In the autumn of the year 1980, I could have been found sitting in a public park during my lunch break, beneath a huge tree, reading astrology magazines.  I would eat my cheese sandwich and apple B all I could afford for lunch on a cub reporter=s salary B and I would savor the words of the great Dane Rudhyar, as he would expertly and in his inimitable Victorian prose explicate the meaning of Mars the Lord of this and that.  Ah, yes, this was what I really liked.  Something meaningful, unlike the stale, boring, and sanitized newspaper reporting I was doing for a living.

My dreams of honing my prose to become the next Ernest Hemingway were beginning to fade into the dull routine of traffic accidents, obituaries, and coverage of the local Chrysanthemum Club=s next flower sale.  Oh, there was always the next gory murder or drug bust with surly cops to enliven my day or night. We did not clock in because we worked all the time, day and night.  That was the business.  The excitement wore off real fast as each new scandal and disaster resembled the last one. Permanently boring.

Being a news reporter was for me like being married to the brother of the one I loved. The real deal would have been literature, and in particular, mystic literature.  Oh, sure, I had the fun of wordsmithing and seeing my name in print every day, but something serious was missing from my life.  Missing was the mystic point of view that I had discovered late in my college career by studying the works of the great American writer, Frank Waters, who wrote of the American West with the transcendent sagacity of an oriental sage.  Now there was a writer. Frank Waters changed my whole life and I was privileged to meet him and interview him during the early >80's.

I remember asking my professor, Dr. Charles Adams, who taught the courses of Frank Waters literature at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, ADo people really believe that stuff?@  AOh, sure,@ said Dr. Adams, AMany people who are very well developed in their intellects have no trouble with it.@  ADo you mean they would think they were communing with a tree?@ I asked.  AAbsolutely,@ he said, AI commune with trees all the time.@

Well, that was all I needed. Official permission to be different.  To be myself and acknowledge my own inner beliefs. 

I=ve been hugging trees ever since.

And looking up at the sky, fascinated.

Frank Waters wrote a good deal about astrology and if the teachings of astrology were good for the Sage of the Southwest (the title of my article about Waters), they would be good for me.  That much I knew for sure.  And then there were Shakespeare and Chaucer, with all those references to astrology. Yes. It had some meaning, this astrology.  Deep Meaning.  It was the mystic meaning, the one that had gone missing from the so-called canon of accepted literature.  But whenever it popped up, there it was again, the voice of truth.  It made sense in a profound and coherent way. I started reading pop astrology magazines and I would buy for a quarter those little rolled up things at the counters at convenience stores.  I started to understand things like Neptune transits and squares of Pluto. 

Wow B this was interesting!

I became an astrology scavenger, reading any little bit I could find, except for those things in the newspapers, which were never correct and somehow just stupid, like most everything else in the newspapers.

This was the early >80's and the so-called Reagan Revolution had hit us big time.  The culture of cruelty and corruption got itself off with a big bang of propaganda.  If you ever wonder why I=m always harping about propaganda, there is a real simple reason for my aversion to the big lie.  I worked in a newsroom during the early >80's, which was in many ways no more than working in a fiction factory.  I saw nearly everything we wrote twisted and gutted and often deleted or killed as they say in newspaper lingo, so that the greedy could get more greedy and the poor get more poor.  It was sad and cruel and I saw many young reporters sell their souls to the devil just to keep a job.  That=s life in the mainstream media.  It=s only gotten worse since then.

One January morning in 1981, I decided to visit a grocery store in one of the poorer sections of town to do a man-in-the-street piece on the so-called trickle-down economics. I was sure the poor black people saw through the whole scam and would say some pretty funny things, which they did, indeed.  It turned out to be a good little piece.  I remember I took my own pictures over stacks of bananas and in front of grocery ads at the front windows.

There, over the stack of bananas, I met a black woman who called herself Nettie and said she was an astrologer and she talked about Jupiter being conjunct Saturn in Libra and how it meant that the conservatives would find increase for themselves.  Conservatism, she said, would grow by decreasing fairness to others.  She said that the Libra Jimmy Carter was up the creek without a paddle at this time because Saturn conjunct Jupiter transiting his natal Sun meant he had run out of luck.  Just the energy of the stars.  The cosmos at the time. 

Yeah, I said to myself, this lady knows something.  I befriended Nettie and she taught me a lot about astrology and she said I had it in me, according to my chart, and if I ever wanted to B  to be a pretty good astrologer myself, and to write about it, too.  Sounded good to me.

I started going to Rosicrucian meetings that were advertised in the newspaper and there I met another woman, Stacy Dean, who later became the doyenne of astrology in Las Vegas.  I would go to her house for astrology confabs with a couple other friends from UNLV, who were also graduate students in literature and who were already astrologers.  I learned quite a bit at these meetings and then I started to collect books on the subject.  My first books were the Sakoian and Acker Series that came out in the early >80's and I did my best to memorize them. 

My husband thought I had gone crazy because I was always reading the same books over and over B for years.  He really did believe I was deranged and I remember one time he asked me, AWhy don=t you read a new book?@

Just before my misadventures in the media mercifully came to an end, I had this hare-brained idea that I would write some kind of alternative column (not my regular daily column, mind you) which would be a kind of an almanac, and have homespun wisdom, something like Poor Richard=s Almanac, by Ben Franklin, whom I greatly admire.  And this almanac would also have some sort of mystical appeal to it, something like the mystical idea of the cosmos and the earth all being in harmony, like I had learned from the writer, Frank Waters.  It would have some sort of earth-religion, or pagan sensibility to it, like Frank Waters= work.  And it would have listings of the planets and the times and all that stuff, which I had absolutely no idea whatsoever of being able to locate for myself, for I had yet to see my first ephemeris and really couldn=t have read one even if I had one at the time.

My idea was a bit vague, but something was pushing me in that direction.  The column would be something that the native people would understand: the harmony of natural cycles and cosmic seasons.

So I went over to the art department and explained my hare-brained idea to a sympathetic artist, who really did seem to understand what I was getting at, vague as it was.  The artist, whose name I now do not recall, made up from clipart a logo for this prospective column, and we called it The Dreaming Indian Almanac, which I thought was pretty neat.  There was a silhouette of a flower during a lunar eclipse with stars sprinkled around in the background.  That was it.  The cosmic idea.  I wrote and published one column (minus the ephemeris, of course).

The writing was sort of philosophical and mystical.  Next morning, my editor promptly called me into his office and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing.  I really had no answer for that because I did not know.  It was just an idea that I had. 

Sort of Vague.  The Dreaming Indian Almanac was promptly killed, as they say in newspaper lingo, and I took home a whole stack of paste-up logos that the artist gave me.  In those days, they used to paste-up the paper by hand in the back room before it went to print. Someday, I said to myself, I will do something with those logos. 

The Vague Idea persisted.

Things happened in my life B many things that I will not pursue in this particular piece because I would digress from my point, which is to explain my path to astrology. Suffice it to say that during the many other things that happened in my life, I remained always a fascinated student of astrology.  It was the red thread that held my life together, like the coherency gained in an essay by a good thematic statement.  I was constantly discovering truth.  I found in astrology a voice that never lied and a discipline that was more finely and accurately wrought than any form of study I had ever come across, including my two years as a biology major.

Astrology was never boring B always as interesting as the changing kaleidoscope of the sky.  It was wise.  It was mystic.  It was richer than any study I had ever undertaken and I could see why it had been made occult or hidden by the so-called mainstream society.

I could see why dictators would forbid its study and why political and religious despots of all kinds would lie about it and try to demonize it: It was powerful.  The tool of seers.  Just what we don=t want any more of in our public squares, given their venality and shallowness.  It was good that astrology was hidden and that few believed in it.  It was good that they printed astrological trash in the newspapers.  Better to keep the real thing hidden.

Only the truly interested would ever come to know astrology well. And that would be  a good thing.  Astrology is difficult to learn and very complex, so it naturally repels those who are unwilling to take the time to learn it.  Like wisdom itself, astrology is a discipline you follow because you love it, not because you can own it, because you never can. 

During the early >90's, I discovered the earth religions from a feminist viewpoint.  Zsuzsanna Budapest, Barbara Mor and Starhawk made an indelible impression upon me.  This again, I knew was truth -- my truth -- and I would never go back.  Now I knew what was missing from the official versions of history that we had been taught as the canon of literature.  It was the women=s voices of wisdom: the pagan, or earth-centered voices of philosophy, such as the voice of Diotoma, the priestess, who tells of the doctrine of love in Plato=s Dialogues.  Diotoma, like Frank Waters, was one of the few meaningful voices I encountered in all my years of studying for a masters degree in English.

It was the pagan voice, the voice of the earth-religions that saw and studied the harmony of the spheres, the harmony between mankind and planet Earth within her cycles in the solar system.

There was none of that phoney baloney about spirit being separated from and superior to matter, or earth. The history of the female of the species, the Earth, and our evolution upon this planet were honored, rather then relegated to a lower status or denied altogether.  These women writers honored women=s work and pointed out that our evolution into humanity was a long, slow chain of daily tasks: the tasks of nurturing and sustaining life and of developing social customs based in justice.

The wisdom of the garden is deep, meaningful and meant to sustain life on earth.  It is our heritage of common decency and common sense. I realized that mother love was indeed the love that kept the human race intact and that it was the basis of civilization. This great truth has been eradicated from the patriarchal religions, which I learned by reading history have come into existence largely for the purpose of denying female cultural authority.

Here were the old teachings B the old wisdom.  Here, at last, was wisdom.

I remember reading Budapest as she talked about the meanings of the Tarot cards and there was one card that seemed to speak to me.  It was the Star card, which she said represented the astrological sign of Aquarius. I have a stellium in Aquarius in the sixth house and Uranus in Cancer conjunct Moon in Gemini in the eleventh house.  So, yes, Aquarius, that would be me.  She said the card also represented Urania, the Greek Muse of Astronomy and Astrology.  She talked about taking a special name within the craft.  I thought maybe this name would be good for me.  I wondered if I might use the name Urania.

About a week later, I went shopping at a mall and I was in a candle shop where they had some of those Mardi-Gras masks that you find in such places.  One of those masks was staring me in the face.  I looked a little closer at it.  It was named Urania.  Well, that was it : Urania ever since B  my alter-ego B my mask B as in Greek theater.

Now I had a logo and a mask or persona, but never did I think to put them together.

As those who know astrology may have already guessed, I have the North Node of the Moon in the ninth house, which means I will find my luck and my fate in  philosophy, the abstract mind, university studies, foreign countries (the highlight of my life was a study trip to India when I was a graduate student in literature) and in publishing.  Correspondingly, I have the South Node of the Moon in the third house, which means I will be unlucky at and unfit for the mundane mentality of newspapers or the so-called mainstream media because I will find myself generally out of harmony with the prevailing social trends as defined by the conservative elements of society. 

I spent quite a few years teaching at the university level as an adjunct instructor in the fields of literature, argumentation, composition and rhetoric and journalism: news gathering and writing and print editing.  Now those days were coming to end because I had grown out of teaching other people to write.  I wanted now to do my own writing, but I wasn=t sure what exactly to write about. Investigative reporting? Creative writing?  Astrology?

That North Node of the Moon in Aries seemed to be talking to me. I was hearing it whisper: publishing, self-publishing. 

Along about February of 2005, I was web-surfing and happened to come across a really neat site called The New Moon Journal by Michele Bailey-Lessirard, who does shamanic astrology.

Wow!

Right up my alley!  She wrote a piece for the New Moon in Aquarius that was entitled,

 Do What You Know.  I realized that the one thing I might know a little bit about, after 25 years of study, could be astrology. I particularly liked the idea of lunar astrology because it speaks to women in a special way, but as I have learned, lunar astrology is a wonderful oracle that uncannily predicts the coming events that we all will experience on the planet Earth. Lunar Astrology is an old technique enjoying a revival at this time in our history.

Astrology is such a vast subject that we astrologers are always learning more. That=s one of astrology=s most fascinating charms.  If you are the perpetual student, astrology will give you perpetual growth. 

Astrology is a field of study I really love.  I know I love astrology because I never abandon it, even when I=m occupied with other pursuits because at some level, astrology is always in my mind, informing my consciousness of the here and now.  After all these years, I feel I can define myself within its terms.

I decided to set up my own astrology website, which I did with the help of my expert web designer, Keith Merrill, of Las Vegas.  Keith Merrill was the guy who made it happen.  Without him, I would have been lost.  Also, the folks at Matrix Software made it possible for me to do this project.  Matrix provided the most advanced, professional astrology software available on the market for a reasonable price.  From Matrix,  I even acquired  the tools to do a real, genuine ephemeris, or almanac which I now publish on the web.  We now have information on the movements of all the planets all the time and the ability to do the most sophisticated astrological computations that form the state-of- the-art of astrology. 

It took a little while of struggling to learn to use all the computerized equipment, but the struggle was worth it.

Things started to come together: we had the logo, the mask or the pen name, the self-publishing venue of the website and all the ephemerides we could ever use in our lifetimes, along with astrology charts galore and even programmed readings for different purposes.  We found art and learned how to post it and made use of the novel idea of the so-called blog, a form of diary or log to be posted on the internet.  The blog seemed to be the ideal format for noting the changes in the sky in an astrological diary, which most students of astrology use as a self-teaching tool. Mr. Merrill installed the Wordpress blog on the web site and we were ready to publish.

Finally, the Vague Idea manifested on April 9, 2005, with the birth of www.Uranias9thhouse.com

Special thanks to my husband, David Jenkins, for his constant support and patience.  And yes, I do still read those same old books, and a bunch more.

                                                      B Urania (aka Robin Jenkins)