OCTOBER 2019 9
for simplifying, organizing, and
condensing that greatly clarified
his explanations of technical facts
without trivializing them. His
section on delineation made it seem
quite natural, which is a major feat
in a book of this type. Of course, as
a professional astrologer he knew all
those little details I was still trying
to grasp, so it wasn’t quite as easy
as he made it look. Some years later,
and attending my first astrology
conference, I had the pleasure of
meeting him at what turned out to be
his last attendance at an American
conference, as while sipping on his
Harvey Wallbanger he announced to
the conference organizers and a few
others sitting around the table that
he couldn’t take the travel anymore.
I came to Marc Edmund Jones’
work in those early years as well, and
in contrast to Davison and others,
his work took time and patience to
read, as you might guess from what
was laid out in the Saturn-Neptune
article. Where Davison would write
a few well-chosen paragraphs and
accompany them with a diagram
or two, Jones would write a long
chapter with maybe a few list-like
tables, with all of it wrapped around
carefully crafted terminology in
search of a theory. He was intent
on finding a way to reorganize and
update astrology as a whole, and
perhaps this was what was required
to do it, but I’m not sure what I
carried away from it.
As an example of how far off
track I might have been, in the first
year that I began actually working in
astrology for an actual paycheck, my
younger brother was visiting me, and
as we were talking in the kitchen, he
noticed a copy of Stephen Erlewine’s
The Circle Book of Charts lying
open on the table. After looking
intently at several of the charts for
three or four minutes, he asked,
“Do the shapes mean something?”
He didn’t know much of anything
about astrology, but in his first
close glance at a few horoscopes he
had immediately picked up on the
principle underlying Jones’ chart
patterns. Despite my reading on the
subject, I suspected at that point that
he understood it better than I did.My main thought behind the
meanderings above is that even
though the astrology of today is
generally much better, much more
advanced, than it was many decades
ago when writers like these were
working with clients, teaching, and
writing on the subject, there is still
much to be learned from astrologers
like Ronald Davison, Marc Edmund
Jones, and their contemporaries.
How to read their work? My best
advice at this point is to search out
their works at abebooks.com, which
at this point is my go-to for used
books – better selection, and very
clear pricing and shipping terms.
Accompanying this column you’ll
see the cover of Jones’ book The
Guide to Horoscope Interpretation,
in which he covers those chart
patterns, and I think that I am
now going to put that one on my
nightstand, so I can begin reading it
again after all these years. P