Limits and Reasonable Uses
Linda Goodman was the author of a number of astrology books and is credited with helping to popularize it. She died in 1995, so me critiquing her work will not harm anyone living and hopefully that means it won't lead to drama to do so.
As an astrology enthusiast who had two bookshelves worth of astrology books, I owned more than one book written by her. My recollection is that it was one of her books that had this mathematically silly suggestion:
For much of human history, it was pretty common for children to die, for people to live with mystery health ailments no one knew how to effectively address or even explain, etc. It was common for people to turn to spirituality or religion to try to cope with these burdens and somehow make their peace with painful details of what were usually quite hard lives compared to what is more generally expected of life today.
Having read some of her books, my impression is Goodman just couldn't accept the loss and doubts and turned to astrology and mystic or spiritual elements associated with it to help her cope with this unresolvable personal nightmare.
This is not intended to be some harsh criticism of her PERSONALLY.
I've never lost a child nor lost anyone close to me under tragic, mysterious circumstances. I nearly ran away from home in my teens and one relative told me "I would have NEVER stopped looking for you."
So I think if you really love someone and don't have answers, that kind of PERSONAL reaction to something like this is completely understandable. Unfortunately, I feel it likely caused her writing to have problematic elements.
Her writing was very idealistic. It was sometimes not very grounded.
She wrote somewhat often about a world she wanted to live in, not the world she REALLY did live in. It was a somewhat idealized concept of what could be and it seems like it was rooted in her personal denial of a pain she could not accept nor adequately process.
I think she desperately wanted astrology to provide answers for HER that it could NOT provide and this fact meant her writing tried to provide "answers" for her readers that astrology could not really provide them either.
One of the things she wrote about was her idea that astrology could provide a PERFECT form of birth control. That if you knew your natal chart, you could predict when you would ovulate astrologically and use an infallible version of The Rhythm Method of birth control without having to take your temperature or keep records or whatever is usually involved.
She spoke of not NEEDING to pollute your body with chemical birth control pills, a world in which NO child would be UNWANTED and similar.
I was young and idealistic and had mystery health problems and didn't want to be on hormonal birth control pills, so I used her astrological birth control method which is how I had "my flaky birth control method fail" as I have described it in the past and the result was my oldest child. After that, I used actual birth control.
Edgar Cayce was a psychic who was born a few decades before Linda Goodman. He and his friends invented a game and sent a copy of it to a gaming company and the company stole it from them and made tons of money off their idea and never gave them a dime.
So he did one of his "psychic readings" in a trance-like state to try to find answers or something and the answer was: You should have seen a lawyer before sending it off.
Astrology and spirituality and so forth have their uses. They also get very much abused by people who want "magic" solutions that somehow fix things without effort and in defiance of the laws of physics or whatever.
One of the worst abuses of astrology is trying to "predict the future" in ways it has no hope of actually doing.
This likely grew out of the fact that astrology was initially almost certainly a means to help predict the weather and make decisions about when to plant and when to harvest and things like that. The Farmer's Almanac STILL lists moon phases and makes commentary on how this relates to what farmers do.
But it's very POORLY suited to predicting when someone will fall in love or meet their true love or "win the lottery" without buying a lottery ticket.
I have a serious medical condition and I have gone through many years where I frequently felt awful and the future looked extremely bleak, so I often read astrological prediction crapola on my bad days to try to reassure myself "The sun will come out tomorrow." The ability of "popular" astrology sites to predict when I had money coming to me or when important romantic events would occur is so bad, it's worse than random chance.
If you have a person's actual natal chart, some "predictive" bits based on your actual chart seem to not be completely stupid.
I no longer know all the right terms. I largely stopped doing astrology in earnest a lot of years ago, but some actual examples from my actual life:
It's a snow job and at best ENTERTAINMENT. It's NOT a good use of astrology and helps give it a very bad reputation and that bad reputation is very much deserved at the moment.
Astrologers do it because "If you sell to the masses, you live with the classes. If you sell to the classes, you live with masses." Serious astrology takes substantial study and a lot of math and most people cannot afford to pay you what you are worth to cast and interpret a natal chart, tell you anything useful about your latest romantic relationship, etc.
So astrologers make a lot of their money off of "popular" astrology and astrological predictions are very popular. People are always wanting some "edge" to try to cope better than others with the scary, unknown future.
Popular astrology could probably be improved but I'm not holding my breath. It is probably popular in part because it is viewed as basically harmless good clean fun and if you did something more meaningful, people who don't like astrology would be more likely to object to it.
I have heard that in Japan, no one really believes in Western astrology but people routinely share their sun sign. I think this is done BECAUSE no one believes in it AND it is a convenient means to help them determine what honorific to use when addressing someone they interact with regularly but don't know well enough for it to be socially appropriate to ask their date of birth.
I think if Japanese people felt that telling you their sun sign was telling you something ACTUALLY meaningful about themselves, they would probably stop doing it.
I was a homemaker for a long time and it left me with a largely empty resume. I also had studied astrology in earnest in my teens and cast charts for friends for years, etc. so I DID consider becoming a professional astrologer because astrology has no governing body.
There are no colleges that I know of offering a degree in astrology. There is no "board" to test your knowledge or review your credentials.
If you have studied it enough and can get people to PAY YOU, you are "a professional astrologer."
I made a CONSCIOUS decision at some point that if I was going to get PAID for my ADVICE, I would have a COLLEGE DEGREE and a professional title associated with it where I could legitimately say "This is my PROFESSIONAL opinion as a therapist/doctor/lawyer/urban planner/whatever and HERE are my educational credentials and etc upon which it is based." and NOT "The STARS say..."
I think astrologers of old got some kind of reputation in Europe as amazingly wise and insightful NOT because of astrology but because they were probably very smart people and the world was such that they could know most of the important factors needed to advise a king effectively and astrology was a cover story that made both the king and the astrologer comfortable with a king taking advice from a commoner.
The commoner was less likely to be seen as trying to usurp power personally. He was less likely to be seen as social climbing, a scary mover and shaker with political aspirations and similar.
He was just a guy who knew a lot about THE STARS and needed a paycheck. He and the king and the rest of the people could swallow that and not freak out about him telling the king what to do about x, y and z serious political issues.
It wasn't HIS "advice." It's JUST what THE STARS told him. That's his story and he's sticking to it.
In my twenties, I cast a chart for someone and was told something like "This is amazingly good advice and insightful and you really know a LOT about astrology." I was strongly aware that it was mostly that I had done a LOT of therapy and reading in my teens and twenties and sorted MY personal crap and "astrology" was sort of the facade for giving my two cents worth about a person I knew personally.
Most of what I said was not rooted in "her chart." It was rooted in "I know this whack job psycho bitch PERSONALLY. Here is my PC version of the opinions I MOSTLY had before I cast her chart."
Astrological advice is ONLY as "wise" as the person giving it and that wisdom MOSTLY has nothing to do with ASTROLOGY per se.
Astrology is NOT useless. But it really cannot do most of the things people seem to WANT to use it for.
The people who, like ME at one point, wanted to get PAID to do this because they needed a paycheck and there were no bureuacratic barriers to entry but, unlike ME, actually succeeded in turning this into an adequate income are unlikely to admit that what they do is mostly garbage.
I can say that because I FAILED to turn it into a career and also DECIDED at some point that THIS was not the kind of career I wanted.
As an astrology enthusiast who had two bookshelves worth of astrology books, I owned more than one book written by her. My recollection is that it was one of her books that had this mathematically silly suggestion:
She said we should start putting Earth in astrological charts because when humans start living on Mars we will include Earth in astrological charts for people born on Mars.According to Wikipedia, Goodman had a child die in infancy and also had a daughter either die or disappear at the age of 18. A body was identified as the daughter in question and then cremated and then the person who identified her recanted his identification. Goodman spent many years looking for her "missing" daughter, simply unwilling to accept that she was dead for a lot of years.
And her PROPOSAL for where we should place the Earth is that it should be 180 degrees away from the Sun. It should be OPPOSITE the Sun in all charts of Earth-born humans.
For much of human history, it was pretty common for children to die, for people to live with mystery health ailments no one knew how to effectively address or even explain, etc. It was common for people to turn to spirituality or religion to try to cope with these burdens and somehow make their peace with painful details of what were usually quite hard lives compared to what is more generally expected of life today.
Having read some of her books, my impression is Goodman just couldn't accept the loss and doubts and turned to astrology and mystic or spiritual elements associated with it to help her cope with this unresolvable personal nightmare.
This is not intended to be some harsh criticism of her PERSONALLY.
I've never lost a child nor lost anyone close to me under tragic, mysterious circumstances. I nearly ran away from home in my teens and one relative told me "I would have NEVER stopped looking for you."
So I think if you really love someone and don't have answers, that kind of PERSONAL reaction to something like this is completely understandable. Unfortunately, I feel it likely caused her writing to have problematic elements.
Her writing was very idealistic. It was sometimes not very grounded.
She wrote somewhat often about a world she wanted to live in, not the world she REALLY did live in. It was a somewhat idealized concept of what could be and it seems like it was rooted in her personal denial of a pain she could not accept nor adequately process.
I think she desperately wanted astrology to provide answers for HER that it could NOT provide and this fact meant her writing tried to provide "answers" for her readers that astrology could not really provide them either.
One of the things she wrote about was her idea that astrology could provide a PERFECT form of birth control. That if you knew your natal chart, you could predict when you would ovulate astrologically and use an infallible version of The Rhythm Method of birth control without having to take your temperature or keep records or whatever is usually involved.
She spoke of not NEEDING to pollute your body with chemical birth control pills, a world in which NO child would be UNWANTED and similar.
I was young and idealistic and had mystery health problems and didn't want to be on hormonal birth control pills, so I used her astrological birth control method which is how I had "my flaky birth control method fail" as I have described it in the past and the result was my oldest child. After that, I used actual birth control.
Edgar Cayce was a psychic who was born a few decades before Linda Goodman. He and his friends invented a game and sent a copy of it to a gaming company and the company stole it from them and made tons of money off their idea and never gave them a dime.
So he did one of his "psychic readings" in a trance-like state to try to find answers or something and the answer was: You should have seen a lawyer before sending it off.
Astrology and spirituality and so forth have their uses. They also get very much abused by people who want "magic" solutions that somehow fix things without effort and in defiance of the laws of physics or whatever.
One of the worst abuses of astrology is trying to "predict the future" in ways it has no hope of actually doing.
This likely grew out of the fact that astrology was initially almost certainly a means to help predict the weather and make decisions about when to plant and when to harvest and things like that. The Farmer's Almanac STILL lists moon phases and makes commentary on how this relates to what farmers do.
But it's very POORLY suited to predicting when someone will fall in love or meet their true love or "win the lottery" without buying a lottery ticket.
I have a serious medical condition and I have gone through many years where I frequently felt awful and the future looked extremely bleak, so I often read astrological prediction crapola on my bad days to try to reassure myself "The sun will come out tomorrow." The ability of "popular" astrology sites to predict when I had money coming to me or when important romantic events would occur is so bad, it's worse than random chance.
If you have a person's actual natal chart, some "predictive" bits based on your actual chart seem to not be completely stupid.
I no longer know all the right terms. I largely stopped doing astrology in earnest a lot of years ago, but some actual examples from my actual life:
- I have a powerful quintile in my chart. In line with that, there were very significant life-altering events in my life around my 36th birthday.
- Back when I did do serious astrology, I looked at some progressions and concluded that my path and the path of someone very close to me would diverge and we would stop being so close. When that actually happened, I CHOSE to not blame them or feel like they abandoned me. I felt it was no one's "fault."
It's a snow job and at best ENTERTAINMENT. It's NOT a good use of astrology and helps give it a very bad reputation and that bad reputation is very much deserved at the moment.
Astrologers do it because "If you sell to the masses, you live with the classes. If you sell to the classes, you live with masses." Serious astrology takes substantial study and a lot of math and most people cannot afford to pay you what you are worth to cast and interpret a natal chart, tell you anything useful about your latest romantic relationship, etc.
So astrologers make a lot of their money off of "popular" astrology and astrological predictions are very popular. People are always wanting some "edge" to try to cope better than others with the scary, unknown future.
Popular astrology could probably be improved but I'm not holding my breath. It is probably popular in part because it is viewed as basically harmless good clean fun and if you did something more meaningful, people who don't like astrology would be more likely to object to it.
I have heard that in Japan, no one really believes in Western astrology but people routinely share their sun sign. I think this is done BECAUSE no one believes in it AND it is a convenient means to help them determine what honorific to use when addressing someone they interact with regularly but don't know well enough for it to be socially appropriate to ask their date of birth.
I think if Japanese people felt that telling you their sun sign was telling you something ACTUALLY meaningful about themselves, they would probably stop doing it.
I was a homemaker for a long time and it left me with a largely empty resume. I also had studied astrology in earnest in my teens and cast charts for friends for years, etc. so I DID consider becoming a professional astrologer because astrology has no governing body.
There are no colleges that I know of offering a degree in astrology. There is no "board" to test your knowledge or review your credentials.
If you have studied it enough and can get people to PAY YOU, you are "a professional astrologer."
I made a CONSCIOUS decision at some point that if I was going to get PAID for my ADVICE, I would have a COLLEGE DEGREE and a professional title associated with it where I could legitimately say "This is my PROFESSIONAL opinion as a therapist/doctor/lawyer/urban planner/whatever and HERE are my educational credentials and etc upon which it is based." and NOT "The STARS say..."
I think astrologers of old got some kind of reputation in Europe as amazingly wise and insightful NOT because of astrology but because they were probably very smart people and the world was such that they could know most of the important factors needed to advise a king effectively and astrology was a cover story that made both the king and the astrologer comfortable with a king taking advice from a commoner.
The commoner was less likely to be seen as trying to usurp power personally. He was less likely to be seen as social climbing, a scary mover and shaker with political aspirations and similar.
He was just a guy who knew a lot about THE STARS and needed a paycheck. He and the king and the rest of the people could swallow that and not freak out about him telling the king what to do about x, y and z serious political issues.
It wasn't HIS "advice." It's JUST what THE STARS told him. That's his story and he's sticking to it.
In my twenties, I cast a chart for someone and was told something like "This is amazingly good advice and insightful and you really know a LOT about astrology." I was strongly aware that it was mostly that I had done a LOT of therapy and reading in my teens and twenties and sorted MY personal crap and "astrology" was sort of the facade for giving my two cents worth about a person I knew personally.
Most of what I said was not rooted in "her chart." It was rooted in "I know this whack job psycho bitch PERSONALLY. Here is my PC version of the opinions I MOSTLY had before I cast her chart."
Astrological advice is ONLY as "wise" as the person giving it and that wisdom MOSTLY has nothing to do with ASTROLOGY per se.
Astrology is NOT useless. But it really cannot do most of the things people seem to WANT to use it for.
The people who, like ME at one point, wanted to get PAID to do this because they needed a paycheck and there were no bureuacratic barriers to entry but, unlike ME, actually succeeded in turning this into an adequate income are unlikely to admit that what they do is mostly garbage.
I can say that because I FAILED to turn it into a career and also DECIDED at some point that THIS was not the kind of career I wanted.
