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A how-to course in witchcraft, though, is offered by San Francisco's Heliotrope Free University. At a recent lecture in the seamy Fillmore district of the city, the door was opened by the presiding witch—young and tall, with flowing golden hair. "I'm Witch Antaras Auriel," said the white-gowned figure softly. This barefoot witch clearly has magic, especially considering that Antaras Auriel is a boy, born Dennis Boiling, 19 years ago in San Jose.
Beyond such folderol, astrology has been taken seriously by serious students. They believe that the ancient religion and superstition from which it springs are embedded in the unconscious of modern man. Psychiatrist Carl G. Jung referred to it as a "scientia intuitiva," and often had horoscopes cast for his patients. The idea was not to predict their futures but to call attention to elements that might or might not lie in their personalities. A horoscope showing excessive fatherlove and tendencies toward sadism, he realized, could be used to provoke talk, self-analysis and perhaps insight. "Today," wrote Jung, "rising out of the social deeps, astrology knocks at the doors of the universities, from which it was banished some 300 years ago."
So—at the moment—it seems. Dr. Ralph Metzner, a psychologist with Stanford University's counseling and testing center, uses astrology in a quarter of his cases in the same way Jung did. He thinks that it will soon be "an adjunct to psychology and psychiatry," not because it is truer but because it is "much more complex and sophisticated than present psychological maps or systems." Graduate Student Michael Katz led a weekly astrology class last semester as part of Stanford's introductory psychology course, and New York University recently invited Astrologer Shirley Spencer to lecture.
Predictive astrology, like divination and occultism generally, tends to take hold in times of confusion, uncertainty and the breakdown of religious belief. Astrologers and assorted sorcerers were busy in Rome while the empire was declining and prevalent throughout Europe during the great 17th century waves of plague. Today's young stargazers claim to be responding to a similar sense of disintegration and disenchantment. This fact disturbs social activists and reformers like crusading Yale Chaplain William Sloane Coffin, who fulminates: "The growing interest in astrology is a beautiful example of the lobotomized passivity that results from the alienating influence of modern technological society."
Marshall McLuhan, the noted medium, is far less pessimistic. "The current interest of youth in astrology, clairvoyance and the occult is no coincidence," he feels. "Psychic