Modern Living: Astrology: Fad and Phenomenon

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motion, relative to the motion of the rest of the planets, made the others seem to slow down or reverse direction (retrograde), the gods were thought to be irritated and therefore "malefic." The sun is said to "rejoice" in Leo (July 23-Aug. 22) because it is summer and because the king of beasts resembles him in splendor and strength. The sun is "exalted" in Aries (March 21-April 19) because Aries is a fiery sign associated with the coming of spring. For corresponding reasons the sun is said to be "in exile" in autumnal Libra (Sept. 23-Oct. 23) and "in his fall" in winter's Capricorn (Dec. 22-Jan. 19). The other planets (in astrology the sun is treated as a planet of the earth) exhibit similar fluctuations of temperament, though for less obvious reasons.

Other astrologies developed among stargazers in China, India and what were to become the Americas; the Babylonians' system moved, with many modifications and name changes, to Egypt, Greece, Rome—and eventually to Christian Europe. The New Testament's Wise Men from the East were, of course, astrologers who had discerned a convergence of planets in the heavens that signified the birth of the Messiah. In the second century A.D., the Greek astronomer, Ptolemy, codified astrological tradition in his Tetrabiblos, which is the source book for all modern astrologers.

Caruso, Pickford, Mr. X

Condemned by the church, astrology lay dormant during the Middle Ages, flowered in the Renaissance—when Nostradamus worked for Catherine de Medici—and receded almost to the vanishing point with the Age of Reason and the advance of science during the 19th century. So it was that in the 1890s, when a Boston girl named Evangeline Adams began studying the subject, it seemed a very strange preoccupation indeed.

Evangeline's horoscope told her to move to New York City in mid-March 1899, and she arrived just in time. She put up at the Windsor Hotel on March 16, and that very evening consulted the stars of the hotel's proprietor, Warren F. Leland. As she wrote later, she hastened to warn him that he "was under one of the worst possible combinations of planets—conditions terrifying in their unfriendliness." The next day the hotel burned to the ground, and Leland's daughter and other members of his family perished in the fire. Leland told the newspapers about the prediction, and Evangeline's success was assured.

So, too, under this potent lady's influence, was the success of astrology in the U.S. To Miss Adams' studio above Carnegie Hall came the rich and respectable—King Edward VII (Scorpio), Enrico Caruso (Pisces), Mary Pickford

(Aries), Steel Tycoon Charles Schwab (Aquarius), J.P. Morgan (Aries). Morgan, in fact, is said to have become quite interested in what she had to say about the effect of the planets on stocks and bonds. Not the least of Miss Adams' achievements in behalf of her art was raising astrology from the status of fortunetelling, illegal in New York State. Haled into court as a fortuneteller, she gave so accurate a reading of the natal horoscope of an unknown "Mr. X" (who turned out to be the judge's son) that the judge ruled she had "raised astrology to the dignity of an exact science." In 1930—two years before her self-predicted death—she