A Conversation With... Rob Hand

The Monthly Aspectarian: Rob, how long have you been involved with astrology?.

Rob Hand: All told, I've been studying astrology for about forty years.

TMA: Give us the high points up to the present.

RH: How I got started is a little unusual in that I'm sort of, but not quite, second generation. My father got into astrology before I did, using it to forecast the market. He had been doing it for five years or so, and he was the reason I got into it. To some extent, we studied it together.

TMA: Were you interested in using it for the market yourself?

RH: Yes, but I never actually speculated using it, due largely to a lack of disposable cash. One should never speculate unless he has a large amount of money he can afford to lose.

TMA: You don't bet the rent, huh?

RH: You do not bank the house. Although I've never been poverty-stricken, I've very seldom been in a position where I had enough superfluous cash. One of the things I've learned is that speculation is a full time occupation. There is no easy way to make money with the market -- but astrology sure as hell can give one an edge!

TMA: How did your father do?

RH: He consistently made money, but he worked a 12-hour day.

TMA: Where did you go from there?

RH: Not very long after I got involved, he died. In my twenties, it was something I did from time to time. I kept studying the books, I would occasionally cast charts, but it wasn't until I was about 28 that the fire really took hold again. At 29, I turned pro. I was involved in making a living . . . and it wasn't exactly the highway to wealth. For a couple of years it was touch and go. I worked in New York and Boston. Finally I got a regular thing, writing texts for the computer service ParaResearch of Gloucester. My first three books came out of that.

TMA: That was Planets in Transit, Planets in Compositet . . .

RH: And Planets in Youth. That gave me something to talk about on the lecture circuit, and that's how I got established as a lecturer and workshop presenter.

TMA: Those books are still available. Go into a Barnes & Noble or most metaphysical bookstores and there they are.

RH: My publisher tends to keep things in print. But the books have sold very consistently. They've become staples, and that's very helpful to me. They're not exactly what I do now, though. What I've been doing for almost nine years now – which is very much a part of what I call the Neo-Traditional Movement – is working with this movement that is predicated on the idea that the future of astrology requires reestablishing a complete connection with the past. Some Neo-Traditionals are extraordinarily traditional, but most of us believe we should use tradition as a launch pad for the future development of astrology rather than doing what the Twentieth Century so often did, reinventing the wheel and deciding that it ought to be square. Or doing things that simply make no sense in terms of traditional and theoretical understandings of astrology. I'm one of the people who is directly responsible for restoring the connection with ancient and medieval astrology.

TMA: That was originally called Project Hindsight?

RH: It was originally called ARHAT, actually, just to set the record straight. The original group of us that got together, I suggested we call the Association for the Retrieval of Historical Astrological Texts. That included the people at Golden Hind Press; they had originally published a Project Hindsight of the History of Mathematics. They liked the term, and so suggested that we start a publishing program as a joint enterprise between ARHAT and the Golden Hind Press, and that was Project Hindsight.

A few years later, for reasons that are personal, not intellectual, I left Project Hindsight -- they're still going -- and I resurrected ARHAT, only changing "Association" to "Archive." It's now my publishing company. My wife and I do ARHAT out of Virginia and our webpage is robhand.com. It's not just a commercial website; we also address articles on it that people might be interested in. A couple of things are out of date because I haven't had much time to work on it lately, but there are some interesting things there.

TMA: What are some of the more interesting things coming out of ARHAT?

RH: Oddly enough, a genuine esoteric astrology. I'll be talking about that in a couple of the talks in July. I say "genuine." A great deal, if not all, of modern esoteric astrology has been grafting an astrological top onto a theosophical root system. The result is an astrological system that does violence not so much to the logic of astrology, but to the symbolism.

TMA: I'm not even sure what could be called esoteric astrology in this time.

RH: Most commonly, it's the teachings of Alice Bailey. What people don't know is that the actual philosophical foundations of astrology include among its people "minor" figures like Plato and Aristotle and Pythagoras and some not-so-well-known but equally significant philosophers like Plotinus and Procous, who are called Neo-Platonists. And of course, the whole Corpus Hermeticum was very strongly involved in the astrological worldview. What several of us have been doing is going back into these roots and seeing how they actually do make esoteric statements astrologically. By "esoteric," I don't mean so much hidden, although of course that's the literal meaning of the word, but an astrology of consciousness expansion. Transpersonal astrology we'd call it, except that most people would think we simply mean astrology based on transpersonal psychology.

TMA: That's what astrology is for: the expansion of consciousness.

RH: This is a system that actually has deep roots in the Western philosophical and mystical tradition.

TMA: Where are these texts coming from? Where have they been all this time?

RH: A lot of them are lying right at the edge of consciousness. The Corpus Hermeticum has been translated for years, Plotinus has been translated for years . . . the problem is that astrologers haven't been reading this stuff. Because we have a serious problem of always looking to foreign countries' cultures for our inspiration, and because modern Western philosophy is so antagonistic to this stuff, we assume that philosophy always has been so . . . and it hasn't been at all. Of course the actual ancient astrological texts, which are largely practical in orientation, not spiritual, have been in Greek and Latin. Since the eighteenth century, astrologers by and large have not been able to read Greek and Latin. So what's happening is a mini-renaissance in the ability to read Greek and Latin. In addition to Robert Schmidt and Project Hindsight, there are two other people who are actively involved in translating Greek texts into English. Dorian Greenbaum in Massachusetts has just completed and republished a new translation of Paulus and all the commentators who derived the stuff from Paulus. It's is a fairly extensive work, about 180 pages, which is largely a complete astrological system of the fourth through sixth century A.D.

Dimitra George, who is well-known for her books on asteroids and asteroid goddesses is now becoming a very competent Greek translator. She's decided to go back to her roots and is doing a very competent job of it. She's translating astrological hermetica that's never been translated before. In fact, until she started bringing them out, I didn't even know they still existed.

TMA: That was my question, where have these texts been?

RH: Academic scholars do have their uses. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, all of the surviving Greek astrological works we knew about were edited, collated and published in the original language.

TMA: For no particular reason other than it was there?

RH: There was a reason. They were trying to find out if there was anything interesting in it about the history of astronomy, which there wasn't, much. But thanks to their efforts, scholars are reading this stuff on its own merits. Even in academia, there's a fairly active business going on in reading Greek and Latin magical, alchemical and divinatory works.

I recently discovered that there's a person of the classics department of the Catholic University of America who is about to publish a book on late Greek divinatory texts. This stuff is out and about. Astrologers are fortunately playing a role in it without being entirely academic.

TMA: What of the history of modern astrology?

RH: By the end of the seventeenth century, practicing astrology was largely confined to Great Britain. It had pretty well died out on the continent. There were a few hundred underground people here and there . . . I have seen personally a couple of handwritten manuscripts in French dating from the mid-eighteenth century . . . really bad, I might add. They were genuine astrology; they just weren't very good at it. By 1700 in England, astrology, as far as professionals were concerned, was down to one guy, John Partridge. He single-handedly decided to reform astrology, so he started cutting out things right and left. The only problem was, he was neither learned nor skillful so he cut out a lot of muscle and bone along with the fat. He became the astrologer that everybody after him looked back to as the great astrologer. He wasn't. All the astrologers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries derived their work from Partridge. And of course, the eighteenth century was not exactly a field day for astrology. It died out almost everywhere except for a few people in Britain. Britain kept it alive.

In the early nineteenth century, I think probably partly inspired by the Romantic movement, there was a revival of interest in astrology. They basically went back to Partridge for their roots or to newly available translations of Ptolemy, and started doing a kind of neo-Ptolemeic astrology that didn't have a whole lot of actual depth to it although sometimes it was technically very complex.

Then at the end of the nineteenth, early twentieth century, Alan Leo was the person most responsible for making astrology into a popular movement. The English from that point on had a regular, pretty much ongoing astrology movement. In this country, the astrology movement seems to have been largely founded by an Englishman named Luke Broughton, who moved to New York City and worked with William Chaney. Chaney was a brilliant astrologer, especially for the time, and was very critical of the British. These guys basically started the American astrological movement.

TMA: Why am I thinking Evangeline Adams?

RH: She was one of their offshoots. She was in the right place, New York. Chaney actually led indirectly to Llewellyn George. Llewellyn George was one of his offshoots, and created the New York astrological community. There was also a Bostonian, J.D. Dalton. He taught himself, and did very good work. Evangeline Adams might conceivably have learned from him, but I do get the impression that when she moved to New York she was already trained in astrology.

TMA: Who was it that started the sun sign columns, which led to everybody learning what their sun sign is?

RH: That was started by an astrologer named Naylor in England, who wrote an astrology article for a newspaper, got tremendous readership response, and the newspaper said, "Can you figure out a way of doing this on a regular basis?" and he invented the sun sign column. This was back in the thirties.

TMA: What are the major discrepancies between the ancients and the moderns? Are we going to have to make major changes in our chart reading practices?

RH: It depends. There are two flavors of pre-modern astrology, Greek and medieval. The medieval is largely Arabic and Persian in inspiration, and the Greek is Greek. The early Greek stuff is quite different from modern astrology. By about the eleventh century in the Arabic world, astrology was recognizably the stuff that is done now. That was so in the Greek, too, but they were finding more individual differences. Modern astrology is basically an extremely truncated form of medieval Arabic astrology. The emphasis is changed considerably. I don't have a problem with this; it's the technical change that I have a problem with. In the nineteenth century, astrology was largely used to answer very practical questions, all the way up to and including rank fortune telling. In the twentieth century, the idea of psychological, person-centered astrology, to use Dane Rudhyar's term, came into being. Modern astrology is still pretty much that way. I don't have a problem with that. I just think that medieval astrology technically does a better job with person-centered astrology than modern astrology does. And, if people do ask me practical questions, I can give astrologically plausible answers.

TMA: Hindu astrology has a reputation for being much better at actual prediction than Western.

RH: The traditional Western astrology, I would say, is at least the equal of Hindu. They're not very similar techniques, but their orientation is extremely similar. If you ever pick up a volume of Lilly from the seventeenth century Origins of Horary Astrology and read some of the horary cases, they're just mind-blowing in their precision. Now of course, he's giving his best cases; we all do. But all of us have experienced that, of horary questions that we answered unbelievably accurate. Not derived psychically, I hasten to add. Pure, astrological rationale for the whole thing.

TMA: Part of my final exam with the astrologer I studied with was to go to the track, read the names of the horses and the jockeys and the colors they were wearing, and I did a little better than breaking even.

RH: That's pretty impressive.

TMA: So, you approve of that part of the final exam?

RH: I do, actually. I don't completely think that's the way astrology should be used, but I think a person who could do that has demonstrated a mastery of the technique. Breaking even at the track is highly improbable.

TMA: A little better than breaking even. I came home up $20 or $30.

RH: You did this in one day? That's quite a blessing, yes.

TMA: Yes, and I really did make all of my decisions astrologically. It was a lot of fun. But, you know, somebody close to me said the worst thing that can possibly happen to you is to go to the track for the first time and win.

RH: I'll tell you a funny story. An astrologer I know in Australia was beginning to study with an Indian astrologer. The Indian astrologer had a news conference, and the people asked him to make a prediction, so my friend said, "I'll predict the winner of the Stakes." He had actually done a careful study of horse racing in Australia, and made a prediction. A few days later they were arriving in another city and the train was mobbed by reporters. The Indian astrologer thought they had come to see him but they had come to see my friend because he had predicted the winner correctly. He did it based on the birthdays of the jockeys and the horses, which are recorded in Australia. He was quite good at telling who would win.

TMA: You could certainly pull up the greatest probability.

RH: Yes. His name was Kevin Barret. He still practices in Australia.

TMA: Again, are there going to be big changes based on discoveries that you guys are making?

RH: If you try to do Greek or Hellenistic astrology, there are whopping changes. If you do medieval, it's basically a matter of examining what you already know, with a couple of exceptions. Most of us who do traditional astrology reject the outer planets as rulers. We don't reject them as occupants of houses, but we don't use them to rule signs.

TMA: Uranus, Neptune and Pluto?

RH: Exactly. We use Saturn for Aquarius, Jupiter for Pisces and Mars for Scorpio. The more liberal among us will use both. This I don't approve of unless there's a good reason. Plus, I don't like it because if you multiply things too much, you get mushier and mushier readings.

TMA: Clearly, astrology needs to evolve over time, and with the discovery of new planets . . . I've wondered who's going to give up Venus, Libra or Taurus.

RH: We do have the solution to the problem. If you can't see it, it doesn't rule the sign. There is a theoretical reason. The planets you can't see are of a different order. They are not part of ordinary reality. The problem here is the asteroids are delineated as if they were, and I think that's probably wrong. I think they are probably not ordinary even though they pertain to issues that people think of as being routine.

TMA: I haven't incorporated asteroids, although I know a lot of people have.

RH: I don't think we should drop the asteroids, but they are a major methodological crisis. As last heard, we have several thousand of them catalogued with orbits. I don't mean the astronomers, I mean astrologers who have ephemeri of several thousand of them. At that point, the conjunctions become rather insignificant, don't they! I mean, if you don't have a conjunction, something's wrong!

There is a PC program called Dance of the Planets that came out a few years ago, and one of the things you can do is to play the solar system at any given moment, including a couple thousand asteroids. What you saw was a few little dots of light corresponding to the planets and this fog bank between Mars and Jupiter. There were so many of them, it looked like a dust cloud. We can't deal with that. There are things that people do that bring it down to a somewhat reasonable level, but there's just a lot of flotsam and jetsam out there. If we try to use all of it in astrology, we'll go nuts.

TMA: It's real interesting to listen to astrologers argue about things. For instance, if I catch two astrologers arguing about house cusp systems, I take them outside and point at the sky and say, "Show me lines."

RH: I have an interesting answer to that. In our work in Greek astrology at Project Hindsight, we made a rather interesting discovery. All of the Greeks did houses in the same way that the Hindus do, which is whole sign houses. What they did was, they counted the rising signs. Not the degree, the sign. So the first house was the rising sign, the second house was in exile, and so forth. So the houses were actually functions performed by the signs of the zodiac. Now we call these whole sign houses. I've actually switched to it because I've found that it gives a more objectively accurate description of the life. The circumstances of the life show up much more clearly.

The main reason we thought it was a good idea to switch is that it worked better. But a theoretical reason was when we discovered how modern houses came into existence. The idea of trisecting the arc between the ascendant and the midheaven was used fairly early, by the second century at the very latest. But it was used only to determine whether a planet was strong, medium or weak or angular, succeedent or cadent. It was not used to tell what the planet signified. Nobody among the Greeks used it for this purpose. They used the modern type houses, mainly Porphyry and later on, Alcabitius, only for determining strength. They would use the signs for telling what the planet signified.

The one that first we thought was an exception, apparently is the exception, was due to a mistranslation. Now the problem is, there's a passage in Ptolemy where he tells you how to calculate the planet that is later called the Giver of Life. As he describes it, it sounds like he's describing equal houses. The problem is, he isn't describing houses, he's talking about places where you can find this planet. There's a particularly critical passage where the whole thing depends on a couple of two-letter words in Greek, and the manuscripts differ on which ones they are. So at that point, we don't know what he actually said. To make matters worse, people looked at this and said, "Well, it shouldn't be done this way, it should be done this way" and began tinkering with houses. But again, not for signification. It wasn't until the Arabs that we find modern-type houses used for signification. By that time, the house cusp controversy was on full blast.

TMA: And then there's the whole problem between tropical and sidereal.

RH: Yes, there's some interesting history there, too. Most people think the sidereal is more rational and that the ancients used it. Well, there's no doubt the Babylonians used the sidereal zodiac for telling you where the planets were located, for positional purposes . . .

TMA: It's astronomically correct if it's done right.

RH: Actually, in the earliest charts they would say the Moon is five degrees to the west of Regulus. They didn't use constellations at all, they used distance from fixed stars. The zodiac started out as being twelve irregular constellations, four more, and then -- and this is the interesting point -- based on a twelvefold division of the year, they assigned each of those twelvefold divisions to a constellation. Now that's tropical.

TMA: Right. That's where it starts.

RH: ...clear use of examples of the use of signs to interpret until the time the two zodiacs coincide. So we don't know what they were doing with tropical or sidereal, and apparently they didn't, either, because they mixed up criteria all over the place. One of the things you will find on my website [robhand.com] is an article called "On the Invariance of the Tropical Zodiac." Go to my website, go to ARHAT Journal, and you'll find that title. There I present the entire problem. Then to make matters worse, it's apparent that some of the early Hindu writings were tropical. Some of them may not have been. All of them used qualities of the signs that could only have been deduced tropically. Back in the West, meanwhile, used aspects of the signs that could only be used sidereally. So both sides had it royally confused until modern times.

Robert Hand lectures in conferences, seminars and workshops worldwide. He offers professional astrological services to astrologers and the general public, and can be reached at ARHAT (703) 758-7150 USA or through email to info@robhand.com.