Donald Bradley's robbery
Posted: Sat May 04, 2024 2:27 pm
This post is not about when Donald Bradley actually was born (we got a surprise on that with his birth certificate this morning!) but on when he thought he was born as of 1963. I've previously shown that in the late 1940s he regarded his birth time as 2:40 AM (besides telling Gary Duncan this, he used it as the basis of the sample charts in Chapter 6 of Solar and Lunar Returns). When he died, American Astrology published his time as 2:04 AM. Was this a typo? Did he rectify his chart along the way?
We have an intermediate "check point" from the June 1963 issue American Astrology. In his "Your Powwow Corner" column, under the heading "Full Barrage!", he wrote about a robbery of an unnamed astrologer that we know was actually him. The robbery occurred March 1, 1963, 8:00 AM, New York City. He used this as an example of the premise:
Bradley used this burglary as one of his pet events for testing various astrological techniques. I also added it to my shortlist of major test events. The article in 1963 was an examination of the way even (thought to be) minor techniques converged all at once to give a similar message. Because he gave a lot of precise planet positions, it gives us an opportunity to test what he thought was his birth time. He noted:
We have an intermediate "check point" from the June 1963 issue American Astrology. In his "Your Powwow Corner" column, under the heading "Full Barrage!", he wrote about a robbery of an unnamed astrologer that we know was actually him. The robbery occurred March 1, 1963, 8:00 AM, New York City. He used this as an example of the premise:
He described the 8:00 AM event as follows:Garth Allen wrote:Let's face it, sometimes "the heavens" unleash such a barrage of adverse influences, there is little that we can do to stave off at least some "show" of something unfortunate. Heretical and defeatist, you claim such a statement to be? All the platitudinizing about free Will goes by the boards once in a while, and if facing this fact is "completely contrary to the philosophy of astrology," we freely please guilty of such contrariness. Just the same, we say Hurrah for the folks who can la-dee-dah into the very visage of disaster.
As a passing anecdote, I should mention that my life ended up being connected to this event after a fashion. In November 1975, at a public meeting in Hollywood, a noted Sidereal astrologer actually accused me of being the one who robbed Bradley's apartment. I pointed out that on March 1, 1963 I was eight years old and living in a small Midwest town a thousand miles from New York City. He immediately changed his story and said I could have travelled or arranged for someone else to rob it. - As you can imagine, this anecdote bears no connection to the astrological event I'm writing about other than, perhaps, to indicate that this story, a dozen years after Bradley wrote about it and a year after he died, was still very much in some Siderealists' mind. (I was accused of stealing something from him that I indeed had, and had told people I had, but that he didn't write until the early 1970s.)...our colleague made the distressing discovery that his home had been burglarized, perhaps within the preceding hour by the evidence. He had fortified his entire life to minimize if not escape from the barrage of malefic indications [previously known to be coming] - but burglarization was simply too farfetched a possibility to be anticipated. The over-all loss was not severe, but money, jewelry, and small household items of value were taken.
Bradley used this burglary as one of his pet events for testing various astrological techniques. I also added it to my shortlist of major test events. The article in 1963 was an examination of the way even (thought to be) minor techniques converged all at once to give a similar message. Because he gave a lot of precise planet positions, it gives us an opportunity to test what he thought was his birth time. He noted:
Students commonly complain that astrology has become too chart-heavy, too complicated for convenient use on a day to day basis. We can only sympathize, having ourselves been buried in a blizzard of chartwork for many years. But when you see the many testimonies which follow, you'll agree that the concept of wheels-within-wheels is a verity which the conscientious astrology must be mentally geared to if astrological truths are to be fully appreciated.
Maybe if NLR = 10° increments, NSR can also fairly be used for 10° increments?