A “Paradigm Popper:” How I Came to Be an Astrologer

Part of my problem, I now recognize, was that I had had an Ivy League education. That is, I had been “trained into orthodoxy” at a leading university which left my mind in a very small box of rationality, objectivity, quantification, and scholarly rigor. Stuff like crystal balls, Tarot readings, psychics’ predictions and astrology I dismissed as hogwash valued only by credulous, uneducated fools. In this lamentable state I was completely unprepared to cope with a dream I had on November 25, 1983. There was no action, just words: “Friends will die. Relatives will die. You will give up everything, and your life will be transformed.” Then I woke up. I was married at the time and I asked Ed if he had heard the words. He said no, so I repeated them, and then, because I rated dreams on a par with witches’ brew, I dismissed the whole experience.

Five days later I learned that my friend Hazel Crafts had dropped dead the night before. When I told Ed, he reminded me of the dream. But I pooh-poohed the idea that the dream might have been predictive. “Oh, that’s just a coincidence!” It was to be many years, and many more predictive dreams before I became convinced that there’s no such thing as coincidence.

Just as the dream said, everything in my life began to fall away. Over the next six months I lost two aunts, an uncle, and got divorced. And I kept having these weird dreams! I thought I was losing my mind. When I would seek solace from my friends that I was not actually going crazy, they gave me no satisfaction at all, as they weren’t psychiatrists. But they began to send me hither and yon to every psychologist, counselor, therapist and shrink they could find (and in eastern Maine in 1984 there were not many of them).

So it was in May of 1984 I thought I was about to see another mental health professional when my student Miranda suggested I consult someone she knew. She came with me to a nice house in Bar Harbor, and it was only while walking up the steps to this house that I learned I was about to see not a therapist but an astrologer. An astrologer!???!!

I was livid, and castigated Miranda for thinking that astrology was of any use. It was just bogus hogwash. And I refused to go in. Miranda then told me that the woman had done all the work to create and analyze my chart, and she would have to pay the woman even if I didn’t go in. Then I felt exasperated, but also guilty–that one of my students was going to pay for this mumbo-jumbo.

With great reluctance and skepticism I went in and sat down. Initially my body language reeked of disdain and disbelief, but then I began to hear things that resonated. This woman somehow knew what I was experiencing. She seemed to know me. More than this, she was telling me when things would improve, timing the passage of this interval filled with turmoil and torment.

It turned out that my “upending experience,” beginning with the first of my “voice-over” dreams, was timed by the classic Uranus transit opposing Uranus, which, given my chart, occurred at my mid-heaven, i.e. a sensitive part of my chart and life: my home, my career, my marriage and my sense of myself were all up for grabs and, just as the dream forewarned, everything in my life was falling away.

Of course, given the limitations of my Ivy League training, I saw no way to explain the accuracy of the reading but to accuse the woman of being a psychic, but she denied that and said that I could do just what she did, if I learned how to identify and interpret the symbols, that astrology is a very powerful (and complex) symbol system. This presented me with an intellectual challenge I could not resist, which is how I became a student of Frances Sakoian, the foremost American astrologer of her generation, author of dozens of books, and my first teacher. Subsequently I got into Jung’s use of astrology for psychological insights through the work of Liz Greene, founder of the Centre for Psychological Astrology and author of dozens of works combining her training as a certified Jungian analyst and her expertise in chart analysis. That’s how I became a practicing astrologer, and how I got myself out of the box of the limited mentality I was trained in, so that now, like Jung, I appreciate the “unpopular things” that our Western intellectual tradition dismisses.