Swinging on the Stars

(A Virgo with Leo Rising)

The Scene is a social-celebrity cocktail party on the seminal slopes of West Hollywood. "Boo!" says the tall, courtly man who advertises himself modestly as the World's Greatest Astrologian. "Gregarious Aquarius here! How's Virgo the Virgin tonight? Meet Miss June 23! Don't abuse her, she's a sensitive child, born on the cusp of Moonchild--I don't say Cancer, because of the malignity, you know. Oh, Leo, don't be so pompous. Be hearts and flowers and tiddlywinks tonight. Scorpio, too, you old troublemaker, this is Sag." (Aside: "Sags are Gods on wheels.") "Now, action, action, action!" The several hundred guests are rapt, clinging like leeches to every Babylonian locution, yearning for some instant analysis from their superseer.

A trembling man sits with his pretty lady on an Arizona ranch and tells the grizzled old astrologer he has a premonition of death by gunshot. "I never saw a person get shot unless he's got a Mars-Uranus affliction," says the astrologer. The man leaps to his feet: "My God, that's what I've got! And this woman's another man's wife. Do something!" The astrologer shakes his head and says evenly: "Mars conjunct Uranus can be a helluva sex aspect; it can involve rape and violence in a mill town; but in a place like this, heck, all it means is a little adultery. Relax."

In Malibu, the recovering movie star confesses to her personal astrologer that she ingested all those pills after failing to follow his advice to junk her Freudian analyst altogether, in favor of her Jungian one. (After all, it was Jung, not Freud, who admitted that "in cases of difficult psychological diagnosis, I usually get a horoscope.")

An oil-rich widow flies from Los Angeles to a South-western city to ask her astrologer: "How can I live on $25,000 a month?" Two hours later, she hands him a check for $500 and returns to her 10 servants and $1,000,000 manse in Holmby Hills, poorer but presumably wiser. In nearby Laurel Canyon, a lovely female astrologer solemnly tells her actress daughter that her chart is propitious for a solo flight to Moscow in a small plane. While over in the San Fernando Valley, an admitted-homosexual astrologer shakes his head ruefully and concludes: "Reagan's trouble is he has Scorpio rising!"

In Santa Barbara, the rich-matron members of the Scorpio Birthday Club celebrate an anniversary in the town's classiest beanery. In Los Angeles, Bullock's retails a Personal Horoscope for $20, prepared by an IBM/360 computer; and high-toned Robinson's merchandises men's underwear in a splashy zodiac print. On the Costa Brava, Salvador Dali hangs an astronomical price tag on his 12 zodiacal lithographs. In Monte Carlo, Princess Grace throws a Scorpio Ball, which is graced, fittingly, by her favorite Hollywood astrologer. At Cape Kennedy, invited guests to the second moon shot include some of the nation's top-seeded astrologers, selected by NASA.

In San Francisco, an astrologer tries to contact a "zodiac killer" cryptographically. In Manhattan, Lord & Taylor keys a vast ad campaign to "the horoscope in fashion." A Broadway star consults a dime-store astrologer nightly before the show. ("The audience is going to be rotten tonight, deary--it's full of Pisces.") In The Wall Street Journal, graphologist Huntington Hartford scolds astrology for not paying sufficient attention to heredity and environment. Paraphernalia designs the zodiac dress; Steuben makes crystal zodiacs; and at least one astrologer has become chargeable via credit card. Some 16 astroalbums guck up record racks over the past Christmas holidays. Women's Wear Daily devotes two full pages to the horoscope's upsurge in high places. Vogue finally gives way to competitive pressure and installs a resident seeress. And Jackie Onassis' chart appears in countless slick magazines around the globe.

In bookstores everywhere, paperback racks sag with planetary pointers ranging from How to Play the Horses Horoscopically to Sex in the Stars. Between the sleazy movie magazines (many of which carry regular astrology features) and the chic haute couture publications (almost all of which do) lies a sargasso of magazines devoted exclusively to the subject. Dell alone boasts 49 horoscope publications, one of which, Horoscope's annual cosmic dopesheet, sold more than 8,000,000 copies last year.

Some 1200 of the 1750 U.S. daily papers surfeit the nation with syndicated sun-sign clichés on love, money and health--in that order. (One druidess forecast financial and sex difficulties for this writer for the same period that another forecast the opposite.) And the underground press is glutted with such graffiti as: "Wanted: Male with moon in Aquarius, sun in Sag., Venus in Aries, Mars in Cap. From 1927 to 1944. Object: to see if astrology works. Dick."

In Phoenix, Los Angeles and New York, the singles industry uses computers to cast charts as well as to match people via their planets. In India, holy men still sit up all night, waiting for the world to burn to a cinder or vanish like Mu into the celestial sea, as predicted periodically by Indian astrologers. Both governments of Vietnam study astrological charts and even distribute astrocalendars when the "aspects" are not too "malefic." In Los Angeles, one well-meaning astrologer studies the charts of terminal-cancer patients for planetary parallels, while another does regular forecasts for several savings-and-loan associations. In Chicago, a major insurance company retains an astrologer to study life expectancies. Coast to coast, some 30 academies and occult temples, such as the Rosicrucians, teach the stuff. In Arizona, a renowned astrologer confides that he is deeply troubled by the personal future of the Nixons: "I've been watching Pat and she doesn't look so good. And Dick's chart is bad in relation to his wife. Discretion forbids me from saying anything more."

In Munich, an astrologer who has counseled some of the world's spangliest names also puzzles over Nixon's chart: "The President's planets in the sign of Capricorn give him the ability to organize on a down-to-earth level--he is better able to build from a basic structure than any other President in recent years. His Virgo rising brings an analytical quality that is sometimes mistaken, in the case of persons of high office, for being too detailed and critical. His conjunction of the moon and Uranus in the sign of Aquarius, which is also in the midheaven of the United States chart, brings him very much to the fore in relation to the U.S. and its leadership in a very worldly sense; and he will do everything in his power to keep the U.S. in first place among nations of the world. It also places him in a congenial position in this new Aquarian Age and, in spite of conservative tendencies, he will do sudden and dramatic things that can startle not only people of his own country but those of foreign countries. He will always keep them guessing. His ricocheting between the conventional and the unusual, the formal and the progressive, gives him a chance to be of far greater service than if he were mired, in a pragmatic sense, in either of these apparently contradictory schools of thought."

The soothsaying grandson of an ex-President of the U.S. delineates the horoscope of an ex-President, Virgoan Lyndon Baines Johnson. No less than Lady Bird herself had supplied the exact moment of birth, without which no self-respecting (continued on page 154)Swinging on the Stars(continued from page 104) astrologer can read the cosmic radiations: "Self-driving character, an executive eccentricity that is not queerness or unbalance but, rather, is power. A remarkable facility for intuition and insight which he is unable to use, because he does not trust spooky things. But a fine green line to Pluto keeps him constantly in touch with the people; and a fine blue line to Uranus in the house of play makes him a superb showman. Yet his Jupiter in Leo makes it seem logical to shake the big stick, and this proved to be his downfall. He believed 'might makes right.'"

And so it goes, astrology ad infinitum and often ad nauseam, too. Is it some neo-Mesopotamian madness, this cosmic hang-up that currently grips the psyches of an estimated 40,000,000 Americans, from hippies to highbrows, socialites to solar-flare scientists? Or is it a serious study, grounded in pure spherical trigonometry, of the correspondences between man and celestial movements that, in the favored lingo of America's 5000-odd astrologers, "works"? Whichever, whatever, the starshine is providing the energy for an astrological renaissance that was launched (and is primarily sustained) by the young, for whom astrology is a quasispiritual aid in their wistful search for selfhood. To them, astrologers are the priests of the dawning Aquarian Age.

The late Dartmouth English professor and former editor of Horoscope, Grant Lewi, has said: "Astrology is 'believed in' by a lot of people who know practically nothing about it; and it is 'disbelieved in' by even more who know absolutely nothing about it." Learning about it is dismayingly difficult, and the lore is as contradictory and as variable as it is large, but the heart of the system--the horoscope--is simple, at least in concept: It is nothing more than a map or clock of the heavens, as seen from the earth. Astrologer Ruth Hale Oliver calls the horoscope "a diagram of potentialities"--as good a definition as any. Since most astrologers believe events and tendencies are predestined by stellar forces in motion at birth, the traditional horoscope, known as a natal chart, shows the positions of the planets and the symbolic signs as they appear from the earth at the exact moment the child first inhales; and the person whose horoscope is under study is known as a "native."

When reading a horoscope, the serious astrologer must study and synthesize a mind-boggling array of factors: the positions and meanings of the two lights (the sun, or vital life force, and the moon, or life process, both of which represent endless things astrologically); the eight planets (Venus is love, Mercury is mind, Jupiter is vision, etc.); the 12 signs of the zodiac; the 12 houses (which rule all the departments of human life: personality, family, sex, money, etc.). He must consider the all-important ascendant, or rising sign, which is the degree of the zodiac on the eastern horizon at the moment of birth; which planets were in which signs and houses and what were the aspects or geometrical relationships (conjunction, sex-tile, square, trine or opposition) of the constantly moving planets. Obviously, all these peculiar factors combine and influence one another in numberless different ways. "In one chart alone, there are roughly ten-raised-to-the-26th-power possible combinations of qualities," says Argentine astrologer Carlos Baravelle. "Even twins are entirely different, being several minutes apart. One might have 29 degrees of Aries on the ascendant, the other the first degree of Taurus."

If he wishes to project a horoscope into the future, the astrologer must execute a complex maneuver called "taking transits and progressions," which at its simplest is a comparison of the birth horoscope with a new chart of the skies at any moment that interests the native, and then make an interpretation of the interactions between the two. As he did for the natal chart, the astrologer consults his ephemeris, an astronomical almanac listing celestial positions from 1890 well into the future. Small wonder, then, that astrology is nowhere close to being an exact science, or that the average astrologer--who ideally should be versed in astronomy, math, mythology, ancient symbolism, parapsychology and good common sense--is understood only by another.

But once over the cusps and combusts, trines and transits, astrology can be fun, instructive and possibly even efficacious. It all depends on the integrity and skill of the seer and on the native's attitude, if not his celestial arrangement. As once-skeptical Henry Miller put it: "Astrology does not offer an explanation of the laws of the universe. What it does, to put it in simplest terms, is to show us that there is a rhythm to the universe and that man's own life partakes of this rhythm." And if man doesn't exactly roll with the cosmic rock, he may still be pleasantly mesmerized by the inane optimism of his daily forecast. ("Those who really care want you, not money.") When McCalls editor Shana Alexander accepted the Los Angeles Times's Woman of the Year Award from one of that paper's star columnists, she said: "You are my second favorite columnist on the Times. My first is Carroll Righter, who tells me every morning that something nice is going to happen."

At 70, Carroll Righter, fondly known to his disciples as Pappy, reaches the widest audience (about 330 newspapers world-wide) of any living astrologer and, to the envy and despair of his colleagues, has the most socially prominent clientele since Nostradamus served the French court. Potent people call him at all hours from every corner of the globe, but "I always remember my charts and keep current aspects by my bed," says Righter.

Mrs. Norman Chandler consults him on the most propitious times to soak the rich for her charities. Governor Reagan set his swearing-in ceremony (12:30 A.M.) by Pappy's planetary clocks. Lawyers loathe him for advising clients to sign contracts at god-awful hours (Susan Hayward signed one at 3:47 A.M.), and he is the bête noire of Hollywood obstetricians, whose delivery plans are often thwarted by Pappy's charts. Righter also determines the most favorable time to conceive and is proud "to have been responsible for quite a few children," having planet-plotted the conceptions, for example, of all four of Marlene Dietrich's grandchildren.

Though Pappy has old money, a law degree and a patrician heritage, it was Marlene who gave him the thrust he needed to swell the starry bag with the big green. When she told him of her plans to retire years ago, he predicted that she was on the verge of a great new career. He also advised her to stay away from the studio on a certain day; the "aspects and angles were disharmonious." She went anyway, tripped over a toy fire engine and broke her ankle. That tore it. From then on, Pappy's word has been the gospel of the stars. He has made 133 celestially charted, transcontinental round trips, all to consult clients, and tossed 162 consecutive zodiac parties with food, drinks and decor themed to the sun sign of the moment. Sometimes the decor is live: Righter produced walking, talking twins for a Gemini blowout, a real horse for a Sag party, a live bull for a Taurus do, a crocodile for Scorpio, two goats for Capricorn and a lion for the now-fabled Leo bash at a beach club in Santa Monica. The lion broke away from its two liveried keepers, toppled over a few guests, but stopped cold before Rhonda Fleming--"another Leo, of course"--got the vapors and had to be carried home in a blanket.

Robert Cummings, a self-styled "astrological hypochondriac," credits Pappy with the huge success of a TV series (Righter recommended then-unknown writer Paul Hennings); and author Erich Maria Remarque feels that if Righter hadn't "worked with him," he'd have died in 1941, when 14 European doctors gave him six months to live. When Hildegarde Neff's career sagged in Hollywood, Pappy dispatched her to Munich, where she has scorched the screen ever since. And had a famous actress flown out of St.-Tropez the day Righter said nay, she'd have gone down on the plane that killed prize fighter Marcel Cerdan.

Pappy also advised Clark Gable when to marry Kay Spreckels; but some other (continued on page 180)Swinging on the Stars(continued from page 154) of his famous congeniality charts haven't turned out too well, e.g., Linda Christian and Tyrone Power, Zsa Zsa and George Sanders, Arlene Dahl and several calamities. Nor did his prediction that Leo-born Leo Durocher, then managing the Giants, would "have an extremely good year." The Giants finished in fifth place that season; but as astro-observer Robert Wallace puts it: "It is no crime to coat the old pill with moonshine instead of sugar."

Though Righter dauntlessly coats the pill with publicity, charm, courtesy and innate cunning, it is no mere planetary placebo with him. "I take my work dead seriously," he says, "and when it doesn't help someone, I am very, very sorry. When I was told, at 14, that I should be an astrologian, I thought it was idiotic, but after 16 years of study, I believed. Mother said, 'I have hatched a duckling.' Well, quack, quack. I love people. All my life I have wanted to help people. The more people who can be told about astrology, and convinced, the better. I always say, 'The stars impel, they do not compel.' And what you make of your life is largely up to you. Everyone is reaching for something. I don't think people can be astrosocial and still be communistic, and I feel I've been helpful in that respect. Astrology fascinates and aids. Even those who say, 'I don't believe in that stuff' usually add, 'but I'm a Virgo. Tell me about me.'" Pappy very much wanted to tell Marilyn Monroe about her, but admits he was on the wrong astral frequency: "I told her that she was born under the sign of Gemini, the same as Judy Garland, Roz Russell and Errol Flynn. She looked at me as if I were crazy and said: 'I know nothing about them. I was born at the same time as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and Queen Victoria!'"

"Nine out of every ten people you meet today can tell you their sun sign," says Sydney Omarr, who is known in the trade as "the astrologer's astrologer." Like Righter, Hollywood-based Omarr counsels the stars (Kim Novak, Jennifer Jones, et al.), is syndicated world-wide (about 225 papers) and hires mathematicians to draw up a client's chart, because that part of astrology bores him. Unlike Righter, Omarr's astrological diggings and several surprisingly solid books have drawn critical orchids from reputable writers, fellow astrologers and even scientists. After years of personal abuse and professional obloquy, he was considerably bolstered by the admission of the late John J. O'Neill, Pulitzer Prize-winning science editor of the late New York Herald Tribune, that "astrology is one of the most important fields for scientific research today, and one of the most neglected. ... No stigma of any kind should be associated with it in the mind of any scientist or layman."

While O'Neill admitted that "we know very little about the array of forces that are impinging on the earth" from afar, he concluded: "The hypothesis of the astrologers that different [terrestrial] effects will be produced by different configurations of the heavenly bodies is entirely consistent with modern developments in the field of chemistry, in which the properties of substances are stated in terms of the architectural configurations of the atoms within the molecules, and with the theories of the atom physicists that the properties of the atoms are associated with the orbital architecture of the electrons."

Though that is hardly the sort of stuff guaranteed to capture the imagination of the average fellow, it goes a long way toward shoring up the battered egos of beleaguered astrologers and dissipating the lunatic fringe's effect on the so-called pseudo sciences, or, in Omarr's argot, "scientific arts." And he has practiced them all, from reading palms at $100 a throw in Bricktop's Mexico City boite to writing an eight-dollar book based on astrological and numerical symbolism (now in its eighth edition). He is the only member of the Armed Forces ever assigned full-time duty as an astrologer: Omarr was serving in the Air Corps on Okinawa when he accurately forecast the end of the War in the Pacific and predicted F.D.R.'s fourth-term election and death in office. The Armed Forces Radio immediately borrowed him to create a show in which he charted and analyzed horoscopes of hundreds of Servicemen, drawing the paunchiest mailbags of any show on Government airwaves.

He is even more in demand on radio and TV today, but the National Association of Broadcasters technically bars Omarr's appearance on member stations with a fusty code that says: "Program material featuring fortunetelling, occultism, astrology, phrenology, palm reading, numerology, mind reading or character reading is unacceptable when presented for the purpose of fostering belief in these subjects." Nevertheless, Four-Star International, currently shooting a half-hour TV pilot around Omarr, hopes to circumvent the code with the same disclaimer used by Carroll Righter's radio sponsors: "This program is being presented solely for your entertainment and is not intended to foster a belief in astrology."

Actually, Sydney Omarr has done as much as anyone to deflect the ridicule that traditionally is heaped upon the horoscope by the establishment sciences. He admits that the daily forecasts, on which many astrologers must depend for a living, are far "too general and superficial" to work. But most are based only on the sun sign, and he is one of the few who takes the time to use the position of the moon and other planets in relation to each sign. "I cause amusement, but I don't cause harm. I never found anyone who did anything but benefit by astrology, if only to get a laugh." Moreover, he does not claim the planets have the power to cause events to occur nor to cause people to respond the way they do. "What we do claim is that there is a correspondence, a coincidence between the planetary patterns and mundane actions, reactions, events. Jung uses the term synchronicity. There is a synchronicity. We don't know why this should be. But it happens so often that it is a reliable indicator. Prediction per se is skating on thin ice. Astrology merely points the way to self-knowledge."

As the accumulated "knowledge" of the effect on man of all forces bombarding him from outer space, astrology has made herculean efforts to point the way since the beginning of time. In prehistory, the heavenly processions were doubtless studied for signs that might give some sensible form to man's intuitions, his psychic rumblings and sneaking suspicions of the cosmic order. Ruth Oliver, board member of the American Federation of Astrologers, a Vassar dropout and authority on ancient astrology, says that according to Mesopotamian tradition, the zodiac was discovered between 8000 B.C. and 6000 B.C., "at which time the winter solstice was the beginning of the year and the sun appeared against the constellation of Aries at that moment of the year."

Sometime between 4000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., the beginning of the year was changed to the vernal equinox, "when the sun appeared at that time of year against the constellation of Taurus," which marked the beginning of the worship of the bull in various parts of the world, notably Egypt. The ancients made constant adjustments "as new constellations slipped into place behind the equinoctial and solstitial positions," says Miss Oliver, but even this so-called evolving zodiac got its final polish around 1850 B.C. It was, she says, virtually the same zodiac that Ptolemy used almost 2000 years later and that is still in use today.

Along the way, the study of the heavens went through hell. A bloody shame in some societies, it became a bloody faith in others. It was not unusual, says another astrohistorian, for a major event in the heavens to be acknowledged by "a ritual murder rivaling the blood baths of the Aztecs." By the time of the Babylonian Empire, astrologers were considered the wisemen of the ancient world and archaeological evidence indicates that they founded the first universities, arranged the first calendars, became the first astronomers and mathematicians and physicians and built the first skyscrapers (the fabled ziggurats, or observatories) above the Chaldean plain. Every Assyrian king employed astrologers. The Greeks adapted the same solar zodiac and ascribed to the planets those Olympian names which the Romans promptly changed to their own corresponding gods.

The Bible remains filled with astrological symbolism; and although the Catholic Church ultimately outlawed astrology, the Vatican is said to have the biggest astrolibrary in the world; and the Pope still bathes in a tub inlaid with the 12 zodiacal signs. In the Second Century A.D., Ptolemy wrote a fascinating source book on astrology called Tetrabiblos, in which he predicted all sorts of dire fates ("death by beheadings," "death by the halter or scourge") for those who ignored the malefic angles and aspects of their charts. But he also treated the more benign subject of astrometeorology ("Venus in Virgo brings rains and favors the crops of Amurru"), the principles of which are still written into the Fanner's Almanac and employed by scientists in predicting weather conditions in the ionosphere.

During medieval times, astrology survived in the monasteries, of all places; and not a few of the Renaissance Popes hired astrologers on a full-time basis. Writers from Chaucer to Dante and from Shakespeare to Goethe loaded their poems and plays with astrosymbols (though Dante ultimately came to call his faith "the Love which moves the sun and other stars," not the other way around). During the 16th Century, Nostradamus cradled his predictions in cunning little conundrums to titillate the three kings he served, and they have since been interpreted to explain the fire of London, the rise of Cromwell, the birth of Napoleon, the French Revolution and both World Wars.

Galileo struck "the royal art" a near-fatal blow when he proved with his telescope in 1613 that Copernicus was right: The earth did revolve around the sun. The resulting astronomy-astrology breach has never been closed, though astrologers--holding fast to their Aristotelian, earth-centered horoscope--claim that they have been vindicated by Einstein's theory of relativity, with its assumption of a point of reference that, says Ruth Oliver, "may shift according to the convenience and the intention of the observer, and from which one may observe the apparent movements of other bodies." In short, the earth is as functional a point of reference as the sun for contemplating the cosmos.

But between Galileo and Einstein, Western astrology had its own Dark Ages, in which it was dismissed as a superstition at worst, at best a fossil science for fossil historians. And except for part-time poetic dabblers such as William Butler Yeats, it was practiced mostly as a secret art until Catherine Thompson's short-lived vogue in Boston and Evangeline Adams' gaudy one all over the Eastern seaboard. To her Carnegie Hall salon came artists, writers, students, Enrico Caruso and J. P. Morgan, her most famous client. She was thrown off radio for making a prediction about the kidnaped Lindbergh baby.

But Miss Adams is best known for having tested an archaic New York law that classed astrologers with "acrobatic performers, circus riders, men who desert their wives and people who pretend to tell fortunes." Armed with "a mass of evidence that reached as far back as the Babylonian seers," he marched into court charged with fortunetelling and marched out again with an acquittal. Fortunetelling is still illegal in New York, but astrologers are no longer prosecuted and even advertise their prowess in the Yellow Pages, a practice still prohibited in most U.S. cities.

Benjamin Franklin gave astrological advice in his Almanack and Theodore Roosevelt kept his engraved natal chart on the chessboard near his White House desk. In 1922, Marc Edmund Jones, the dean of U.S. astrologers and the first (but, alas, hardly the last) to utter the classic cliché "It works," made a spectacular prediction: In the fall of 1942, when Neptune entered Libra, a cataclysmic event would alter the course of history. And, sure enough, in the fall of that year, the atomic age was born with the first laboratory-controlled nuclear reaction.

Practically everyone claims to have predicted John Kennedy's assassination; and, for some reason, astrologers continue to marshal gratuitous tons of unscientific and often contradictory evidence to illustrate the accuracy of their forecasts of this tragic event. The day before the President was shot, the New York Daily News's astrologer, Constella (Shirley Spencer), walked out of a TV studio when pressed about the Kennedys, on whom she had just done horoscopes. "All of the charts showed a severe disturbance," she explained later. "[Jack] had had an eclipse on his Saturn. He had taken office under the fatal conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. I was afraid."

As early as 1958, and again in 1959, crack astrologer Carl Payne Tobey predicted that the next President would die in office. Carroll Righter lamely claims that just before J.F.K. died, he warned Robert Cummings, "who had the same signs and aspects as the President," to be careful. (Nobody shot at Cummings.) And as she seems fond of pointing out, Jeanne Dixon, the seeress of D.C., forecast back in 1956 that "a blue-eyed Democratic President," elected in 1960, would die in office; but as astrowatcher Richard Armstrong points out, she marred it by predicting in 1960 that brown-eyed Richard Nixon would win, a matter that seems to have been overlooked in the best seller about her soothsaying successes.

When they are asked about predictions that go wrong, astrologers' eyes tend to glaze over and they manage to change the subject swiftly, knowing that more go wrong than right. End-of-the-world predictions, none of which, at least at this writing, has been realized, are as old as astrology itself, which is as old as time. Famous astrologers predicted world inundation by water for 1186 and 1524, both years of spectacular droughts. In 1939, the top British astrologers agreed unanimously that there would be no war; when it came, they predicted the end would come the following year with the end of Hitler. Constella predicted that Eisenhower would not be a candidate for re-election in 1956 and admonished: "You'd better bet on a Democrat ... the luckiest may be Averell Harriman." Jeanne Dixon predicted that Walter Reuther would be a candidate for the Presidency in 1964. And in 1966, Zoltan S. Mason predicted that when Jupiter transited through the zenith of Jackie Kennedy's birth chart in the summer of 1968, she would be "strongly in the public eye in connection with important assignments of political and diplomatic duties. But Jacqueline will not marry again. She belongs to her country. This is what the stars destined for her at the time of her birth."

From his Institute of Abstract Science in Tucson, Carl Tobey predicted that the war in Vietnam would end on December 26, 1968 ("give or take a couple of days"), when the sun was square with the lunar nodes, and Jupiter and Uranus conjunct with the nodes. He saw Ronald Reagan as the likely Republican Presidential choice--"he's got the horoscope to shoot all the way through"--and looked for James Rhodes of Ohio to "play an important role in the campaign."

Yet today, with a coast-to-coast audience fast approaching 10,000,000, Tobey remains unflappable. He feels that racial strife won't end until the closing days of 1970, when Neptune will have passed through its 14-year Scorpio cycle. "Then a very emotional religious revival will sweep the country," lasting another 14 years. As for 1970 politicos, Spiro Agnew "can have poetical moments of confusion and should be on guard against off-the-cuff remarks that can be misunderstood. Hubert Humphrey may be found running around in multiple directions simultaneously. Gerald Ford can have some real problems if he allows his resentments to build up. J. William Fulbright doesn't have an easy road ahead--he should watch the health factor. Barry Goldwater can be depended upon to do the unexpected. Ted Kennedy will be happier in private life. But he will continue to leave too much to the public's imagination."

While predictions are the stuff that headlines are made on, Tobey feels deeply that "what people are seeking today is not predictions but understanding." His real love is the mathematical-scientific approach to astrology. "Astrology is a study of geometry," he says. "It is an acausal phenomenon. And a horoscope is the equivalent of a mathematical formula. It is the mathematical pattern according to which one human life functions. But we suddenly find ourselves classified not as scientists, philosophers or religious people but as entertainers. We are in show business."

In an effort to see that astrologers become better classified, Tobey has made exhaustive statistical studies. A sampling: In a survey of 91 hysterectomies, limiting himself to the study of aspects, he found that square aspects of the planets to Mars (with which surgery has long been identified) were above chance expectancy. He studied 500 fat people and concluded that obesity is more common in Libra women than in any other. In 100 charts of premature widows, he found a preponderance of Mars-Uranus afflictions, concluding: "I know these women are sexual as hell and I strongly suspect they wore the men out. Death was their only escape. I warned one woman with a Mars-Uranus chart not to marry; she went ahead and her husband died the next morning." And in a survey of the sun signs of 100,000 people, he found that those born in winter were most likely to enter the professions (law, medicine, teaching), while those born near the summer solstice had a commerce-and-industry bent, with the Cancer male most likely to succeed.

Tobey is regularly consulted by California, Arizona and Texas millionaires and ranchers and by Wall Street brokerage firms; even the Foundation for the Study of Cycles at the University of Pittsburgh has sought his counsel on "extraterrestrial causes of cycles." He is proud to have sat at the desk of John Nelson of RCA-Communications "while he drew some diagrams and showed me how sunspots can be predicted by following the motions and aspects of the planets." For more than 20 years, Nelson has, with more than 90 percent accuracy, predicted disturbances in the earth's magnetic field by studying planetary aspects. It was to Nelson that the Electronics Research Center of NASA turned when faced with the problem of solar flares, which can now be predicted by studying the planets.

Tobey likes to remind skeptical astronomers that use of the planets to predict weather was advocated by Ptolemy in 150 A.D., adding: "Despite the fact that astronomers are open enemies of astrology on the surface, I have acted as an astrological advisor to a number of the most prominent astronomers in their personal lives--one of whom is conducting an astrology practice on the side in a large Midwestern university."

While astronomers may be astrologers' foremost enemies, they are hardly the most vociferous. USC psychologist Chaytor Mason indignantly contends, "You can find fairly strong belief in the subject by people who tend to be paranoidal. Too, we are in a period of enormous social upheaval and flux, with the old cultural conventions breaking down. Freedom produces anxiety. So with increased freedom, you need other ways of seeking answers to problems of an indefinite future. Thus, many psychologists look upon the need for astrology as a sign of monumental insecurity; others go so far as to suggest even mental illness."

Dr. Charles Wahl, prominent analyst and professor of psychosomatic medicine at UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, goes further: "I've seen astrology and the reliance on horoscopes do decided psychological harm, and my view corresponds with almost all scientifically educated persons, in that astrology is a system of belief maintained without any shred of scientific proof and, like all species of irrationality, it does, in the long run, incredible harm. It also gives charlatans an enormous advantage in preying on the minds of the easily influenced."

Though the American Federation of Astrologers, which requires members to take tests and sign a code of ethics, tries to police astrology's ranks, "to get rid of the frauds, fakers and pretenders," it is an uphill battle. As Ruth Oliver points out: "Fortunetellers put horoscopes in their tents to stay out of jail." Moreover, she feels that "it is unfair for psychologists to take a person who relies on astrology as a crutch as an indication of what astrology is all about. Astrology does not pretend to be psychology, but the psychologist often feels it gives a more rapid insight into a person and asks the astrologer for a chart of his patient."

She is correct. One New York psychoanalyst says: "I think a horoscope is more useful than a Rorschach test. The latter shows only a patient's condition at the time the test is taken. The horoscope reveals his basic psychological setup."

It was when he was doing psychological counseling of prisoners at San Quentin that an inspired eccentric named Gavin Arthur decided to employ astrology furtively: "I knew I could help them much more if I could do their horoscopes, though I'd have undoubtedly been fired if anyone found out; but I always told them that heredity and environment play a large part, too. There are three ways to tell about a person: (1) from the genotype, that is, the genes in your making; (2) the shape of the macrocosm into which you emerge, setting its seal upon you, which is astrology; and (3) the environment you grow up in."

As the grandson of the 21st President of the U.S., the heredity and environment of Gavin Arthur--whose real name is Chester Alan Arthur III--were decidedly more signal than his astrology, which he has practiced among actors, artists, courtesans, dukes and camp followers since 1931. Alan Watts calls him the aristocrat of bohemians, and his museum apartment in San Francisco's Little Tokyo area is as colorfully disarrayed as his mind--vividly colored diagrams of cosmic principles transiting autographed photos of Walt Whitman, Woodrow Wilson and Ernest Hemingway, with Havelock Ellis conjunct Eleanor Roosevelt.

"Do you feel more like a lion than an intellectual spinster?" he asks a visitor, studying a chart with the sun in Virgo and 28 degrees of Leo rising. "You're sort of spread all over the place. You're not too yang or yin. If you were too yang, you'd be too masculine; if too yin, you'd be a dripping, nauseating Southern belle. You're quite flowing, mutable, gaseous You have the moon in Capricorn in the fifth house, not a very romantic sign. The Jews are under it--it's the scapegoat sign. With a badly aspected sun and a beautifully aspected Neptuna--Neptune is incorrect, because the sea is feminine--you might die of some sort of cold through dampness, particularly wet feet. My grandmother just missed being the First Lady, but she got wet feet and died. Feet are your Achilles' heel. You were not too good a person in your last life and have to pay a certain amount of karma for it in this life--as you sow, so shall you reap."

The astrologer's preoccupation with the Hindu concept of karma and reincarnation is well known, and Arthur fervently believes he last lived in the 13th Century, "until I was trampled to death on the steps of Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde in Marseilles. I was the son of the Count de Provence and, since I wanted to be close to the daughter of Necromancer, the forbidden alchemist and astrologer, I took lessons from him. I saw her recently in her current incarnation and she said: 'It's so wonderful to be with you after all these centuries.'"

Around the Bay Area, Arthur is best known as the author of an astrosexology book titled The Circle of Sex, which he wrote while casting horoscopes and selling newspapers on Market Street--except when old friends such as Tallulah Bankhead came around. She would trundle him to her suite at the Huntington for champagne and caviar--and a little cosmic counseling on the side.

As readers of Alan Watts's December 1965 Playboy article, The Circle of Sex, will recall, it was his astrologer's passion for classifying people by the signs of the zodiac that gave Gavin the notion that there are 12, not two, sexual types, and he handled them like the horoscope clock. "The circular sequence of sexual categories came to my first wife, Charlotte, and me when we were living in Dublin in 1924, and a Lesbian friend wrote from New York that she was contemplating suicide," he says as insouciantly as one remarking on the weather. "We had been talking to Yeats about astrology and theories of reincarnation and, at that time, we rather imagined that perhaps the poor girl might be born again with a real penis." As even the most unmystical can see, one does not really go to Gavin Arthur to have his chart delineated at $50 a throw, but for entertainment without price.

Today, most respected astrologers see no conflict between their "scientific art" and heredity, free will, psychology or religion, but as a helpful adjunct to all passions and philosophies. "That astrologers often foretell the future is only possible because the majority of men follow their passions," wrote Saint Thomas Aquinas. "For it is precisely the basic drives of human nature that are influenced by the heavenly bodies." And by applying his will and intellect, man can presumably arrange his very life in harmony with the heavens. "The wise man controls his destiny," says Sydney Omarr, interminably. "Astrology points the way."

So, if Constella or Celeste or Madame Xavora Pové or Dame Sybil Leek or Madame St. George Calliope--or any other of the commercial soothsayers--tells you that the month opens with the new moon in Libra, making the worst possible aspects to the majority of the big planets and, at the same time, alas, Mars in Sagittarius goes into battle with Uranus, immediately withdraw every penny from your joint checking account and leave home at once; for--so goes the interpretation of these evil aspects--"this could have a serious effect on your financial condition and stir up trouble in your home and with your family." However--and forecasters are wonderful at equivocating and hedging their bets--if you have the good Venus ray in your sign and Jupiter passes into it, too, "this should ease your tension." So you might just as well stay home, after all, be nice to your colleagues and make love, if you can. With such a benefic aspect, you could be in horoscoped heaven.