History of Astrology in America

History of Astrology in America

Astrology came to America during the colonial era along with the entire body of occult teachings available in Europe in the seventeenth century. The first American astrologers, the Rosicrucians, under the leadership of Johannes Kelpius (1673–1708), established an astrological library and conservatory on Wissahickon Creek in what is now the Germantown section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Among other activities, they helped upgrade the almanac already being published by Daniel Leeds, and, in 1698, one of their better astrologers, Johann Seelig, was commissioned to cast the horoscope for the Swedish Lutheran church in Wisaco, Pennsylvania, in order to determine the best date to commence the new building. After the demise of the Chapter of Perfection, as Kelpius’s group was known, surviving members became the first hexmeisters, the well-known folk magicians of eastern Pennsylvania.

European Background

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans attracted to astrology derived their interest from a flow of material from Europe, even though several almanacs, which passed along astrological data for farming and doctoring, were published in America. After reaching a low point in the eighteenth century, a distinct new era for astrology began in England in the early nineteenth century. This new era can be marked by the 1816 publication of James Wilson’s A Complete Dictionary of Astrology, which for the first time gave its readers the basic kind of astrological information they needed to construct astrological charts and interpret them. A decade later, Robert C. Smith (1795–1832), writing under the pen name Raphael, launched the first successful astrological publishing house. His first book, Manual of Astrology, was an immediate success, but more importantly, he produced an ephemeris, a book of charts showing the position of the planets in the sky day by day. The annual Raphael’s Ephemeris remains a standard astrological textbook. After Smith’s death, a succession of individuals carried on his work, providing the material necessary for those who wished to follow its practice. Wilson, the various Raphaels, and the two men who wrote under the pseudonym of Zadkiel (Richard James Morrison and Alfred J. Pearce) produced the initial library of books that circulated in the United States and through which Americans rediscovered astrology.

At the end of the century, astrology received additional support from the Theosophical Society. The first important Theosophical astrologer, Walter Gorn Old, also assumed a pen name, Sepharial. As popular as Sepharial became—and his books are still in print—his work was eclipsed by that of a man he introduced into the society and to astrology, William Frederick Allen (1860–1917), better known by his pen name, Alan Leo. Allen launched the very successful The Astrologer’s Magazine (later renamed Modern Astrology), and, in 1896, he and Old organized the first modern astrological society. This Astrological Society, soon reconstituted as the Society for Astrological Research, survives today as the Astrological Lodge of the Theosophical Society. Among its outstanding members were Allen’s wife, known under her pen name, Bessie Leo, and one of the first British astrologers not to use a pen name, Charles E. O. Carter.

New Beginnings in America

Throughout the colonial era, America had never been without astrology. As with Europe, astrology had been pushed to the hinterland and for many years survived only in the annual farmers’ almanacs. It experienced an initial revival in 1840 when Thomas Hayes began the Hayes United States Horoscope and Scientific and Literary Messenger, which lasted for eight years, followed by Mark Broughton’s Monthly Horoscope. However, it was not until the 1880s with the emergence of Luke Dennis Broughton (1828–1898), Mark’s younger brother, that astrology experienced the foretaste of its present success.

Broughton came from a family of astrologers. His grandfather, a physician, had become an enthusiastic student of astrology after reading Culpepper’s Herbal, which gave information of an astrological nature about each medicinal plant then in a physician’s bag. The grandfather passed the interest to Luke’s father, who in turn passed it to Luke and his brothers. Mark had begun publishing an almanac and an ephemeris while still living in England, and after migrating to the United States, began his magazine when Hayes’s initial effort ceased. In 1860, Luke began issuing Broughton’s Monthly Planet Reader and Astrological Journal from his Philadelphia home. Three years later, he and his magazine moved to New York City where he launched that city’s astrological establishment. He became the major American distributor of British astrological books and the teacher of the next generation of American astrologers.

Broughton authored several astrology books himself. His Elements of Astrology, issued the year of his death, summarized astrological knowledge to that point. It its pages the reader could find a history of astrology, a survey of astrological theory, information on horoscope interpretation, and a lengthy apology for astrology in response to its major critics.

The four decades of Broughton’s career saw the movement of astrology from an almost nonexistent state to the point where practitioners could be found in all the major cities. Broughton claimed that in 1860 he knew “nearly every man in the United States who had any knowledge of the subject, and probably at that time there were not twenty persons that knew enough of Astrology to be able to erect a horoscope, and they were all either French, English, or German.” But 40 years later, Broughton could say, “At the present day [1898] there are many thousand American people who are studying Astrology, and some have become quite proficient in the science.”

The growth of astrology in the 1880s and 1890s did not go unnoticed, and attacks upon it were frequent. Broughton assigned himself the role of defender of the faith and at every opportunity made the case for the fledgling science. He went on the offensive against laws that prevented astrologers from freely doing their work. In 1886, he came to the defense of a Mr. Romaine who had been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment for practicing astrology. He accused Romaine’s attackers of ignorance. Why, he asked, is “astrology the only science or art in existence concerning which expert testimony is entirely discarded, and in regard to which only the opinions of men who are the most ignorant of the subject are entertained.” Broughton would go on to do battle with other debunkers of the heavenly art such as New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana, astronomer Richard A. Proctor, and popular encyclopedists Thomas Dick and William and Robert Chambers.

Broughton was, of course, neither the only astrologer nor the only astrology teacher in the late nineteenth century. Boston had developed its own astrological establishment that included astronomer Joseph G. Dalton, who, in 1898, published an American ephemeris. Also, at least three astrological religions had emerged. The first dates to 1876 when Emma Harding Britten published her book Art Magic, within which she included the teachings of an occult order, the Brotherhood of Light, which she claimed dated from ancient Egypt. During the early years of the Brotherhood of Light, a young lumberjack, forced out of the business by an accident that cost him several fingers, retired to a hermit’s life in rural California. He began to have visions that he shared with others. A group of 12 formed around him and, pooling their resources, moved to Applegate, California, where they formed the Esoteric Fraternity. Hiram Butler, the ex-lumberjack, taught them what he called Esoteric Christianity, a form of Christian occultism. Butler called his astrological teachings Solar Biology. It differed from Broughton’s more orthodox astrology due to the adjustment Butler made in light of the Copernican insights on the position of the sun. The practical effect of Butler’s alternations was to reverse the signs so that a Libyan in solar biology would have all the characteristics of a person born under Aries in the more traditional system.

A third astrological religion, The Order of the Magi (in this case, magi refers to astrologer) was founded in 1889 in Chicago. Its founder, Olney H. Richmond, had begun his occult career while a soldier in the Civil War. Eventually, Richmond became a teacher to a group of 30 men and women and opened an initial temple in Chicago on South Division Street. The following year, a second temple opened in Lansing, Michigan. The emergence of the Order of the Magi and other astrological religions merely underscore the genuine revival of astrology and the occult in general that was occurring in America during the last half of the nineteenth century.

The Astrological Universe

In trying to present itself anew to the culture that had previously banished it and, therefore, to a public largely ignorant of it, astrology aligned itself to the increasingly influential world of science. The single affirmation common to all of the nineteenth century astrologers was that “astrology is a science.” As F. M. Lupton asserted in his book Astrology Made Easy, “Astrology is an exact science, and … as a science, is pure mathematics, and there is no guesswork about it.” This affirmation was made in the opening paragraph of almost every book published in the nineteenth century on astrology and was repeated frequently throughout the texts.

Like other new “sciences” of the era, such as psychology, astrology had a specific realm of knowledge assigned to it. Astrology described the nature of planetary influences upon human life, and thus the astrologer’s task was to know and describe the zodiacal forces and the laws that govern them. Most astrology books would take the reader systematically through each of the signs of the zodiac and the planets and minutely describe the influences exerted by each.

As a science, the astrologers claimed, astrology was not really new, but, rather, thousands of years old. It dated to ancient Chaldea and Egypt. Its influence in biblical times was obvious from the many Old Testament references, and more than one astrologer reminded readers that the New Testament opened with the account of Chaldean astrologers following the star to the Christ child. Astrology as it was practiced in the nineteenth century—and as it is known in the twenty-first century—is ancient. It derived from Ptolemy, the second-century Greek author of the Tetrabiblos. In fact, rather than developing a new body of “scientific” knowledge, nineteenth century astrologers merely copied Ptolemy’s system and took their information on the significance of the signs and planets from his book.

While affirming astrology as a science, astrologers had to admit it was a science with a slight difference. It was an “occult” science, by which they meant that it described the hidden (and some would say “spiritual”) forces of the universe. Astrologers claimed that centuries of observations had demonstrated the truth of their assertions that the planetary movements through the zodiac effected human life. They were, however, at a loss to pinpoint the exact nature of the force or connection between the stars and the earth. They had to fall back upon an esoteric or occult connection.

Most astrologers postulated a universe of heavenly correspondences to earthly conditions. Thomas Burgoyne of the Brotherhood of Light described it succinctly in his book The Light of Egypt:

Astrology, per se, is a combination of two sciences, viz.: astronomy and correspondences. These two are related to each other as hand and glove; the former deals with suns, moons, planets and stars, and the motion, while the latter deals with the spiritual and physical influences of the same bodies; first upon each other, then upon earth, and lastly upon the organism of man.

This law of correspondences had been a major building block of Emanuel Swedenborg’s thought in the previous century and ultimately derived from the hermetic principle, “As above, so below.” Hermetics assume that the individual was a microcosm of the universe, which was the macrocosm. For astrology, the movement of the planets through the zodiac activated the correspondences. Only in the twentieth century would some astrologers move away from the hermetic approach, though, even today, many rely upon it.

As an occult science, astrology tried to have the best of both worlds. As a science, it was as new and modern as the latest scientific journal and aligned to the wave of the future. As an occult body of thought, it was allowed to make “religious” affirmations about the place of individuals in a universe of meaning, purpose, and morals. Minimally, these affirmations might be little more than reflections about the nature of life, but astrology, taken to its natural conclusion, led directly to the religion of the stars.

Astrologers, even the most secular, were quite aware that they were offering a “religious” alternative to Christianity. In his book Evolutionism, Olney Richmond decried as unscientific the traditional Creator Deity who he saw as a mere convenience for those who pretended to give people the directives of the Almighty. “A far off God and a remote heaven,” said Eleanor Kirk, in her book The Influence of the Zodiac upon the Human Life, “are no longer attractive. The quickening spirit has breathed a thought to those who have ears to hear and hearts to feel, of the Eternal Now, and a God and a heaven in every human soul.” The astrologer’s God was an impersonal but immanent force or a principle of order and causation. In his book Solar Biology, Hiram Butler described God as the Cause World.

The astrological universe, which replaced the traditional Christian one, once pictured God and nature and humanity as intimately connected in a matrix of correlates. God was not someone or something apart from human beings. Each individual, affirmed F. M. Lupton, in his book Astrology Made Easy, was a soul that comes from God “and is a part of It—a part of the Great One.”

Astrology and Religion

The twofold nature of the occult science provides the major clue as to astrology’s place in the developing culture of the West. Beginning with Deism in the eighteenth century and continuing through Free Thought in the next, religious skeptics conducted an intense attack upon the essential “supernatural” elements in Christianity. In the name of science, critics questioned the existence of a personal Creator God, the viability of prayer, revelation, moral law, and the legitimacy of the church. In the face of a new understanding of the world, the spiritual world of traditional religion was seen the same way as was astrology—simply worthless superstition.

Astrology, as occultism in general, however, aligned itself with this critique of the supernatural in general and Christianity in particular, and throughout the nineteenth century, Free Thought and the occult made common cause. Yet Free Thought had a problem. Few could live with the cold hard universe within which it seemed content to leave humanity. The new occultism offered free thinkers a way both to accept the very compelling critique of supernaturalism and yet to retain a “spiritual” vision that offered many of the benefits of traditional religion without its ecclesiastical trappings. Astrology replaced the controversy between science and religion with a complete capitulation to science, an approach that has allowed it to accept and feed off of each new scientific insight. Most especially, astrology rejoiced in scientific descriptions of the subtle and invisible forces of the universe—from radio waves to gamma rays—as welcome confirmation of its previous insights. More recently, new trends in psychology have been integrated into the astrological universe. Astrology tied itself to the rising wave of science and has ridden that wave to new heights of success and acceptance.

Astrology in Twentieth-Century America, 1900–1920

The twentieth century for astrology began a year early in a fiery explosion as a new astrological light appeared in the person of Evangeline Adams. A member of the Massachusetts family that had given the country two presidents, Adams was reared in the conservative atmosphere of Andover, a Boston suburb. Though not in Boston itself, she was not so far away to be isolated from the large occult community developing there and in nearby Cambridge. This community included the former president of the Society for Psychical Research, William James, and a number of his academic colleagues. One of these, Dr. J. Heber Smith, a professor of medicine at Boston University, introduced Adams to the practice of astrology and to Eastern religion. Smith introduced the young woman to astrology while she was recovering from a broken leg. She went on to become a serious student of Eastern religion after seeing an Andover professor manhandled in a heresy trial.

In 1899, having chosen astrology already as her life’s profession, Adams moved to New York City and took up residence in the Windsor Hotel. A Mr. Leland, the proprietor, became her first client. Since he believed the following day, Friday, March 17, 1899, would bring bad luck, he felt in need of advice. Adams cast his chart only to find him under the “worst possible combination of planets.” Danger was imminent and would possibly overtake him the following day. A second check on Friday merely reinforced Adams’ opinion that disaster was imminent. Leland walked out of her hotel room to find his fashionable hotel on fire.

Saturday morning, New Yorkers awoke to read of the fire and to a new celebrity in their midst. In bold type on the front page, the newspapers printed Leland’s statement that Adams had predicted the fire. Adams became an instant astrological superstar, America’s first, and after finding a new office, she began a career as astrologer to the rich, famous, and powerful. She also gave astrology a new level of respectability. By 1914, she had gained enough leverage to challenge and have stricken down New York’s statute against “fortune telling,” at least as it applied to astrologers.

While astrology continued a powerful force in the East, Chicago, the new occult center of the era, developed its astrological community. At its center was Professor Alfred F. Seward, who for many years published astrological books, taught astrology by mail, and claimed to be America’s largest dealer in astrological and occult books. Such proliferation in the East and Midwest set the stage for the emergence of three new astrological giants on the West Coast—Elbert Benjamine, Max Heindel, and Llewellyn George.

Elbert Benjamine (1882–1951) had been a member of the Brotherhood of Light for nine years when, in 1909, he was summoned to the home of one of its governing three and informed that they wanted Benjamine as the order’s astrologer. They also wanted him to undertake the task of writing a complete set of lessons on the 21 branches of occult science. The next year he agreed to take the position and assume the task. After five years of preparing himself, in 1915 he began conducting classes to brotherhood members and in 1918 to the public at large. Work on the 21 volumes began in 1914 and took the next two decades. In this task Benjamine wrote under the pen name C. C. Zain, a name he assumed to separate his official Brotherhood of Light lessons from his other numerous writings. He wrote a series of 12 reference books on astrology, a number of booklets and pamphlets, and many articles in astrological and occult periodicals. Under Benjamine’s leadership, the Brotherhood of Light developed into a large occult body with centers across the United States and international centers in England, Mexico, Canada, and Chile. It was one of the major teachers of astrologers for the century.

Max Heindel migrated to the United States from his native Germany in 1903. He had been a Theosophist and headed the Los Angeles Lodge in 1904–1905. He was also a student of German theosophist Rudolf Steiner. On a trip to Germany in 1907, Heindel claimed that a being described as an elder brother of the Rosicrucian Order appeared to him. The Rosicrucian led Heindel to a secret temple near the border between Germany and Bohemia and taught him the material later published in The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, Heindel’s main book. In 1908, Heindel formed the Rosicrucian Fellowship with its first chapter in Columbus, Ohio. Within two years, chapters appeared in Los Angeles; Seattle; Portland; and North Yakima, Washington. In 1911, headquarters were moved to Oceanside, California, where they remain to this day.

While teaching the whole range of occultism, astrology was one of several main interests. Heindel wrote several popular astrological texts, all still in print and used far beyond the fellowship’s borders. The fellowship began the publication of an annual Ephemeris and a Table of Houses, the two necessary reference books used by astrologers. Like the Brotherhood of Light, the fellowship became a national and international organization during the first decades of its existence.

But as outstanding as Benjamine and Heindel were, neither approached in accomplishments Llewellyn George. Born in Wales in 1876, George moved to Chicago as a child and grew up there. At the turn of the century he moved to Portland, Oregon, and in 1901 established the Llewellyn Publishing Company and the Portland School of Astrology. In 1906, he began the annual Moon Sign Book, and two years later he began the Astrological Bulletina. George’s career gained significance by his lifelong attempt to separate astrology from occultism. Such an attempt, which could only be partially successful, was a natural outcome of the articulation of astrology as a science and the growing status that science was gaining in society in general.

George could be successful to the extent he could make his publishing house, school, and magazine concentrate solely upon astrology to the exclusion of such occult topics as card reading, tarot, palmistry, and numerology. He could and did drop much of the traditional occult language of astrology, but failed in separating astrology from the occult in that astrology still had to fall back upon occult explanations of its operation. But George did try to move away from the magical (i.e. hermetic) explanation of astrology. Instead of talking about correspondences between individual and universal phenomena, he spoke of planetary vibrations. Some of these cosmic vibrations were plainly physical (e.g., gravity, radiation, etc.). “A radio broadcasting station,” asserted George, in his book Astrological Charts, “vibrates all those receiving sets within range which are attuned to it …. Each station sends out its own particular program …. In astrology every planet is a broadcasting station: the nervous system of every person is a ‘receiving set’.”

George also effectively associated astrology with the findings in the natural sciences rather than the ongoing development of occult thought. He lauded experiments in astrology that demonstrated the truth of particular astrological propositions, while denouncing the misuse of astrology for fortune-telling. But ultimately George’s success could only be relative.

Astrology was, and still is, intimately linked to the occult, and no physical “vibrations” or influences were ever located to account for all the astrological effects. Also, most people attracted to astrology were also attracted to the occult in general. Both served the effect of offering a “religious” world view to those who were attracted to science, but who found the various secular philosophies, such as rational humanism, personally cold and unsatisfying. In the end, George’s publishing arm, Llewellyn Publications, began circulating its catalog offering hundreds of books on progressive subjects, including psychism, hypnotism, prophecy, spiritualism, character reading, magic, personality, prayer, yogi, personal-development, careers, diet and health, employment, business success, etc.

Expansion Between the Wars, 1920–1940

Astrology moved into the roaring twenties formally established across the United States and with a growing clientele. However, it still needed to break into the mass market. The two decades between World War I and World War II were the years of that accomplishment.

Prior to 1920, most astrology books were privately published. Only two received the imprint of a major American publisher, Katherine Taylor Craig’s Stars of Destiny (E. P. Dutton, 1916) and Yarmo Vedra’s (a pseudonym) Heliocentric Astrology (David McKay, 1910). The attention by major publishers to astrology changed in 1924 when Dodd, Mead and Company published the first of four major volumes by Evangeline Adams, The Bowl of Heaven. Within the decade, both J. B. Lippincott and Doubleday had published a line of astrological titles and opened a whole new audience to the wonders of astrological speculations.

Astrology was ready for a growth period in the 1920s and responded to its popularity by fostering a number of successful periodicals. Prior to World War I, several periodicals had been started and attained some degree of success within the astrological community, but as a whole they had been unable to break into the large mass markets or the newsstands. That situation changed in 1923 when Paul G. Clancy began American Astrology, the single longest-running astrological periodical. His effort was followed the next year by that of Sidney K. Bennett, better known by his pen name Wynn. Wynn’s Magazine quickly joined American Astrology on the newsstands, and Wynn’s books flooded the popular astrology market.

Though several astrological societies had been formed before 1920, the first organizations to claim widespread membership were formed after World War I. In 1923, Llewellyn George and A. Z. Stevenson founded the American Astrological Society, and George helped found the National Astrological Society four years later. That same year, a group of New York astrologers founded the Astrologers’ Guild of America. The various national and regional organizations spurred the formation of many local groups, such as the Oakland (California) Astrological Society founded in 1925 and the Friends of Astrology founded in Chicago in 1938. They also led to the formation of the American Federation of Astrologers (AFA) in 1938. The AFA, the most prestigious of the several astrological organizations, has been the most effective force in bringing professionalism to the field and creating a favorable public image for its members.

The massive growth of astrology in the 1920s and 1930s set the stage for another spurt after World War II. Only one step—the spread of the sun-sign columns now carried in most daily newspapers and many monthly magazines—remained to create the popularity level so evident today. Since the turn of the century, astrologers had tried to break into the popular press. Sepharial had a column briefly, but in the end his forecasting ended in disaster for both him and the cause of astrology. Not until 1930 did a successful column appear in England. P. I. H. Naylor wrote it, but it was suppressed in 1942 as England began to use astrology in its intelligence efforts against Hitler. After the war, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic began to publish astrology columns and quickly recognized their popularity with the public.

Since World War II

The spectacular spread of astrology through the culture in the second part of the twentieth century was made possible by several developments, the most important being its gradual movement from a base in the hard sciences to one in psychology. The most significant thinker in that transition was Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985). Rudhyar developed what he initially termed harmonic astrology, now called humanistic astrology. Deeply moved by Eastern metaphysics, theosophy and the teachings of Alice Bailey, and the occult speculations of psychiatrist Carl Jung, he was at the same time disturbed by the problems of the older astrology with it psychologically questionable analysis of good and bad points in individual horoscopes, not to mention the irresponsible predictions traditional astrology seemed periodically to suggest to its practitioners. Thus in the 1960s, Rudhyar founded the International Committee for a Humanistic Astrology, which would attempt to orient astrology to the fulfillment of the individual person and to undergird astrological practice with a sound philosophical and psychological perspective.

The transformation of astrological thinking by Rudhyar and his students has been the most significant intellectual development of the discipline, and the least understood by astrology’s traditional critics. Using Jung’s category of synchonicity, Rudhyar suggested that stellar and planetary bodies did not directly effect humans, merely that the astrological chart has a coincidental relationship to the individual human peculiar psychological makeup (students of astrology will recognize his argument as a very sophisticated recasting of the correspondences theory). By this means, Rudhyar removed the need to find specific physical forces that operated on humans causing the behavioral consequences predicted by astrology. Rudhyar went beyond his predecessors, however, in his suggestion that astrology dealt in possibilities and potentialities inherent within the individual, rather than forces operating on him or her from outside, either from physical or occult forces. Thus, Rudhyar completely discarded any need for empirical verification for astrological insight while at the same time distancing it of its main albatross—determinism. Astrological forces did not determine the future; they merely suggested a future with which the individual could fruitfully cooperate.

Rudhyar’s insights finally stripped astrology of the remnant of its “fortunetelling” image and recast it as a psychological helping profession. Contemporary astrologers have little problem with stepping into the role of professional counselors assisting their clients, much as do clinical psychologists and psychotherapists. Psychological counselors have had little base from which to critique their new astrological competitors as their own field has fragmented into numerous competing camps, none of which has a strong empirical base.

Meanwhile, those astrologers who still wish to operate out of a base in hard science have continued to look for specific scientific findings that would support their faith in the direct influence of the planetary bodies on human life. Some spectacular underpinnings came from the study of biological rhythms. The work of biologist Frank A. Brown at Northwestern University demonstrated celestial influences on plant and animal life, and brought the results of the studies of natural rhythms by other scientists to the attention of the astrological community. Even more spectacular, Michel Gauquelin continued to demonstrate the coincidence of astrological delineations in large samples of various occupational groups. He found that particular planets would be prominent in the ascendant and midheaven of outstanding representatives of the differing occupations tested—scientists, military leaders, sports stars, doctors, and musicians. While Gauquelin presented much data against traditional astrology, only the positive results attracted attention.

In the end, however, the scientific work has had little influence on the developing practice of astrology. Like empirical behavioral studies, empirical studies in astrology have continued but have had little to do with the developing trends in psychological counseling practice.

Astrology Today

The new wave of astrological thought set in motion by Rudhyar, recent attempts to create a neo-astrology based on science, the continuing allegiance to more traditional astrological schools, and some new forms of astrological practice have mixed and matched to create numerous schools of astrology. They are all inheritors of the efforts of the astrological pioneers who operated in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century without the broad popular acceptance and legal protections that today’s astrologers accept as a matter of fact. Given the growth of astrology through the twentieth century, there is no reason to believe that it will not continue to grow and prosper.

In the meantime, all of the astrological schools of thought have been equally affected by the advent of the computer. Given the mathematical nature of the horoscope, the computer arrived on the astrological scene in the 1970s as if it had been created just for the field. Computer programs will not only draw the basic horoscope and note the major aspects, they will run progressions and midpoints, place asteroids, and execute any number of other manipulations. Today, astrologers find their workload immensely reduced by the computer, and all astrologers use them.

—J. Gordon Melton

Sources: