Solunars by Aldebaran Sidereal Academy

I will compile here a list of topics in Donald Bradley / Garth Allen article topics as I go through them. (We might want to reference one later, and I just spent two hours reading the table of contents of most issues from around 1942 until the mid-80s, so I'm not eager to do that again very soon.) The list primarily will focus on his "Powwow Corner" series and its successor, "Perspectives." I haven't come across the two-part weather study series, and I'm leaving out reprints if the original is listed. All articles are under the byline "Garth Allen" unless I specify otherwise. (I'm adding them here as I reread the article.)

July 1948. Astrology Explores Psychoanalysis, Part VI by Donald A. Bradley. [Surely I have more issues from 1948. This weekend, I hope to get all of these in chronological order. According to the title, there must be at least five other installments. This installment is on "Jung's Plan for the Psyche." He wrote tis when he was 22.]

1955 June. Life With Pluto! Tagline: "During Richard Burton's lifetime, Pluto made 138 conjunctions with his progressed Sun, resulting in a most incredible biography."
Oct 1955 - May 1956. Taking the Kid Gloves Off Astrology.

June 1956. Your Powwow Corner. "Come on off it, Prof!" "Mere Coincidence?" "More Baseball Talk." "Vanity Cases." "Man With Magic Foot." "Addendum to Kid Gloves."
July 1956. Your Powwow Corner. "Impressive Record" "December Groom" "A Prediction Pitfall!" "Virgo's Gift of Gab" "The Happy Chemist" "More Type Casting" "Wonders Never Cease!" "Monument to Laziness"
August 1956. "Why I Accept the Sidereal Zodiac:" [Very early, out of date, reprinted in Spica]
September 1956. Your Powwow Corner. "Venus' Favorite." "Double Talk." "Lucky Flyboy." "Musings About Music." "Odds and Ends."
October 1956. Your Powwow Corner. "Some Plain Talk," "Odds & Ends," "Auburn Revisited" [first execution by electrocution & other ghoulishness]
November 1956. Your Powwow Corner. "See What I Mean?" "People and Planets." "Systemry and Cancer."
December 1956. Use Your Faith in Living. by Donald Bradley.

February 1957. "Murder Will Out!" [statistical study of murderers' angles & aspects]
March 1957. "Statistics to the Rescue!" [SLR statistical studies]
April 1957. Your Powwow Corner. "Fateful Pattern." "Funny, Funny Saturn." "Hap Not So Happy." "Odds and Ends."
May/June/July 1957. Unveiling a New Tool. [his introduction to Sidereal ingresses]
August 1957. Your Powwow Corner. "People and Planets." "The Moricand Pattern." "Birthday Assortment."
September 1957. Your Powwow Corner. "Orbs and Like That There!" "Pluvius Restored!"
October 1957. Your Powwow Corner, "Contact." "Mess Psychology." "Transit Gimmick." "Thorny Question." "Attention All Teen-Agers!"

February 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "Miracle of Fatima." "Favorite Bogey!" "The Retrograde Complex." "Other -Ologies." "Breakthrough."
March 1958. Powwow Corner. "Fulfillment!" "Crow's Fete." "Some 'Plane' Talk." "Through and Beyond."
April 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "In This Corner" [boxer study]. "Words About Words!" "Apparel's Appalling."
November 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "The Grand Manner." "Planes, Not Points!" "Never Mind the Grunion."
December 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "Track-down of Truth" [early critical summation of studies]

1959 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
September 1959. Your Powwow Corner. "Bo and Error." "Windsock." "War and Marriage!" "Celestial Gadgets."

1960 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
March 1960. Your Powwow Corner. "Birthdata Bonanza!" "Ingress Info..."
April 1960. Your Powwow Corner. [his excellent article on Algol]
June 1960. Your Powwow Corner. [the alcoholism study]
July 1960. Your Powwow Corner. "Agadir and 5000 Ghosts."
October 1960. 1960 Presidential Election.

1961 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
February 1961. Your Powwow Corner. "On Being Wrong." "Nature's Geometry." "Odds & Ends." "News Worthies!" and here. "Another Man's Persian."
April 1961. Your Powwow Corner. (a discussion of Sheldon's constitutional typology)

January 1962. Your Powwow Corner. "Pardon Earth's Dust!" "Mind and Body Together." "Wasted Millennia?" "Name-Calling Problem."
March 1962. Your Powwow Corner. "Just One of those Things?" "Just Checking." "Armageddonists Take Note." "Odds & Ends."
August 1962. Your Powwow Corner. "Flora's Fauna" [a study of Jack London]. "Closer to Home." "Odds & Ends."
December 1962. Your Powwow Corner. "The Strangest Thing" [few Su-Sa aspects at time of suicide], "The Moon and Moo."

January 1963. "Feet His Fate!" "Astro-Semantics." "Horoscope for a Heist." "Madams Make Money."
February 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Another Great Lesson." "Contribution to UFOria." "Newton Turned Over..." "Natal Potpourri" and here.
March 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Saturn's Burden." "Agonizing Reappraisal." "We Got Rhythm!" "Just the Beginning?"
April 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "The Angels Knew Better." "Let's Talk About Aries!" "Odds & Ends."
May 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Telling the Other Side." "Odds & Ends."
June 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "One for the Books." "Full Barrage!" (the astrology of his apartment being burgled). "Daughter of Earth and Sea" (on Rachel Carson). "Bossy Nova."
July 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Mopping Up After Aries!" "A New Wives' Tale!"
November 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Biorhythms and Astrology."

January 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "Through a Glass Darkly," "Atlas Shrugged" [recent disasters analyzed], "Prized Birth Data" [Edith Piaf & others]
February 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "Saturn-Neptune Not All Bad!" "Death at the Crossing." "Odds and Ends."
March 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "JFK, LBJ and PSSR." "Moon Madness and Gladness."
April 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "Stone Experts Have a Lot of Gall." "An Exercise in Discovery."
July 1964. Shakeup Showdown: Republican Convention.
July 1964. Your Powwow Corner. (a study of reunited identical twins, separated at birth)
August 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "How to Unvex a Vexed Question" [ayanamsa issues & stats, typescript only]
September 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "Retrograde-Mercury Complex." "From Agony to Ecstasy in Peru."

1969 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?

1970 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
January 1970. "What Really Matters"
February 1970. Give Tertiaries a Try.
May 1970. "Aquarian Age Myth."

February 1971. "Baby's Sex"
November 1971. "New Horizons in Health Research" [lunar phase & health crisis or death]

June 1973. "Face the Facts and Figures" [arguably his most important article]
September 1973. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Backward Glances." "Return Theory Updated" [the historic introduction of the Ennead]. "Love is a Mirror." "Show of Hands." "Saturn's Proxy."
February 1974. Perspectives in the Sidereal. [His article on Uranus angularities and aspects natally. This is a reprint, but I haven't yet found the original.] "Maverick in the Sky." "Tents & Tests." "Through and Beyond." "Favorite Bogeys."
May 1974. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Facts About Longevity"
December 1974. Perspectives in the Sidereal. [reprint, but I haven't found the original yet] "Rest Ye Merry!" "About Orbitry..." "Call For Tolerance." "Middling Advantage." "Getting the Message."
February 1975. The Truth About the Aquarian Age.
February 1975. Perspectives in the Sidereal. [Some of these have been listed above; others, reprinted, are not yet in my list above.] "Contact." "Handy Calendar." "Finally, the Capstone." "No Mystery At All." "Odds and Ends." "Oriental Enigma." "Probability." "Physiology Theory." "Dasa System."
March 1975. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Through the Number Jungle." [an important reprint of his work in Arisolar progression, I haven't found the original yet]
June 1975. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Lo and Behold!" "According to Hoyle." "Wasted Millennia?" "Mind and Body Together."
July 1975. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Another Milestone..." [discussion of the Solar Apex - 0° Cap idea that was later retracted; unclear why this was then reprinted a decade later].
November 1975. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Just the Beginning!" "Vital Facts." "Agonizing Reappraisal." "We Got Rhythm!"

July-August 1976. Crashing the Atmospheric Science Barrier.

March 1977. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Earthquakes Can Be Predicted."
1978 Digest. Astrology Explores Your Brain Patterns by D.A. Bradley. [A major, important contribution on the potential of astrology to contribute directly to clinical psychology.]
July 1978. "The Big Question: Why Suicide?" [reprint]
August 1978. Perspectives in the Sidereal. "Believe It or Not!" [about Robert Ripley's chart, reprint], "Armageddonists Take Note," "Odds & Ends," "What Is the Zodiac?"

Just for the heck of it, I'm also going to list all of my articles in AAM. I'm not overly proud of most of them at this point (some were written when I was 16 years old. But some of them were good, others were at least thoughtful, and they all had benefit of good editing <g>. Some still seem to be missing, e.g., my mundane forecast article on Uranus in Libra.

July 1971. The Horoscope of the United States.
August 1972. Secrets of Mayan Science.
December 1972. The Soaring Eagleton.
March 1974. Uranus in Sidereal Libra: Upheaval of World Structures. Reproduced here: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=1686
March 1975. Leonardo da Vinci. Reproduced here: viewtopic.php?f=18&t=644&p=4089
August 1975. Rectification - In Search of Missing Links.
December 1975. A Hindu Predictive System. [Dasa-Bhukti segments as pure spatial areas]
March 1976. Basic Delineation Procedures.
May 1978. How to Be Your Own Astrologer. [my 3-column sheet as a learning/practice model]
August 1978. "Harmonics & the Zodiac" [in "Many Things"].
March 1979. The Horror of Jonestown.
April 1979. The New (?) Morality. [On Saturn in Leo. Written/accepted many months before the Jonestown article, and kicked to a month later when Jonestown was more timely; hence, my statement that the Jonestown article was the last one I wrote for AA.] Reproduced here: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=1688&p=10695
August 1979. Priorities in Chart Delineation.
January 1980. Priorities in Chart Delineation.

Historic note: Subsequent to posting this, the original thread (on the old site) had dozens of requests for some of the material to be made available or summarized, or questions about it. Most of those requests were met. I will only quote the posts on this thread that seem to have had independent value, e.g., summaries of some of the pieces or important questions answered.

Arena wrote:1955 June. Life With Pluto! Tagline: "During Richard Burton's lifetime, Pluto made 138 conjunctions with his progressed Sun, resulting in a most incredible biography."
Very interested in this Pluto article, even though people were not sure about Pluto's effects in those days.

OK, I'll see what I can do. Here's the gist, though: Burton was born with a tight Sun-Pluto conjunction, with transiting Pluto's annual speed being so close to his progressed Sun's speed that he never had Pluto more than 2° from conjunct his progressed, and the exact transiting conjunction occurred twice a year, every year of his life.

Most of the article reviews the details of Burton's life, to establish that he was a singular outlier in almost every respect, and then the point was driven home that the exception theme of Pluto is the main mark of this.

Oct 1955 - May 1956. Taking the Kid Gloves Off Astrology.
Was this an article only? Or a book as well?

It was originally a set of eight articles. After Bradley died, Clancy Publications collated them as a book.

April 1957. Your Powwow Corner. "Fateful Pattern." "Funny, Funny Saturn." "Hap Not So Happy." "Odds and Ends."
Ok, that sounds like contradiction Saturn = funny? Well I guess it can be sarcastically funny, black humor

I'll look for it. It's short. I almost typed it up but some of the numbers were tedious and some of the names less known today.

But this is one of the oldest (maybe the oldest) astrological acknowledgement of something that has now long been taken for granted: Saturn is the main planet of comedy. The segment acknowledges that every planet has its own antidote built in and, that psychologists (beginning with Freud, who wrote a major paper ion the subject) acknowledge humor as arising out of the depths of sadness. He then mentioned numerous comedians, well-known at the time, who have close Sun-Saturn aspects. - I'll might be able to do something with this over the weekend, when I read it this week I mostly made sure that I had the comedy reference / study cited in the Sun-Saturn natal aspect section.

February 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "Miracle of Fatima." "Favorite Bogey!" "The Retrograde Complex." "Other -Ologies." "Breakthrough."

What's this one about? I've often wondered about that retrograde movement, since there of course is no retrograde movement in space. Just appears like that from earth - and I guess we use it since we use the geocentric view.

Astrologers overall make a huge deal about retrogradation. Bradley wrote two or three significant pieces debunking this, and I forget which one this is. It might be the one about Mercury retrograde specifically where he mobilized several statistical studies to show that most people's greatest concerns about Mercury retrograde were inconsistent with facts.

1959 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
1960 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
1961 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
1969 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
1970 Digest. What's Ahead for the World?
Sounds interesting what he said at the time what would be ahead for the world.

These were very long articles, millions of words altogether. If I had to guess, I'd say that each article in small-type two-column magazine format) 15-20 pages, but that might be an exaggeration.

They're difficult to read. Their usual format was: A gabby, breezy, "hey, this is a magazine yearbook cover story" section that never said much but served the format. A discussion of outer planet sign changes, primarily Jupiter and Saturn (since those were the ones changing most years). Very brief remarks about the main Sidereal solar ingresses (interpreted bizarrely much as Tropicalists interpret monthly lunar phase charts and utterly removed from how we would approach them today, or how his original research addressed them; I'm pretty sure this was editorial pressures). And then the main body of the article, that I found impossible to read outside the context of the time, were week-by-week predictions for more or less every spot on earth. Gary Duncan was calculating astro-maps for him by computer, so he had in front of him the map for every lunar ingress of the year (but may never have said this is what he was reading),. He just plowed through, line after line, page after page, without heading shift, throwing out sentence after sentence about what to expect. My own suspicions is that the chance to do this is why he agreed to write the yearbook article in the first place.

There is so much we know now - that we find easy to see now - that wasn't evident to hi then. Remember that he published his initial findings in 1957, so '58 was the first year to test them, and he had to write the 1959 article without more than, say, half a year's experience in watching these work in action. Then (perhaps because of the style the magazine required) he'd read charts that, today, we'd say "nothing here to see, move on," but the magazine format required he have something to say about them. So, he'd talk about things like Sun in the 5th house of the 1959 USA Capsolar and that this would mean a busy theater season (or something like that), and a 6° background Mars-Jupiter opposition meant that Cold War tensions would continue with everyone treating it like a game to bring home the best trophy. (Things that were going to happen anyway, with aspects with twice the orbs we'd use today and nothing to link them to Washington specifically anyway; but, hey, it made good copy.)

I remember wincing at his 1961 remarks on the Capsolar. This was a nice, clear chart with a Venus-Pluto opposition across the horizon. Today, with many more years of cataloguing results, we know that one major likelihood is dramatically altered internation relationships, including such things as the start and end of wars, international tensions, etc. It was, in fact, the year of Bay of Pigs, intense competition with the Soviet Union in the space race, layered Cuba problem, and more. - Bradley, however, said something like: Venus-Pluto is the queen, the reigning feminine, and this would be a happy, celebratory time.

There might be some nice excerpts to dig out, perhaps his trials at interpreting outer planet sign passages, but most of these wouldn't help people much today.

March 1960. Your Powwow Corner. "Birthdata Bonanza!" "Ingress Info..."
Yebb, of interest.

I'll see what's there. He was frequently posting new birthdata he came across (and much that we have today came from that). This might be his article right after getting a French copy of an early Gauquelin book, and saying, wow, this guy has collected hundreds of fascinating French birth certificates, and here are some people that might interest you. - I'll take a look this weekend.

October 1960. 1960 Presidential Election.
February 1961. Your Powwow Corner. "On Being Wrong." "Nature's Geometry." "Odds & Ends." "News Worthies!" "Another Man's Persian."

I'd like to read these.

Any particular part? There are several sections there. (On the election, he predicted Nixon would win, then later wrote an article acknowledging he was wrong; t hat Fagan, Firebrace, and Gleadow all predicted Kennedy would win; that he had the chance to hedge or alter his predictions before they went to press, once Fagan's article came in, but he didn't. He remember that the reset of his life, BTW, and wrote me a decade later about how he missed something critical in Nixon's Anlunar that should have made a difference.)

March 1963. Your Powwow Corner. "Saturn's Burden." "Agonizing Reappraisal." "We Got Rhythm!" "Just the Beginning?"
Yebb, of interest.

What in particular? I'm not going to type up whole columns, but I suspect there was a topic title or two that got your attention here.)

February 1964. Your Powwow Corner. "Saturn-Neptune Not All Bad!" "Death at the Crossing." "Odds and Ends."
Yebb, of interest.

Again, anything in particular? (The "Death at the Crossing" piece was the Margaret Eden story, hit by a train when her car stalled on the tracks.)

I'm not going to do any great volume of these definitely do not want to give the impression ?I'ml republishing Bradley" but, more, "Here are a few fragments and key things that should survive and have distinctive value. It is not my right to be his posthumous republisher, though I do wish someone with that life station and those rights would undertake a massive collation of these things in book form for permanent availability.

Arena wrote:February 1958. Your Powwow Corner. "Miracle of Fatima." "Favorite Bogey!" "The Retrograde Complex." "Other -Ologies." "Breakthrough."
What's this one about? I've often wondered about that retrograde movement, since there of course is no retrograde movement in space. Just appears like that from earth - and I guess we use it since we use the geocentric view.

In response to astrologer's repetitive and ungrounded concern about retrogradation in general, and the adversities of retrograde Mercury in particular, the following facts were cited:

Paul Clancy, years earlier, had documented that "large business deals, international pacts and treaties, and the like," made and signed with Mercury retrograde, "were no different in their ultimate success or failure than those made and signed when Mercury was direct." Garth Allen summarized,

The scroll of history, scanned unbiasedly, offers more than enough evidence that the popular idea holding retrograde Mercury to be unfortunate, or at least frustrative, is hardly warranted.

Mercury spend 20% of its time retrograde and catches the blame for things that happen just about as frequently the other 80% of the time, too. The year before, a fleet of airplanes circled earth non-stop (a really big deal in 1956!) at a record-breaking pace, without a single problem, during a two-day period Mercury was retrograde.

He reminds his readers (I think primarily the Tropicalists among them) that it is physically impossible for Sun to trine a planet from Jupiter outward without the planet being retrograde - so the idea that the trine is really, really good, and that retrogradation screws things up, is, oh, a bit inconsistent.

One of my favorite of his quotes because it requires that the audience think at least a tiny bit:

To impute any special shade of meaning to Sun trine "retrograde" Jupiter is about as logical as trying to give a favorable interpretation to the Part of Fortune in a New Moon chart.

(from AA 6/56)

As a small addendum to his series, "Taking the Kid Gloves Off Astrology," Garth Allen added some afterthoughts.

First, he forgot to mention that "the written symbols for all three of the basically malefic planets are, in substance, glyphs for weapons," i.e., a spear, a sickle, and a harpoon. Building on this, the Bolshevik hammer and sickle is a union of two of these as a castration symbol, a sickle across that which Mars anatomically represents. He then drew analogies of the one-party system police state as a form of social castration.

His larger addendum, though, concerned Jupiter. I'll have to decide how much of this to type out, and whether to add it here or in some other section about Jupiter.

Scales requested a summary of the following:

1956 July. Your Powwow Corner. "December Groom"

A man born February 1, 1877, 4:00 AM LMT, 45N57 71W57, one day after his 76th birthday, eloped to Tijuana to marry his 22-year-old sweety.

Bradley was curious whether the typical virile, "young man's honeymoon" sort of astrological indicators would show. It turns out, they did - his wedding charts were pretty much textbook perfect.

Some details:

On the very day of his wedding, a new SLR occurred only 12 minutes before his new SSR. (The Ascendants were, respectively, 17°00' and 19°56' Taurus.) In both, Pluto conjoins his Uranus on IC with "the planets of inadequacy," Saturn and Neptune, in the distant background [near the 6th cusp, each of them 2°away in the SLR]. Venus and Mars in Pisces oppose his natal Moon (which is in "that playpen of the zodiac called the 5th house"). Moon-Mars (typical of wedding charts) is only half a degree. Bradley shares a statistic I haven't seen published elsewhere: "According to statistics, the 5th is the most frequent house position of the Moon for marriages in general."

Bottom line, his solunars are no different from what we'd expect if he were 70, not 76.

Arena was curious about this article:
1963 March. "Agonizing Reappraisal."

Going from memory, I remarked that, "I think this is the column (a variation of one he wrote for Llewellyn a decade earlier) where he made the point that how mundane astrologers use New Moon charts just doesn't stand up to the simplest examination." Yes, that's what it is.

He reminds the reader that, "One of the oldest and presumably most rewarding techniques of astrological interpretation, particularly in the realm of mundane prediction, is... a horoscope for the moment of astronomical New Moon, oriented to the capital city of the country in question." He paused to trace the likely origin of this, which really likely came from the Neomenia, or first appearance of Moon at sunset a couple of days after conjunction.

He suggested that how astrologers use this tool needs to be reappraised. I think he really wanted to challenge the technique outright, and professional politics moved him toward a more moderate path of sharing his great puzzle.

He made the following bold assertion:

There is no doubt in this writer's mind that the value of the lunation map is primarily astro-meteorological, having to do with the ensuing trends in natural phenomena as they pertain to various regions of the Earth. When one recollects the severity of the great California heat waves of September 1955, with a new volcano erupting in Baja, California while a serious forest fire charred a vast area of the Pacific Northwest at the same time, the impact of the moment of New Moon can hardly be doubted. At the preceding Moon-Sun conjunction in 24°07' Leo, Mars was 23°56' Leo, with 24° Leo on the scorched meridian of Los Angeles. All tropical positions, for your convenience. This one example alone is sufficient testimony to the value of the standard New Moon map in the anticipation of natural trends and conditions for the four weeks following.

Ah, but other things, for which these charts are historically used, don't fare so well. For example, he observes that New Moons for Washington before the starts of wars "would lead an unbiased observer to the conclusion that Mars may not be the key planet of war," because Mars has no distinctive presence in these charts.

Thinking wars may be too complicated, he suggested a simpler test: the deaths of U.S. presidents in office. The very first example was a solid one, supportive of the usual theory: When William Henry Harrison died, Saturn squared the conjoined Sun and Moon, and Sun ruled the 10th house cusp By the usual rules, this was a "win" for the New Moon theory.

The thing is... that's the last time New Moon's showed any such thing for the death of a U.S. president in office. In the six subsequent cases that had occurred (this article being published eight months before November 1963), not one of them was shown in the New Moon chart preceding. This part deserves to be quoted:

Garth Allen wrote:"Accurate" as the Harrison death chart was, none of the other six "national sorrow" New Moon charts seem to contain anything truly descriptive or predictive of demise insofaras the Midheaven or its tropical or sidereal "rulers" are concerned. Moreover, the horary trick of house-rotation to make the 5th house the 8th or "house of death" counted from the 10th doesn't seem to give results either. The 8th houses by themselves are quite normal too with respect to planetary occupancy and the activity of their cusp rulers. The Lights are no more "afflicted" than normal probability would dictate, and then the edge is definitely on the more "favorable" side than not.

The biggest surprise is the result of tabulating all aspects within wide orb of the planetary rulers of the 10th cusps - for, according to the accepted doctrine, the ruler of the 10th house of a mundane chart is the significator of the Presidency. In brief, there were considerably more than twice as many sextiles and trines involving the 10th-cusp ruler as conjunctions, squares and oppositions, throughout all of American history when Presidents passed away in office! Twice as many, mind you, even counting in the Harrison chart which seemed to be beyond criticism.

We have sincerely tried to find an approach to tabulating factors in these seven lunation charts which would place at least four of them in a "good light" where astrology's standard techniques are concerned, to no avail. Apparently, we have been expecting far more of the lunation technique than actuality can deliver... Not even application of the sidereal frame of reference can salvage that record, it appears, a fact which your Powwow writer is pained to confess. (We tried to make the sidereal come out the winner.)

He. therefore, concluded that an agonizing reappraisal was warranted on just exactly what lunation charts should be used for.

[from American Astrology September 1959]

All directional systems have built-in limitations, mainly in regard to their applicability on a time scale. Primary directions have had little appeal for modern students partly on technical grounds but chiefly because of the sheer dragging-pout of their indications over long periods. The quotidians and birth diurnals, and now the PSSR, are the opposite in action and strike most students as too brief in their expression to have real biographical milestone significance. This is why the majority of astrologers are middle-of-the-roaders and stick to the famous secondary progressions, the day-for-a-year equation which has the progressed Moon eat up about a degree per month, thus striking a happy medium between the long-term and short-term techniques. This compromise might not be the wisest but it is surely the easiest and, besides, the secondaries are definitely valid influences despite their wide misuse and misinterpretation by the rank and file on account of the incompetence of the textbook writers. Most of our standard authors wrote what they thought an "astrology book" should say and not what they knew.

The painfully frequent gap between what the books taught and what experience proved created a schism among astrologers a couple of decades ago - a controversy that cut deep enough to create the name tags "transitist" and "progressionist" in student circles. The transitist was a student who believed in the efficacy of transits only and the progressionist, who for a while ruled the roost, approached chartwork only via progression systems and felt that the transitist was something little short of subversive. Between the two camps were the anything-works-if-you-believe-in-it crowd which found every idea thrilling and respectable so long as it looked and sounded terribly astrological.

Astrology as a field of inquiry undergoes cycles of overemphasis just as do the other sciences. I believe it was Marc Edmund Jones who once pointed out in an essay that our subject is subject to fashions, lasting a couple of decades per cycle, exemplified in the emphasis by students on the relative importance of basic factors. The past generation has been overly aspect-conscious, while before that the signs were the most talked about features of horoscopy, and there was a long spell when it seemed that everything was a matter of houses. The period in history when one learned astrology is often a windsock telling which general way the wind of ideas and conversation can be expected to blow. It is often possible to scan the personalities at an astrological convention and tell, from the age and over-all mannerisms of the attenders, which are the Leo-George-Heindel faithful follows, which are the Rudhyar-Jones postgraduates, and which are the offbeatniks with systems of their own. Should you be one of the old-timers, it is a good guess that you are a standard progressionist to the extent the very word "direction" applies to the secondaries and you get all your answers out of the progressed chart with little or no awareness that this system even carries the label "secondary." Dyed-in-the-wool progressionists are probably the happiest lot in our field, for they can blithe fully find everything from hiccups to an earthquake in the scrawling's of a single personal chart.

Today I added links to all of those Bradley pieces listed in the first post where the article is reproduced or significantly excerpted and discussed somewhere on the site. (At least, all I could find.) This should help sort out which items are not yet here - and make it easier to read the ones you want that are here.