R.O.S.A. - 50th birthday recognition

[Jim Eshelman]

On March 17, 1975 - intentionally on St. Patrick's Day - Karen Wilkerson and Joan Piszek founded the Registry of Sidereal Astrologers (R.O.S.A.) in Placentia, California. They called it a registry because they didn't want the usual kind of "federation" with rules and structures but simply a way for Siderealists everywhere to discover each other - to learn how many of us existed and put us in communication decades before anything like the Internet existed.

Cyril Fagan had died five years earlier. Bradley, Firebrace, and Gleadow had died in the prior twelve months (in 1974). Gary Duncan (who lived in nearby Irvine) supported them in the organization.

R.O.S.A. was quite successful for a time. It brought Siderealists out of the woodwork. It created a robust Sidereal community in Southern California that endured, meeting in person, for several years. Its quarterly journal The Constellations (of which I was privileged to be the first editor) kept Sidereal writing alive at a time that the only public names of the first generation - all the leaders of the field - had recently died.

R.O.S.A. was responsible for my meeting both Matthew Quellas and Anna-Kria King, which may not have happened otherwise (making my life entirely different than it would have been). I moved to California three months later, initially lived with Gary, then lived with Joan and her husband Stanley for many months, and finally moved to West Hollywood to begin my decades of partnership with Anna-Kria (initially close to Phyllis Kneip's Sidereal School of Astrology). Nearly all of Southern California's Sidereal astrology history sprang from that organization - and that, my friends, is nearly all of Sidereal astrology's history anywhere after 1974.

I wish I could do more to honor R.O.S.A. and the two enthusiastic women who gave birth to it.

I at least want to pause and acknowledge them on this weekend of the 50th anniversary - half a century! - of their efforts.

[Veronica]

Stay Golden brave souls

[SteveS]

Thanks for R.O.S.A.--Makes me realize what it meant to siderealists in Ca.