Isabel Hickey was my first wise woman mentor, and it would be
many years before I met and studied with my “second wise woman” Alice Howell. (It
was also at this time in 1968 that I read Carl Jung’s auto-biography: “Memories, Dreams, and Reflections”. Here
was another mentor; it didn’t matter that he wasn’t alive or my personal
mentor, he changed me by the story of his journey into the subconscious. It
felt reassuring to know that there was more to life than the academics I had
been learning, and that one can navigate into the unconscious Neptunian worlds
and still survive. Today, a portrait of him hangs on the wall in my study—such
was his effect on me.
After college I moved to San Francisco and studied
psychology at the Institute for Integral Studies, and had the chance to meet
one of my favorite writers, Alan Watts. He was one of the first to bring
Eastern wisdom, such as Taoism, to America. He also wrote books such as “The
Wisdom of Insecurity” which was a source of comfort for many of us at that time.
It was a rich
learning experience in California, and yet as my life changed I felt drawn to
return back East to New England again. While living in Cambridge, Massachusetts
I discovered pottery and began making pottery in the basement of my house…this
was to be a continuing thread; and a way of grounding and centering. (In the
chapter on the Nodes you’ll see that I have no earth signs in my chart, except for
the North Node, so the physicality of the clay seemed to compensate for that
lack of earth. Later I married an Earth sign man, and found that he helped
“ground” me, as well as the experience of mothering and living in a stone
house.)
Back to the story: the clay had a strong hold on me.
I tried doing other things but always came back to the clay—and then one day
before Christmas while selling pots on the street in Harvard Square, I met
someone that would lead me to Provincetown and my first pottery shop with two
other women.
The life-thread of astrology was weak at this point
in my life. But Spirit spoke to me through a Near-Death Experience at this
time, and out of that experience came the message to be more patient with my
life, to be grounded and fully present in all I did, and a reassurance that I
would come back to deeper spiritual studies later in my life. And indeed, it
was true. But marriage, family, and clay would need to come first.
One pottery shop led to another, and finally to
meeting my husband, who was also a potter. We had a daughter and I loved being
a mother. The family experience was wonderful and although hard at times, it
was grounded in lots of idealism. We were quite successful with the pottery shop
(being in the right place at the right time) and our daughter grew into a wise
woman in her own way. (She now has two little wise women in-training!)
So fast forward some years, and I’m finding more
time for reading and studying astrology—in fact, I remember I was reading a
book called “Jungian Synchronicity in Astrological Signs and Ages” when I felt
so inspired that I wrote the author to tell her how much I liked it. Then a
couple of days later the phone rang, and it was the author, Alice Howell,
inviting me to come to her study group at her home in the Berkshires. Here was my second wise woman.
Alice combined astrology with Jung and a grounded earthy
presence; she and her husband Walter, and their little Cairn Terrier, lived on
the top of a mountain in western Massachusetts. I would go to visit her often
and also bring her pictures of my daughter and our little dog, a Cairn Terrier
as well. We were alike in many ways, stubborn and head-strong, and both
passionate about astrology. But she was my teacher; and a good one.
It was around this time that I had to make a
decision. Should I take training to become a “certified astrologer” or instead
go back to school for a Masters in Counseling Psychology? Alice didn’t have
advanced degrees, or certification from astrological organizations, yet she was
a great astrologer. With her inspiration I decided to go to graduate school and
focus my studies on Jungian psychology while reading astrology constantly. I
never jumped through any hoops of traditional certification and I still don’t
think it’s necessary to do that.
But perhaps that’s not quite accurate. Many years
later I was certified through Steven Forrest’s apprenticeship program which was
excellent. But it wasn’t traditional; it didn’t involve learning the art of
making a chart from scratch, or the 101 million details of this craft, but
instead he focused on the soul centered aspect of astrology and how to
translate astro-jargon into a language that would allow us to be competent astrological
counselors. When I studied with Steven Forrest he was focused primarily on the
South Node, whereas I was intrigued with the North Node. With his inspiration I
wrote my first book: “North Node Astrology; Rediscovering Your Life Direction
and Soul Purpose.”
There were other astrological “lights” that helped
along the way; I met and studied with Greg Bogart, Steven Levine, and Liz
Greene and others at the British Astrological Conferences that I would attend
each year for about four years. I also studied at the Jung Institute in
Switzerland for a short time, but it was at the Theosophical Society in
California later on that I was introduced to the work of the astrologer Dane
Rudhyar, and to my “third wise woman” Annie Besant. Rudhyar’s work is
brilliant, but it was Annie that grabbed my heart. She wasn’t an astrologer;
but our charts are remarkably similar….
Annie Besant lived before my time, having died in
1933, but her life story grabbed me and changed my life. She was the English
woman who was the head of the Theosophical Society, after Madame Blavatsky, and
she was the one who adopted the young boy, Krishnamurti, out of India and
raised him to be a spiritual teacher. He was known in the 1960’s as the
“anti-guru Guru” because of his dislike of dogma.
Now Annie Besant wrote volumes on spiritual studies,
but was never focused on astrology, although she wrote about it a little and
highly respected it. However my “meeting” with Annie was profoundly
astrological. The story goes like this: one day while visiting a quaint
bookstore in Litchfield, Connecticut, I found a small book on the life of Annie
Besant. I read it straight through that day and was completely awed by this
courageous passionate pilgrim. Not only was she the leader of the movement that
brought “New Age” ideas into the West; ideas such as reincarnation, karma, and spiritual
evolution, but she also lead the first successful women’s strike in history—the
strike of the match girls in 1875. She also published one of the first books on
birth control and had her children taken away from her because this was
consider immoral—the judge at her trial declared it was obvious she didn’t
believe in the Christian Church doctrine, and was therefore unfit to be a
mother. This woman, who’s been lost in history, was also President of India
before Gandhi—but all that is her story, not mine. Except for an interesting
twist—
Soon after reading my first book about Annie Besant,
I went to the Redwood Library in Newport Rhode Island, and found an old and
rare copy of a biography on her. I opened the hardcover of the book, and there
was her astrology chart—! She was born exactly 100 years and 3 minutes before
me, and our charts were very similar, though she was born in 1847 and I was
born in 1947. We both have Libra Suns conjunct Venus on the Descendant, with
Aries Rising, and squares between Mercury, Moon, and Mars. I can’t say what our
karmic connection is, except that it is still an on-going one, as I return to
the Theosophical Society in Ojai California each year and find myself
discussing Theosophy and astrology there. The rest of our connection is yet to
unfold…
Again back to the story: so after reading the book
with the chart in it, I felt a strong calling to find out more about her; so I
went to a psychic. The first thing she said was that “I was to be in a
collaborative writing project with a woman named Annie”. I don’t remember anything else she said, but
that was enough! That was all I needed to begin writing on her life, and not
long after that my husband and I decided to move to Ojai California, where I
studied, wrote, and taught about Annie Besant at Krotona Theosophical Society.
This was the time of my Uranus Opposition at 41. This was also when my passion
for astrology began again in earnest. If our charts hadn’t been so similar,
would I have come? Probably.
So Annie brought me to Ojai California, but she also
made it possible for me to meet up with two astrologers there: Sharon Russell
and Helga Stern, who fanned the fire of my passion for astrology. We would take
long walks discussing astrology and spend hours with our heads bent over
charts. It was around that time that I started doing astrology professionally,
and taking workshops at Pacifica Institute. The language of Jungian psychology
and Archetypal Astrology was spoken there—I felt I had come home to something
deep in myself.
But the home front situation was to change again, with
aging parents, and we moved back to New England were I opened—not a pottery
shop this time—but an astrology office in a storefront on Bellevue Ave in
Newport. I wrote a horoscope column for the local newspaper and found another
spiritual mentor in an Episcopal priest, Aaron Usher. His profound connection
with God put the “heart” back into my readings, and I began to read great
Christian writers as well as writing articles. Thanks to my husband and the astrologers,
Greg Bogart and Jeff Jawer, I was inspired to write and get some articles
published.
Learning and teaching never seem to stop. My Sun
sign in Libra is in the 6th house which governs mentors and
mentoring. I studied astrology at Oxford
University one summer recently, and have now taught four workshops at the
Boston Jung Institute, one each year. I was never certified as an astrologer.
So this is the part of my story that is my
astrological journey. There are many different stories of each of our lives,
depending on which part of the story we choose to tell. For me, the
astrological journey has been significant for many reasons, but mostly because
more than any religion, it reflects patterns: that a great Order exists, and
that I and everyone else is a part of the Whole. There is a mystery here rather
than a science, and I believe we don’t live from our intellect alone—we only
know what we know, because of grace, the depth of the symbolism, and the
presence of synchronicity. And all that is magical. (c) Elizabeth Spring www.elizabethspring.com
