To Linda Goodman, my first astrology teacher: Happy birthday

Most of the books in my dad’s study captured exactly none of my interest when I was 13. But tucked in among the financial how-to books and guides to wines and operas, one blue paperback caught my eye one day. On the back was a pretty, intense brunette with piercing eyes. On the front, the all-capital words LINDA GOODMAN’S SUN SIGNS.

“How to really know your husband, wife, lover, child, boss, employee, yourself – through astrology,” promised the cover. Astrology? I knew my sun sign was Libra, but nothing more than that. I took the book off the shelf and turned to my sign’s section.

How to Recognize Libra

Librans hate to be rude, yet they’ll straighten the crooked picture on your wall and snap off your blaring TV set. Librans love people, but they hate large crowds. Like gentle doves of peace, they go around mediating and patching up quarrels between others; still they enjoy a good argument themselves…

I read on. Extremely intelligent, yet gullible. Restless, but rarely hurried. A face like a box of chocolates. In short, a mass of contradictions behind a Brigitte Bardot smile. (Or possibly a Dwight Eisenhower smile. “You have to make allowances,” Linda warned with a wink.)

Her portrait of Libra didn’t suit me at all. It did describe someone I wanted to be. Invariably pretty? Harmonious and brilliant? Never without a boyfriend? Wow, I won the zodiac lottery! So what if we Librans also suffer from chronic mood swings and can’t make a decision without consulting our sweeties? For that matter, so what if I was actually bookish, introverted, and chronically timid around boys, and would sooner shrink into the earth than argue my case? I was hooked.

Clearly, the book’s appeal wasn’t the infallible accuracy of its descriptions. I believe that, once we’re told what we are supposed to be like, courtesy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs or any system of personality classification, some of us naturally tend to start conforming to that description. We nod furiously in recognition of the parts that rhyme with what we know (or believe) about ourselves, and shrug and skip over whatever doesn’t match. “I’m a Scorpio, I can’t help it if I’m secretive.” We’ve all heard that. Whereas I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say, “I’m a Scorpio, I can’t help it if I’m the life of the party.”

What piqued my curiosity was that, even as Linda wittily described the penchants and predilections of Virgo men (Dad), Taurus women (Mom), and Gemini friends (my best friend), she would slip in these sly, subtle references to something beyond sun signs alone. “Most [Libra women] are about as female as the average man can stand (unless there’s an aggressive ascendant),” she’d write. Or, “This antipathy to making a decision can turn into quite a stalemate with [Librans] who have adverse afflictions between their planets at birth.”

What? The other planets were relevant, too? And what did she mean by “an aggressive ascendant”? That was my first hint that there was something more to astrology. If I couldn’t claim to be Linda Goodman’s typical Libran, I reasoned, maybe it had something to do with my Moon, or my ascendant, or any of a number of other factors. No wonder all Libras weren’t identical – there was a whole deck of planets to shuffle and deal out, and my hand was different from everyone else’s. I was determined to learn more about the astrology beyond the sun signs, to find out what made me different, special, unique.

The next summer at camp, I had the good luck to take an astrology class with a college student who taught us how to calculate birth charts by hand. We used a paperback Rosicrucian ephemeris and tables of diurnal planetary motion from the American Federation of Astrologers. I learned to calculate Placidus house cusps, draw up a chart, insert planets, and do some cookbook-style analysis. It was just the rabbit hole I was hoping to tumble down. There was no turning back. (Okay, there was a turning back at my Saturn return that lasted five years, but that’s a tale for another time.)

I never asked how a book like Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs came to be in the possession of my father, a scientist and businessman with a love of art and music but not, as far as I can tell, of the occult. But I’ll always think fondly of the role it played in my youth and beyond. Whatever its actual merits as an astrology text, it’s still the original signpost that pointed me down this path.

To the late, lovely Linda Goodman, the self-proclaimed triple Aries who turned me and millions on to astrology, happy birthday today, April 9th. I raise my Mars bar to your memory.