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The Real Astrology Applied - John Frawley
£18.99
Apprentice Books
Available from www.johnfrawley.com
Reviewed by Bernard Eccles in Astrology Quarterly Autumn 2002
  This
is the sequel to The Real Astrology,
John Frawley’s earlier book. If you liked the first one, then you’ll
love the second, because in many ways it’s a more approachable work
than its predecessor. It consists of a series of essays and notes taken
from the author’s wonderful magazine, the Astrologer’s Apprentice,
plus a few items which have appeared in other publications. That makes
it to some extent a ‘Greatest Hits’ compilation, but it does
work extremely well. Frawley’s style is hard-hitting and philosophically
intense, but at the same time larded with jokes and intentional anachronisms
which all go to create its distinctly moreish flavour. It is, however,
too rich to take in large doses, and the short magazine-length essays
in this book are just the right length, avoiding that mental indigestion
which would sometimes afflict the unwary reader when tackling the earlier
book. Paradoxically, though, being in book form makes these short essays
seem more serious and worthy of study, whereas when they were in a magazine
one tended to flip through them. So this really is like a ‘Greatest
Hits’ album: cleverly compiled, beautifully weighted and balanced,
and despite you telling yourself that you’re too much of a purist
to buy compilations, it’s actually the one you listen to the most.
The content, of course, is pure Frawley. Like liquorice, you either
like him or you don’t. But even if you don’t, you still need
to know what he says, because there is a debate going on at the heart
of astrology, and you need to know which side you are on, and why. Despite
all that people may say about being traditional in their practice, what
they actually do is add a bit of the traditional, as if it were pepper
or some other seasoning, to what is usually middle-of-the-road mid-20th-century
astrology as learned from the Parkers, Oken, et al. Frawley is the only
astrologer arguing for the tradition - and I really mean arguing, as though
he were the barrister representing the tradition in a court of law - in
the modern day. At the recent Lilly 400 celebrations, one key speaker
suggested that we were incapable of divesting ourselves of the scientific
mindset that prevails in modern society, and actually thinking in a pre-Enlightenment
way; but Frawley is having a jolly good go at proving otherwise.
This is not a book about drawing horoscopes, or a manual of some clever
new technique of self-analysis in the chart. It is about the philosophy
which underlies the art, and which most astrologers either take for granted,
learn wrongly, or simply ignore. It is a book to make you think, to make
you laugh, to make you uncomfortable, and to give you hope. If you learn
from it, so much the better; but even if you hate it and disagree with
every page, then at least it will have made you think about what your
own form of astrology is, and that can be no bad thing. Buy it anyway.
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