Isabel Hickey's landmark astrological cookbook

Astrology, A Cosmic Science: The Classic Work on Spiritual Astrology by Isabel M. Hickey

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Astrology books are not exactly like literature but they have a writing style that clearly defines the astrologer/writer's relationship to the subject whether intended or not and to make it more confusing astrology has its own language that is somewhat universal but bleeds into the writer's own interpretation, and this makes rating any astrology book very hard because they all have some wisdom or insight to help a student but that doesn't mean they are all well written, or well thought out. I should also add that an American student circa 2014 is going to have a hard time finding any astrology book that wasn't written in the 20th or 21st century and that would pretty much make it a 'modern astrology' book as opposed to what is now being referred to as 'traditional astrology' an all encompassing word that defines any western astrology practiced from the Hellenistic period through the middle ages and Italian Renaissance, nor does this take into account 'vedic astrology,' which is similar to western astrology, and even absorbed by many western astrologer's (Hickey's book included), and yet is its own branch of astrology that no astrologer, not even the most mediocre cheesy hippie era one, would think of conflating because there are enough subtle distinctions between the two to boggle an astrologer's mind, but not a novice. Indian culture was very popular in the Sixties (think of the sitar) and this extended to astrology, so I'd say that Hickey's book introduced the hippies to some Eastern ideas about astrology, but Hickey herself was an American from Massachussetts born at the turn of the 20th century, who must've been inluenced by Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, or freemasonry, or some new spiritual ideas at the time, that were trying to fuse a lot of the world's spiritual beliefs into one, or that would be my conjecture. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," was published in the Sixties but must've seemed like a hard astrology book back then compared to the L.S.D. inspired astrology that was starting to become popular, and later mocked to death when I was growing up ('what's your sign, baby?') making it almost impossible for me to even like astrology let alone study it but this wasn't fair to astrology; like art, astrology will survive as long as the human race does, going in and out of vogue, with different popular interpretations of what it means or doesn't depending on who adheres to it, and yet we're all political creatures and it's hard to get over our biases. I'm not sure when it started but around the Thirties and Forties, but most definitely by the Sixties, astrology was taking on a lot of ideas from humanistic psychology, and trying to incorporate them into a reading, and while we could argue the merits of this and what will survive (this would also take a big conversation on psychology), it's fair to say that a Gen X'er was raised on 'humanistic psychological astrology,' that saw Jung as an almost mystic figure, who'd somehow discovered the key to human consciousness. I'm sure Hickey was influenced by this too but as an adult, and probably after having studied it for a long time, so that the humanistic ideas were secondary to her rather 'karma bound' way of looking at a horoscope, as a series of challenges brought over from a past life, and that it was our duty to overcome them as spiritual lessons for this incarnation, but she made it clear she believed in reincarnation, and this was a pretty spiritual dogmatic idea for the time. I'm not saying I agree with Hickey's notion of reincarnation that I'd imagine is similar to a Hindu's, but the spiritual belief that pours through every sentence and word of this book is just plain overwhelming, Jungian or not. I really felt like Hickey had a vision when she wrote this book, but one she'd been working on her whole life, so that it was free of all the flakiness of most Sixties-era modern astrology books, because she had really absorbed the fundamental rules and lessons of astrology, before sitting down to write this, I'm sure, and yet the writing is lit with illumination, so that I can only believe that she had waited her whole life for this moment, and wrote purely and potently from her heart, like a saint after having a vision, or any ascetic who has trained long and hard to see God. Nothing in this book feels fake or false, or like Hickey was talking out of her ass, which happens in a lot of astrology books, because I really think she meant "Astrology, A Cosmic Science" to be exactly what the title implies 'cosmic,' and that she was as intent on teaching a deep spirtual lesson on karma, as much as writing a 'how-to book,' and that is quite a feat. It doesn't hurt that her sentences and words are also beautifully composed in a sort of Gertrude Stein/Hemmingway short sentence way, so that each one feels like it's building on the other, and before you know it she has built a castle in words.

"Astrology, A Cosmic Science," is also a very good primer for beginning students needing the purely pragmatic. She organized the book very well, and it's one of those rare astrolgoy books that could be read by an advanced student, or a beginner, and probably both would get something out of it, but as a disclaimer you are not reading 'traditional astrology' when you open up this book and let its magic surge through you, so if you're interested in that you're going to have to go down a different road, and to be honest I wouldn't even know where to tell you to begin. Some traditional astrology books are being translated today, and you could buy them online for a normal price, but you wouldn't know the language, or the basic rules, and to my knowledge very few of these books would even begin to do this for you because they assume you already know those, and this might be because astrology wasn't for the people back in those days like it is today, so maybe I'd say that if you're going to study astrology in 2014, you'd probably have to start with modern western astrology, just to learn the basic rules, like the rulers of the signs, the aspects, and the houses, before you could even begin to go on, but I feel strange saying this, because I can easily imagine wanting to study traditional astrology when I first started, but I didn't even know it existed, so I'm sort of telling you what I did, but I think there might not be another way to do it, unless you have a tutor teaching you the rules, or a good friend. Organization is the key to any astrological book and often good organization can make a not so great book on astrology alright and bad organization absoultely impossible to read but it should be remembered that astrology books aren't novels meant to be read from the beginning to the end once or twice and then put on a shelf but are consulted over and over again like a physicain consults a book of diseases because each one has an astrolger's insight, or a way they looked at a configuration in a chart that is special to them and finding this should be easy, or at least make sense, and yet not all astrological books get this down, but maybe that's not a surprise because it's a lot like organizing your thoughts for an essay where one has to follow the other for the composition to make sense, no easy task considering how few people write well. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," is very well organizled and Hickey has a lengthy 'cookbook' section and that's something most beginners like a lot (myself included, though not as much now), and that's where she'll go over the essential meaning of a planet in a sign (Mars in Aquarius, Moon in Aquarius, etc.) and give a brief description of the karma of this position, and then goes on to do the same with the aspects, but even more so, describing the karmic challenges that each one poses for this life, and what we must do to meet it. Most books just end there and indeed that's a lot for any student, but I can say after years of poring through it there's almost always some new insight you can find, or a chapter you missed, so that it really feels like a comphrehensive almost sacred book. "Astrology, A Cosmic Science," would be my reccomendation for a new student because it lays down the rules well and offers a real spiritual vision of the chart, but it's not the humanistic psychological view of the signs that most people expect. Hickey looks at the chart from a more spiritual perspective that can make people feel chained to their life in a way that humanistic astrology doesn't do so much, but I can see Hickey arguing that only seeing your chains could let you break them.



View all my reviews