19/03/2026
In Memoriam: J. Lee Lehman, PhD September 9, 1953 – March 18, 2026
This has saddened me indeed. I first met Lee when I was a very young Astrologer in the 1990's on one of her trips to Adelaide, Australia. It was like meeting a rock star!She told me that I really ought to give up on romantic entanglements and find a religion - based on the lovely state of my 7th house. We laughed about that on our next meeting in 2018 when she came to Melbourne to teach Medical Astrology. After that she became my mentor within the Medical Astrology world, and trusted me enough with her material to co-teach it for the School of Traditional Astrology, along with a few other mentee's. She pushed us to go further, and challenged us to read almost incomprehensible and unreadable things 😂 And boy she made us laugh!!! Especially during covid!
Deepest condolences to Maggie and family.
My former colleague Will has written a beautiful tribute which describes some of the things she has achieved much better than I can:
Lee Lehman left this world this morning, and the astrological community is poorer for it — though richer beyond measure for everything she gave us and everything she set in motion.
J. Lee Lehman spent four decades doing what no one else in the English-speaking astrological world had done at her level of rigor: recovering the classical tradition from its primary sources and making it teachable. Her Essential Dignities in 1989 restored a doctrine the twentieth century had largely abandoned — planetary condition assessed through domicile, exaltation, triplicity, term, and face, not as decorative symbolism but as precise diagnostic instrument. Her Book of Rulerships, Classical Astrology for Modern Living, Martial Art of Horary Astrology, Traditional Medical Astrology, Classical Solar Returns — each volume was an act of excavation and translation, bringing the historical lineage forward without distorting it to suit modern tastes. Her doctoral training in Botany at Rutgers gave her a researcher's instincts: care with evidence, precision with sources, skepticism toward received narrative. She read the historical record directly, in its primary sources, and taught others to do the same.
She also understood — before most of her contemporaries had the vocabulary for it — that the failure of quantitative research paradigms to evaluate astrology reflected epistemological mismatch rather than the tradition's inadequacy. The consistent, transferable patterns of accurate recognition that skilled practitioners report had never been evaluated with methods adequate to their nature. She demonstrated this in her teaching constantly: the way she moved through a chart, held multiple simultaneous considerations without collapsing them into formula, and arrived at a judgment that was neither mechanical nor arbitrary. That was a form of knowledge. Her life's work was an argument that it deserved to be treated as one.
In 1995 she received the Marc Edmund Jones Award at UAC; in 2023 the Charles Harvey Award from the UK astrological community. Both acknowledged what those of us who worked with her already knew: that Lee Lehman was the central figure in the restoration of traditional Western astrology in the English-speaking world.
Teaching with Lee was an education in itself. She did not perform certainty she did not possess, and she did not tolerate imprecision in anyone else. If you could not say what you meant, she would wait — with a patience that was somehow also a form of pressure — until you found the words.
Beyond her books and teaching, she served as Research Director for the National Council for Geocosmic Research for twelve years, as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kepler College, and as Program Chair for UAC in 1995 and 1998. She founded correspondence courses in horary and electional astrology and directed the Medical Astrology program at the School of Traditional Astrology. She understood that a tradition without institutions does not survive, and she built accordingly.
The chart she cast for the world, over more than forty years of practice and publication, was drawn with great care. The stars that informed it are still there. Those of us who were taught by her carry forward what she gave — not as museum pieces, but as living tools for a living tradition.
So long, big sister. Travel well with the ancestors. We are all better off for having known you.
