpio), Enrico Caruso (Pisces), Mary Pickford

(Aries), Steel Tycoon Charles Schwab (Aquarius), J.P. Morgan (Aries). Morgan, in fact, is said to have become quite interested in what she had to say about the effect of the planets on stocks and bonds. Not the least of Miss Adams’ achievements in behalf of her art was raising astrology from the status of fortunetelling, illegal in New York State. Haled into court as a fortuneteller, she gave so accurate a reading of the natal horoscope of an unknown “Mr. X” (who turned out to be the judge’s son) that the judge ruled she had “raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science.” In 1930—two years before her self-predicted death—she began a thrice-weekly radio program that brought in letters and requests for horoscopes at the rate of 4,000 a day.

Another thing Evangeline Adams did for U.S. astrology was to convince a young, wellborn Philadelphian named Carroll Righter that he ought to be an astrologer. As a friend of his family, she met him first at 14, found out his birth time (“I’m a gregarious Aquarius,” he archly rhymes), and informed him repeatedly that his chart was perfect for interpreting the stars—”just like mine.”

But young Carroll, the second of four sons in a proper Philadelphia family, went on from the University of Pennsylvania to take a law degree at Dickinson School of Law and work for a year in a large Philadelphia firm. When he found law incompatible, he turned to civic projects—the Robin Hood Dell concerts, the Philadelphia Grand Opera Company—and when the Depression struck, helped feed, clothe and house Philadelphia’s unemployed. Under Miss Adams’ influence Carroll had been trying his hand at horoscopes, and now he began to do them for the unemployed. He was impressed, he says, at how often the special ability indicated by a man’s stars were useful in landing him a job.

When, owing to complications from an old back injury, doctors gave him six months to live, Righter looked at his own horoscope and found he had “physical protection in the Southwest.” He moved to Los Angeles, and “in a year I could dance.” His amateur astrologizing proved to be so popular among the movie crowd that he turned professional in 1939. In the 30 years since then, a constellation of Hollywood stars have been his clients, and his rooms are crammed with photographs of the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Susan Hayward, Robert Cummings, Tyrone Power, Van Johnson, Ronald Colman, Peter Lawford and Ronald Reagan. To newsmen’s repeated queries as to whether he is using astrology to run California, Governor Reagan replies that he is no more interested in the subject than the average man.

Some of Righter’s clients have tended toward fanaticism: Director William Dieterle insisted on starting the shooting for one movie on a certain date, even though it had not been cast by that time. For the most part, like many astrologers, Righter does his best to couch everything—even the unpleasant—in positive terms. “If I find a strong indication, say, that someone is going to lose his job, I say: ‘You know, nothing in life is certain. This is a period of change. Your chart shows that you have some interesting new beginnings, and if I were you I’d prepare for them.’ ” He also tries to discourage what Client Robert Cummings calls “astrological hypochondria.” Says Righter: “If all they want to know is what color suit or dress to wear, I cut them off, and I just won’t talk to them again until they straighten out.”

How does Righter help them, once they have straightened out? “Suppose you’re an actor and you’re offered three different scripts at once. How do you make a choice via astrology? It isn’t difficult; you look at the aspects. If you have a beautiful Venus aspect, I tell you to take the romantic part. If you have a Mars and Saturn aspect, I tell you to take the part in which there is a lot of fighting and bloodshed.”

Remember Me to Aries

Now 69, Righter does not often leave his spacious, high-columned Hollywood house near Grauman’s Chinese Theater. Though his 6-ft. frame is trim, he has the colorless, puffy look of one who does not often go into the sun. Less frequent are the big splurgy parties, complete with animal when appropriate, with which he used to greet the beginning of a new zodiacal sign. For the most part, he stays home, attended by a butler (“Mr. Libra”) and a cook (“Miss Virgo”), and works with four secretaries and a mathematician. “I don’t like to go out,” he says, “because I would hate to miss a call from someone who wanted my help.”

The phone rings constantly, and Righter—who has never bothered with people’s names—spends much of his time in a soft-voiced swivet of “Oh, Moonchild,-I’m happy to tell you that this is a very good day for you.” “Hello, Taurus. Yes, sign the contracts day after tomorrow, not before.” “Well, Capricorn, I’ve been expecting your call. I’m pleased that it worked out well, but I’m not surprised. Remember me to Aries.” At night he keeps a file of his principal clients’ charts by his bed for ready consultation at 2:30 a.m. when an actor calls up from Hong Kong—as one did recently—to ask him when the ankle he twisted on the set was going to get better. Righter plainly loves this kind of doctor-patient relationship; he has never married, and much of his affective life is lived through his clients. “If I don’t get called late at night,” he says, “I sometimes toss and turn and wonder what’s happened to everybody. I begin to feel not needed.”

Substitute for the Bearded Man

When he is not working up charts for clients—for which he charges, like some doctors, according to ability to pay —Righter is dictating the newspaper columns and potboilers that constitute the real financial base of the astrology business. These include Carroll Righter’s Astrological Forecast, a six-page printed sheet for each sign of the zodiac giving a brief, ambiguous tip-off on what to expect for every day of a given month ($1 a copy, $10 by the year). Next month P. G. Putnam’s Sons will publish his Astrological Guide to Marriage and Family Relationships. In the works: Astrological Guide to Business and Finance.

At its worst, Righter’s kind of advice is banality; at its best, it is a little common sense, with an overlay of zodiacal lingo. This is not to say that it is cynical; Righter and most practicing astrologers believe with complete seriousness in what they are doing, and their experience in dealing with human problems gives what they say some validity. In fact, two Northwestern University psychology professors, Lee Sechrest and James H. Bryan, reported in a recent issue of the social-science monthly, Transaction, that they found the mail-order marriage counseling of 18 sample astrologers generally valid and useful.

The same cannot be said, though, for the newspaper and magazine columns that have proved so popular. Righter’s is the Leo’s share of that questionable market, but it is only a share. He has some 17 rival newsprint astrologers. Outstanding among the competition is Sydney Omarr (225 papers), a highly intelligent younger astrologer who has given up most of his private practice to devote himself to writing and promoting the cause. Omarr, 42, a former news editor for CBS radio and the most skillful and sober public protagonist astrology has, is interested in aligning the antique art with the modern disciplines of psychology and space science. Then there is Constella (100 papers), a cheerful, overweight 72-year-old New Englander (Shirley Spencer) who started writing a graphology column for the Daily News in 1935, but switched to the stars nearly 20 years ago. She feels that many of astrology’s new converts are refugees from religion: “We’re afraid to say no, no, no to the bearded man upstairs before we have a substitute.”

Zolar, a New York astrologer, does not write a newspaper column but profits amply from every other form of astrological activity. A former clothing salesman named Bruce King, he turned to astrology during the Depression, when he learned that a certain Professor Seward had amassed a fortune peddling horoscopes on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Now 72, he supervises the distribution of more than 50 zodiacal and occult items and books all over the world. Zolar horoscopes range from $200 for a personal one down to $25 for a stock-market forecast in a plain envelope (ten choices on the New York and American exchanges), $15 for an overall look at next year and $10 for a natal chart. He is now looking for a buyer for his name and business.

Variables and Options

Faithful followers do well to stick to one mail-order magus at a time if they would avoid schizoid tendencies. Often, different astrologers will give different readings of the same chart. It is hard to see what solace or stimulation can be gleaned from the columns’ redundant injunctions to “Avoid troublesome people” and “Try to get along with higher-ups.” Last week the inane appropriateness of Jeane Dixon’s March 10 message for Gemini was good for a laugh when Mission Control Center relayed it to Astronauts McDivitt and Scott (both Geminis) in Apollo 9. The sage advice: “Don’t get into any disagreements today, and group activity is preferable tonight.” But somebody out there is gobbling up this kind of thing; astrology columns now run in some 1,200 of the 1,750 dailies in the U.S.

Astrologers who publish mere sun-sign generalities earn the scorn of their less commercial (or less successful) brethren, who limit themselves to charting and interpreting individual horoscopes. The simplest horoscope is the natal chart, which depicts the solar system at the precise moment of the person’s (or country’s or corporation’s) birth. Just as important as the sign the sun is in can be the sign of the zodiac that was rising (“ascending”) in the east at the exact time and place of birth.

These, and the positions of all the other planets, must be recorded on a standard chart like the one on which the horoscope of President Nixon was cast (see chart).

All charts, like Nixon’s, consist of two parts: 1) an outer ring showing the location of the signs of the zodiac at the time of birth, and 2) an inner pie chart, divided by “cusps” into twelve “Houses,” each representing a different aspect of earthly life. The positions of the signs of the zodiac, and the planets among them, affect the Houses below. Even the angles between the planets are significant. The characteristics of the planets strongly affect each other when they are in “conjunction” (only 10° or so apart). Their good characteristics strongly reinforce each other when they are “trine” (120° apart) and reinforce each other less strongly when they are “sextile” (60° apart). They represent an obstacle to overcome when they are “square” (90° apart) and possible disaster when two “malefic” planets are in “opposition” (180° apart, at opposite sides of the circle). Even these factors are just a few of the hundreds that can enter into an astrologer’s interpretation of the chart.

Language Inaudible to Man

It is the interpretation of a given chart that determines whether an astrologer is adjudged good, mediocre or bad. And it is here that astrology’s scientific pretensions are tested, and fail. If astrology works in any way other than intuition on one side and faith plus hope on the other, the key question for modern man is “How?” The how of things seldom bothered the Babylonians, for whom a mountain might fly through the air or the sun stand still. Later it was assumed that some kind of emanations issued from heavenly bodies to affect the characters and destinies of men. When scientists found no emanations powerful enough, sophisticated astrologers abandoned causality altogether and eagerly embraced Jung’s theory of “synchronicity”—that everything in the universe at any given moment participates through that moment with everything else that shares the same unit of time.

These days, though, the emanations may be staging a comeback. Some astrology apologists point to the fact that experimental oysters transported from Long Island Sound to Evanston, Ill., and shielded from light and temperature change, gradually altered their rhythm of opening and closing from the tidal cycle of Long Island to what it would have been in Evanston—if Evanston had had a tide. Apparently, the moon was communicating with the oysters in some language as yet inaudible to man. Japanese Dr. Maki Takata found that the composition of human blood changes in relation to the eleven-year sunspot cycle, to solar flares and sunrise, and during eclipses. French Science Writer Michel Gauguelin foresees a new science of astrobiology, which could vindicate the intuited conclusion of the ancients that extraterrestrial forces affect human life, and at the same time explode the anachronistic conglomeration of myth and magic cluttering up modern astrology.

Lucky Break?

In the meantime, astrologers must continue to uphold the fancy that particular planets influence particular facets of human personality or specific events. Even under these ground rules, there are so many variables and options to play with that the astrologer is always right. Break a leg when your astrologer told you the signs were good, and he can congratulate you on escaping what might have happened had the signs been bad. Conversely, if you go against the signs and nothing happens, the astrologer can insist that you were subconsciously careful because you were forewarned.

Sensitivity, intuition and maybe even clairvoyance make the difference between such tomfoolery and “good” astrology. The good astrologer senses the mood of his client, perceives his problems and finds the most positive way of fitting them into the context of the horoscope. Then he looks ahead, shaping predictions so that they amount to constructive counsel. The client might have been better advised to consult a psychiatrist, marriage counselor, physician, lawyer or employment agency. But there are many troubled people who refuse to accept personal responsibility for their lives, insisting that some outer force is in control. For these, a first-class astrologer can seem a necessity—and perhaps he is.

-Cancers were renamed Moonchildren by Righter about ten years ago to dissociate the sign from the disease; Cancer’s most influential planet is the moon.