Guy Spiro: Glenn, I like to begin by having you tell your story. How did you start out and how did you get to where you are?

Glenn Perry: I came to California back in 1972 wanting to write screenplays. I was doing a lot of reading in metaphysics, comparative religion and spirituality in general like a lot of other people in that era. I had been interested in astrology even in high school. Once I got out of college, I had the time to really study it, and the more I studied it, the more I fell in love with it. After I began doing readings professionally, I decided that I was a bit over my head with the emotional and psychological dimension. I felt that astrology was a very useful tool for describing the rough outlines of a person’s fate and character, but people would have emotional responses and want to go deeper. They clearly wanted help with something they were struggling with and, while I could see the signature of that challenge in their chart, I didn’t necessarily know how to help them with it. Just being able to describe something is not necessarily curative or helpful or therapeutic. So I decided to go back to college and get first my master’s degree and then my doctorate. All the while, I was comparing and contrasting and integrating and synthesizing all the information I was getting from my psychological courses into an astrological or an astro-psychological model

GS: So you were an astrologer first.

GP: Yes, and continued to take classes and workshops and work with clients during the time that I was getting my psychological training, interning as a psychotherapist and eventually getting licensed. Over the next 35 years in private practice, I watched my clients and worked with them and saw how they were expressing the astrological chart, because I did charts on all my clients. I got to a point that I could work with people more effectively and deeply than when I first got started with astrology. I developed an increasing respect for people’s capacity for change and for expressing their charts at higher levels of integration.

GS: It’s always been clear to me that astrology and psychology make powerful allies.

GP: It enriches immeasurably both disciplines. I think doing psychotherapy without astrology is kind of like swinging in the dark. There’s no way of getting inside the person in any kind of visual way to see how they’re psychologically organized. There’s all sorts of models for developing hypotheses for how people are structured, but, for the most part, it is guess work and most psychological models are heuristic in the sense that they invent categories of behaviors that sort of function, but we don’t really know what we’re dealing with. With astrology you have an actual objective reference point, the chart. That balances the subjectivity of the therapeutic process.

GS: The energies of the chart are clearly there, the question is what is the person doing with them?

GP: That’s the other thing. I think it’s so important not to presume that you can know someone on the basis of looking at their chart. You’ve got to listen to them and ask questions and find out how they’re expressing that chart. I always like to say that a person is not their chart, but people have charts the same way that students have curriculums. How well a person does with that curriculum is not determined by the chart but by some sort of an ‘x’ factor that transcends the chart or predates the chart.

GS: I tell my students that when you do a chart reading, you’re not reading a chart, you’re reading a person with the help of the chart. It is amazing how major issues stand out when you look at a chart. I have had clients say, wait a minute, my therapist doesn’t even know about that.

GP: Any therapist is going to be working with the client through the filter of whatever theoretical model they’re coming from. Some are better than others. Some therapists can be enormously intuitive. But again, if you have an objective model that has the kind of complexity and clarity that the astrological chart has, that’s just invaluable. I can’t imagine doing therapy without it.

GS: You are the founder and director of the Association for Psychological Astrology. That would be an umbrella organization for people working in various psychological systems and incorporating astrology?

GP: Exactly. We don’t have any one particular model, just anyone who’s interested in integrating astrology and psychology.

GS: They don’t all have to do it your way?

[laughter]

GP: I try to encourage them to, but they don’t always listen. The Association is a loose, informal association of people that subscribe to my newsletters and participate in various ways. Some come to my workshops and I have personal relationships with a lot of people that are interested. It’s an informal organization, so it’s not like we have dues, or regular meetings or conferences. The Academy of Astro-Psychology is a different matter, because that’s an actual school. We have students that are working through the course work.

GS: This is your school.

GP: Yes. I founded it a couple of years ago. We’re in the process of applying for state authorization so we can legally grant degrees, but the infrastructure is already set up. We have all our faculty members with their courses online, ready to go. Students are moving through and we are hoping that over time it will be an independent school, formally accredited, or at least formally approved and authorized, which is actually different from accreditation, that is legally able to grant Masters and Doctoral degrees.

GS: It is a problem that anybody can read two or three books on astrology and print some business cards.

GP: That’s one of the problems that ISAR has been addressing.

GS: But once there are certifications that you have to have or you can’t practice, then you inevitably are going to have politics. One faction or another will take over and you’ll have an astrological AMA. That would be worse, in my opinion.

GP: I guess the only solution that one can hope for is that the certification process remains just that, not just a process whereby individual astrologers get certified but also a process that keeps abreast of changes in the field; one that encourages research and supports advancements in the field in terms of better understanding and new ideas and concepts and models that periodically will come up, and, I hope, are incorporated into the certification process. It would be a living document subject to periodic revisions and updates.

GS: That leads right to the article I was reading on your website about astrological fundamentalism. That is an issue. Astrology has to be an evolving practice.

GP: It has been much more so in the 20th century. I think everything up until that point was a kind of rehashing of a lot of old ideas and remained fairly rigid. Although new techniques were definitely introduced by people, astrology remained mired in a kind of fatalistic, rigid, event oriented perspective, and as a consequence, became associated with fortune telling. Even in the 20^th century when psychological or humanistic astrology departed markedly from that old model and challenged it. But still, in the public eye, astrology is largely associated with fatalism and fortune telling, and to that degree, it suffers a very serious public relations problem. It’s one of the things, again, that ISAR’s programs and this conference in particular are trying to remedy.

GS: The whole fate and free will question needs to be addressed. To my way of thinking, people are fated to deal with the energy as the timing comes up, but with consciousness, they have unlimited ability to choose what to do with it. 

GP: Exactly. That’s one of the paradoxes in the field and one that creates a great deal of confusion and conflict between different camps. It’s not really a fate versus free will issue. It’s understanding the appropriate balance and dialogue and relationship between fate and free will. I did a lot of work in graduate school in an area called General Systems Theory. We used to talk about open systems in terms of their self organizing by virtue of feedback cycles. Feedback can be defined as the information about output, that is the systems behavior that is re-introduced to the system as information about that output. Systems can be self-correcting, self-organizing and self-transcending, that is they can evolve to a higher and more inclusive state by virtue of processing the information that is fed back to them. In spiritual circles we call it karma, as ye sow, so shall you reap, but it’s just another version of what in General Systems Theory, they call feedback.

     If you can, think about the fate/freewill controversy in that context, that fate is feedback, but it is fate that is determined by prior choices. If you want to extend that all the way back to prior lives, it places freedom and choice at the center, because in the end it’s the only thing we have control over. But if you minimize, or worse, ignore that capacity for freedom, and you focus more or less exclusively on fate or outcome, then I think you are performing a disservice to the client. That fosters dependency, weakens the client, and reinforces a kind of anxiety that often brings the client to the astrologer. If you minimize or negate their possibility for free will and using their fate as a catalyst to learn, grow, integrate, evolve, face challenges, find solutions and so forth, then you’re not really helping the client. You’re using astrology in a way that exploits the client’s fears and anxieties and making them dependent on you. It’s at the best not helpful, and at the worst unethical.

GS: I’m continually appalled by what people tell me other astrologers have said to them. I got this squared that and I have this quincunx and that opposition and I’m screwed. I’m never going to be able to do this, and I’m always going to have trouble with that. Wow! That is not how it’s supposed to be used. 

GP: That’s it. There’s a revivalist movement in astrology now called the Neo-traditional Movement.

GS: The research is interesting, translating Greek and other ancient texts, but a lot of what I’ve seen of it seems very deterministic.

GP: I think what’s unfortunate is that a lot of astrologers are being indoctrinated into this archaic, deterministic, fatalistic model and they’re applying it with clients.

GS: It’s ancient so it must be right.

GP: That seems to be the presumption in some circles.

GS: Have you seen the hatchet job Penn and Teller did recently on astrology?

GP: No. I knew that they were intending to do it.

GS: They’ve done it, it’s been broadcast. It’s just so easy to go out there and find people to make fun of. But what I always say is that the most vociferous detractors of astrology and these kinds of things, generally know two things about them, they know jack and they know shit. It amazes me.

GP: It is easy to find jack and shit out there who will confirm their worst presuppositions.

GS: They went out and found people who would play right into their hands.

GP: I was warned by several colleagues not to do the show. I’d been contacted by their producer, a real smooth talking, seemingly kindhearted, best of intentions ... I thought maybe I could use the opportunity to strike a blow for astrology, but I have a feeling that the deck was so stacked against me that no matter what I would say that sounded credible or believable, they’d find a way to edit it in a way that made it seem silly.

GS: The ISAR Conference that’s coming up is not just for the professional astrologer.

GP: There’s hope at every conference that we can attract other people in the community. We invite educators, scientists, media people, to give them a sense of what astrology is in the hands of its more competent practitioners, and what it’s moving toward, what its value is, and how it can be utilized in ways that are actually in service of the greater good.

     The bottom line is that astrology has been maligned and marginalized and pushed into the shadows from academia, and therefore from the scientific community, for the last 300-400 years. As a consequence it has not been well utilized. Over the years, ISAR in particular, and notably NCGR, have developed educational programs that have had as their objective an upgrading of the field so that new standards have been established. We’ve introduced not merely certification programs, but also ethics codes and ethics training and counseling skills training. A lot of people that have prior training in these areas have pooled their talents to develop these different programs, that have been introduced to facilitate a maturation and greater professionalism, to enhance the competence of the practitioners in the field. Also to address a 300 year old wound in the field that has been a consequence of astrology being banished from the scientific and academic fraternity. Largely for reasons that have to do with the fact that astrology is wedded to a much older organic paradigm or world view that was not intelligible within the framework of the emerging scientific-mechanistic world view. It didn’t make sense in that world view and was derided, oppressed and disenfranchised.

GS: It can’t be confined to the scientific model.

GP: No, but if it is going to have more impact on the larger culture, it needs to clean up its public relations image problem. It needs to show that it is compatible with other disciplines, and that’s largely what this conference is about. We have to show that it is compatible with new ideas in science such as New Physics, Evolutionary Biology, General Systems Theory, and Chaos Theory. It’s compatible with Psychology for sure. It’s being well utilized to advantage in the field of finance and business in terms of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology. Mundane Astrology is fascinating because it shows collective trends, not only economic and financial, but fads and interests, eclective mindsets and the way that the culture is evolving and changing with new values and focuses. In a whole variety of different disciplines, astrology has been and can continue to be well utilized. What we’re trying to do is be more proactive in reaching out to the media and educators, and religious leaders and community leaders to say in effect, we’re ready to resume our rightful place in the scientific and academic community so that people can be educated in astrology and use it in ways that are conducive to the public good.

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