Real Astrology: Is Future Prediction Possible?

Ten Planets? When I got home, I spent a little more time perusing the booklet. Some of it seemed to describe me, but most of it either did not, or was so general it could have applied to almost anyone. Inside the back cover was an ad. "Your Sun is in Virgo. But it's only one of ten planets in your chart." Planets? Ten planets? What are they talking about? For only 25 bucks I could get a more fleshed out computerized report with all ten planets (Earth doesn't count, but the Sun and the Moon do, as does Pluto...despite the recent pronouncements of the astronomer community), including the meaning of the location of each one within the signs and houses, as well as the meanings of the apparent angles they make to one another when viewed from the Earth (the "Aspects"). I was supposed to give not only my date of birth, but the exact time of day and the place of my birth, as well. My mother had told me I was born "a little before 9 AM," so that's the time I gave.

Two weeks later, my package arrived. My heart raced as I ripped open the envelope. It was about 15 double-spaced pages, if that. It said that the Moon in my Eighth House squaring Pluto in my Eleventh House meant that I would likely experience deep emotions and be subject to bouts of jealousy and outbursts of temper due to offended vanity. I couldn't deny that. It contributed mightily to my divorce a few years earlier. It said (as did that little booklet from the supermarket) that I would have in interest in health related matters, optimizing health through diet and exercise, and that I would have a particular interest in, and be healed by, unusual medical therapies. I had been extremely interested in acupuncture since 1972 and successfully underwent treatment in 1975...long before it became commonplace in this country, and I'd also developed a continuing interest in homeopathy in 1978. It said I may very well belong to "an exclusive group of intellectuals." Five years earlier I had joined Mensa. It said some other very nice things about me, too. I'd accept the part about the temper and jealousy if the rest of the report was like this. But what I read next made me break out in a cold sweat.

Suddenly, here was more about that Moon/Pluto connection. The Moon, as mentioned, was in my Eighth House. The Eight House is traditionally associated with deep emotions, sex, ESP, birth, and Death. The position of the Moon in my Eighth House, according to the report, signified that "your Death may be the subject of pubic discussion." I hadn't counted on finding something like this in my $25 report and it set my mind reeling. For a while, I couldn't even continue reading. I took another peek. "A public death" it reiterated. I read on til I came to another disturbing entry which dovetailed with the position of the Moon in the 8th. I had Mars (energetic, explosive Mars) in my 9th House (the house of travel) conjuncting powerful Uranus (sudden, unexpected things).


According to the report, this was a strong indication of a tendency to experience "surprising incidents while traveling." Accidents! Two powerful indications; one suggesting accidents while traveling, and another indicating a "public death." I lay there doing a quick inventory of my life to that point. When I was in Korea 18 years earlier pulling a 24-hour stint as "duty driver," I had come within a hair's breadth of broadsiding a bus in my open Jeep going about 45 MPH. But I missed. Not a scratch. In New Mexico two years later, I almost drove off a cliff in the Sandia Mountains north of Albuquerque. But I didn't. In 1968, a stranger was giving me a lift from a gas station back to my car which had stalled by the side of the road during an ice storm. As we got within a hundred feet, it became apparent that he would not be able to stop. And didn't. He totaled my car. But I was uninjured, despite riding "shotgun" without a seatbelt. However, about ten years before that report arrived, back in 1972 as I was stopped, waiting to make a lefthand turn, I was struck from behind by a kid who admitted he had never even touched his brakes. He said he'd been going 35 miles an hour. The impact spun my car around , across the white line. I was lucky I wasn't struck by oncoming traffic. Since I had no cuts or bruises, I never sought medical help. But this was in the days before headrests were standard equipment. Beginning a few weeks later, I began experiencing excruciating headaches, dizziness, anxiety and extreme sensitivity to noise of any kind, all of.which lasted for approximately three years; until I was cured by that acupuncturist ("unconventional medical therapies") in 1975. But the story doesn't end here.

Uranus is also associated with inventiveness, originality, humanitarianism and the study of...astrology.

William Herschel is credited with discovering Uranus in 1781 while systematically charting the skies with his telescope, although it had actually been seen decades earlier. Formerly, it had been thought to be a star rather than a planet.

Most planets spin on an axis which is perpendicular to the ecliptic, or the path of their orbit. In other words, they appear to be "upright" as they orbit the Sun. Long before telescopes were powerful enough to see Uranus as anything more than a point of light in the sky, astrologers had Uranus pegged as an oddball.
Unlike the other planets, the axis of Uranus is parallel to the eclipic. It is orbiting the Sun "lying on it's side!"

Copyrightfree photo of Uranus shown here is made available courtesy of ESA/Hubble.

...for a time. I was aware (from reading the report) that birth time was critical if the house cusps were to be properly placed. A few minutes difference might just move the Moon out of that damned 8th (Death) House! I began to think that maybe my birth time had been misreported. Maybe my mother was too groggy (I was delivered by Ceasarian section) to really know what time it was. I decided to send away to Lansing for my official birth certificate. It arrived two weeks later. Yessss! I had been born at 10:00 AM, according to my official birth certificate; not 9 AM! I happily filled out a new form to send to the astrocomputer people. But when the corrected report arrived, nothing had changed! Well, some things had. But that damned Moon; it was still stuck in my damned 8th House!

"The New Compleat Astrologer." It's a book by an English astrologer couple, Derek and Julia Parker, and that's the way they spelled the title with that "olde English" spelling. As luck would have it, within a month of having received that computerized report, the Parkers were guests on Lou Gordon's local talk show promoting their book. Despite that bothersome 8th House, I was hooked on astrology; one of the most amazing things I'd ever come across. The next day, I bought the book. There were instructions on constructing a chart along with an ephemeris (a compilation of planetary postions on every day over a period of time). The ephemeris in the back of the Parkers' book rounded off only to the nearest degree, but that was close enough to allow me (following their instructions) to construct my astrological chart. Today, although I know more about astrology than I did then, I would not be able to construct one by hand as I have relied on my computer to construct charts for many years.

(You can buy this book from Amazon, below.)

About the same time that very first astrology report had arrived, I had begun making some headway with my freelance cartooning. And by 1985, checks, nice fat ones for a freelancer, were coming in, sometimes right in the envelope along with the rejects. This jibed nicely with my chart. But even as I was beginning to enjoy some real success, I was becoming more obsessed with the astrology. I would head to my drawing board around 9 AM, but by 10 AM, something astrological would occur to me. I'd get my books out (by now, I probably had 7 or 8 of them, although in fact I had barely scratched the surface of the subject) and begin poring over them. Next thing I'd know, it would be 7:00 in the evening. After a couple of months of this, my checks had stopped rolling in. And for good reason; I had stopped writing gags and drawing cartoons!
By the end of Summer, I knew something had to give. I gathered up all my astrology books and threw them into the trash. Good riddance!

I'd forgotten that when I'd first become interested in the subject, I had left a book at my sister's house; Rob Hand's excellent "Planets In Transit." When I mentioned that I had thrown my books away, my nephew reminded me that I had one left. I took it home. And gradually, over the next year, I rebought many of the ones I'd tossed out, and added new ones to my collection.. In the ensuing months, I learned that the very worst usually does not come to pass. If a transit indicates the possibility of "health problems having to do with the lungs" for a given period, for instance, it does not necessarily mean that you will be stricken with lung cancer. It may mean a bout of bronchitis. A predicted "unpleasant surprise" might turn out to be your car not starting. It doesn't have to mean getting hit on the head by a falling meteor.

(To find out more about astrological prediction, see "Planets In Transit" in the Amazon module below.)

Around 1988, I looked at the major transits and progressions which would affect my chart over the next few years and remarked to friends and family that I wasn't sure I was going to make it through the next decade.. I said it looked like a minefield. That was in early 1988. In May of that year, I was broadsided by a Saab while riding my bike and flipped over the hood onto the pavement. A witness said he thought I was dead when I hit the pavement. I escaped with a "strawberry" on my elbow.

In 1991, my little Omni was run off I-75, ending up upside-down in the median. In the early '90's, while stopped in the left turn lane waiting to turn, a women who thought she was stepping on her brakes, instead floored the accelerator, flying out of a mall parking lot and broadsiding my car, powerfully enough to slam my car into the car to my right. In 1995, a young woman who failed to see me coming darted out of a side street, broad siding my car, sending me spinning across the while line where I ended up facing in the opposite direction on the other side of the road.

In fact, in the years since I first had the devil scared out of me by that computerized chart, I have been involved in perhaps 20 accidents. In none of them was I at fault.
In most, I was stopped, minding my own business.

Since November, 2006, I have been rearended four times, one of which accidents totaled my car. In one instance, I was the middle car in a five car collision. We were all stopped as the front car was waiting to enter a gas station. Was that my last accident? Ask me again in a year. Heck, ask me tomorrow!

Has the glimpse into the future made my life a living hell?
Or have I benefitted from my interest in astrology? Well, I began wearing my seatbelt immediately after perusing that first computerized report, 17 years before a state law was enacted to require them. I wear it religiously. Had I not been wearing my belt in 1991, my neck would've been broken in that highspeed rollover on 1-75. As it was, I was able to unbuckle my seatbelt, drop safely to the roof of my overturned vehicle, roll down my window, crawl from my car and stand to receive the cheers, or more accurately the honking horns and upraised thumbs, of all the drivers who had seen what had happened and had come to a halt for as far as the eye could see in both directions. Without that seatbelt, here certainly would've been the fulfillment of that "public death" forecast in my $25 chart eight years earlier!

March 19, 2005
Mary Hynes Interviews Richard Tarnas on CBC Radio's Tapestry.

Ms Hynes' introduction:

"Every now and then a book about astrology lands on Tapestry's doorstep. As soon as one comes in, it goes out. Right into the give-away pile. Astrology might be good for a laugh but it's not something you're going to hear about on CBC Radio!

So, here's the problem. One day, a book lands on our doorstep. It's about astrology, but it's written by a highly respected scholar - whose last book was praised by the likes of Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith. His name is Richard Tarnas and the book is called "Cosmos And Psyche" . There's only one option - interview him! You'll hear the results on this week's Tapestry."

Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World" is published by Viking and distributed in Canada by Penguin.

Listen to Ms. Hynes' interview with Richard Tarnas, HERE.

Buy the book from Amazon.com, below.

"It is hard to think of many books written in the past century that will still be read two hundred years from now. Cosmos and Psyche will top that short list. It is majestic, sweeping, and profound. This will be a book for the ages. It will stand over time with the seminal expressions of the human spirit."

-William Van Dusen Wishard
author of Between Two Ages:
The 21st Century and The Crisis
of Meaning

"This is the closest my head has been to exploding while reading a book."

-Mary Hynes
CBC Tapestry

"Cosmos and Psyche is an epoch-making work. It combines impeccably meticulous scholarship and extraordinary clarity of thinking and writing with deep creative vision. The evidence contained here represents the most significant challenge I have seen to the materialistic paradigm of modern science."

-Stanislav Grof, author of Psychology of the Future

"What more important message could there be for our time? If you want to understand more deeply the currents which have shaped and are shaping our world, then this passionate, brilliant, and luminous book is essential reading."

-David Lorimer, Scientific and Medical Network Review

"Breathtaking in the scope and scale of its vision, this extraordinary book shatters our cosmological assumptions as it awakens us to a living universe and its creative intelligence. Tarnas succeeds masterfully in bringing his encyclopedic knowledge forged in writing the critically acclaimed Passion of the Western Mind to the task of discerning the archetypal pulse of history. Spellbinding, eloquent, compelling, Cosmos and Psyche will be a marker for an entire generation."

-Christopher Bache, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies,
Youngstown State University, author of Dark Night, Early Dawn

"Some rare books, presenting very challenging evidence after decades of research, have the power to transform a whole culture. It happened with the groundbreaking works by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. It may happen now with Cosmos and Psyche. Searching beneath the depths of the psyche Tarnas has found the heights of the cosmos. This book will radically transform the way we see cultural and political history, individual life journeys, and our sense of participation in the universe."

-Jordi Pigem, author of La odisea de Occidente (The Odyssey of the West)

"Cosmos and Psyche opens doors in the reader's mind, doors towards the future. Yes, it records, analyzes, and interprets events of the past, but its primary relevance points towards the future. Its thorough research fulfills a function that is central to the genuine, hard-nosed pursuit of human knowledge: 'the elicitation of disbelief and the celebration of surprise' (Lewis Thomas). Richard Tarnas dares to be far ahead of conventional thought. He broadens our horizons until we suddenly see with delight vistas and connections we never expected. Here at last is a world view which - in contrast to prevailing ones - has a future."

-David Steindl-Rast, author of Belonging to the Universe

"With this book Tarnas has succeeded in unveiling what only a few years ago might have seemed impossible: an accessible bridge between the mainstream high culture and an emerging world view that returns the soul to the cosmos."

-Renn Butler
New Age Journal Reviews

"A profound and beautiful book. Could there be a hidden order to our universe that conventional science has completely overlooked? With rich historical scholarship and exquisite prose, Tarnas has written a work that not only challenges our ways of thinking about the world but is a transformative experience in itself. A brilliant tour de force that will ignite debate for years to come."

-Ray Grasse, author of The Waking Dream

"Beyond the depths of our inner experience, even beyond the wonders of the natural world, Cosmos and Psyche confronts us with the astonishing challenge of discerning meaning in the very order and structure of the physical universe. Reconnecting the heavens with the human psyche may well be the 'last frontier' in the re-enchantment of the cosmos. Richard Tarnas' magnum opus sets the grounds to meet, and ultimately overcome, that deepest of all dualisms. The opening of the archetypal eye has never received a more powerful and elegant expression."

-Jorge N. Ferrer, author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory

"Tarnas not only possesses a staggeringly comprehensive reservoir of cultural and historical knowledge, he is a lucid, beautiful writer who can sustain not only the interest but the excitement of the reader for hundreds of pages at a time."

-Frederick J. Dennehy
Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter

With The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas gave the world what many scholars, from Joseph Campbell to Huston Smith, regarded as one of the finest histories of the Western mind and spirit ever written. Now, Cosmos and Psyche challenges the basic assumptions of the modern world view with an extraordinary body of evidence that points towards a profound new understanding of the human role in the cosmos.
Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View shines new light on the unfolding drama of human history and our own critical age. It also suggests a new possibility for reuniting religion and science, soul and intellect, ancient wisdom and modern reason in the quest to understand the past and create the future. Published by Viking Press 2006 (hardcover), and Plume 2007 (paperback).

Card can be customized for any line of work, but is especially apt for any New Age business with mystical or occult overtones (astrology, energy healing, palmreading, shamanism, etc.)

Hope you'll stop by for a looksee.

Zurich-based Astrodienst offers a variety of Free Astrological Charts . But they also offer some of the very best paid services. In between those free charts and those paid services are lots and lots of extremely interesting articles and links.

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