Liz Greene & Friends

Part 1, The Psychopath, was a seminar given on July 1, 2001, at Regents College, London. Part 2, Sanity & Madness, was a seminar given on June 25, 2000, at Regents College, London. Part 3, The Scapegoat, was a seminar given on April 26, 1999, at Regents College, London. Regents College is located near the Baker Street tube station.

Comments: Charts discussed in this book include Timothy McVeigh, Charles Mansion, David Koresh, Slobodan Milosevic, Josef Mengele & others. It would appear from the extended table of contents (above) that Liz Greene believes aspects from the moon to the outer planets produce deranged maniacs & mass murderers. Makes no difference if the orbs are a bit wide or if the planets fall in succedent or cadent houses. These aspects are deadly. Greene's problem is that Moon-Pluto, Moon-Neptune, Moon-Uranus, Moon-Saturn aspects are not uncommon. Greene's problem, over & over again, is that no sooner does she state her general thesis than a timid hand rises from the audience & asks, "I have that. Does this mean I'm going to become deranged?" Greene has no astrological answer, for the simple reason that Liz Greene has never learned how to read an astrological chart. If she had, she could show how the many, various pieces of the chart come together to produce the monster in question, how the problem was, in fact, unique to this specific native. To use her first example, for Tim McVeigh:

Greene gives McVeigh's data as April 23, 1968, 5:24 am, Pendleton, NY. Set it up & follow along:

Greene says the problems in this chart, what created the monster McVeigh, was his Moon-Pluto opposition (4 degrees applying), his Moon-Uranus opposition (9 degrees, applying), his Moon-Neptune trine (9 degrees, applying), and his Venus-Saturn conjunction (13 minutes, separating). The Moon is in the 12th, the Uranus/Pluto conjunction in the 6th, Neptune 23 degrees above the descendant in the 7th, Venus/Saturn in 12th. Where's the angularity? How do you get mass murder from lunar aspects with such wide orbs?

Look again at McVeigh's chart. See how his ascendant is tightly bracketed by Sun & Mercury? This gives him a sharp eye on the materialistic (eg, Taurus) side of the world. Note the debilitated Mars in the 1st. Note the chart ruler, Venus, debilitated in Aries, note, too, that it is in mutual reception with the debilitated Mars. This mutual reception binds not only the two planets (which are the final dispositors in the chart), but also the affairs of the two houses. From first to twelfth is alpha to omega, beginning to end, birth to death, debilitated & final dispositors. "Final Dispositors" means the affairs of the ten other houses all eventually end up in the pit of the 12th & 1st. This alone is the signature of a fanatic. (Do you have this in your chart? Let me see your hands.) Note the Moon in Pisces. The Moon in Pisces does not know what to feel. External stimulus - every one else's feelings - wash uncontrollably over it. It has no idea what it should feel nor how it should react. Can we, as observers, see this? No, we cannot. The Moon in the 12th keeps its feelings to itself. Like as not with the Moon in Pisces as well, McVeigh had no idea what his own feelings were. If there was any residual sympathy, the Venus-Saturn conjunction slammed the door on it. Greene says McVeigh felt no remorse but is unable to find the astrological reasons why, for she cannot even read his Moon.

We turn now to that extraordinary Venus-Saturn conjunction. There are some who are cursed at birth. McVeigh was one such. Not only is Venus debilitated in Aries, so is Saturn. The world hates him. It gives him no love, it rejects what little he can give. He sees it, every day, in everyone he meets, even in everyone he passes casually in the street. He must, for his Sun-Mercury eyes tell him so. Is he proud of his appearance? Probably not. A debilitated Venus for a chart ruler, with a debilitated Saturn sitting on top of it either makes him ugly or convinces him that he is ugly. Despite whatever efforts he may have made, the world was both very vivid (the eyes) and completely closed to him (Venus/Saturn). Put a fanatic like this under stress & he will blow. Is my analysis 20/20 hindsight? Of course. No one would dare draw these conclusions, chart fresh in hand, 20 minutes after McVeigh's birth. But people with extraordinary charts, like McVeigh, give plenty of advance warnings. And that, class, is a brief astrological analysis of the executed convict, Timothy McVeigh. The one Liz Greene didn't write.

It's not as if we found Liz Greene in the street & thrust McVeigh's chart in her face & recorded the first things that came to her mind. Such would be unfair. Greene chose McVeigh's chart, Greene prepared her notes, Greene presented her materials in what was, to her, a familiar setting: In front of eager students. What she presented on McVeigh's chart, in London, around 10 am on Sunday, July 1, 2001, was literally the very best astrology she could do. Fair to say that not everyone can make a convincing chart synthesis, as I have done (and I admit I am far from the best). But Liz Greene is not everyone. Greene is, by her assertion, one of the better astrologers on the planet at the moment.

So, pressed by panicky students with "that same aspect" in their charts, Greene falls back on vague psychological mumbo-jumbo. It wasn't just this or that common aspect, it was also McVeigh's childhood, it was also poor parenting, it was also genetic, it was also this, it was also that. All rubbish. If it's his childhood, Greene can find the transits & progressions in the chart & show us the dates when the damage occurred. If it's genetic or poor parenting, Greene can present the parents' birth data. Astrology is the most powerful, the most reliable analytical tool on the planet. Liz Greene should learn some of it.

Fair warning: If you bought this book for the astrology & fail to find much of it, do not blame the humble bookseller. If you're not sure if Greene is right, or if Dave is right, do your own research: Get Lois Rodden's Astro Data V: Profiles in Crime, 735 charts of criminals & their friends. Decide for yourself if Greene's outer planet thesis holds.

Two days later: A customer read these notes & asked if I thought this was Greene's worst book. No, I replied, Dark of the Soul was pretty average Greene. I confessed I didn't think Liz Greene was as astrologically incompetent as the book implies. No one with 30+ years in astrology could possibly be that stupid. Greene says lunar aspects to outer planets are dangerous & as that's absurd on the face of it, could she have some other agenda in mind? Let's do some math & see if we can find out:

The moon is said to be in orb of aspect if it is within 8 degrees, applying or separating. This is 16 degrees in all. For sextiles, half that, which is an orb of 4, or a total of 8. There are 1 conjunction, 1 opposition, 2 squares & 2 trines, a total of 6 aspects. Times 16, that's 96 degrees. Add in another 16 degrees for the two sextiles, and we get a total of 112 degrees. The moon moves 360 / 28, or 12.86 degrees a day. 112 / 12.86 is 8 days, 16 hours & 48 minutes. So, for nearly nine days every month - nearly one third of the time - the moon is in aspect to any given planet. A day or two more if you like wide orbs, a day or two less if you go for narrow ones.

Now consider that it's not merely one moon/planet pairing that Greene is talking about, but four: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune & Pluto. I don't have the math in front of me, but it seems obvious that more than half of all people alive have at least one of these aspects in their charts. A goodly number have more than one. (I have three.) Tim McVeigh got an extra one just because of the decade of his birth.

So why is Liz Greene demonizing aspects as common as this? Frankly, we should ask her. I wouldn't want to think she has found a way of terrifying the ignorant for her own self-aggrandizement. Heavens! No genuine Ph.D. would ever do such a thing.

CPA Press, 326 pages.

Comment: This book contains three separate seminars. The first starts as a rehash of Charles Luntz's Vocational Guidance by Astrology. First published in 1942, it is currently out of print. Luntz gives Adolf Hitler as an example of a modern, effective & successful executive, a man who had excellent knowledge of & took full advantage of, astrology. This is not easy to stomach. I cannot decide if Luntz was glorifying Hitler, or merely had a good example & didn't want to let go. I tend to favor the first possibility. At the 1991 Sasportas seminar from which the first part of this book was extracted, handouts summarizing the Luntz book were provided. They are not included in the CPA Press edition, a pity, as, aside from his politics, Luntz had an excellent book. The best part of the Sasportas's seminar was built around the handout. When the seminar wandered it turned into to the usual CPA sap: Heroes, wounded healers, personal myths, family issues, fear of owning one's own power, etc. Nothing much to do with getting a job. Sad.

The node section associates the sun with the north node, and the moon with the south node. This is something I have not heard of elsewhere & for which Sasportas offers no explanation. In this section, the principle inspiration came from Tracy Mark's Astrology of Self Discovery, and Martin Schulman's Karmic Astrology volume 1. The discussion of the nodal axis by sign & house is erratic, incomplete, and, as is common, confuses signs with houses. On page 101, Sasportas credits Tracy Marks with [talking] a lot about what she calls the nodal ruler, which is the planet that rules the sign that your North or South node is in. This is nowhere to be found in Tracy's book. Sasportas is perhaps thinking of Mohan Koparkar's excellent Lunar Nodes, which covers this exact topic.

Part 3, The Astrology of the Helper is supposedly about Saturn & Neptune & the weird desire to be an astrological counselor, but it quickly descends into mother as caretaker, mother/child, father/child, mother/father, Moon/Chiron, serve or suffer, saviors or victims, guilt, etc. Eg, more dreck. Donna Cunningham does this better. And without the ramble.

The most interesting part of this book is Sasportas's remarks about the writing of The Twelve Houses. Seems he hated it.

CPA Press, 234 pages.

Comment: I must descend again into the dark world of Liz Greene. In browsing through the book, I came across this, on Oral Defenses: But the sleepy eroticism of a long kiss, like the sleepy eroticism of a delicious bar of creamy chocolate, may be linked with the infant's sleepy eroticism after a really good feed.... Babies are very sensual. Their feelings, as well as their bodies, respond to being touched & stroked. We must differentiate between sexual & erotic feelings. An infant's eroticism is not focused on penetration, nor does it reflect passion or attraction as we experience it between two individual adults. Freud called infants "polymorphous perverse", which means that they respond to a wide variety of pleasurable erotic stimuli as passive recipients, regardless of the identity or nature of the stimulus. (pg. 10) Greene here implies that what is oral is sexual, and vice-versa, not a new idea. That babies are erotic is but one of dozens (or hundreds) of bizarre ideas that Greene has had in her career. For the sake of demonstration, let us demolish this fiction, and, for the sake of brevity, call that a review of this book.

We start with the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1992. In the first column on page 624 is this definition of the word, erotic 1. Of or concerning sexual love & desire; amatory. 2. Tending to arouse sexual desire. 3. Dominated by sexual love or desire. [Greek erotikos, from eros, erot-, sexual love.]

As the dictionary defines it, babies are incapable of erotic sensation. They are asexual. In prenatal classes (which I have attended), parents are cautioned their newborns will sport engorged sexual organs immediately after birth. This is not only surprising, it is often upsetting. Why engorged? Because the newly born babe is full of its adult mother's hormones, sex hormones among them. This I personally saw at the time of my daughter's birth in November, 2000. It faded in less than a week. Why? Because until the child reaches puberty, it makes no such hormones on its own.

The sex organs command their own chakra, the sex chakra. Individual consciousness, as we understand the concept of consciousness, is composed of the interplay of various chakras. Factors determining chakra development - and therefore, consciousness - include overall size, color purity, speed of rotation, etc. These are themselves governed by the hormone/endocrine system. In other words, until sex hormones are produced at puberty, the sex chakra is dormant. Dormant means not conscious & therefore not erotic. That the area in question is highly sensitive to touch, even in infants, is not relevant. Any part of the body can be hypersensitized to touch. That does not automatically make such touch erotic, especially when the ability to determine eroticism does not exist. (It's probably intensely irritating.) This is the reason child molestation by adults is so heinous. Molestation forces energy into an immature sex chakra & badly upsets the balance between it & the various other chakras, often forever. Note the obvious difference when two 8 year olds play doctor & nurse. Their chakras will be more-or-less equal in development, the chances for harm greatly reduced.

The assumption of an erotic life in newborn children is therefore an adult projection. So where does the underlying oral-genital problem come from? From another chakra, of course. The mouth area is governed by the throat chakra. There is a tendency for the throat chakra to form relations with the sex chakra. This is not unique. The solar plexus & heart chakras are easily (and usefully) linked. Operatic voice training - that given to the grand divas particularly - forces a link between the throat & the solar plexus, a link which is otherwise rare. The link from throat to sex organs happens with kissing, but is greatly reinforced via oral sex. The oral-genital theory, like most psychology, is a mere cartoon of reality.

In infants there are no chakra-to-chakra links, even if they are born with a tendency to create them. Links from chakra to chakra must be deliberately created, the process is learned. With heterosexuals the linkage from throat to genitals is rarely that strong, heteros have the usual male-female genitalia as a primary playground. In contrast, homosexual males (in particular) deny themselves this outlet. In compensation, the more promiscuous create strong throat-sex links. Like all strongly linked chakra pairs, intense throat-sex chakra links, over time, change body appearance, usually with the lower jaw. It is for this reason that some claim they know homosexuals on sight. This is not, strictly speaking, true. It applies only to homosexual males who are intensely promiscuous for a prolonged period of time. Starting in the 1980's, gay organizations strenuously denied this fact, even though they use it (and other methods) as a means of identification. This is, by the way, a subject dear to Liz Greene's heart, even if she rarely mentions it: The study of deviancy.

This relates to Greene in this way: As I understand things, Liz Greene is a childless late middle-aged American recluse who lives in central England. In the 1980's & early 1990's, her principal professional colleagues were said to be homosexual males. Greene herself is said to be (or have been) a chain smoker. It is therefore possible that Greene has spent the greater part of her adult life in an intensely oral-genital society. And as a recluse, she would have a lot of what this book is about: Barriers & boundaries, her own personal. In my files I have something alleged to be Liz Greene's natal chart. With that, and a few scant hints at her early life, I can guess at wounding trauma around 1971-2, but that would be sheer speculation. But if I were right, Greene herself would be a most fascinating example of all the things she talks about.

It would have been as easy for me to have demolished almost any other part of this book. It would also have been as easy to have compared her sun-sign writing (she often writes nothing else) from book to book to book. Greene has been harping on much the same things for 30 years now.

CPA Press, 229 pages.

Comment: This book is copyright 2001. This is typical Greene: Pick an astrological object, in this case the sun, find a Grecian mythical character - Apollo - combine & see what happens. In the first few pages, Greene mentions Marduk, Buddha & Mithras (all solar deities), perhaps for good measure. (Left without mention is Jesus Christ - the greatest & most obvious of all solar deities.) But whatever the rationale, there remains little practical connection between solar deities & the astrological sun. I was once asked by Ariel Guttman (author of Mythic Astrology) if there were any ancient texts on mythic astrology, but to my knowledge there are none (Messrs. Schmidt & Hand have yet to prove me wrong). Ancient Greeks, who worshiped Apollo on Sunday & consulted astrologers on Monday, failed to see the connection between them, which should give us pause. When mythic astrology got started back around 1980, there were (aside from Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos) no ancient or even medieval astrological texts in print whatever. Now, thanks to Regulus, Ascella, Hindsight & Arhat, there are rafts of them.

Here is Apollo, aka the Sun, according to Greene (pgs 11-12): God of light; ripener of fruit; god of sudden death; god of healing; god of divination; god of music; founder of cities & colonies; governor of the inner solar system; breaker of family curses; a failure in love & fathering; lover/companion/father to the Muses; killer of the Python/creator of the Pythoness; sharer of Delphi. The remainder of Apollo's Chariot amplifies these ideas & includes many sample charts, as drawn from a two day seminar given in London in November 1998. In Greene's list of astrological solar attributes are characteristics that properly belong to the sun, much that does not, as well as much that is left out. By way of contrast, on pg 70 of Christian Astrology (1647), Lilly gives these solar attributes: Is faithful, keeps promises, desires to rule, is prudent, has good judgment, has great majesty & stateliness, is desirous of honor, speaks with confidence, is affable & tractable, is humane to all people, loves sumptuousness & magnificence, etc.

When it was new - 20 years ago - the concept of mythic astrology revealed much. Judging by this book, it may be wearing thin. All-in-all, this book is interesting, but flawed. CPA Press, 266 pages.

From the back cover: Bridging the gap between psychological & predictive astrology is not easy, and many astrologers feel they must polarize & espouse one while rejecting the other. The seminars in this innovative volume explore the psychological dynamics which accompany concrete events, focusing on the important psychological model of the complex as both a generator of individual behavior & an archetypal image of individual fate. This book offers profound insights into the ways in which inner & outer reality coincide & reflect each other.

Notes as of May 2002: First published in 1997, this is the first CPA Press book to go mass-market. Greene is mellowing over the years, I guess that most of us do. This is the best astrology she's done to date, she includes house dispositors for the first time. Astro-psychology, Greene's & most others', is weak astrology coupled with a discipline (a century old now) that has little proven value. Psychiatry is essentially guesswork. It is based on a rejection of metaphysics, coupled with an underlying atheism. In my work reviewing books for this website, one minute I'm looking at a medieval book in which psychological complaints are discussed & cured, to - the next minute - reading modern texts with all kinds of fancy gibberish but with no trace of understanding or cure. Not only did medieval doctors cure "complexes" (read your Shakespeare, Chaucer, too), so do moderns with the proper training. I have, myself, seen this first hand, I have been so trained myself. Greene wrings her hands over mysteries that are known, have been for centuries, just not to her. (Greene: ...it is clear that complexes possess the power to attract external circumstances in ways we [eg, psychologists] do not understand, pg 91) These misinformed beliefs are common in the psychological community & are the core reasons why they, as a collective, wander from one theory to another, to another. On the one hand, they have the intense, sincere desire to help, on the other, they are stuck with a fundamentally flawed archetype. There is, in brief, the old ways that still work, 20th century psychology that did not. Would you like to see the two, spelled out? Look no further than the diagram on page 124 of this book. On the left, the traditional, verifiable world. On the right, current psychological theory. When you consider the two, remember how many more people have been helped by simple religious worship than by psychologists. Why does one work, the other, not? With the rise of religious fundamentalism, do psychologists have any future but to solve this puzzle? Center for Psychological Astrology (CPA), 266 pages.

Comment: From the back cover: The four seminars in this volume reveal the many facets of one of the most misunderstood of astrological symbols. In the present world climate, it is particularly important, perhaps even urgent, that we have a better grasp of this most instinctive & fundamental human urge. Named after the Roman god of war, Mars is usually associated with aggression & violence, and in medieval astrology it was perceived as a 'malefic' & the bringer of disaster. But without the energy & motivation of Mars, we become passive victims of life, unable to defend ourselves or stand up for what we believe in. Each seminar explores Mars from a different perspective, emphasizing the importance of working with Mars' qualities consciously & creatively rather than fearing its force & "selfishness". Whether we view Mars at work in individuals or as a force in society, it is essential that we understand & relate to this powerful archetypal energy in a positive way. This book will be a surprise & an eye-opener for all those interested not only in astrology, but also in human psychology & the compulsions which drive individuals & societies to act aggressively toward each other.

My comment: With the passing of Howard Sasportas, Richard Idemon & now Charles Harvey, the Centre for Psychological Astrology seems now to be entirely composed of females. So this book is a female view of Mars, the ultimate male planet. CPA Press, 364 pages.