Episode 16 - What Makes An Astrologer? with Mo
Hi, and welcome to the 'Luminaries In and Out of Sect' podcast, a show about the Moon and how astrologers embody and relate to it. My name is SP Hall and I'm your host.
Today we are doing something a little bit different. This is the final episode of a mini-series entitled ‘What Makes An Astrologer,’ which came about as a result of the comments that Rob Hand made on a recent Astrology Podcast episode about significations in the birth chart of a professional astrologer.
The link to this episode is in the show notes. Therein, Rob Hand makes a bit of an off-hand comment saying
“The 11th sign from the Lot of Fortune is a Place of Acquisition. People [at Project Hindsight] started looking at their charts, and an awful lot of people had one of the following things true: The Lot of Fortune was in a sign ruled by Mercury, or Mercury was in the sign of the Lot of Fortune, or those same two condition applied to The Place of Acquisition, which is the 11th sign from the Lot of Fortune. And to this day, if I don’t find that in a person’s chart, I wonder about their credentials as an astrologer. This is for making money by astrology, by the way. It’s not for studying it. All you need to study it is a good, solid Mercury.”
In the wake of this episode, there was some commentary about it on social media. Being curious about what Hand said, I put out a tweet thread looking at these conditions in five professional astrologers charts. In one way or another, all five of those people met Hand’s criteria. I’ve put a link to that tweet thread in the show notes for your reference.
In response to that, Michel, who is @astrospeccion on Twitter, shared a database of famous astrologers from astro-seek.com with me, and encouraged me to do more research into this subject. I was reticent, but Mo, who is @austral_taur on Twitter, told me that she’d help me carry out a research project looking at Hand’s criteria in famous and/or professional astrologers. Mo and I ended up looking at about 90 charts of historical, famous astrologers, and received input from about 40 contemporary professional astrologers through a Google form survey.
In this series, I spoke with five astrologers and thinkers - Cameron Allen, Daniel Norman, Amy Green, Dorje Kirsten, and Ali A Olomi - about their thoughts on Rob Hand’s comments, and other significations they identify in the birth chart that may point to remuneration from astrology.
This is the culmination of the series, a conversation between Mo and I where we discuss our research and the conclusions that we’ve drawn from it. In addition, I plan to release an article on my website in the next couple of weeks where I summarize our findings and the thoughts of my guests in this series.
Please be sure to subscribe to my website for updates, which is linked in the show notes below.
Before we move on to the conversation, I wanted to share a quote from Christopher Warnock from my recent correspondence with him. After saying that he doesn’t meet Hand’s criteria and has supported himself and his family financially via astrology for many years he said, “It's not that "Rob Hand is wrong!" about that particular signature, it's just that there is never a 100% correspondence between signatures and what is predicted. Astrological prediction is not, in my opinion, a matter of analysis, breaking everything down to specific, never variant, bits that are totally accurate in themselves, but a process of synthesis, of seeing underlying patterns, which can express in the chart in many different ways.”
Now for my conversation with Mo. Thanks again Mo for doing this project with me, and for helping to make this series a reality. Appreciate you.
Please, be sure to check out the links to Mo’s website and socials below, as well as links to some of the resources that we touch on in our conversation.
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Visit my website here - https://luminaries-in-and-out-of-sect-podcast.ghost.io/
And please subscribe to and rate the show on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
You can also find me on Instagram @sphallastro and Twitter @vincit_qui_se. Please feel free to follow me there, and let me know that you’ve found me from listening to the show.
If you have any questions or feedback on the show, please feel free to email me at: sphallhorary@gmail.com
Book a consult with Mo - https://austral-taur.com/
Find Mo’s Substack here - https://australtaur.substack.com/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=substack_profile
Find Mo on Instagram and Twitter - https://www.instagram.com/australtaur/; https://twitter.com/austral_taur
My tweet thread about Rob Hand’s Criteria in 5 professional astrologers’ charts - https://twitter.com/vincit_qui_se_/status/1625196832799473665?s=20
Rob Hand on the Astrology Podcast (quote is from 47:00-47:55) - https://youtu.be/u4xJP74Rx1Q
The Fixed Astrology Podcast - https://twitter.com/FixedAstroPod
Sam Reynolds NORWAC 2020 lecture on the Lots of Fortune and Spirit - https://norwac.net/downloads/reynolds-samuel-playing-your-parts-the-parts-of-spirit-and-fortune-video/
Example charts - https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Quigley,_Joan; https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Frawley,_John; https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Leo,_Alan; https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Greene,_Liz
Photo for Cover Art by Luke Stackpoole @WithLuke on Instagram - https://unsplash.com/photos/TRXSkmJb40c
Intro/Outro music is ‘Clair de Lune,’ composed by Claude Debussy, played by David O and available courtesy of Great Scott Gadgets - https://greatscottgadgets.com/2021/08-05-open-source-clair-de-lune/