An Exercise in Discovery (Garth Allen)

[Jim Eshelman]

[This article, from the April 1964 issue of American Astrology "Your Powwow Corner," is one of my favorite Donald Bradley examples. The charts he uses in have long been in my standard 20 "test chart" kit, and there is a great deal of the spirit of the first generation of Sidereal pioneering in the article. Along the way there are some examples of how calculation options were limited when we were doing everything by hand out of an ephemeris, and an example of two of the PSSR that probably should be double-checked. Enjoy!]

At noon on his day of birth, October 21, 1941, the criminogenic planet Mars was at 19°41' Pisces. And the cop that Thomas Hadder murdered was born with the Sun at 19°33' Gemini, thus striking the stellar keynote of the intertwining destinies of murder and murderee. Another loop in the fateful twine was the natal Sun of the slain policeman's wife, at 21°00' Gemini.

Thomas Hadder was a double Libra - one form of double Rim with a close Venus-Mars trine as his main aspect signature. A Mars-Neptune square in space at the shooting might (or, then again, might not) have been on his Moon.

But this is only a small part of the astrological story, the data for which was passed on to us by a principal figure close to the case by blood and love ties. The birth data of the slain officer and his wife are stated so precisely that this material surely represents one of those welcome rarities - a dossier of accurate facts and figures which serve to test and prove or disprove "systems" and theories definitely.

Both the policeman and his wife had been born in Washington, D.C., and the tragic event of his death by gunfire while on duty took place only a few miles outside the District of Columbia, thus eliminating the complication of "locality" from our considerations. The lawman had been born July 5, 1936, 10:45 A.M. EST, and his wife-to-be arrived July 7, 1938, 11:34 A.M. EST. The violent moment of their earthly separation fell close to 1:00 A.M. on May 2, 1963. The poignancy of this story is compounded by the fact that the young wife was in her third month of pregnancy when her husband was shot while on patrol duty by a panic-warped young man who has thereby to make the FBI list of the ten Most Wanted fugitives from justice. The fatherless baby, by the way, came into the world on his own at 10:48 A.M. EST on Sunday, November 24, 1963, in our mourning-darkened capital city.

In other words, he was born on the Sunday after President Kennedy was murdered, while the late president's body lay in state. The infant had Neptune on MC squared by Saturn - a known mark of "absent father," just to name one factor.

Both the solar and lunar returns of the young law officer serve to prove that "solunars" are far and away the surest, clearest predictive tools in any astrologer's kit of methods. His fatal solar return, for instance, set for July 6, 1962, 7:39 UT, gave a sidereal time of 21:26:03 for the longitude of Washington. Notice Mars at 3°47' Taurus and Uranus at 3°50' Leo, in the "foreground" of the sky, as precariously close and violent an aspect as could be imagined in the light of the subsequent event.

Here is an example of calculation limitations, maybe compounded by an error. Today's computer calculations give the SSR as 7:35 UT (four minutes earlier) with ST 21:21:56. The real angles of the SSR were about a degree earlier than Bradley thought. Sun on that day moved 0°57'13", so an error of 2" (one for the natal, one for the SSR) as only going to throw the chart off about a minute of time. Even at this one degree earlier correct time, Mars and Uranus aren't spectacularly foreground: With Asc 17° Taurus and MC 24° Capricorn, Mars is over 8° above Ascendant and Uranus more than 15° from IC.

Regardless, the point is sound enough: Mars is foreground, closely squared (0°04') by Uranus, and we'll run into them later in the story.

Brace yourself for this next fact, to wit, that the sidereal time of the policeman's "PSSR" chart for the day and hour of his sudden murder was 22:02:35, putting 4°16' Aquarius on the Midheaven! In thinking this over, bear in mind that we are dealing with specific, unrectified, untampered-with birth and event data. Those who would carp over the mental rigors of the kind of astrology advocated by siderealists should redo these calculations as an exercise in discovery - the discovery that astrology is no more intellectual plaything workable chiefly in terms of fuzzily-conceived "generalities."

Remember, Bradley had calculated the SSR's ST about 4 minutes too late, so it would really be about 4 minutes earlier, the angles about 1° earlier - which still makes them just about as good! This would be the PSSR calculated by Apparent solar rate. My recalculation by Mean rate (estimated) gives MC 5°30' Aquarius, which is a little farther away but still leaves PSSR Mars 1°00' from square MC and Uranus 1°37' from IC.

[Jim Eshelman]

Take the dead officer's lunar return, and observe how it too dictated the quality of the month, with the three "killer planets" Mars, Saturn, and Neptune all in the foreground, with no help from the background transiting benefics, seeing as how they too were linked directly with natal malefics. And if you go further, you'll see how every basic chart technique adopted by sidereal astrologers on the basis of observation and study of actual cases proves its mettle and precision in this case.

His SLR has Mars 4° past MC, Neptune 6° before Ascendant, Saturn 7° before IC, and Mercury 6° before Descendant. Ecliptically there is a Mercury-Mars-Neptune T-square; mundanely, it's Mercury-Saturn-Neptune.

As mentioned, the SLR benefics are background, both in the 5th house and Jupiter close to the cadent cusp. His additional point is that even if they had been angular, they wouldn't have indicated a clearly good month because Jupiter as square his Mars and Venus exactly conjunct his Saturn. They would have brought natal malefics with them.

The widow's charts are in some respects even more remarkable as examples of the truth of astrology's precepts. Notice that transiting Saturn was at 28°04' Capricornus at the hour her husband died, directly opposing her natal Venus 28°30' Cancer. At the moment of her lunar return, fixed by the Moon's crossing of 26°59' Libra, Saturn was at 26°44' Capricorn, making this a simple pair of "precision aspects" almost too clear in their implications!

I'm not sure why he didn't mention: SLR MC was 26°47' Aries, so this combination was exactly angular with Moon on IC and Saturn on Dsc. (There's more: Uranus rising 4°, Pluto rising 9°, Neptune 4° past IC in 0°04' mundane square to Saturn 4° below Dsc.)

In the sample charts that follow, I've recalculated with modern tools, but displayed them in the fashion he originally did.

At this point, scan the two charts appearing herewith. The first wheel, figure 1, is the wife's solar return, with cusps marked off as equal thirty-degree divisions from the Midheaven in order to emphasize the key aspect of the celestial layout. Uranus is exactly on the upper meridian, squared by Mars right on the Descendant. This would surely leave no room for doubt but that the year's pivotal event would bombastically affect her husband.

Regular readers are aware that lately we have been pumping in behalf of the "regressed quotidian" chart as being a basic predictive or timing tool. It merely represents the converse calculation from the standard progressed system and is not essentially a sidereal technique in the sense of contrast with the tropical. In fact, the method was inaugurated by well-known tropical astrologers long before the sidereal "school" emerged on the scene. We understand that the method's revival and refinement is a contribution of the European astrologer Alexander Marr, to whom the credit must go for bringing it to our attention. Cyril Fagan. Brigadier Firebrace and others have been acclaiming its usefulness in recent years, and now your Powwow injun enthusiastically joins the gray.

Our first real encounter with the regressed chart was a case of a young friend who suddenly felt ill one evening and was urgently operated on the next day for removal of his appendix. The lad's lunar return was clear enough but the calendar timing for his explicitly timed birth data seemed to be "off" by three or four days by the use of the familiar progression systems which hit off so exactly for the other key events in his life. Out of curiosity we toyed with the regression-chart idea and, bingo, here was Mars exactly crossing his Midheaven during the climacteric 24 hours of his physical ordeal.

It was this "discovery" that drove us to doing "R2s" for scores of cases which we call our "method testing cases" because of the exactness of the birth and event data on record. The regressed system is often astounding in its clarity and upon careful investigation we have privately found no justification for "working in" any correction for the equation of time (this matter being a bugaboo in the astronomy of so many other techniques).

The last sentence means that he found the best results from the Mean solar rate, not the Apparent solar rate; i.e., this was a converse version of the SNQ, not of what Fagan later called the Neo-SNQ. The chart below is cusps and inner ring Secondary Regressed and the outer ring is transits.

In passing, we should also like to mention that we heartily endorse the simple process of using equal-house divisions from both the Midheaven and the Ascendant while studying case material. Many tropical as well as sidereal astrologers use this approach. As for preferences, using the Midheaven seems to afford consistently better results. Statistically, too, it is well to point out that planets ninety degrees either way from Midheaven seem to be basically more important than those on the Ascendant-Descendant line itself. At least, that holds true in mass studies of mundane events, and many an individual nativity "clears up" when framed in these terms (as a glance at Adolf Eichmann's or Queen Elizabeth's horoscopes will demonstrate).

Now back to figure 2 which is the young window's "R2" chart for the date, hour and place of her husband's sudden, violent end. As she was 24.8180 years old, the planets and cusps shown are for 24.8180 civil days preceding her date and moment of birth. The outer circle of figure 2 contains the transiting planets' positions at 1:00 A.M. EST, May 2, 1963. Staggering, isn't it? Now you see why we must acclaim the validity of the regression theory - that placement of Mars kerplunk on the Midheaven, square Neptune on the Ascendant, the pair further interlocking with regressed Uranus on the 7th cusp, simply cannot be a "coincidence." If there were any question about the accuracy of the birth particulars, or other datal uncertainty, there might be margin for hesitation. There is no other reasonable conclusion to arrive at, than that both the policeman's and his wife's chartworks pinpointed the exact data of the critical event, and with a clarity that all but dumbfounds us - and we are used to experiencing waves of astonishment at astrology's workability since we use sidereal methods.

[Jim Eshelman]

Having the same insatiable curiosity about the "possibilities" that characterizes all sincere students of astrology, the thought occurred to us that perhaps, if regressions influence events subsequent to birth, progressions similarly have a bearing on prenatal incidents which directly pertain to the individual. There is certainly a shortage of case-history material to test out such a notion; data on the date or prenatal traumatic injuries, for instance, would be all but impossible to come by. As for family events that would qualify in this sense, the only likely eventuality we can think of on the spur of the moment would be the death of the father sometime during the nine months of one's own gestation. This too would be a rare event.

Fortunately, the present subject offers us this rarity, since the slain policeman's son was born half a year after his death. To "regress" the child's chart back to May 2, 1963 would require use of what we would normally call progression. The boy's sidereal time of birth was 14:51:28 and the mean Sun had moved 13:33:47 between his dad's death and his own birth. The primary arc fort his interval, then, is 0:02:14, so that the sidereal time of the "progressed-regressed" map is obtained by adding 13:36:01 to the sidereal time of the birthchart, giving 4:27:29, putting 14°22' Taurus on the Midheaven and 17 07' [Leo] on the Ascendant. Thirteen hours and 36 minutes after birth the Moon was at 19°01' Aquarius, opposing Pluto at 19°52' Leo, close enough to the Ascendant to seem meaningful because the configuration seems so appropriate.

Nothing is proved one way or the other by this little exercise, but it is surely interesting when you consider the baby's natal Uranus being at 15°37' Leo which can be construed either as conjoining the Ascendant or squaring he "parental axis" of the meridian - as electrifying sudden "separation" did take place.

This whole question of the validity of regressions is philosophically complex, to say the least. When we try to conceive f Einstein's time cone and what he called "the tangle of world lines," we begin to comprehend why it is possible for astrological time to work backward, quite literally. If both regressions and progressions are valid, maybe the gimmick involved is akin to the concentric circles of waves that move outward on a water surface equally in all directions. The birth moment would be the center of impact, sending out rippling shock waves in all directions in the plasma that is Time or, to sound scientific, the time continuum. Every chart we set up, it follows, is a kind of cross-section of time, but if you could move at right angles to the time dimension, you would encounter and cross the same "ripple" at the same distance from the center but in the opposite direction from the center.

Whatever the true explanation for the authenticity of regression might turn out to be, there is one great certainty that we can cling to now, and that is that astrology is both miraculous and fun!

[SteveS]

Great post Jim, showing the importance as one article of the wealth of Sidereal astrological material left in American Astrology Magazine. As another astrologer once wrote I do believe the articles in American Astrology by the Siderealists represent the greatest astrology book ever written, only not put in book form.