Chapter One

THE NATURAL DISPOSITION

In addition to the thirty-four primary factors of SIGNS, HOUSES and PLANETS found in every horoscope there are the ASPECTS that are of equal if not even greater importance, and with these the astrologer must deal far more particularly. His usual concern is with five major ones, or the CONJUNCTION, SEXTILE, SQUARE, TRINE and OPPOSITION. Since their presence in the chart is extremely variable they provide the fundamental means for identifying and measuring the most significant characteristics of human individuality. By linking the thirty-four regular components of the horoscopic wheel they establish the skeletal relations that describe the organic effectiveness or essential wholeness of the given life. It is this linkage of all astrological factors in the skeletal wholeness of the person that, through the many different forms of it to be described and interpreted in these pages, lays the ground for incisive and accurate DELINEATION. Without some such an over-all view of the PLANETARY structure in the natal map the astrologer is quite likely to give a wrong emphasis to the detailed features of the chart, and thereupon develop a distorted conception of his client's character and situation.

The ASPECTS, with technical exceptions not important at this point, are formed in the zodiac and measured in the degrees of celestial longitude of the ecliptic as in distinction from (1) the right ascension by which the HOUSES [13] are defined and (2) the terrestrial longitude used for geographic measurement on the surface of the earth. They reveal the characteristic stresses in the personal energy system when PLANETS are (1) at approximately the same place in the SIGNS or in CONJUNCTION, or (2) functioning in an equilibrium or balance with each other at approximately opposite points in the zodiac or in OPPOSITION, or (3) situated relative to each other in zodical distances that are significant directly or indirectly through geometrical divisions of the circle into equal segments as the TRINE which defines a third of the whole, the SQUARE defining a quarter section, the SEXTILE defining a sixth, and so on through the other ASPECTS that are of lesser consequence and that in themselves or in their multiples present less evident ways of identifying longitudinal significance.

There are two modes of classification for the twelve SIGNS of the zodiac that in astrology must have an almost primary attention in DELINEATION, and they are important principally because they sustain the possibility of major ASPECT. The four TRIPLICITIES, or groups consisting of three SIGNS each that have their basic functional association with the TRINE and SEXTILE, are more subjective in their INDICATION and will be considered at a later point. The three QUADRATURES, consisting of four SIGNS each that have their basic functional association with the OPPOSITION and SQUARE, are more objective in their INDICATION and they provide an unusually significant factor of DELINEATION in a very considerable proportion of all horoscopes. They are given first consideration at this point because they are particularly useful as the astrologer starts to build the over-all perspective essential to any intelligent analysis.[14]

Any unusual emphasis of Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces, or the COMMON or MUTABLE SIGNS that constitute a QUADRATURE because established in the zodiac clockwise from the equinoxes and solstices, indicates the most immediate and fluid manner of function in the shared experience of everyday living. The clockwise direction of emphasis in the usual form of horoscopic diagramming is representative of the daily rotation of the heavens as in contrast with the counterclockwise movement or net progress of the PLANETS through the zodiac, and so is indicative of the more normal rhythm of events as distinguished from their more critically distributed place in experience. Thus this type of functioning can be said to be naïve because it is practical rather than ideal, and to be friendly because it is sentimental rather than opportunistic. When a horoscope is emphasized in this fashion an individual is apt to exert himself most significantly in gaining and holding his place in the usual scheme of things among his fellows, and in general to be more interested in people and personal relations than either in current crises and adventure or in moral issues and the prevailing ideas of life and of the nature of self.

Any unusual emphasis of Aries, Cancer, Libra and Capricorn, or the CARDINAL or MOVABLE SIGNS that constitute a QUADRATURE because established in the zodiac counterclockwise from the equinoxes and solstices, indicates a slanting of the interest that is quite different from the simple emergence into reality or rising above a plateau of origin characteristic of any special stress under the COMMON SIGNS. It rather is an untiring projection of the self into experience in a marked disregard of consequences or [15] of the convenience of others. Here is found a species of continual plunge back into life's vicissitudes, together with an uninhibited restlessness. There is an almost constant and immediate dependence on situations and critical issues, since there must be the almost intemperate entering into their involvements as a basis for any self-expression. This temperamental slant can be said to be a craving for excitement and personal recognition because it is ambitious rather than adaptable, and it will be found insatiable and prodigal because it is opportunistic rather than particularly aware of the right or wrong of anything. When a horoscope is emphasized in this fashion the NATIVE finds his existence consistently cathartic in a psychological sense, and he always tends to be more concerned over transient crises and problems than either people and their intimate relations or fundamental moral and philosophical considerations.

Any unusual emphasis of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius, or the FIXED or FOUNDATION SIGNS that constitute a QUADRATURE because in part they are established in the zodiac clockwise from the COMMON SIGNS that represent the naïve or the primitively normal form of man's relations with his fellows, indicates in this respect the emergence of the individual into a sense of personal responsibility for himself. With this emphasis his interest is less bound by immediate time-and-space necessities and so it functions with some measure of concern over probability or potentiality. Since these SIGNS in other part are established counterclockwise from the CARDINAL group they also indicate an interest in crises or problems in terms of consequences, or through what fundamentally is a more [16] vicarious participation in events. Here are zodiacal divisions without definition directly in either possible respect by the equinoctial and solstitial axes, and thus they reveal the working of FUNCTION in its purest form of noncontact with the factors of CIRCUMSTANCES that are carried into the zodiac by the equatorial circle through its establishment of the equinoxes and solstices. In view of all this the FIXED SIGNS can be said to be essentially moral or self-justifying, and of necessity concerned with matters either of right and wrong or of truth and error. Their slanting is uncompromisingly ideal rather than ever satisfied with solutions of the moment, and fundamentally imaginative because always ready to forgo any immediate gratification for some ultimate promise. When a horoscope is emphasized in this fashion the NATIVE is inclined to throw himself into the pursuit of some goal he can set for himself, and to give more consistent attention to ideas and values than to particular people or transient crises and excitement.

The simplest of all forms of approach to an over-all perspective on the horoscope is when a strong emphasis of one of the three QUADRATURES is shown by OPPOSITION ASPECT. When this emphasis is found as it is in a considerable majority of natal charts it is known as the NATURAL DISPOSITION. It is a general slanting of the COMMON, CARDINAL or FIXED nature brought forward to become a primary manifestation of personality.

The OPPOSITION among all the ASPECTS is of particular importance because it reveals the most direct instrumentation of that balance or equilibrium already identified as the practical fact of functioning individuality or experiencing [17] existence. Out of the almost innumerable types of zodiacal relationship that can be established among the PLANETS it pre-eminently DELINEATES the mode of coming to attention or remaining alert in the business of being a self-integrated entity. In detailed horoscope interpretation it indicates (1) a pertinent necessity or opportunity for personal equilibrium together with (2) some phase of conscious self-awareness that facilitates a personal response to the immediate potentials of experience. An astrological wheel in which there is not at least one OPPOSITION reveals a definite handicap in the life of the NATIVE, and consideration of the deficiency will follow in Chapter Four.

Although the PLANETS like all horoscopic factors have a basic and precise meaning in all combinations of astrological relationship, yet each of them may enact quite a number of separate roles in a NATIVITY and so in a sense be more than one of itself. When this occurs the factors of its INDICATION in one role make no appreciable difference whatsoever in any other. In this respect the PLANETS in a sense are no different from people since a man who drives a car skillfully may be a baker or an artist or anything else in another connection. Hence and by the same token a PLANET in some instances may have no particular meaning in distinction from any others, as in the parallel instance of a man who happens to fill the quota of passengers for an elevator, and as becomes the case in connection with NATURAL DISPOSITION. While the ASPECTS in nearly every detail of horoscopy obviously have a detailed significance because of the PLANETARY bodies establishing them, yet when it comes to any dominant emphasis of a QUADRATURE it always is the simple nature of the emphasizing relationship [18] and not particular PLANET identity that contributes of the DELINEATION.

When the OPPOSITION or ASPECT of equilibrium is present in a horoscope in such fashion that (1) any two or more of the ten PLANETS lie opposite each other in signs of the same QUADRATURE within the allowable ORB of deviation from exactness for a major ASPECT — 17° when the sun is involved, 12°30' when the sun is not but the moon is, and 10° when neither LIGHT participates—and (2) all such cases of it are found in one of the QUADRATURES only, then the NATURAL DISPOSITION of the NATIVE is indicated as COMMON, CARDINAL or FIXED as the case may be. In this connection an OPPOSITION made ACROSS THE LINE OF THE SIGN, as for example from Aries 29° to Scorpio 2°, is simply disregarded although in all matters other than NATURAL DISPOSITION and the QUADRATURE emphasis of a COSMIC CROSS it is as strong and significant an ASPECT as any other within the same ORB.

Here is NATURAL DISPOSITION by positive INDICATION, and it gives the astrologer's mind a simple and convenient springboard for his over-all approach to the astrological chart. Excellent examples of the COMMON emphasis are Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie who at the threshold of the Forties and each in his own way assumed the white armor of a modern Galahad and sought high office in the American political scheme of things in order to lead humanity into the promised land of statesmanly answers to the economic needs of the age. NATURAL DISPOSITION however is a slanting of the character that explains the more general reactions of the individual in purely horoscopic terms, and it is not always a detail of DELINEATION that [19] might have meaning to the layman or that indeed might seem even correct to the NATIVE in a given case.

Thus John L. Lewis, the highly successful leader of the United Mine Workers from the Twenties and a moving spirit in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the late Thirties, is another illustration, but any identification of his character in terms of an altruistic interest in his fellow man would be rejected very quickly by many people. In the case of Lewis the outside observer often recognizes nothing but a pure power lust. In the average instance any messianic proclivity inevitably seems to be merely an unjustified excess of ego or an insufferable basic aplomb. Actually the NATURAL DISPOSITION shows nothing of personal motivation or inner stirrings, and gives no hint of the nature of the individual's struggle towards his security and self-fulfillment. All that is identified is the psychological area of his interest, and certainly Lewis in building immensely powerful labor organizations in two distinct chapters of his career was interested more in people than in situations or ideas even if he has given every appearance of exploiting the workers in the main or of sacrificing the welfare of everybody else for the sake of his own special group.

In the case of Noel Coward as another type of example the versatility of his work as actor, dramatist and composer all centered in his use of people for the substance of his effort. His primary lean to the exceptionally intimate side of the individual found in the milieu with which he was familiar led to his clever sophistication and indeed to an almost sardonic exploitation of human foibles in his Private Lives and Blithe Spirit. His leading [20] at no point has been on the one hand towards the crisis or situation that is characteristic of most popular playwrights or on the other towards the ideals and subtle theories of life that mark the author with a message.

Often the NATURAL DISPOSITION may indicate a slanting that has contributed more to the disappointments than the achievements of a life, as when William Howard Taft no less than Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie sought to play the role of the ideal public servant and so make an ultimate contribution to his generation. Although drawn to people at all points for his psychological sustainment he yet lost his everyday human touch progressively with the years, and from the presidency went to the Supreme Court as Chief Justice as in a sense kicked upstairs by a fate that helped him to fade almost altogether from public consideration and estimation. In his case astrological advisement might have changed the whole course of his career.

Far more than in the instance of John L. Lewis the NATURAL DISPOSITION might seem to be wholly wrong in any DELINEATION of Charles Lindbergh. While much the universal hero after his successful solo flight to Paris he yet developed a bad press almost at once, and thereupon shut himself off from people at large almost completely. His frustrations very obviously were due to this particular slanting. His basic simplicity or naturalness with his fellows was shown in his days of camaraderie with the workers when his Spirit of St. Louis was being built, as it was when he arrived in Paris without clothes or background adequate for the formalities into which he was thrust. Unquestionably his unreason and subsequent outrage [21] resulted from the desire for the very touch with the common man he just did not know how to make, once he was off on the wrong foot, and this is something that might be very difficult to understand if it were not for the perspective provided by QUADRATURE emphasis.

With the technique made clear, in the building to overall perspective on the horoscope through the NATURAL DISPOSITION, a briefer initial consideration of this emphasis of the other two QUADRATURES is possible. Illustrations of the positive CARDINAL disposition are Huey Long, the Louisiana politician who was one of the most obvious and perhaps dangerous opportunists of recent American politics, and Hermann Göring, whose organization of Nazi economic and military potentials was a piece of the same cloth in Germany. On the happier side is Swami Vivekenanda, who accepted an invitation to the World's Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and grasped the opportunity to spend a major part of his effective years in presenting the Vedanta to the Western World.

Examples of the positive FIXED emphasis are Queen Elizabeth II, who actually was brought up to exemplify the values and ideals that dramatize the tenuous thread of mutual allegiance in the British Commonwealth of Nations, and Anthony Eden, her minister whose staunch loyalty to the intellectual traditions of the English gentleman was a basic factor in preserving his place in the Tory party however less well it served him when he became prime minister. Others are Alexis Carrel, the brilliant biological researcher whose book, Man, the Unknown, had wide acclaim in the Thirties, and Grover Cleveland, the American president who attained distinction by holding [22] to his principles with a spectacular disregard of political expediency at home and international consequences abroad.

NATURAL DISPOSITION is also shown by negative INDICATION, and this while a somewhat more complicated form of psychological slant in interest is yet no different from the positive stress of QUADRATURE as far as its practical implications are concerned. Negative INDICATION is found when the OPPOSITIONS other than those formed ACROSS THE LINE OF THE SIGN and as taken within the proper ORBS lie in two rather than one of the QUADRATURES. In such a case the third QUADRATURE becomes significant in revealing the characteristic quality of a NATIVE'S interest. What develops is a marked ambivalence in the two areas of direct stimulation under the equilibrium ASPECT, since each area has a tendency to negate or confuse the other whenever they are brought to common stress. The need is for a functional linkage in the skeletal wholeness of the individual, and the psychological recourse of necessity is through the uninvolved or essentially neutral form of naïve self-outreaching.

Illustrations of negative COMMON emphasis as shown by OPPOSITION ASPECTS in both CARDINAL and FIXED QUADRATURES, and revealing a NATIVE'S characteristic ambivalence in respect to the impact of situations and values as they tend to compete with each other for a primary interest, are Mahatma Gandhi who gave India her independence and the French novelist best known by her pseudonym of George Sand. Despite the positive lean on the part of both of them to fundamentally idealistic considerations on the one hand, and to an early and exceptional concern [23] over the issues of the moment in their own particular milieus on the other, they were destined by the complex psychology of their own nature to speak at the end primarily for simple human welfare. Thus the man responsible for Indian independence became no political theorist of any depth, exactly as he remained the opportunist in entirely subordinate particular, but out of the inner conflicts that plagued him so fundamentally he emerged as the living and contemporary great soul or avatar in whom man's eternal potentials could be brought to living actuality. The authoress whose writings gained their genuine power in their insight into her fellow creatures' everyday efforts at normal self-realization was unable to go very far with her really deep interest in the socioeconomic theories of which Karl Marx became the prophet, or to continue at all effectively in the zealous pattern of her highly opportunistic concern over passing issues, but she became one of the founders of the modern problem novel and certainly an effective exponent of the view that life should be centered in its own individual and completely personal aspirations.

Examples of negative CARDINAL emphasis are Harry Houdini and Jeddu Krishnamurti, thanks to the conflict of stresses in their horoscopes with the OPPOSITIONS in both COMMON and FIXED signs. The famous magician was caught between the desire to win and hold popular approval as a condition of any success in his calling and a tendency towards acceptance of deeper or more occult ideas than he ever was prone to admit, and in consequence he was alert despite himself to every opportunity for self-publicity as in his continual exposing of spiritualistic [24] fraud. The young Hindu Theosophist was torn between his personal loyalty to those who were sponsoring him as a new messiah and offering him a very true adoration, and his ever-expanding mystical insight into the depths of East Indian metaphysics under his own inner and intellectually honest auspices, and out of these parallel conflicts came his development and presentation of the highly spiritual existentialism expressed in a recognition of the eternal immediate. His contribution with its refinement at the time of Pluto's discovery has been excellent prophecy of subsequent developments in the world's religious turn to a pure CARDINAL self-orientation.

Illustrations of negative FIXED emphasis are Earl Browder and Friedrich Nietzsche, whose horoscopes have OPPOSITIONS in both COMMON and CARDINAL QUADRATURES. The former shining light of the Communist Party in America can be seen driving inevitably to an all-encompassing ideological self-orientation, reflected in his book Marx and America published as late as 1959, and all as a result of the troubled stirrings within himself on the one side through his concern for people and their welfare and on the other through his restless dissatisfaction with any or every immediate reward or culmination of the moment. The German philosopher was harassed by his psychological struggle with the seemingly inescapable and thoroughly unhealthy ties with his mother and his frustration through his inability to capitalize to any satisfactory extent on the creative ferment sweeping the Europe of his day, and so he turned to the philosophical speculation and its concern with abstractions that while ending in the unseating of his reason yet resulted in a significant [25] contribution to his generation as well as to the whole history of human thought.

The full astrological data for the individuals used in these pages to illustrate the various points of delineation is to be found in the author's Sabian Symbols in Astrology, with sole exceptions in the cases of Maria Callas and President Eisenhower. The singer was born in New York City at dawn on December 3, 1923, and tentatively her midheaven and ASCENDANT are taken as Virgo 9° and Scorpio 25° and her Greenwich mean time as 11:00 a.m. Dwight Eisenhower was born at Denison, Texas, on October 14, 1890, in the late afternoon following a thunder shower, and the author has found the most satisfactory chart to be one with an ASCENDANT in the very last degree of Taurus, a midheaven at Aquarius 14°5' and a Greenwich mean time of 1:46 a.m. on October 15th. The President's birth on the basis of RECTIFICATION by events is thus assumed to be almost two hours after sunset, but this is not impossible in view of the rather indefinite information that alone is available.

The selection of example horoscopes for this book has had no great latitude at any time, and may seem strange in many instances. But by drawing here almost completely on the collection available in the companion volume the student or investigator is given easy access to the cusps and planetary positions for the cases he may wish to take for further reference or more detailed study. Every effort has been made to use the NATIVITIES of the most widely known people, but as far as possible to avoid those where there is even the slightest reason to mistrust their validity. To screen out all possibility of error is impossible, [26] whether on the side of the available astrological data or of the trustworthiness of the accepted accounts of the various careers. The private lives of individuals in the public eye are not often revealed in much detail, and seldom with any of the fundamental frankness an astrologer should have for a top-flight analysis. The considerable spread of illustration throughout the exposition has been employed to minimize the chance of distortion of meaning or misconception of INDICATION as a result of any misguided individual interpretation.

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