Bennett, Sidney Kimball
Bennett, Sidney Kimball (Wynn)
(religion, spiritualism, and occult)Sidney Kimball Bennett, born February 10, 1892, in Chicago, was a prominent astrologer of the early twentieth century. Under the pseudonym Wynn, he published Wynn’s Astrology Magazine in the thirties and forties. He began studying astrology as a young man (about 1915) and was practicing professionally by the twenties.
In The Key Cycle, Bennett relates that a number of his clients had complained that his prognostications, based on the techniques of progressions and directions, had failed. He regarded these failures as being traceable to mistaken birth times. These faulty predictions struck home, however, in May 1926 when he failed to foresee an accident in which he was almost killed by a hit-and-run driver. At the time, Bennett was traveling in California on a business trip during which he was attempting to take advantage of a “marvelous combination of progressions.” However, from a business standpoint the trip was a total failure. Reflecting upon these events and calling to mind his clients’ complaints, he was persuaded to give up progressions and directions.
Bennett then began to experiment with other predictive methods, such as solar return. He devised a technique for utilizing this method for intermediate dates, and this was the origin of the predictive system he called The Key Cycle.
In the early thirties, Bennett wrote an astrology column for the New York Daily News. In 1932, he foretold a week of financial turmoil for early March 1933. One of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first official acts as president after his inauguration on March 4, 1933, was to proclaim a “bank holiday,” closing all the banks in the United States. Many banks did not reopen, and depositors suffered a complete loss. This act shook the nation and threw the financial markets into chaos. Bennett became famous for his prediction. In later life, he lived in Australia, where he is thought to have died in the late fifties.