It was November 1966. I was sweet seventeen and lying in bed recovering from a tonsillectomy. Transiting Neptune was one degree from my Ascendant. One effect of that transit was that I’d just had my first and only experience of knock-out anesthesia. Another far more important one was that I was about to discover serious astrology.

As I lay there in my bed nursing my sore throat, my Scorpio mom came in and asked me if she could get me a book to read. I asked her for an astrology book. I think she was a little surprised, but she didn’t have a problem with that – I was blessed with an open-minded family. A couple hours later, she returned with a paperback. It was silly Sun Sign astrology aimed at the sorts of teenagers who weren’t destined for careers in rocket science. I won’t name the book because I try to avoid blaspheming against other astrological authors, but it was truly terrible. I devoured it anyway. I could tell that there was something real going on behind the obvious pandering and stupidity. If I were a fish, I’d have been toying with the worm, not quite sure if I was actually going to chomp down on it.

In for a penny, in for a pound – I finished that book and asked my mom for another one. This time she picked a winner. She brought me one of the dozen or so books that have actually changed the direction of my life. It was called Write Your Own Horoscope. The author was one Joseph F. Goodavage. I never hear anyone refer to it today – as a contribution to the astrological vocabulary, it’s mostly forgotten even though it was actually the first astrology book to sell over a million copies.

 Thinking back, Write Your Own Horoscope wasn’t really much of a book, at least by my present standards. But its impact on me was monumental. Unlike the typical Sun Sign fodder that was everywhere back in those days, what Goodavage did was to go through each planet in each sign, paragraph by paragraph. I learned that I wasn’t just “a Capricorn.” I also had a Mars in my chart and its meaning was shaped by the fact that it was in Aquarius. Meanwhile, my mom’s Mars was in Libra and that was a different beast entirely. I began to see the deeper system behind astrology. I began to see how it actually worked. 

I soon swallowed the astrological worm, hook, line, and sinker. I did nothing but read astrology books for the next twenty years – and, oh yeah, I went to college too. No one could major in astrology in those days, so I majored in the nearest thing I could find, which was Religion.

Sadly, I never met Joseph F. Goodavage. I only started speaking at astrology conferences in about 1986 or 1987. He died in April 1989, so we did briefly overlap in AstroWorld, but our paths never actually crossed. I regret that. I wish I could have thanked him for the gift he gave me, especially at a time when I really needed one. I guess that’s what this newsletter is about. It’s a belated thank you. 

I say Goodavage’s gift to me came at a time when I really needed one. As I mentioned earlier, Neptune was approaching my Ascendant. Any slow-moving body hitting the Ascendant always marks a fork in the road of life. Decisions are made that shape one’s future and bridges are burned behind us. With Neptune, there’s also a feeling of being lost – or to put that same idea more encouragingly, there is a need for a new vision. 

For me, despite my science-y academic tendencies back in those days, it was time to commit to a more metaphysical path. Before Neptune left the orbs of my Ascendant, I’d become a Religion major. I was also a subject at the then-famous Rhine parapsychology labs at Duke University. And of course, given the times, psychedelics were opening my eyes too. Neptune left its indelible mark, in other words. Even now, many decades later, I’m still happily in the grips of the wheels I set turning when I was seventeen. 

(By the way, if you want to know more at a technical level about my take on Neptune transits, have a look at The Book of Water or The Book of Neptune.)

Back to Joseph F. Goodavage. Most of us have read books that had a big impact on us. When that happens, we all often feel a sense of a special connection with the author, even though typically it’s someone we’ve never met. We know that with our flesh-and-blood relationships, the connections between our charts are always extremely revealing. What about with authors? Does synastry still work even with relationships that aren’t direct?

Here’s a bi-wheel with Joseph Goodavage’s chart arrayed around my own:

Many connections are immediately obvious. Here I am, over half a century down the road, thanking the man for a generous gift he gave me – one that changed the direction of my life. Note his Jupiter sitting less than one degree from a conjunction with my own Sun. Our Moons and our Venuses are both conjunct too – thus the strange sense of rapport and familiarity even though we never actually met. 

He impacted me through his writing – and, no surprise, there’s his Mercury just about three degrees from my Scorpio Ascendant. Three degrees is close enough to call it a conjunction, but I love the 12th house dimensions of it too – they bring us right back to Neptune and metaphysics. Write Your Own Horoscope is not a metaphysical work – it’s really everyday, “descriptive” astrology, but it ushered me through the door. Soon I was reading the British Theosophical astrologers – Ronald C. Davison and Charles E.O. Carter primarily – and they led me into far deeper waters.

Here’s where it gets weirder. Joseph F. Goodavage’s lunar south node is in the final degree of Capricorn. That places it almost exactly in conjunction with my own Mercury. Is there personal karma between us? That’s certainly a possibility. Keep perspective though – naturally we all have lunar nodal connections with a large portion of the earth’s population. That doesn’t mean we have personal karma with all of them. Before I leap to an interpretation of any such  configuration, I always need to see a green light – and that green light is the presence of some complexity or depth of actual relationship between the two people in the present life. Then I feel safe unassuming that yes, there’s probably some personal karma between them.

Did I have that kind of “complexity and depth” with Mr. Goodavage in this lifetime? More generally, do any of us have that connection with authors who change the direction of our lives? I don’t know, but I’m open to it in this case. 

With Goodavage’s south node on my own Mercury. I wonder if he was my teacher in a prior life? He certainly played that role, at least indirectly, in this life. Karmic patterns tend to repeat. In the formal methodological language of evolutionary astrology, I certainly  “presented a Mercury face to him” in a prior lifetime. 

Was I his student? That could be true. What about his teacher? That could be too. For many of us practicing astrology today, this is not the first time we’ve had contact with the craft. I wouldn’t call AstroWorld a “family.” It’s more like a tribe – or even a collection of warring tribes. But as usual with we humans, the roots of the present story go back a lot further than most of us imagine. It would not be a big surprise to learn that Joseph F. Goodavage and I have had prior life contact.

Anyone reading Write Your Own Horoscope and comparing it with my own writing will quickly see that my acorn landed a good distance from his tree. My work is very different than his, in other words. But nothing delights a good teacher more than seeing the student take the teachings and run with them, creating something fresh and maybe even deeper.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Thank you, Joseph F. Goodavage, wherever you are now. You made a big difference in the life of a seventeen year old kid. 

Listen to the podcast version.

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