A story by O. Alan Weltzien
The Taylor Triptych
| Charles Tousey Taylor (1857 – 1956) | m. 1881 | Mary Laura Dodds (1865 – 1942) |
| 1) Guy Dodds Taylor (1884 – 1966) | m. 1910 | Winifred Lindman (1891 – 1959) |
| 2) Beach Bassett Taylor (1888 – 1980) | m, 1914 | Seena Mercord |
| (a 2nd wife whose names and dates are unknown) | ||
| m, 1957 | Ella L. Hansen (1888 – 1979) | |
| 1) Gladys Taylor | m. 1917 | Oliver R. Weltzien |
| A) Robert Taylor Weltzien (1921 – 1997) | m. 1946 | Lorraine C. Boos (1922 – 2014) |
Family trees matter, particularly two, three generations back, else we don’t know, in some respects, root versions of our bodies and personalities. In the Taylor Triptych, I imaginatively draw closer to my great grandfather, great uncle (the only one I knew), and grandmother and try to draw some possible threads between their lives and my own.
Dad talked plenty about his Taylor grandparents and Uncle Beach, whom we came to know because he lived long. He stayed quiet about his mother, Gladys, who died a couple months before he turned eighteen and graduated from high school.
I grew up hearing about the Taylors, particularly as my father carried his maternal grandparents’ name as his middle name. Dad loved his Grandma Taylor; I don’t remember him saying much at all about that grandfather nor do I remember my great grandfather. We met and he likely held me. He died when I was nearly four.
My great grandfather’s son, my Great Uncle Beach, I knew well from childhood through young adulthood; Great grandfather Taylor’s only daughter, my paternal grandmother, died thirteen-and-a-half years before my birth, and I knew her name—Gladys, an old-fashioned name—and little else. Dad couldn’t talk about his mother, it was too painful.
Dad’s Norwegian paternal branch forms part of the identity story in my, A Father and an Island (2008). I pretend I know the Taylor side much more acutely and, in some regards, that’s true. The essays profile their primary identities, each illustrative of a period in the cultural history of Seattle (and the nation) from the first half of the 20th century, which I find equally exotic and improbable: astrologer, advance man, and devout Christian Scientist. Astrology, vaudeville and circuses, and Christian Science all proved popular and attractive for a host of reasons in the early 20th century. Because of those identities I likely fail to make the connections I seek, though perhaps I can say I imagine more accurately.
Aries
When the mooooon is in the Seventh House
and Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius… (Hair, 1969. James Rado and Gerome Ragni).
Sometimes when I sing “The Age of Aquarius” I think about my great grandfather, a professional astrologer in Seattle. Composer Galt MacDermot’s catchy theme song captures some 1960s flavors and is stamped in the aural memory of most baby boomers. As soon as I see those lyrics I sing the tune in my head.
A high school senior, my hair wasn’t even long. The song reminds us that astrology surges into ascendancy every generation, its appeal timeless.
In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius, persuading Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar, famously declares, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Shakespeare’s Cassius, in Julius Caesar, gets it exactly wrong because “The fault,” in astrology is “in the stars” which effectively govern “ourselves”. What a seductive system of projection, of detaching human agency from humans and locating it in our oldest mirror map, the night sky. A place to map our dreams.
Many consult their daily horoscopes as though they’re taking their temperature. Even those of us who don’t know our birth sign—or thought we did. An indispensable benchmark for the day or week. Maybe these horoscopes distract and amuse us for a minute, and that’s the end of it: a flicker of fantasy and desire. What do any readers of newspaper or online horoscopes actually do with or about their predictions? There’s the rub. And the cue for my great grandfather’s entrance.
Taurus
I’d enthusiastically report his line of work as “professional astrologer” to interested friends. Not everyone claims an astrologer on a not too distant branch of the family tree. “C.” Charles Tousey Taylor (1857-1956) lived a few months shy of 100, so presumably his own horoscope consistently predicted a long life. I even met him more than once when I was a wee bairn and remember nothing except the overlapping smells of old skin, a faded suit coat, and a tired brocaded sofa.
I’ve always thought that going by one’s middle name, preceded by a teasing initial, lent one a certain distinction. I’ve always done so, signing myself O. Alan; though I’ve wished for decades that I’d instead used my first name, Oliver, my paternal grandfather’s name. And I like the cadence of C. Tousey, with a rhyme and a mystery. We’ve never discovered the origins of Tousey, obscure counterpoint to the common surname, in New England and elsewhere, of Taylor. Maybe our habit of middle-name-after-mysterious-initial forms the only imagined bond.
He was Dad’s peculiar maternal grandfather and lived long enough for Dad’s marriage and the births of great-grandchildren. I felt a slight affinity with C. Tousey.
The Taylor name matters because it was Dad’s middle name, as it is my older brother’s and a nephew’s, and I grew up with its sound and shards of their history.
Gemini
When I was a kid, on a recessed wood bookshelf above my bed, a tome leaned that had belonged to C. Tousey. It weighed more than a couple pounds and could have served as a door stopper. Occasionally I’d leaf through its hundreds of thin pages of arcana—it may as well have been written in Greek or Hebrew of Sanskrit, for all I understood. Opening the volume released its own peculiar odor of old print. But when I did, I imagined myself palpably connected to this short bald very old man who’d held me when I was a baby or toddler. I regret losing track of that encyclopedia long ago, another move prompting my discard. Who would take its pages seriously? How often did he consult it in his work?
Cancer
I hold a pair of daguerrotypes of Tousey at ages 18 and 24. In the former, necktied and vested, he stands behind his sister and mother; in the latter, similarly appareled with prominently dangling watch fob, he sits casually, left leg crossed over right, his left hand loosely cupping his left knee and his right arm resting on a table. His dark hair, with a slight wave, is still parted on the right. In his mid-20s, Tousey wears a mustache that curls slightly at the corners of his mouth, and though he looks at you his gaze seems more self-directed, as though he’s trying to take his own measure rather than yours.
How soon after marriage did he lose his hair? Most of his life his bald pate gleamed and he wore that mustache balanced by a tight goatee.
The first half of Tousey’s life shows him enacting Henry David Thoreau’s advice in “Walking” which Horace Greeley had distilled in his famed dictum, “Go West.” We knew that he was born in Bethel, CT and archival research plots his migration. By 1870, age 13, he was living as an apprentice printer and newspaper carrier in nearby Fairfield CT with news dealer, Horace Northrop and his family. Maybe he’d been apprenticed out years before. At the same age I worked as a paper carrier for the local weekly, biking and tossing bundled and tied papers for four years, but knew nothing about printing.
By 1880 Tousey was working as a telegrapher in Corning and Holt, MO, so he’d crossed the Mississippi. How did he pick these towns? Apparently my aunt used to mimic his excited voice when he’d repeat, “And then, the news of [President James] Garfield’s assassination flashed over the wire!” He married Mary Laura Dodds shortly thereafter (6/4/1881) in Wymore, NE, where her father published the Arbor Gazette, and their two sons were born (1884, 1888). A family anecdote Dad loved to repeat concerned Tousey’s father-in-law, Grandfather Dodds, a stout man of strong Union opinions who, faced with an objecting reader in the newspaper office, picked him up and threw him through the plate glass window.
I’ve always hoped that’s a true story.
Leo
Why didn’t Tousey continue as a printer, perhaps working his way up the ranks of a local newspaper, assuming for example leadership of the Arbor Gazette upon his father-in-law’s retirement? Why didn’t he follow the career path of a more famous printer from the preceding century Ben Franklin? Wasn’t he capable of graduating from compositor to reporter or essayist? Very likely, astrology already proved a hobby.
After leaving his wife’s hometown behind, he eventually turned his gaze upon the stars and planets. Dad never knew how soon astrology became the fixation in his Grandpa Taylor’s life.
By the time Gladys, the only daughter and my grandmother was born (1894), the Taylors had moved to northeastern Oregon. What took Taylor and family to two or three hamlets between the Blue and Wallowa Mountains? Archival records from 1900 state that he worked doing “station art” in Hilgard and Union, OR, four miles west or a dozen miles southeast, respectively of LaGrande, the only sizable town; my grandmother was born in Kamela, a village twenty miles northwest of LaGrande and west of US 30 (and more recently, I-84). A decade after her birth, the population reached 204 residents; by 1940 it had shrunk to 27.
My great grandfather worked as a stationmaster since Hilgard, OR served as a Union Pacific junction and Kamela boasted a roundhouse and the highest railroad pass in the Blue Mountains. He knew little about locomotives nor Emily Dickinson’s, “I like to see it lap the miles” or Walt Whitman’s, To a Locomotive in Winter. Why did he abandon newspaper work for the railroad in three tiny places 1000 miles northwest of Wymore, NE? And after a few years, what led Tousey to move the family to Seattle, as he no longer painted or serviced small railroad stations? Of more moment, was he already taking astrology seriously in a mathematical way? What led him to deepen his hobby into an all-consuming obsession, even his calling? The family history had offered no hints.
If he weren’t a true believer upon the family’s arrival in Seattle, he quickly became one. There were plenty back in the day just as there are plenty now, many of whom keep it quiet and consult surreptitiously.
Virgo
By 1902, after three states over a score of years and an interlude in San Francisco, Tousey and family reached Seattle, where he’d remain, excepting occasional stints in Portland or San Francisco, for the second half of his long life. In Oregon he’d owned one home; in Seattle he never had enough money for another purchase and the family lived in a series of rentals. Income was precarious and infrequent, and his sons, especially his younger son, in a familiar plot, dropped out of school and worked to help pay rent and buy food. My great uncle, Beach Bassett Taylor, stopped schooling before 8th grade and became primary breadwinner. The archives list Tousey as “astrologer – teacher” between 1910-30; by 1930, age 73, he’s listed as a secretary for a local chapter of the Masonic Order, which provided a steady pittance in old age. My grandfather got him the job as librarian in a Masonic Library on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.
Due to a Seattle cousin’s extensive research, we know that at Seattle’s Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition (AYE, 1909), Tousey was selling souvenir astrological charts. He tried, for a brief period, to run an astrological journal, New Moon Magazine, in which he placed prominent ads for his “Astrological Investment Service.” Neither magazine nor investment service fared well or lasted long. By August 1910 he had closed his “brokerage business”—and tried to jump start it in Portland.
As Seattle matured as a young city, particularly after the AYE, interest in astrology likely surged along with the population. While it holds a universal appeal, a tempting “cosmic” explanation for our life’s paths, its appeal unsurprisingly ebbs and flows. Yet even in a period of rising popularity, how many common or affluent folks are willing to spend money for consultations and interpretations? How many “professional astrologers” can a young city sustain? I’ve often wondered about Tousey’s competition.
He owned a record collection of John Philip Sousa’s marches, whose sturdiness and patriotic appeal seems at odds with his starry fixation. Maybe he especially liked Sousa’s “Nobles of the Mystic Shrine” march; Sousa a devout freemason.
Tousey likely was so caught up in his recent professional identity, his pursuit of arcana, that he blinked away his financial obligations as head of house. The family became adept at hiding, silent, behind furniture, according to this cousin’s research, when bill collectors knocked on the door or peered through windows. His daughter records in her journal 8/1/1910. Her journal reads, “I wish we could move to some other place where there is a yard and a front door that opens into the parlor where there is cheaper rent. It seems since the stock market [Seattle’s dubious “bucket shops”] closed here we have got poorer and poorer.” A year and a half later, she notes, “Beach has lost his position, no one works now, that is for a salary, yesterday was rent day, we paid our rent all right but what of the future rent days coming?”
The Taylors were in the Seattle majority ca. 1910: there were approximately 15,000 more renters than homeowners in the rapidly expanding city. But Tousey would never finance a home.
In late 1914 his middle-aged wife worked elsewhere as a domestic and Tousey, according to his daughter, “spent this Thanksgiving [eating] crackers and cheese in solitary splendor.” My great grandmother, Mary Laura, who married Tousey at age 15 1/2, maintained some sympathetic interest in her husband’s pursuit of the occult. Apparently my Dad’s beloved grandmother served as a fortune teller when social occasions called upon it, even sitting behind a booth. I don’t know if she used a crystal ball or flashy spangles and robes. How much more than an occasional entertainment was it for her?
This interest in the occult or spiritualism likely influenced their “educated” daughter, Gladys, who sustained an interest in 1910s “cutting edge” movements that would eventuate in her ardent embrace of Christian Science. Their son, Beach, was too busy hustling jobs—slapping on circus posters and working shows—to cultivate a similar passion.
Tousey, like many others, adopted unearned credentials to boost his authority before clients—and himself. In his self-published pamphlets he lists himself as Prof. or Dr., “Scientific Astrologer.” A loyal freemason, he presumably saw a big overlap between the Order’s cabalistic claims and his profession.
He likely didn’t get as far in grammar school as his younger son, Beach. The rest consisted of self-invention and self-promotion.
Libra
I hold a postcard advertisement entitled “Law Governs Everything.” His photo on the left shows his nature. In this enlargement we see more of his formal wear, and prominent on his left lapel is woven the round patch of the Royal Arch [Free]Masons, “Friendship Chapter No. 50 RAM” printed in a circle around the logo. Turns out Tousey, as a Royal Arch guy, has passed the “York Rite” according to Masonic doctrine.
How many paid for a copy of this booklet? How much did he pay for compiling and distributing? According to my cousin, some old ladies, devoted students, smuggled copies of this booklet and others into a fancy downtown department store and placed them on the “best sellers” table. Their place was presumably short-lived.
Tousey has divided his course into two sections, “Astrological Horoscopes” and “Key to Planetary Influences for Reading the Horoscope.” The former includes Franklin Roosevelt’s birth horoscope (1/30/1882), his 1934 horoscope, the “Horoscope of Premier Mussolini” (1934), and, after this famous pair, a crumb for the rest of us, the “Horoscope of [a] Girl Born August 15, 1934.” These readings illustrate his expository pages which describe the four separate heads of astrology: “Mundane astrology. . .Natal astrology. . .Atmospheric astrology. . .and Horary astrology, answering questions” (p. 6). The only hint of attribution in the booklet comes early: “The tables used in this work are all found in Raphael’s Ephermeris, which can be purchased from the Simplex Publishing Co. of Seattle or from any good book store.” (p. 7) In case you don’t remember, an “Ephemeris”—always a proper noun—is created by mathematicians to “show the movement of the Sun, moon, and planets according to their designated times and places.” (p. 6).
The lay meanings of “ephemeral,” of course, undercut the sustained knowledge claims of astrology, defined by Pauline Gerosa, a consultant for Astrology Oracle. It is described as “…a symbolic language, a philosophy, a multidimensional concept.” In that sense, astrology appears a wish fulfillment, a futile desire to attach our transitory selves to the deep time of the zodiacal constellations as if the latter exist primarily as reference points for ourselves. That ancient longing, deep-wired within, to locate our fleeting selves in the heavens, thereby fixing our transitory nature.
There is nothing simplex about this material, particularly once he launches into the longer “Key” which includes “Influence of the Rising Constellation,” sections on solar and lunar and planetary aspects, as well as the planets in the First through Twelfth House[s], then the Lord similarly distributed. Tousey likely padded his content from others. No plagiarism worries here. In his prefatory remarks to the “Key,” he boastfully concludes, “In the past 50 years astrologers have made the greatest change in the heavens that has taken place for over 2,000 years. The god of mammon has been deposed and Neptune exalted as ruler of the heavenly hosts so that all may know the Truth.” Turns out, though, that the symbol for Neptune matches the logo for those Royal Arch Masons.
Guess Tousey and his fellow RAMers, if not fellow astrologists, fancied themselves on the vanguard, subjects no doubt of special revelation.
Certainly the Masonic Order surged in popularity, in Seattle and elsewhere, in the early 20th-century, and my grandfather, Tousey’s son-in-law, was a 33rd degree Mason. Both Freemasonry and astrology, in their devotion to esoterica, play the border between restricted knowledge and potential access. At that border stand many self-appointed gatekeepers.
In a late section devoted to “The Twelve Tribes” (Taylor pp. 37-38) he repeats, verbatim, this preface. Did astrologers share copy?
As I read, boredom overcomes titillation. Certainly it confirms him as a True Believer and willing translator. But few were willing. The fact that Tousey bumbled along, barely scraping by and relying on sons and wife, documents his failure as breadwinner. This weird conflation of Biblical authority with the arcana of horoscope tables unsettles me as does, more essentially, the thoroughly deterministic flavor of astrology. If your signs are unfavorable or you mismatch your prescriptions, you live in a tough patch and can do nothing about it. Tough beans.
Maybe those endless tables pose astrology’s bid at a Linnean taxonomy, as though the latter grants an odor of legitimacy to the former.
Sagittarius
I also have in my possession an elaborate Astrological Horoscope prepared for his second son, erstwhile breadwinner Beach Taylor in 1933, one year before his booklet. The astrologer, an old man who’d live another 23 years, is temporarily living on Market St. in San Francisco; his son is middle-aged. In this bound miscellany Tousey intermixes three pages of general exposition, the third of which repeats verbatim the preface to the “Key” he’s printed at least twice before. These are framed by two sections titled Judgment: Tousey copied the former and wrote the latter. The stationary states, in the top right, “Work on Nativities a Speciality”—the second “head” of astrology. Other pages declare him Author of “‘‘‘Bible Stories’ Written from The Zodiac’ and ‘Which—Impulse, Instinct, of Intuition?’’” The letterhead also advertises him as a “Teacher of Scientific and Metophysical [sic] Astrology” in Seattle.
The circular diagram just both sections of Judgement is comprised of a series of concentric rings and straight lines: the diagram the natal specialist employed that includes, in his longhand, various markings in red, green, and black ink and pencil. This is the “Natus. . .Computed to The Constellations by C. Tousey Taylor” based, in this case, upon the exact time (13 March 1888, 9:30 a.m.) and location (Wymore, NE) of his second son’s birth. Tousey records exact latitude and longitude as well as traditional zodiacal symbols for the Sun through Neptune. Though it’s 1934, Pluto, the “newest” but farthest planet discovered four years earlier—and more recently demoted, relegated to inferior status in our solar system—doesn’t figure in the charts.
The zodiac, like Pluto’s rise and fall, is subject to change.
The use of those symbols and latitude and longitude details suggests a coterie language only trained specialists can translate. The decoding of secrets resembles the dedication to secret hierarchies characteristic of Freemasonry. Tousey reveled in both as did many in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such arcana glows then fades, only to glow again.
The first Judgment begins, “The progressed horoscope for the year to follow your birthday in 1933 promis[es] a much better condition financially than you have had for the past three years, as Saturn has reached the Midheaven and turned south in your horoscope and the progressed Moon is coming above the horizon and to a conjunction with Jupiter.” I bet that was news to his long-suffering son. Likely Beach’s next three years (1933-36) were no easier than his preceding three, the Great Depression and rise of the “talkies” curbing the vaudeville circuits. The rest of the forecast proves a mixed bag as father translates planetary positions into advice column—like an elaborate prescription—for son.
Father has also predicted for son worse news at home to counter the supposed better news for the pocketbook: because “Mars and Neptune in the Home is a very bad situation. . .There will not be much success in the home and you should visit your friends [and] relatives often until after that time.” Recognition of a faltering marriage? Did the fact that Beach Taylor remarry more than once color his aging father’s interpretation?
How much was my great uncle forbearing and forgiving about his eccentric father? Uncle Beach, a kind man, had been helping support his folks a long time. Maybe, apart from indulging his father, he believed.
Capricorn
At what point did Tousey stop printing promotional materials and hang a “Closed” sign since business barely trickled in? The rest of the family including my grandfather, also a Mason, humored his father-in-law. Did anyone ever call him out?
Somewhere along the way he gave up on the printing business and turned into a True Believer, one who could ignore his practical failures as the head of house. Was astrology more popular in Seattle or elsewhere a century ago? That seems doubtful though in the Internet age is that, anyone can look up whatever they desire rather than pay an expert. Or they can locate “experts,” eager to defer.
Given Dad’s steady shrugging off the Masonic legacy of his father and grandfather, the high tide of active Masonic enrollment likely passed several generations ago. Could that be true for astrology as well?
He outlived his wife and daughter and had little influence on his sons’ lives. His own natal horoscope promised long life since he almost became a centenarian, in the process meeting and holding, I suppose, half a dozen great-grandchildren including me. In four passport-sized black-and-white photos, Tousey, shrunken in a dark suit, holds his first great-grandchild—my sister, Marilyn Jean, who arrived with multiple birth or developmental defects and who would die one month shy of her third birthday. He outlived her. He never looks at the camera. It’s sometime in late autumn, 1949, and Tousey, 92, does not smile. In one picture his brow furrows and he grimaces ever so slightly, his hands carefully wrapped around his burden; in another he stares down and to his left, in a brown study, an innocent look in his shrunken eyes.
By then he’d given up his line. I fear what my sister’s natal horoscope would disclose, given her short tragic life.
Aquarius
Tousey didn’t subscribe to Cassius’s philosophy which accepts the centrality of personal will and choice in the human condition. Astrology, scientific or otherwise, divorces us from ourselves and relegates us to a passenger seat. In its displacement of personal responsibility, its fuzzy fusion of Biblical exegesis through zodiacal lenses, it feels like a self-sustaining system of gossip wherein moments of criticism or condemnation or dismissal give way before the forceful stream of our curiosity and our desire to map ourselves in the stars. That stream, that desire, flourishes before and after more rational systems of knowledge.
And many crave it. In Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead (2009; trans. 2018), protagonist Janina Duszejko, a True Believer, admits sharp ambivalence: “On the one hand we’re proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter—this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it’s a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There’s no escaping it.” (p. 112)
A quick Internet search shows that astrology is alive and well in Seattle as elsewhere, with promotional appeals from individuals—Tousey’s ideological descendants—and groups. Of course it outlasts the long shadow it cast over one branch of my family tree. It holds chronic appeal.
An article by Courtney Firth, “The Psychology Behind Why People Feel So Connected to their Zodiac Signs,” (www.thriveglobal.com, 10/28/2019), explores its perennial appeal. She concludes, “astrology is really about direction, more so than anything else.” Astrology can serve one’s moral development: “Practicing astrology can spark self-awareness. . .and the backbone of ethics.” It all depends on the degree of literal application, though the connection between astrology and “the backbone of ethics” feels fuzzy. Or more.
And it’s a dicey way to make a living.
Once in my student days in northwest Scotland, the attractive young B&B wife and I chatted over tea, discussing Mahler and other composers. She suddenly rested my right hand in her folded hands, asked “May I? I inherited full powers from my aunt,” and at my surprised nod, her index finger began tracing, probing. In my only palm reading, I learned that I’ve a weak lifeline, a couple of skin furrows in my palm not exactly optimal. I’ve been trying to prove her wrong ever since.
Lines in one’s palm or charts that fold together latitude and longitude, degrees and minutes, zodiacal movements, and Bible stories? Reading the palm’s much quicker.
With no apologies to Walt Whitman, “When I [Read] the Learn’d Astrologer,” with his “proofs, the figures. . .ranged in columns before me,” and his “charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,” I’m with the poem’s dismissive narrator: “I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
They don’t shine as a mirror, whatever our yearning or our projections.
Pisces
Were Tousey still around in the 2010s, he and the legions of other astrologers and horoscope readers would have to revise their charts and act. According to a 2016 article by Kayleigh Daly (www.stylist.co.uk), updated four years later (11/2/2020), “a massive 86% of us were actually born under a different constellation to our star sign.” Tousey, a natal astrologer, got it all wrong, along with everyone else. Turns out that we have thirteen rather than twelve zodiacal constellations and that their time along the ecliptic is variable, not a steady 30 degrees. Turns out Babylonian astronomers aligned the zodiac with the twelve-month calendar. And they never factored in the earth’s wobble derived from our less than perfectly spherical shape. Earth, an oblate spheroid with midrift bulge, wobbles rather than spins forever perfectly.
Daly claims “we’ve been reading the wrong horoscope all this time.” No less than NASA has revised the zodiac to match astronomical accuracy, in the process returning neglected zodiacal constellation, Ophiuchus (Greek, “serpent bearing”), to the lineup. Why this disruption and elevation of Ophiuchus, which doesn’t quite trip off the tongue? In a NASA statement (7/24/2020) quoted by Daly, “The sky has shifted because Earth’s axis (North Pole) doesn’t point in quite the same direction” as 3000 years ago “when the Babylonians first invented the 12 signs of the zodiac.” Ophiuchus, showing a man wrestling a serpent into two halves, falls between Scorpio and Sagittarius.
Is my great-grandfather turning over in his Seattle grave? I grew up believing I was a Scorpio (who’s now relegated to six days, Nov 23 – Nov 29), loved to say “vituperative,” and worked a self-mocking vein about my ostensibly stinging temperament. Now, sliding into old age, must I jettison this history and make peace with being under the sign of Virgo, who scores nearly six weeks in the revised zodiac (Sept 17 – Oct 30), longer than any other sign? I need a new script based upon Virgans being “logical, practical, and systematic in their approach to life,” according to a recent posting.
When I’ve spoken about Tousey to a few old friends, I repeat “professional astrologer” with a slight rise in the voice and an exclamation mark since he lent some quaint hues to the extended family portrait. But given what he put his family through during his long life, I shrug dismissively.
And fifty years later, the Age of Aquarius has not dawned.
This work was featured in issue #12