Hudson Valley Astrologer

“Astrology done well, cannot leave the human being behind.”

~ Noel Tyl

We were coming off a championship season but in my heart I knew it was my last year in the “almost Dixie” state of West Virginia. Those years are blurry now but I recall it was around 1981. I thought it would be a good idea to transfer, and where better than a school a buddy of mine attended and whose little State University computer program ranked ahead of M.I.T’s and Stanford’s at the time? Personal computers weren’t really a household thing yet. In fact, we were still using punch cards.

I majored in computer science for about a week, but one particular morning there was such a long line at the card drop off point that it stretched down the hall and out the door into the quad. It was longer than those lines that parents formed later that year in the mad rush to buy their kids the latest Cabbage Patch doll for Christmas. Both lines were insane from my point of view. But still, I’d wait in line for a beer back then no problem.

Bill Gates made the cover of Time Magazine in 1984. Neptune was just finishing up an extended sextile to Pluto. The two most outer planets danced back and forth from the middle degrees of Sagittarius and Libra, respectively, to the early degrees of Capricorn and Scorpio, from 1976 to 1986.

The relative orbital speeds and elliptical paths have kept the outer most planets synced up to a near sextile relationship since 1945. Neptune orbits the Sun every 165 years whereas Pluto orbits the Sun every 248 years. This means that Neptune moves faster than Pluto on average, except for a period of time when Pluto is closest to the Sun in its orbit. In fact Pluto becomes the 8th planet for a brief period when its orbit crosses inside the orbit of Neptune. This last occurred for a 20 year period between 1979 and 1999.

When a planet is closest to the Sun in its orbit, astronomers refer to the planet as being at its perihelion (in Greek peri – near, Helios – Sun). Phenomenologically, Pluto at its perihelion travels at a speed comparable to Neptune, which explains the unusual entrainment between these two planets for almost 90 years. This unusual relationship between Neptune and Pluto continues up to 2035. The computer has fundamentally transformed (♇) the way we SEE (♆) the world.

The PC was becoming a big deal when Gates’ gaunt face graced the cover of Time Magazine. Punch cards became a relic of the past. Technology was moving fast. I should have stayed in line but I hate waiting in lines. I dumped the cards and headed for the dorm in frustration. Cutting through the building housing the economics department I noticed no lines. That’s how I decided to major in economics.

But an economically minded person understands, instinctively perhaps, that there is this thing called supply and demand. When people desire or need something that is either difficult to get, or is on the other side of a “bottleneck,” where people squeeze themselves in to grab something that is going faster than it can be replaced, or in the “narrows” of the retail experience, where 300 million consumers coming online vie for supremacy, and desire exceeds the flow and availability of a thing, scarcity is created, and accessibility denied, all of which drives up the price. Scarcity was alive and well in the computer department in 1981, but the only thing scarce in the economics department was demand. No lines! Still, I’m glad I made my choice. I still hate lines.

Everyone knows who Bill Gates is, but few people know the name Michael Erlewine. In the 1970’s Michael got and programmed his first computer. It was a Commodore PET and marked the beginning of a long and illustrious career in the business of publishing astrology software. He started his company, Matrix Software, in 1977. My first personal computer, a Dell 386, wouldn’t be on my desk at home for another 10 years. We had PCs at work, fresh out of college, and as early as 1983, but they were not “personal” in the sense that we could take them home. That all changed quickly, and by 1987 I had a nice set up with my Dell desktop paired with the ubiquitous HP Laser Jet printer. I was in business! This was a huge development for me personally since I had become a single parent, and I was now able to set my work station up at home and work remotely, even though that’s not what we called it back then.

Erlewine was flourishing by this time (early nineties), and by then I had finally read my first astrology book. Robert Hand who founded Astrolab in 1979, became the worldwide publisher of Solar Fire, another popular astrology software program. I think back on my first computer and its immediate successors with nostalgic regret that I didn’t load them up with one or both of these programs. That day wouldn’t come until 1998 when I met the brilliant Yogi and astrologer who introduced me to The Gnostic Circle.

Patrizia Norelli-Bachet wrote The Gnostic Circle and its publication predated the uproarious debate on Whole Sign Houses by about 10 years. In the mid to late 1980s Robert Hand first began lecturing on the concept of traditional astrology in connection with his involvement in Project Hindsight. Patrizia worked alone and the tool that she envisioned was not a program or a piece of written code, but a “download” of another sort altogether, and where to this day, no computer is required.

It is fascinating that at about this same time, when the seed for collective nostalgia was planted, for all things traditional, two researchers from Israel who reshaped the way we think about taking risk, broke the mold on everything we thought we knew about prediction. Michael Lewis documents this incredible “friendship that changed our minds” in his book called The Undoing Project. It’s the story about Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann who revolutionized economics through a psychological lens and dubbed the “new science” behavioral economics.

Tversky and Kahneman’s key insight regarding hindsight bias for example, was that it stems from a cognitive heuristic they called “anchoring and insufficient adjustment.” They proposed that once people know the outcome of an event (and I would add, once an astrologer understands the aspect measurements of planets), the outcome (or an astrologer’s prediction) serves as an anchor in their reasoning process. When reconstructing past judgments (predictions for the astrologer), people adjust their estimates based on this anchor but fail to sufficiently account for the uncertainty or alternative possibilities they originally faced. This leads to overconfidence in the predictability of past events and a distorted view of what was foreseeable at the time.

Astrology struggles with this cognitive bias, and it’s the same issue Hindu astrologers, who practice Jyotish Astrology, have struggled with since they splintered off onto an artificial Zodiac.

Although it was not my first computer, I think the computer I most revere was the one I uploaded my first astrology program to, the one from Matrix Software. Erlewine takes credit for developing Matrix, and he should, like Stephanie Johnson and Graham Dawson are credited for the astrology application better known as Solar Fire. But like Thomas Edison, who gets credit for inventing the light bulb, there were hundreds (if not thousands) of other people involved. Twenty-five years later I am still learning new things about the capabilities of my software program, and some gems that were stuck way down in between the proverbial cushions I am getting reacquainted with again. Such a massive program could never be the result of a single mind.

At the end of the day, all these years later, with first, Chat GPT, and now Deep Seek, I am reminded of Noel Tyl’s sage prediction, that “Astrology, done well, cannot leave the human being behind.”

Let me make a BOLD PREDICTION: From the advent of the first computer, to the rise of robots and artificial intelligence, and this point forward, the biggest growth industry (and which presently enjoys very short lines) will be found in leveraging soft skills, or people skills, in the realm of social work and counseling. We are going to need all the counseling we can get, with hordes of well trained experts in the field, who can speak to the army of displaced workers (human beings), left behind by robots.

HVA

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