|
|
Darrelyn Gunzburg Astrologer and Author |
||||
|
|
Interview |
|
![]() |
Q: How and why did you decide to move from
Australia to Bristol? What part did astrology play in forming the
decision?
We had commuted to England seven times in the
last nine years. I had contacts in Europe and the UK for my film/theatre
work and Bernadette has done extensive astrological lecturing in the UK
and Europe. In April 2001, Bernadette and I were originally going to spend
Passover with my cousins in Israel. Bernadette was developing
Starlight and working
with Sarah Ashton, the mathematician behind the program, by email. She had
planned to spend a couple of days with Sarah en route to Jerusalem. When
the Middle East started to heat up, we cancelled the trip to Israel but I
suggested Bernadette still go to England and work with Sarah for the
duration instead.
|
|
One morning Nick [Campion] said, 'Come over,
and I'll show you what I'm doing with Bath Spa University', and he took
her to see the Sophia Centre. As soon as Bernadette saw the campus, she
knew immediately that she wanted to be part of it. It was such an
overwhelming feeling that as soon as she got back to Sarah's place, she
rang me and said, 'Would you move to Bristol with me?' I had spent three
months on an Australia Council Writer's Residency in Paris in 1992. That
was my first encounter with Europe and my DNA just loved it! I had
returned to Australia aching to return to Europe but at the time it was
impossible for us to even consider moving away from Adelaide.
In the intervening years we had developed our system of e-learning (distance education) for teaching our students astrology, so when Bernadette asked if I would move to Bristol with her, she knew two things: firstly we had an e-business we could transport with us to the UK; and, secondly, that I had always wanted to live in Europe. So the course at Bath Spa University was the catalyst that allowed this to happen.
Q: I'm interested to hear a bit more about
Astro Logos and how your move is going to affect the organisation.
Astro Logos is a graduate astrological school
and we prepare students to undertake the International Diploma of the
Astrological Guild of
Educators, International (A.G.E. Int.). This body is a collection of
schools in the UK, Europe and Australia that share a common syllabus and
standards and mark each other's students. Astro Logos is proud to be part
of this teaching process. All our teaching is done through e-learning,
email and student forums. We've been educating astrologers through
e-learning since 1993 and pride ourselves on our completion rates. Astro
Logos also offers accreditation in Fixed Stars, Bernadette's speciality,
of course, as well as a two-year Diploma in Medieval Astrology for
astrologers who are coming from a psychological background and want to get
more nuts-and-bolts into their consulting work.
Our International Diploma Course is a two-year course consisting of 6 modules: the first two modules are five months' duration each. the final four modules are each ten-weeks in length. There are assignments to complete for each module.
Q: What is the entry qualification for the
Astro Logos International Diploma?
Anyone who has some basic form of astrological
knowledge, including planets, zodiac signs, houses and aspects, as well as
calculations.
Q: E-learning - that means that people can go
through the entire course and never see you?
Yes [grins]. However, it doesn't mean they
feel separate from us. Our preferred method of giving feedback on their
assignments is by audio tape, so students are continually hearing our
voices as their one-to-one tutor and have continual access to us by email.
Q: Why should someone study with you, rather
than with any other school?
Because we turn out a well-rounded astrologer.
Our Diploma modules cover the following topics: Whole Chart Delineation,
Predictive Astrology, Children's Charts, Relationships, Weft and
Weave (techniques) and Time and Space. These cover all the things you need
to know if you want to set up as a professional consulting astrologer. We
prepare the student as much as possible for the issues clients bring to
the consulting room, for people come for an astrological consultation for
all sorts of reasons and you have to be prepared for all of them.
Astro Logos has a very high success rate in terms of students gaining their AGE Int. Diploma, so we must be doing something right. We empower the students to set up as consultant astrologers and that is what has happened with a large number of our graduates. Some don't want to be full-time consultants and astrologers but they will combine astrology with their other disciplines, for example, if they've come from the medical field, they will combine it with that. We have extremely high benchmarks and we expect a lot from our students.
Q: Is it really possible to develop someone as
a well-rounded astrologer without having face-to-face contact with them?
The onus is always on the students to start
testing what we teach them in the market place, that is, on friends at
first and then by seeing clients. Even when we taught at foundation level,
we would always encourage first year students to talk about the Cross of
Matter with their partners or friends. Getting empirical feedback is so
important. It not only consolidates what we have been teaching them via
lectures but it also gets them over the hurdle of 'talking to a stranger'
about what exists in the chart. That is something we can never do for a
student, whether we have face-to-face contact or not.
Q: From teaching with Astro Logos, what have
you found to be the main difficulties that people have in learning to be
effective astrologers?
Their own biases. The obstacles and challenges
in their own charts. Some students find it difficult to let go of their
particular world-view and find that astrology clashes with that. So they
either go through a mini-crisis and give way, or they leave the course.
We used to tell our students in their very first class (when we had them for four years), 'Astrology will change you. If you don't want to change, leave now.' Four years was a long enough time for them to go through a major life-crisis and learning astrology will provoke that, for it will act as a mirror or catalyst to their own blind spots. Suddenly they are seeing the world differently and they feel more empowered. We've had students who had never before used calculators whose husbands would call them silly or dumb and in learning to use a calculator, they became empowered. Such a small action leads to an imbalance in the roles within the marriage and thus catalyses crises. Many times we find that if the relationships the students are in are in any way weak or imbalanced, then unless they are sharing their insights and changes with their partner, and the partner is changing as well, the relationship breaks up. That happens innumerable times and we always say, 'Don't blame us! We told you in the first class!' So to sum up, it's the notion of change. Astrology asks: "Can you change? Can you become more empowered in your life?" and if you can't, then astrology will either cause crises or strengthen it.
Q: That's interesting to hear. It seems to me
that people can grab hold of astrology and just use it to reinforce their
ideas of how they are. But there's this other approach, which you are
talking about, where it can flip us into a new way of seeing things.
Definitely.
Q: Is there a problem, where people learn to
do their own chart and then every chart they look at, they are just
talking about their own chart more or less?
Right from the word go we teach students
universal techniques so that they can read any chart, not just
their own chart. We also set assignments. We're particularly rigorous with
students in that regard. We don't believe that you learn anything by
sitting in a class and just coasting. People need to have what they learn
reinforced and whilst students pay lip service to the idea of hating
assignments, they love assignments when they do them, particularly when
they get feedback and see that they've really understood a concept or a
technique. So it's acknowledging their growth and understanding of what we
are teaching them which is an aim of the course.
Q: You also work in other areas, not just
astrology?
Yes. I have, in the past, made documentary and
short films and written plays. The last few years I have been writing a
book on grief - and changing countries! (grins). I always thought
astrology was just an adjunct to what I did. I didn't realise until a few
years ago that it actually underpins what I do. It is the true
lingua franca of the world. Someone told me that I'm a Renaissance
woman, so now I know who I am! [grins again]
Q: Was this book on grief one which you
decided to write for yourself or was it something you felt needed to be
written, from experience of the difficulties students have in
communicating astrology properly?
I think you always write books for yourself.
It's work that's been ongoing for a long, long time, beginning in the
early 1980s when I started to explore loss and grief. In 1985 the title of
my graduation thesis when I was at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic
Art) was "Grief in Theatre". I was investigating how playwrights dealt
with grief. At the end of that year, my first ever lecture at my first
ever international astrology conference in Sydney, Australia, was "The
Astrology of Grief" and it's just developed from there.
Q: Is the book all about grief, or are there
completely other areas of astrologer/client interaction covered?
It's all about grief, what it is and how we
deal with it - or don't deal with it - in the West. Statistically, once
every 9-13 years we will lose someone we love. If the grieving process
takes between 2-5 years to complete, then 30% of all clients we see as
consulting astrologers will be going through this process. That's a huge
amount of clients. Normally they don't come to you with that as the issue
but if it emerges in the consultation, then both the consultation and the
client's predictive work needs to be handled in a totally different way
than if someone is not in grief.
Q: Spiritual teachers sometimes almost force
people to look at the fact of death, to meditate on it. That's saying that
we need that grief.
I totally agree. It's really interesting to
live with an awareness of death all the time. This is not being morbid. I
could walk out of here and a lorry could hit me. The line between life and
death is so fragile. A small action can produce horrific consequences;
someone can end up a paraplegic or in a coma in a split second and if you
haven't done the work of grief, if you haven't looked at what your
relationships are about and can't fully articulate what is happening for
you, if you haven't considered what the connections between you and others
mean and how they can enrich your life, if you are still living with blame
at how your life has turned out and regret at things you haven't said or
things you haven't done, then when someone you love dies, there will be a
whole lot of undelivered emotional messages which can never get delivered.
No matter how good a relationship is, the brutal fact is that the person
isn't there and you can't ever say anything to them again directly. Yes,
there is still plenty of work that can be done to complete those
incomplete emotional messages. However, if you live life as fully as you
can in the moment, while the person is there, then the unsaid messages and
actions don't accumulate and you don't carry that forward with you into
every other experience of loss. It's always better to complete karma than
to create karma.
The Romans had an interesting philosophy. When a military hero entered Rome in triumphal procession, riding in a golden chariot, hailed as a god, a person wearing the mask and costume of Death stood at his shoulder, preserving him from the sin of hubris by saying each moment in his ear: 'Man, remember you will die.'
Q: How did you start astrology in the first
place? What got you hooked in?
In 1982, after a relationship break-up,
someone suggested that I have my astrology chart read. I did, and it just
felt like coming home. Within a few months I started studying astrology
with a teacher in Sydney. I studied with him for two years and at the end
of those two years he ran a conference to which he'd invited Bernadette to
lecture. She'd just returned from a tour of Canada lecturing on the BRG,
as it was then (the Brady Rectification Graph, which has since became part
of the rectification tool in
JigSaw). I had just begun my training at
NIDA. Once I'd completed NIDA, I went to Adelaide to work in theatre,
threw out all the astrology I'd learned up to that point and started
studying with Bernadette.
Once I got my FAA Diploma, Bernadette asked me to help her teach astrology at TAFE (Technical And Further Education - a post-secondary education network in Australasia). Astrology was the most successful course they had and it was subsidising every other course. At the end of that year they closed down that branch of the TAFE system and we set up Astro Logos. The year was 1990.
Q: How would you characterise Astro Logos's
approach to astrology in terms of medieval-modern?
The International Diploma Course is quite
modern, as it is an international syllabus, so we could call that
modern-humanistic in its orientation. Of course each school involved with
the AGE Int. Diploma will always put their own mark or twist on their
teaching. Our medieval orientation is contained within the Medieval
Diploma which is totally separate from and independent of the
International Diploma. Of course one could really define Astro Logos'
astrology as post-modern, as at its heart is contained a deep connection
to the history of the subject of astrology from its ancient techniques,
the vault of the whole sky, but at the same time embracing the principals
of psychological and mythological astrology.
Q: In your talk about the Centaurs [at the AA
Conference Swansea, September, 2002], you were being careful to evaluate
whether these new bodies give us information which we really need in the
chart.
The Centaurs are with us now, we can't deny
that, so I think it's worth looking at them, exploring them and asking,
'Do we need these things? Are they useful? How are they useful?' We live
in a time when there are outer planetary issues which affect us as a
collective. Understanding death and grief is essential to our wellbeing as
a society and we continually sideline and ignore them. So my approach was
to suggest that maybe the Centaurs are important on that level, to teach
us how we can be more open about issues of loss and grief. So yes, it
really was an exploration and I'll continue to explore it and see if the
Centaurs do have links with us on a personal level or if they are only
relevant in the charts of prominent people who show us what it is to be in
pain, like Michael J. Fox with Young Onset Parkinson's disease.
Q: How is your astrological time divided up -
between writing, teaching, and so on?
Well, I probably shouldn't base anything on
this year, because it's an atypical year. [laughs] But for twelve years
Astro Logos held attending classes on Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and
Fridays. Some classes were held during the day, others at night and most
weekends there were workshops. So it was fairly full-on in terms of
teaching. Into this rigorous schedule I would then fit consulting
work. I'd probably take on four to five clients a week - and that depended
on whether I was writing a play or putting together a documentary
proposal.
Q: If you were going to be marooned on a
desert island and could only take the work of six astrologers with you,
whose works would you take?
Bernadette' Brady; Guido Bonatti; Rob Hand; Rob Zoller; the Liber Hermetis; and Omar of Tiberius.
Q: What does it mean, in astrological work, to
help a client?
To me it means to empower them, so that they walk out of the room feeling that they can cope with the dilemma with which they walked into the room. It means being able to say to them, 'Look - I don't need to see you for two or three years. After that there is a difficult time coming up in your life, so come back then and let's look at it again after you've dealt with the issue you came to see me about and have more tools in your tool kit t handle that period.'
Q: It's a difficult thing, don't you find, to
tell someone that there's a tricky time coming up without striking fear
and dread into their heart?
Well, it's called "chart side manner", as
Bernadette would say, knowing how to tell a client that in order to deal
with that rain cloud there, they have to do this work here. Hopefully the
session will have unfolded what that challenge may ahead of them is about,
so that you send them out of the consulting room with a plan in mind that
fits in with what they are trying to achieve with their life, so that when
they get to that rain cloud, they have a lot more resources and tools and
are able to handle it better.
I think it's incorrect not to tell a client that there are difficulties ahead. Life is not all smooth sailing, it's not bright shiny days all the time. It has seasons and cycles and unless the client knows how to deal with those seasons and cycles, then you haven't done your job as an astrologer. You have been dishonest in not alerting them to the terrain ahead of them. If you are clear with a client, then when they reach those difficulties they feel better prepared and will return to you at later stage for an update because you have been honest with them at the outset.
Q: How about sun-sign columns - do you think
they're a good thing, or a bad thing? Would you write one yourself?
We did for a time - for several years, in
fact. One was for a ditzy women's magazine in Australia and we were trying
to do something a little less ditzy. In the end they didn't want that,
they just wanted ditzy, so we parted ways. Then we wrote for a very
good-hearted alternative magazine in Australia called Australian
Wellbeing, and that was wonderful. We wrote the first half of the
annual magazine for several years using medieval astrology to formulate
the sun sign columns. The editor was delighted at the articles Bernadette
wrote, fantastic mundane columns looking at the year ahead using the
lunation cycles, or using the cycles of Saturn and Neptune. People were
really blown away by what we did. So yes, I think there is a lot of value
in it. If you do it properly, there is absolute value in it.
Q: Darrelyn, many thanks for making time for
this interview. I hope you and Bernadette will enjoy life in Britain and
that you keep on keeping on with all your excellent work for the
astrological community!
Thank you for asking for the interview, Garry!
|
||
Garry Phillipson graduated from the University of East Anglia in 1976 with honours in Philosophy. In 1986 Garry decided to devote time exclusively to the study of Buddhist philosophy and meditation, ordaining as a monk with the Aukana Trust. He left the monastery in 1993 but remains actively involved with the Trust. He works as Resources Manager for an internationally-based software company. Astrology in the Year Zero resulted from Garry's study of astrology. He is now furthering his studies as a PhD student at Bath Spa University College. |
| If you would like to read an interview with Garry Phillipson by Darrelyn Gunzburg, "The Interviewer Interviewed", please go to the Articles page. |