astrology podcast today has astrologer (neotrads) complaining about how clients oftenn resist readings, because they are stubbornly opinionated about their own lives and tend to disagree with the astrologer about what events are important or not, and also do not understand the subtle aspects of the art.
astrology is a good interrogation method for three reasons I can immediately see:
a) It is a technic that grants the interrogator confidence that he knows about something useful about the subject’s life that can be brought out into fuller knowledge. He doesn’t believe he is on a fishing expedition.
b) If the subject believes in astrology, all the better, because now they also have faith that the interrogator can see into them and their life, and will be very easily rattled.
c) the objectivity of the technic has a sort of scale or scope insensitivity built in. astrologer man gives an example where he said to a client “this placement indicates an early childhood illness”, which the client did not see the relevance of. The astrologer, wanting to prove his technic, pushed forward and the client admitted that yes, there was a childhood illness but it was treated and cleared up, and so of no significance. This is quite a common pattern — the astrological system works in terms of malefics and benefics, and all one needs to get a hit or miss is for an event to be broadly bad or good. This is also a skill that an interrogator needs. Agent Korolev has been given a brief that the department has sexual propriety problems which are threatening security — this could be phrased as a bad venus placement. He talks to the patient intent on finding one with a method — he ingratiates himself, or poses as a coooomer himself, or adopts a stern priestlike moralist pose — perhaps he will just find that the patient jerks off every day and does not want to discuss this in the first half hour of a conversation with a stranger, or he will discover that the patient has been fucking whores who are all western spies and giving them soviet secrets. either way, it’s a hit.
they are approvingly discussing some neotrad lunatic called Zoller who was of the previous generation of neotrads (pioneering work in the 80s) who… well:
His bedside manner maybe left something to be desired, but sometimes I think he might say sometimes you need the shock treatment. And I’ve had experiences where the chart is telling… And he would talk about this. Here’s an example to go along with this that you said sounded outrageous, and then later on you kind of came around to seeing it from his way. He would talk about how he would do public chart readings. And so when he would teach something, he said, “You have to have confidence in the astrology that when you see a chart and you’re in front of a group of people you can say what it means and you don’t feel worried about it.” Which can be scary, a lot of people would never do that which could show you that they don’t quite trust their astrology. But he would say, “Sometimes I’m in front of a group and people ask me to look at their chart and you can tell they want a certain kind of answer, but the chart says different.” He said, “So I tell them what the chart says and they will tell me that I’m lying.” And he would say, “The astrology is never wrong, they are the ones who are lying.” And I thought, “Wow, how arrogant can you get? You’re telling me that someone is just going to lie to you about their own chart.” So it just seemed so outrageous until it happened to me. And I’ve had times when I have, including in groups of people, read a chart and people knew how I was going to read the chart and I wasn’t going to whitewash it, and the person would say, “No, that’s not true or that never happened. What are you talking about?” And then I would think, “Wow, maybe I’m totally out of it.” And then I would find out later that no, the chart was right and that maybe they were embarrassed, or I’ve seen cases where people have been deluding themselves about what the chart means, and we find out later that the chart was absolutely right. So what seemed outrageous at first, I then came around to seeing things more from his perspective.