Hudson Valley Astrologer

What colleges have you attended?

O.K. this is a funny prompt. Why? Because I’ve “attended” more colleges than I can count. I once “attended” Wellesley College and was a “guest” living in The Quint for about two weeks. This would have been 15 years after Hilary Clinton attended Wellesley, so I didn’t see her. But I was a the only guy on the hall, dining with some of the smartest women on the planet.

Little did I know that the Vishaal newsletter, which would publish its inaugural issue in 1985, was still incubating in the mind of Patrizia Norelli-Bachelet. Patrizia, or Thea as she was known to her students, wrote the Vishaal (“Magnificent” in Sanskrit) newsletter in response to her “Grand” astrological treatment of time, which she introduced to the world in The Gnostic Circle. I wouldn’t find her work until 1998 through her Principal student Robert Wilkerson — a Yogi in his own right. There were probably as many people in the Study Group on Yahoo as there were in the dining hall in The Quint. But the Yahoo group was imbued with a special goddess energy that was not evident at Wellesley or maybe not since any time before the patriarchy began or at least since the Elysian Mysteries came to an abrupt end. But Thea did indeed provide the presence of The Sacred Feminine and in ways that will be mined for ages to come.

I attended more pedestrian colleges, one small school in the south to play football, and another so called “teacher’s college” up north, which is part of the State University of New York colleges, or SUNY schools.

My wife teaches at a college here in the Hudson Valley that is changing its charter to become a University. She attended The College of the Holy Cross, and so did my two youngest children. My other two kids attended Chapman University. So the prompt asks which colleges I attended, presuming more than one, a good presumption in my case, but what if one them was a university? Do I still count it? Is a university more of a college than a college is a college?

So, I’ve attended all of these colleges and many more but I would have to say that I earned my degree at a SUNY school. In any event, my studies were not serious until I was about 37, that’s when I read The Gnostic Circle.

I recall Thea remarking once that the world overrates credentials, which made me think of a quote attributed to Joseph Campbell who said, “A Ph.D. is a sign of incompetence.” Of course, they could easily say such things because they were each remarkably accomplished in their fields. For everybody else, well, sometimes it’s just nice to talk about the alma mater rather than talk about what we know. Maybe Patrizia and Joseph Campbell were right. Maybe credentials are overrated!

HVA

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