The Basis of Personology If one considers astrology to be heaven-oriented, personology is earth-oriented. That is, the basic structure upon which per­sonology is built is that of the year as it is lived, and as far as we know has largely been lived here on earth. The rhythms of the year are mostly determined by the changes of the seasons themselves, along with the lengthening and shortening of the days and nights. Each year these solar changes are roughly the same. We are fixed to a wheel of life here on earth, whose motion dictates (in the northern hemisphere) that beginning with the winter solstice, around December 21, the shortest day and longest night, the days will get progressively longer and the nights shorter until the vernal or spring equinox is reached around March 21, at which point day and night will be equal. We call this season between solstice and equinox winter, expecting that only certain plants will grow, that some animals will sleep or hibernate while others grow a full coat to warm them against the biting winds. As the days grow longer in spring, highly varied forms of life begin to emerge culminating finally in the heat of the summer, beginning on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, around June 21. With harvest comes the fall and again a period of equal day and night (fall equinox, around September 23).

Finally the days grow shorter, the sun no longer rises high in the sky, and the world moves inside to prepare for winter once more. Thus, for personology, the four most important points of the year are the spring and fall equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices. These points form a cross around which the wheel of the year revolves. Astrologically, these points do not fall in any of the twelve astrological signs, but rather between pairs of them: the spring equinox falls between the signs Pisces and Aries, the summer solstice between the signs Gemini and Cancer, the fall equinox between the signs Virgo and Libra, and the winter solstice between the signs Sagittarius and Capricorn. Each of these four areas corresponds to an astrological cusp. It may be said, then, that where astrology tends to emphasize the signs, personology tends to depend more on the cusps. Yet there is no real contradiction between the two-systems-only change of emphasis and point of view. The great psychologist C.

G. Jung was fond of reminding us of the natural rhythms of nature and of the fact that certain plants, animals, even shapes and ideas come forth at specific times of the year. Similarly, it was no surprise to him that cer­tain types of people should be born at certain times of the year as well. Jung emphasized that man does not stand outside the natural order. Personology holds that not only are certain types of peo­ple born at various times of the year, as Jung or astrology might have predicted, but even specifically on certain days. Jung pointed out that each of us in the human family, regard­less of where we were born or how we live, carries with us a huge repository of symbols in a kind of collective or archetypal unconscious. The symbols of astrology itself, on the mandala of the zodiac, perhaps spring not only from the configurations suggested by the constellations in the heavens, but also from our own shared human archetypes. By looking at the characteristics of many people born on a given day, and correlating what we know about them with basic principles of psychology and astrology, personology seeks to explore certain recurring ideas, actions, concepts and themes which those born on this day--now, in the historical past and in the future--are seemingly fated to encounter.

PERSONOLOGY AS A CYCLICAL THEORY A day is a year is a lifetime is an age As stated, at the heart of the personology theory is an underly­ing cyclical orientation. Of the three areas of study most inti­mately involved in its formation--astrology, history, psycholo­gy--only astrology requires one to think cyclically, probably because of the great wheel of the zodiac itself which is based on the spatial metaphor of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the revolving heavens above us. History is often taught as if it proceeds in a straight-line-dates are presented to us like beads on a string that stretches from the indeterminate past to the unfathomable future. Yet Hegel in the nineteenth century presented a different view of history in which cycles and dialec­tics underlie dynamic, interactive systems (an argument against a straight-line approach). Astrology teaches, as does the Hindu theory of the great wheel of the ages, that we proceed from one two-thousand-year age to the next, crawling backwards around the zodiac with the precession of the equinoxes, until we reach the begin­ning once more. W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet and mystic believed that life proceeds in a spiral movement in which two gyres (conceived of as two cones joined at their tips by a common point) symbolize the rise and fall of mankind''s development.

His poem The Second Coming begins: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer." The peregrinations of the falcon become a metaphor for the move­ment of history itself. In the same way that the medieval alchemists taught "As above--so below," the followers of George Gurgieff (such as Rodney Collin in his book, The Theory of Celestial Influence ), held that the cyclical revolutions of the electron around the atom (in the micro world of 1x10-10) relate to the revolutions of the planets around the sun (in the macro world of 1x10+10). At each step of the way, from the world of trillions to billions to millions to thousands to tens, or vice-versa, from the very small to the very large, revolves another world, and near the middle, the zero point, lies our world of everyday life. Newton''s laws were mainly formulated for this near-zero-point world, but had to be modified as science examined increasingly larger (stellar) or smaller (microscopic) universes. Personology posits this central analogy: a day is a year is a lifetime is an age. It modifies conventional astrology in two ways--first in the empirical, earth-orientecl emphasis described above, and, second, in thinking about each sign as simply a fur­ther evolution of the one before it. In this way an astrological sign is really nothing absolute in itself but rather a spoke in the great wheel.

Dane Rudhyar was the most important astrologer of our time to propose and clarify this idea. In order to explain an astrological sign in human, develop­mental terms, a complete cycle of the zodiac is taken to repre­sent an eighty-four-year human life (suggested by Uranus, whose cycle around the sun takes eighty-four years), and so a "life" can be divided into twelve equal seven-year segments. For example, Aries, the first sign of the zodiac, may be likened to the period from birth to seven years of age. A trip around the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, which is the format of The Secret Language of Birthdays , becomes the cycle of the human life itself, from birth to death. Historically seen, we may be looking at a partial explana­tion for why similar personalities are born in different time periods under the same sign, cusp or on the same day. The cyclical unfolding of repetitive "incarnations"--much like Yeats''s gyres-suggests a cettain personality type arising at a higher or lower level of the spiral, but always in the same loca­tion in any given year. In the area of psychology, Erik Erikson modified Freud''s more static ideas of developmental stages (oral, anal, phallic) into a more human format which defined a stage dynamically (for example, trust vs. mistrust) in his seminal work Childhood and Society.

Yet, until about twenty years ago, most psycholo­gists concentrated principally on childhood as the time of development, neglecting middle and old age. Only the Rosicrucians gave equal emphasis to all the periods of man''s life, from the youngest to the oldest. The increasingly holistic and humanistic view of psycholo­gy is at last beginning to prevail in our time. Abraham Maslow, to whom this book is partially dedicated, believed that every human being must continuously evolve throughout life to ever higher stages, and that getting stuck, refusing or being unable to progress further, is a true living death. Maslow insisted, throughout his life, that every human being must strive to be the very best person he or she is capable of being. Thus, bringing astrology, history and psychology together in concentric cycles or spirals--stressing evolutionary rather than static models for the individual--is at the heart of person­ology. The personality types presented under the twelve signs, forty-eight periods and three hundred and sixty-six days (including the leap year extra clay) are flexible and fluid, each evolving from one to the next, constantly in motion, constantly changing, rather than fixed in stone. THE BIRTHDAY DATA The birthdays presented in this book were gathered from many sources.

Not infrequently, these sources disagreed about the day of birth of a given individual, and in these cases a consen­sus of five or six sources was sought. In the course of collecting birthdays, one often finds repeated errors due to the same fac­tors, i.e., the day is correct but the month has been incorrectly copied, or perhaps the day itself is noted mistakenly as 8 instead of 18, or 2 instead of 21. Sometimes the death day is given instead of the birthday, or perhaps the researcher has confused two individuals w.