11/19/2019
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
Summer of 1982 in San Francisco, during my Saturn return at age 28, I dropped everything I was doing to make way for a sudden fascination with astrology and Tarot cards. The catalyst for this was my first chart reading, done by one Thor Christensen at his flat in Noe Valley. In more ways than one, it was an epiphany for me. About the most unexpected thing I heard during that session was that I possessed unmistakable talent as a psychic or astrologer. He encouraged me to pursue this avenue a few times over the course of the reading. A week or so later I asked him just how I should undertake such a thing, to which he replied something to the effect of “I’m not going to show you, but I can tell you some books you need to buy.” He also introduced me to his small circle of astrologer friends, all gay men who couldn’t have been more friendly and helpful. One of them owned a computer with an astrology program.
There were three principle metaphysical bookstores in the city at that time: The Philosopher’s Stone in Noe Valley, Field’s on Polk Street which had been around for some time (sadly gone now), and Metaphysical Town Hall on Mason Street downtown. The latter was truly old school, owned by a lady named Fritzi Armstrong. Her assistant was a bald man named Micky who wore a drab beige dust coat while on the job. The books I needed to purchase were, per Thor’s instructions: a) an ephemeris, or table of planetary positions, for the years or year required, b) table of houses, so one could determine the ascendant (rising sign degree) and other house cusps and, c) a copy of The Horoscope, The Road and The Traveler, by Alan Oken, which had the correct instructions for calculating a chart with the aid of (a) and (b). The most available ephemeris (ephemerides is the plural) at the time was Raphael’s which you could buy for individual years. Eventually I bought the more up-to-date American Ephemeris for 1931-1980. That way I didn’t have to go down to Field’s or Metaphysical Town Hall to get a Raphael’s for a year I didn’t already have. The companion volume was The American Table of Houses, which also contained excellent chart calculation instruction that were pretty much identical to the ones in the Oken book.
To get to square one I would have to find out the latitude and longitude of a given person’s birthplace. Thor told me to just call up the library. This is what I did for a while. The reference librarian at the Haight-Ashbury branch would give me said information without question or comment. Within a year I bought Time Changes in the USA, then later Time Changes in Canada and Mexico and Time Changes in the World, by Doris Chase Doane, a name which is probably a blast from the past to astrologers of my generation and older. It’s been ages since I’ve seen any copies of these. This set of books had all the information then available on time zones and the dates of changes to and from standard and daylight savings. They were more necessary than you might think. For instance, there used to be a Yukon Time Zone up until 1983, until part of it went to Alaska Standard and the other part to Pacific Time. Much of the area around the Great Lakes was (maybe still is) a hopelessly confusing hodgepodge of Eastern and Central, almost in a checker board pattern in northern Indiana and Ohio, with some counties observing daylight savings and others not. The switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which happened in Catholic countries of Europe in the late Renaissance, didn’t occur in the Soviet Union until 1918, Greece in 1923, and Turkey in 1926, at which point they had to drop back 13 days. In the mid to late eighties I bought the American Atlas, and then the International Atlas, thick hard bound volumes that contained all these time changes, plus longitudes and latitudes for even the tiniest of towns.
Throughout the rest of the eighties desktop and laptop computers became increasingly widespread. Astrology software was available very early on, but I was always too strapped for cash to buy software, let alone a computer. Finally, in 1992 my dad gave me money to buy my first Mac since I’d taken a handful of computer classes at the local community college. The astrology program I bought for it was extremely un-user friendly (and un-Mac like), making me wonder if I should just keep doing the manual calculations. By this time, though, I was doing math-intensive solar and lunar return forecasting so there was no going back. After a couple of years a client let me use their copy of Io, which was much more intuitive. In 1999 I used part of a bike accident settlement to buy Solar Fire and Solar Maps, which I continue to use to this day in my practice. Solar Fire (Maps is now included within) is a Windows program which I run using Parallels on my iMac at work and MacBook Pro at home. It’s just as fast and almost as seamless as having Windows on a PC. It would be nice if astrology software makers weren’t so Windows-centric, as if it were still the nineties when people assumed Apple was about to declare Chapter 11. Go figure.
I love my Macs and astrology software (most of it, at least). As the photo indicates, though, I still hold on to the books required to do the hand calculations. Why? Maybe as souvenirs, or because part of me wonders if the electrical grid could fail for some reason. Whatever the case, I don’t regret spending close to ten years doing “slow astrology”. A computer screen or printout of a chart gives you everything all at once, whereas the old way revealed each planetary position and house cusp gradually, allowing me time to think about and absorb each feature of the chart in turn.
