Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson

[ecosophia]

One of the gifts I received for this year's solstice was a volume of astrological essays, Here and There in Astrology, by Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson. I've been asked several times why it is that I've moved back to modern or, shall we say, not-quite-modern astrology -- the sort of thing that was in common use before Dane Rudhyar's psychological astrology became all the rage. Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson is the reason.

The first of her books I encountered was Simplified Horary Astrology, which turned up in a used book store in Frederick, MD. (It's the same used book store where I found the obscure book on Welsh grammar that led me to the long-lost meanings of the Coelbren, the alphabet of the Welsh bards, so even though now that I've moved to Rhode Island I'll probably never go there again, it has a permanent fond place in my memories.) I'd been working on traditional Renaissance astrology for some years by that point -- this was not long after Chris Warnock and I published our translation of The Picatrix -- and I was very frustrated by my lack of success with traditional horary methods. 

(A word of explanation is probably needed for my non-astrologer friends. Horary astrology basically uses astrology the way a Tarot reader uses a Tarot deck: the astrologer or a client has a question, the astrologer casts a chart for the moment the question was asked, and the chart reveals the answer. Yes, I know, that can't possibly work; the fact remains that it does.) 

As I was saying, again, I was having a lot of trouble getting clear readings with traditional horary methods. Goldstein-Jacobson's methods aren't traditional; they focus on the aspects made by the Moon, starting with the last aspect formed before the question was asked, and ending when the Moon passes out of the sign she was in when the question was asked. You interpret those aspects as the events that will occur in the situation about which the question was asked, and give the answer accordingly. 

I gave it a try, and found that I could get clear, accurate readings using her methods, which I couldn't manage using Lilly's or any of the other traditional sources. I'm quite willing to accept that the difference is purely a matter of the personal equation, as I know people who get good results with traditional astrology -- but I don't, and so I gradually moved my astrological work over from the medieval and Renaissance approaches to the sort of thing you find in Llewellyn George, Robert De Luce, and Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson. 

One of the lessons I took from this is that the myth of the Golden Age can be just as toxic as the myth of progress. Just as being new doesn't make a technology better, being old doesn't make an astrological system better. Picking and choosing on the basis of personal experience, or even personal whim, seems to work better. 

Comments

Book details

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,

Out of interest, can you give me the details of the book on Welsh grammar? It’s ... unlikely... that’ I’ll score a copy here in Beijing, but if I’m ever in Aberystwyth again I might look it up in the National Library of Wales. Also, a friend of mine in the Welsh Department in Aber wrote a book on Iolo and might be interested.

Cheers,

Bogatyr

Re: Book details

[ecosophia]

The book I found in the bookstore was a reprint of J. Morris Jones' A Welsh Grammar, Historical and Comparative. A footnote in it led me to the book that had the Coelbren's meanings: Dosparth Ederyn Dafod Aur, edited and translated by J. Williams ab Ithel. I wonder what your friend in Aber thinks of my book on the Coelbren...

Re: Book details

[(Anonymous)]

You might be able to download _Dosparth Edeyrn Dafod Aur_, by John Williams ab Ithel, in China. It's available from google books, and also from the Hathi Trust (www.hathitrust.org). -- Robert Mathiesen

Re: Book details

[ecosophia]

That was certainly how I got it -- after I found the reference in Jones' grammar, I went straight to Google Books, found it, downloaded it, and ten minutes later was staring at the screen with my mouth wide open, because something that people in the Druid scene had been trying to find for most of a century was right there in front of me.

Re: Book details

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks, both! I’ll download it myswlf when I get a chance. As for what my friend in Aber will think, I’ll mention it to her when I see her next, JMG!

Cheers

Bogatyr

[sweet_jane]

Yes, I know, that can't possibly work; the fact remains that it does.

What I tell myself every time I read Tarot cards.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, what a pretty face! You have inspired me to hunt down a copy of Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson's book. She was also quite pretty.

[ecosophia]

By all accounts she was a charming person, as well as a crackerjack astrologer, the kind of person who could take a good look at your natal chart, progress it in her head, and ask whether you still have any trouble as a result of the health problem you had three years ago. Her books are worth your while; the horary book is first-rate, and the others are worth close study if you want to get past the astrological basics.

[(Anonymous)]

Fascinating. I don't suppose there is an introduction to her horary methods online anywhere?

[ecosophia]

Not that I know of. On the other hand, the book's readily available via the used book trade. One of these days I may go looking for the copyright holder and see if I can arrange for a new edition to happen.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, atomic power, computing power, internets, land-speed records, high-speed intercontinental travel, and moon landings. But perhaps the 20th century will in the future be remembered for and regarded as the Golden Age of occult writings?

[ecosophia]

Back in 1969 an occult author named Edward Whitney published a book titled The Coming Great Golden Age of Esotericism. As I recall -- it's been many years since I read it -- he claimed, on astrological grounds, that the last part of the 20th century would turn out to be one of the great ages of occultism. He was square on target, too.

When I was first getting into occultism, there were, if I recall correctly, five styles of Tarot deck readily available for purchase in North America. If you wanted decent occult books, you patronized used book stores that had the leftovers of the 1920s occult boomlet, and paid a lot of money, or you got catalogs from mail order places that printed things on mimeograph with plastic comb bindings. Instruction? Join an order by mail, get a weekly or monthly correspondence lesson, and hope you chose one of the ones that actually had something real to teach. There was nothing like today's profusion of readily available textbooks and classic occult writings in translation.

That is to say, yeah, this has been one of the great ages of occultism: like the great occult boom during and immediately after the English Civil War, when books saw print that would be central to occult study and practice for the next two and a half centuries. I just wish they'd been on better quality paper this time around!

[(Anonymous)]

JMG, choosing to practice an astrological method on the basis of personal fit, as opposed to finding the one method that is supposedly universally correct (and shunning all others as dangerous abominations), is of course corroborated by what quite a number of competent practicing astrologers are saying. However, I still have to wonder how that can possibly be the case. (I'm not doubting that it is the case, I just can't get my head around how it works.)

To be more precise, I actually have a much easier time understanding how different personal approaches can work out equally well in the context of horary, where the chart used is also very personal, in the sense that it is cast by the astrologer at the time he or she understands the question, with the intention to interpret it according to their own specific rules. In such a situation, I can readily see synchronicity/the gods of divination at work, custom-tailoring the symbolic answer to the specific practitioner's way of deciphering it.

In mundane or natal astrology, however, the situation seems quite different: here, the chart is going to have come into existence independently of all the astrologers who may one day interpret it (they didn't pick the moment of birth, after all), and they are going to interpret it according to wildly differing methods (so there is little hope for it to be custom-tailored in any useful way). And yet, apparently all these interpretations are going to work equally well, provided only that they fit the astrologers' individual proclivities. This is what I don't understand.

As an aside, I don't find the standard answers very convincing either: For example, some days ago Steven Forrest quoted Robert Hand as saying, in the context of feuding schools of astrology, "Which is truer: French or German?", obviously suggesting that each is equally capable of expressing truth. Fair enough, EXCEPT that German and French do not express truth using the same vocabulary, while in astrology, more or less the SAME chart is being interpreted in different ways by different traditions. This would be more like having native speakers of different languages listening to the exact same sounds, which not only turn out to be understandable to each, but also manage to convey the same information. Clearly, a sentence spoken in French wouldn't work like this for a German, or vice versa.

I hope I've made it sufficiently clear what puzzles me about all of this, and would be very interested in your perspective on it. Many thanks!

[ecosophia]

The difficulty here is that an astrological chart is read synthetically, not analytically. Put another way, it's much more like recognizing a face than like reading a recipe. If you were to see a black and white photograph of your mother's face, let's say, and an ink drawing of her face, and a caricature drawn with colored pencils, you'd still recognize it as the same face, even though the three portrayals might not be similar at all when examined under a magnifying glass!

Astrology is the same way. The chart is the face; the various interpretive methods are ways of "portraying" it -- more to the point, they're ways of learning how to "portray" it. As you become experienced in astrology, the rules take a back seat to your own wordless knowledge -- the same sort of knowledge you use to recognize a face -- and the specific cues you once used to identify particular patterns give way to a sense of pattern that allows you to see the chart as a whole.