Lois Rodden - 22 May 1928 - 5 Jun 2003

Nick Campion says goodbye

I can't remember when I became aware of Lois Rodden but it must have been about 1980. That was probably just after it occurred to me that mundane astrology was in urgent need of a verifiable, historically sourced collection of data for national charts and began work on the Book of World Horoscopes. Meanwhile, at first I was aware of Lois' work as mainly just a collection of horoscopes for famous people. It was only after a few years that I realised that she was setting down a challenge to astrologers: if you claim that accurate astrological readings must be based on exact data then stop justifying astrology by reference to wildly inaccurate, unsourced information, or what she called 'dirty data'.

This challenge to face up to the gap between the public claims and private practices of astrology encouraged me to continue with my own work, although her system of classification by letter, AA, A, B and so on, is not appropriate for the one-off instances of mundane astrology. We finally met in 1992 and became 'conference friends'. However, our professional contacts often included reference to the fact that the majority of astrologers still had little concept of the concepts of accurate and 'dirty' data.

My last meeting with Lois was at the Orlando United Astrology Congress in July 2003. I saw her in the hotel restaurant eating alone and, realising that I would never see her again, sat down for a last lunch. Again, our conversation turned to the continued failure of the astrological community en masse to grasp the principles of accurate data. She complained that, in spite of her frequent protestations, lecturers, teachers writers and editors continued to cite 'Rodden' as a source for data, completely misunderstanding the need to cite the original source as well as, if necessary, the full Rodden citation - book title, publisher, data and page number. This detail, she emphasised, was necessary because early editions of her work contained errors which were corrected in later editions. One should therefore cite the edition in order to allow others to check the accuracy of the data. In response I noted that, in a few notable recent instances, major astrological magazines had retreated even from citing Rodden as a source, returning unashamedly to the use of dirty data.

Therefore, if I am to make a comment on Lois' professional legacy it is that, while she received praise and plaudits from the astrological community, the impact of her work has in many respects been slight, for there is still no greater an awareness of the need for accurately sourced data than there was thirty years ago. Lois was a revolutionary who threw down a gauntlet to the astrological community. The fact that the community, when it does pick up the gauntlet, drops it again pretty quickly, is no reflection on her. Perhaps the underlying message of her work, that the times we use for example charts should be accurate, was so easy to ignore because she was so quiet and unassuming. She was too subtle by far. But by her dedication and unique devotion to her work, Lois was a one-off. When God made her he broke the mould. It is up to other data researchers and her successors in AstroDataBank Bank to continue her work.

Goodbye Lois, and thanks.

Nick Campion