Lynda Hill

Studying astrology has enriched my life more than I could have imagined. I regularly travel the world lecturing and consulting, with my articles being published in magazines and journals all over the world. Up until a few years ago, I would never have thought this possible. Now I look back on my life's journey and see the unfolding of this inevitable path. For twenty years I have been involved in a quest that has taken me to more than 70 countries touching me with the wisdom of civilisations past. I now realise I have been guided and driven even from the early years of my life. These days, apart from being a mother and wife, the study and spreading the message of the Sabian Symbols is an integral part of my life. In my youth I didn't understand that I was drawn to certain places in order to begin this quest. At the age of 22, I felt compelled to travel to the Middle East, to walk on the soil and breathe the air. I felt particularly drawn to Iraq and Jordan and for a 22 year old, in 1976, this was not the usual case! I travelled to these countries with transiting Pluto exactly conjunct my Mars and my M.C. I probably wouldn't have gone if I'd known. Pluto transits force us to confront our dark side, they can plunge us into emotional turmoil and bring us face to face with extreme difficulties. There is always buried treasure inherent in Pluto transits, however, and the rewards I found certainly outweighed the difficulties. Pluto transiting over Mars can be a particularly brutal and enormously powerful energy to deal with. One can feel exposed, naked and stripped bare of one's power base. The trick of these transits is to find our hidden reserves of personal authority. At that age I was very interested in astrology, but really didn't do any in depth analysis. I certainly had no conscious knowledge of the Sabian Symbols. My father was an astrologer and an Edgar Cayce healer, having been instrumental in setting up the Association of Research and Enlightenment in Australia. Pluto was discovered in 1930 and the effects of Pluto in a person's chart were just beginning to be really understood. My father's astrology days were rather pre-Pluto-awareness and so I sailed off to the Middle East with little understanding of the depth-charge that was about to explode. I had some hair-raising adventures, to say the least. On this first major trip, in 1976, I arrived in Teheran, by myself, to meet up with a bus tour that would take me throughout the middle east. It was an `overland expedition' that was popular amongst the alternative youth travellers of the day. The alarm bells should have rung when Pan Am lost my luggage (it went to Frankfurt, but nobody told me that for four days), and I had not thought to pre-book any accommodation. There was a religious festival and the only bed available was a hotel called the `Amir Kabir' where I had to share a room with two girls, one from Australia, the other from Denmark. I was wearing only jeans, platform shoes and a see-through blouse (boy, was I naive). It was winter in Iran, bitterly cold and I was staying in a hotel nicknamed `the arsehole of the earth'. But Pluto is a deep world and I hadn't yet plumbed its depths: My room-mates thought they were impressing me with stories of having sex with bus drivers as they hitched across Afghanistan; my luggage didn't arrive for 5 days; I could only afford a very smelly sheepskin coat that got smellier as you wore it; I got my period; I got dysentery; the toilets, on the mezzanine level overlooking the `restaurant', had no doors; the sink had no plumbing; and my bed was riddled with bedbugs. This is definitely an expression of a Pluto/Mars transit. Finally the bus arrived and I joined 36 others to careen off through the lands of Iran and Iraq. I really enjoyed the people and the countryside of Babylon, Baghdad, Ur, Ctesiphon, Petra, Aqaba, etc, relishing the atmosphere and really wondering, at times, what I was doing there. Some years later I'm getting a glimpse. The whole Sabian Symbol story is embedded in the ancient cultures of the Middle East. Marc Edmund Jones, the spiritualist and astrologer who gave birth to the Sabian Symbols with Elsie Wheeler, felt that there was an unseen agency at work in the birthing of the Symbols. He wrote in his book `The Sabian Symbols in Astrology': `The whole Sabian enterprise... has been primarily a species of tapping back into early Mesopotamian and allied roots or of utilizing a matrix of reasoned conclusions from which so much of language and its notation or of mathematical abstraction and scientific achievement, seems to have streamed.' Jones was referring to the ancient Mesopotamian brotherhood, the Sabians. He believed that they were an `ancient mind-matrix' that was spiritually behind the `experiment'. The Sabian people were an ancient race of alchemists, living in Harran, a city on the banks of the Euphrates river in Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq). Harran existed from the third millennium BC to the thirteenth century AD. It was a centre of trade for metals and also the repository for the philosophy of the ancient Chaldeans, who were among the founders of astrology. The Sabian people maintained and developed the tradition of Chaldean astrology, when it had been wiped out elsewhere. Their rather sophisticated system of alchemy linked the 7 planets (as were known then) with metals, colours and numbers. The last temple to their old religion left standing was a moon temple, destroyed by the Tartars in AD 1032. The sect itself disappeared during Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, when its water supply was diverted to a neighbouring town, thus terminating its long and illustrious history. I came across the Sabian Symbols in the late 1980's finding them fascinating and very telling about a person's life and indeed their destiny. For a few years I put them into charts and used them in readings and found them very useful and reliable in painting the person's story. I didn't connect the Sabian history with my chequered past until later. In 1992, a clairvoyant friend told me that I had a mission to spread the word of the Sabian Symbols. She held my hand and told me that I would be invited to lecture at conferences in Australia and around the world, but particularly in the United States. This was on my birthday, I'd had a few drinks and my instant response was, `Sure, Georgina, except when I stand up in front of a crowd to speak, I turn to jelly. I even cried once!'. I didn't feel filled with confidence about my ability to get my point across to more than a few people at a time. The things that Georgina said to me that day, however, resonated with what I really wanted to do. I sat down and decided that I should `ask' for guidance and help in the ability to do what she said. I'd never done this before, so it was a bit unusual to even think about doing any sort of connecting with my inner self in that fashion. I did have Pluto square Pluto (from the 11th to the 8th) at that point and only 2 weeks after doing that meditation, I was tearing around the house like a woman possessed, researching charts and writing about the Symbols. During this time I began to discover the complexity of my path of discovery. I gave 2 lectures in Sydney later that month and 5 months later delivered my first lecture to an American audience at the Aquarian Revelation Conference in Lansing, Michigan. In the short time since then, I have spoken at several Conferences and given lots of lectures and workshops at venues in the United States and Australia. Every step of the way I've felt guided and supported by people who seem to be always turning up at the right moment. At lunch after giving my first lecture in the United States (and only my third lecture ever), Michael Lutin - a fabulous astrologer from New York - asked me to describe the 1st degree of Scorpio to him. There are 360 Sabian Symbols and as luck (or destiny) would have it, although I didn't have this Symbol in my chart or the charts of my family, I happened to know it well. Scorpio 1: `Tourists on a Sight-Seeing Bus'. I said that the tourists knew where they were going, but they didn't know what it looked like. They had maps and a guide, but it was a brand new experience for them. They were looking out from the bus and others were looking back at them, sort of like a gold-fish bowl. We were walking down some stairs by this point and Michael almost fell down! I'd just described the exact scenario he had in his head; he'd put on a fabulous stage show at an enormous astrology conference, The United Astrology Congress, in Washington D.C., about aliens coming from outer space on a friendly visit to earth. Each day before the show, all 1600 people at the conference would get a map of where the aliens were on their journey and where to find them when they landed (the time, date and venue of the show). His immediate reaction was to invite me to speak at a conference in New York, to be held the next year. Suddenly, I knew that within 12 months I would be off to the States again. I sometimes think back on my travels and their true purpose. In that journey through the Middle East there was one particular extraordinary occurrence. I went to Petra in Jordan in March 1976 and sat in the amphitheatre. I was moved to say `thanks'. I was at home. I had never felt at home anywhere. I went to eleven different schools, my parents moved around everywhere and I would travel to more than 70 countries. But, sitting in Petra, I felt as if I had lived there before. Definitely strange for a 22 year old who loved the discos and having fun on a superficial level (as with most of my peer group). Robert Zoller, (a New York astrological scholar who translates ancient Latin astrological texts into English and is working on Robert Hand's `Project Hindsight') sent me some material on the background of the Sabian people. He points out that the Sabian's forebears were the Nabateans. The Nabateans are from Petra! This information aroused feelings in me that defy words or logic. Then, at a Conference in Melbourne, Graham Dawson and Stephanie Johnson from Esoteric Technologies asked me to write a Sabian Symbol component for their superb computer program `Solar Fire'. It seemed like an enormous task, from getting permission to use the Symbols to creating the text. Thank God for the four planets in Scorpio in my chart. The deadline was arduously met and now they've been integrated into the computer program `Solar Spark'. Last, but not least, is the contribution by my husband, Richard. In an onslaught of Neptune to his chart he found the channels to his clairvoyance opening, with surprising results. He is doing things that even amaze me. Who would have thought that this actor come landscaper would become such a valuable esoteric partner for me. People just turn up! He has made a valuable contribution to the book as well as helping with the hard slog of typing and formatting. At first he didn't think he should have his name on the title page, but, I assure you, he deserves it. In reaching this point I've had to confront my dark side: my fear and worry of `getting it wrong' or `looking stupid', but it's mostly been a wonderful, creative and joyous journey... Wonder where all this is leading.