← The Astrology Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Chris.
- [00:00]
B
Hey, my name is Chris Brennan and you're listening to the Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is Courtney Ann Lefarre, and we're going to be talking about the famous 20th century astrologer named Linda Goodman and her famous book Sun Signs, which became the highest selling astrology book of all time. So, hey, Courtney, thanks for joining me.
- [00:20]
A
Hey, Chris, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be able to talk with you about this.
- [00:25]
B
Yeah. So this is a big topic. This is a topic I've been wanting to do for a long time because Linda Goodman's book, her first book just came out in 1968, was so massively influential and she's one of, therefore, the most prominent astrologers of the past century. And you actually did a whole research project, your PhD. You spent like six years researching her life, right?
- [00:52]
A
I did, yes. And you will probably see as we have our conversation, she's a little bit of a difficult topic to research for many different reasons. And so I was also, you know, learning as I was researching. And so I feel like she taught me a lot about astrology and she taught me a lot about research, even if she didn't intend to.
- [01:13]
B
Brilliant. Yeah, I love that. And you actually just published, it's coming out tomorrow. We're recording this today on May 11, 2026, and you're releasing a book that's like a memoir about your time researching her life. And it's actually called. The book is called. What's the book? I'm spacing out on the name.
- [01:34]
A
Oh, it's Follow the Signs, Searching for Linda, America's Forgotten Astrology Queen. And I don't know if you found this in your research, Chris, but Linda Goodman always joked that all you had to do was put the word signs in a title and it would sell. So I told my editor that, and she was like, well, then we gotta have signs in the title.
- [01:54]
B
I mean, it's a good title. That is, I have to say, it's a really good title. Thank you. And it's a good book. I just finished reading it a couple nights ago. It was different than what I was expecting because it's like a memoir. Part memoir, part biography, part investigation case. In my head. At one point I was referring to it as Fear and Loathing in Sedona, somewhat humorously. But I really enjoyed the book. And it was kind of like a Saturn Neptune type experience for me, learning about a very Saturn Neptune type character, which Linda was.
- [02:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the thing that's really interesting about Linda Goodman, in writing about her life in a kind of biographical way, is that I think her life and what she believed in really betrays a lot of what we accept as reality. And so I had to think of a way to write about her, you know, in a way that sort of embraced some of her other beliefs. So, yeah, certainly it is. I wouldn't go to the book expecting a very strict biography. And in order to write about her, I had to kind of put her within the container of my own particular journey. But my hope is that for readers, my journey looking for her also echoes some of what she went through and vice versa.
- [03:09]
B
Brilliant. All right, cool. Well, we'll talk about the book more later in this episode. So let's get into Linda and let's set the stage first by just saying who she is and how we found her. Like I said, she became basically the most famous astrologer in the world in the late 1960s and 1970s after publishing especially her first book, the massively popular book Sun Signs, which came out in 1968. And then she also published a second book in 1978 titled Love Signs that was on Synastry. And I think that book set a record for the highest paid advance in history, right?
- [03:55]
A
Yes, it did, at $2.25 million, which I don't know what the highest advance is today, but at the time that was. It was kind of incredible that she got this huge advance.
- [04:07]
B
Yeah. And it was just cause her first book had been such a wildly popular runaway success and it had helped to popularize the phrase what's your sign? In the late 60s and 1970s. So there's just a lot of notable things about her. And so she partially, not single handedly, but in a very significant way helped to sort of catalyze the massive boom in astrology that started taking place in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So I wanted to do sort of an overview of her life and work here today.
- [04:47]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [04:49]
B
All right, so let's personalize the subject a little bit. How did you first come across Linda's books or get into her work?
- [04:58]
A
Oh, well, I, you know, I grew up in like a relatively conservative town in Wisconsin. I went to church every Sunday and so on and so forth. But I always had an interest in the occult, even from a very young age. And so I would often peruse the shelves at the library, at the bookstore. And one day when I was a preteen, I found Love Signs and Sun Signs at the public library. And I sat there and for hours I read about my sun sign, and then I went. And even, I mean, I had no conception of romantic relationships at all, but I also read through Love Signs, which is about, like, heterosexual romantic pairings. And I was so seduced by her language and her stories. And the thing I think I found to be really captivating about sun signs, even at such a young age, is that she breaks down like, this is a Taurus man. This is a Taurus woman. This is the Taurus child. This is the Taurus boss. And it felt like she gave a kind of guide for how to navigate the world that felt really accessible to me at that time. And so I was just really wooed by her. And I became kind of a super fan of Linda Goodman from a very young age, even though I was encountering her work decades after she had been popular. And so I think it felt like a little bit probably out of sync with the times. And certainly as I've gotten older, I've recognized, you know, oh, like, her gender politics are maybe a little bit retrograde. And like, certain things about this are very much so a product of being written in the 60s or 70s. But I think, like, bottom line, I just thought that she was a really engaging writer. And so for me, she was definitely a gateway into learning more about astrology. I think after that, I made a big leap. And then I discovered Robert Hand and was looking at that. And so even though she's a pop astrologer, and I've met lots of astrology students and astrology enthusiasts who sort of pooh pooh her work, for me, she was actually quite influential in my own journey.
- [07:08]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. And everybody, whatever your first astrology books are, that always holds a special place in your heart, even if you go on to more advanced stuff. And I know for lots and lots of people, there were millions of people that read her books, and that was one of the actually figures. I was supposed to mention that by the time she died, her books were said to have sold more than 30 million copies. And today the publishers claim that it's something like 60 million copies because they continue to be in print and sell relatively well. So it's a lot of people's first introduction. And it's funny because you said that you first found her book when you were a teenager in 2001, and I actually first read her books in 2001 as well, when I was also a teenager.
- [07:55]
A
Wow, Chris, did you think she was cool? What was your reaction to her? Was it like, oh, this is some kind of novelty of the 60s and 70s. Were you wooed by her?
- [08:05]
B
My reaction, I mean. Cause I got into astrology through Nostradamus and some New Agey type books like that. And then I learned astrology, the idea that astrology existed through that. And then I quickly found Astra.com and quickly got into, you know, technical, modern astrology, like psychological, but also timing and things like that. I first saw her Love Signs book, which is like a synastry book, because a girlfriend of mine at the time had it and loaned it to me because it was like her mom's old book. And I read it with interest because I was mainly just looking at my sun sign and our compatibility between me and my girlfriend at the time. And I did notice that it was distinctly. It had an era of the 60s and stuff, because she would refer to celebrities that were popular back then that I didn't know their names or I was only vaguely familiar with. But I was impressed by the elegance of her writing. And she wrote in this very beautiful style that also seemed down to earth and straightforward and simple, while being elegant and kind of engaging.
- [09:22]
A
Yeah, I love that you were offered the book. Because in researching this book, what I think was so fun for me was talking with so many people and seeing how they encountered Linda Goodman. And I feel like, in a way, she. Last summer I was working with this artist at an artist residency and she told me. She's like, oh, yeah, we've always had Linda Goodman in the house. And we would like, whenever we would meet someone new, we would pull it out and look it up. I think if you go to a thrift shop, you will find Linda Goodman. So I feel like even if you're not interested in her work or you don't take her seriously as an astrologer, I think as someone in pop culture, she's worth knowing because you will encounter her, I think. And I think so many people have in different ways.
- [10:09]
B
Yeah, well. And just because her book was so massively popular in the 1960s and 70s, it has stayed on the shelves since that time because it's so accessible that every bookstore for decades would have a copy. So it sort of becomes this ubiquitous book that everyone that's either an astrologer or a non astrologer has either seen or has at least some passing familiarity with to some extent.
- [10:41]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [10:43]
B
Yeah. All right, so why don't we backtrack then and let's set some context for what led into Linda and the astrological community that she sort of arose out of. And I've done some previous episodes on early 20th century astrology. And what I was sort of understanding and putting together this episode and reading your book was that there was kind of like a baseline market by the time you get to the 1960s, because there had been a revival of astrology in the west after it died out for a few centuries after the Renaissance, it started coming back in the English speaking world around, let's say, 1900, especially in England, with figures like Alan Leo, who were reviving astrology. But he was also pushing it more towards character analysis rather than straight prediction, and he was simplifying it. And Alan Leo was also emphasizing the sun placement much more, as well as starting to make more sort of generated chart delineations that could be photocopied and sent out in almost like a mass market sense. So it's like you have figures like him at the early 20th century, and then you have in America, figures like Evangeline Adams, who I did a separate episode on, who was a really famous astrologer in the 1920s and 1930s, who had a radio show and she promoted astrology. And she was like the big figure, probably prior to Linda Goodman, that people would have recognized in the early 20th century. So it was like there was some lead in to some of these figures in the buildup of astrology in the first half of the 20th century, if that makes sense. In addition to the introduction of sun sign horoscopes by the 1930s and 40s.
- [12:41]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Chris, do you think that there was like, when Linda arrived on the scene, so these things were happening, do you think in the mainstream astrology was kind of accepted, or do you feel like there was still. Because I'm just recalling when I did my research, there was some article I looked at, and I remember there was this very kind of mean phrase where they said something like, astrology used to be the realm of the over educated and overly anxious or something? Or do you feel like folks like Evangeline Adams and these other people kind of set the stage for astrology to be accepted? Or do you feel like it was still kind of ostracized by the time Linda arrived on the scene?
- [13:26]
B
I mean, I think they set the stage for it to start to be more acceptable. But one of the issues that both Alan Leo and Evangeline Adams were dealing with is both of them had to deal with in the 1910s, major court cases against astrology where astrology was still illegal. And so both of them had to go to court to defend it. And she famously defended herself in Court in 1914 and did such a good job impressing the judge with some interpretation of his chart that she made that he completely dismissed the case, which always sounds like this legendary sort of apocryphal story, but apparently this actually happened. And so they were having to deal with other issues just to be able to practice it and not have it be outlawed. So they definitely made progress. And then Evangeline did reach millions of people through her radio show in the 1920s and 30s. But then I think the thing that really started setting the stage for Linda was the introduction of sun sign horoscopes in newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s, first starting in Britain and then spreading to the US and US newspapers, where I was looking up some numbers, where prior to World War II, there was only like 185 daily newspapers that carried horoscope columns in the U.S. but then by the late 60s, this had skyrocketed to over 1,000 daily horoscopes in newspapers, with different syndicated astrologers like Sidney Omar reaching millions. So that's more of the period that Linda comes into. There's a rise of sun sign astrology, and then astrology is not getting rejected legally at this point, and astrologers are practicing it openly, but it just doesn't have the same social cachet that it had, let's say, during the Renaissance, before the decline and fall of astrology, during the scientific revolution. So I think that's one of the things that we'll see is that culturally, Linda sits at this nexus where suddenly things change very rapidly, and it went from a lower level niche topic to something that everybody had some familiarity with. And I think that's what's so crucial and interesting about her story historically.
- [15:55]
A
Yeah. Chris, have you read Theodor Adorno's Stars down to Earth? It's like a critique of irrationality. It's a book of essays.
- [16:04]
B
Yeah, it's been a while since I read it. I was rereading. Nick Campion was critiquing it in his history book, but I haven't read it in a while. Why do you ask?
- [16:15]
A
Oh, I think you're correct that I think Linda arrived at this really interesting nexus because in that book he talks about newspaper horoscopes and about how, you know, we read newspaper horoscopes because they just affirm what is like, a newspaper horoscope isn't going to tell you to, like, tell your boss to get lost. So, like, they sort of play into mainstream culture in this way. And I feel like. I feel like Linda actually just got so lucky with the moment that she arrived on the scene because I feel like she was able to sort of transcend, ascend that a little bit by focusing on the sun sign and to sort of move beyond what I feel like maybe Adorno or other critics were saying were sort of superficial about these newspaper sun signs or that they were just kind of like a novelty.
- [16:59]
B
Right? Yeah. I mean, that's one of the. It's an interesting thing that I'm curious about because I often wonder if you mention astrology to somebody in the year, say 1700, they're thinking about somebody who knows all these advanced mathematics, who might be working for kings or emperors, who's casting charts and attempting to predict the future. And then at some point in the 20th century, when you mention astrology to someone in the general public, they immediately think horoscopes and they immediately think sun signs and they think that's all there is to astrology. And so the, the 1960s and Linda and also the rise of sun sign columns is the nexus where that changes. And there's that flip of greater awareness of astrology, but also a greater perception that it's something more simplistic or basic in what it assumes. Yeah. So I think that's what I would say to that.
- [18:00]
A
Yeah. And what a bummer. That is kind of funny to put those two things up, you know, side by side.
- [18:08]
B
Yeah. I mean, that's the double edged sword that Linda's life started to really, especially in her later years, get into, which is the double edged sword of what we call pop astrology and whatever we mean by that. But the double edged sword of that pop astrology makes astrology more accessible and it makes it exist in society in a way that it wouldn't otherwise and becomes many people's first introduction to astrology. But then the other side of that is then people have a false conceptualization of what astrology encompasses and what it can do and what it is in some ways.
- [18:47]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in the process of writing this book, because I was talking with Linda Goodman so often, a lot of people would say to me, well, are you an astrologer? Can you look at my chart? And I always had to say, listen, I am not that smart. I don't know math, I have a PhD, but it's in a completely different thing. And so, yeah, I struggled with that too, with the book where I feel like I have to acknowledge she was so influential, I think, in the popularization of astrology. And for me it still feels a little bit mysterious in terms of what her actual astrological capacity was and that I think probably you will speak to this at a certain point, but about was she casting charts for people? What exactly was the capacity of her knowledge and what was she doing? And I don't know. I think in a way, and I don't know if this is what you think, Chris, but I feel like she had to be a little bit brave as well. And I don't know, maybe all astrologers feel that way. It's like I am going to do something that a huge segment of society thinks is rubbish or it's totally irrational and you have to kind of wrap your arms around it. Does that happen to you as an astrologer? Is that something that you have to contend with?
- [20:03]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think all astrologers at some point, and I think she did, because we see this in her biography, just discover certain people, discover the subject, and they're so taken with it and they're so impressed that it works and that it can do what it can do, that they just want to dedicate their life to it, and they just want to do nothing else but study that subject because they find it so fascinating. And I think she was one of those people at first, especially in the 1960s. Yeah, why don't we talk about that? Let's introduce her and her timeframe. So she was born Mary Alice Kemmere in 1925, right?
- [20:44]
A
Mm, yes, she was.
- [20:46]
B
Okay. And she was very secretive about her birth data for the entirety of her life. She would drop, like, little hints in her books, but she would also sometimes give out false info to throw people off. But a data collector, an astrologer named Frank Clifford, later obtained her birth certificate, I think, after she passed away. And her birth data is April 9, 1925, at 6:05am in Morgantown, West Virginia. And here I'll put up a copy of her chart. So for those watching the video version, this is her birth chart. So she was born with aries rising, with 22 degrees of Aries rising. I'm using whole sign houses in this just because that's what I use on the podcast. She used equal houses, interestingly, which we'll get into, but she had 22 Aries rising, and her sun sign was actually Aries. She has the sun in Aries at 19 degree. So she was born just after sunrise that day with the sun in Aries and Venus in Aries. Also in the first whole sign house. She was born almost exactly after a full moon in Libra, which is over in her Seventh house. That would have gone exact the previous night before she was born, while her mom was in labor. Basically, she has Jupiter in capricorn in the 10th in a day chart. The ruler of her ascendant is this Mars in gemini in the third house of communication, which I've always used for like 10 years as an example of. She became famous as the highest selling astrology book writer of all time. And she has the ruler of the Ascendant in the third house in Gemini. And she also has Saturn in Scorpio in the eighth house. That's pretty closely square Neptune and Leo in the fifth house. And we're going to come back to that a lot because I feel like that Saturn, Neptune, square ends up playing a really prominent role in terms of her biography.
- [22:51]
A
I'm excited for it. You've brought a whole new lens that I hadn't even thought about with Linda or the book.
- [22:57]
B
Awesome. Okay, and then last point is just she has Pluto at 11 degrees of cancer, conjunct her IC at 12 degrees of cancer, and Uranus in Pisces in the 12th house. So early in her career, she worked as a newspaper reporter, a radio writer, and occasionally a broadcaster, right?
- [23:19]
A
She did, yeah. Her sort of, you know, big thing that she did was she had a radio program called Love Letters from Linda, where she would read letters from soldiers who were abroad to their lovers back home, and then she would pair it with a song. And so that's where she, you know, she was born Mary Alice Kemry, and then she got this name, Linda and then Goodman, from her second husband, Sam. And I think that, you know, for me, the conception of her having this radio program really mirrors what she did with Sun Sign and Love signs because she's literally bridging two people who are separated by distance. And I think that's what she does in her books because so much of her work is about understanding. And she's actually. And I don't know if you got this impression from her books, Chris, but I find her to be quite utopian in a way where it's like anyone can, through the power of astrology and through the power of knowing your sun, signs can understand each other. And so I just love thinking about her radio program as a kind of case study for what she did in her astrology career.
- [24:21]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And just later, she would write so much, there would be so many words that would come out of her pen or her typewriter. But early in her career, just thinking about her talking on the radio and stuff, she also may have Written political speeches for a politician at one point as well.
- [24:40]
A
Right, yeah. As with many things in Linda's life, I couldn't precisely pin down who or when or what. But that's also what I heard from several sources, was that she also had a career as a speechwriter and a political consultant.
- [24:55]
B
Got it. Okay. So she seemed to just possess this really incredible natural facility with words. And she also integrated poetry into her life a lot of different times, and that seemed to be something that was really important to her.
- [25:10]
A
Yes, absolutely. And I think we will see that much later in her life. I also feel like she was someone who was a reader. And, you know, if you'll look at her books, there are references to Peter Pan. There's Alice in Wonderland. And so I think she was very interested in language's potential to, you know, illuminate deeper truths about human existence.
- [25:33]
B
Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. And you mentioned. So she had a first husband who she was married to in the 1950s, but they lost at least one child in infancy in 1959, which was on a Saturn Neptune conjunction. And then it seemed like they separated at some point later in the 50s after suffering that loss, I think.
- [26:00]
A
Right, yes. And if you go through the process of the book, I went to her grave, and so you can see. See the grave of her infant daughter alongside her grave. And so, yes, she was married, and then I don't precisely know when they separated, but then later this first husband would die. And based upon her sort of fantastical autobiography, it seems like this experience, certainly the death of an infant child is really devastating. But then I also think her first husband's death was very difficult for her.
- [26:39]
B
Yeah, that becomes one of the recurring themes, is that she suffered a lot of tragedies surrounding death in her life. She has that Saturn in the eighth house in the house associated with death. And sometimes the placement of Saturn can indicate where we have fears or hardships or challenges in life. And so these deaths are happening in, like, the 1950s. But then I think even earlier, there's a reference that she had lost a younger friend of hers when she was a girl or something like that.
- [27:14]
A
Right, yeah. So this. You can see this in her. I hesitate to call it an autobiography. I'm not precisely sure what to call it, but she wrote a book that she published in the 80s called Goobers, and it's. I initially thought it was a kind of autobiography. I would say it betrays a lot of the rules of autobiography. It's a little bit more of a fantastical retelling of her life. And initially when I read the book, I was quite disappointed because I wanted some sort of facts about her life. But knowing that she had Saturn in the eighth house, I think the book is actually quite interesting because it's really charting her experiences with grief. And so we see that even these smaller griefs in her life, early on she talks about losing a cat. She talks about losing her grandmother, and then also a friend when she was quite young and about how impactful that was on her. And then later she talks about losing her first husband, losing her child. And then later on she talks about this lover that disappears or goes away. And so knowing that she has Saturn in the eighth house, I think for me as a reader, I'm like, actually this is quite representative of who she was, even if it's not, you know, factually doesn't have all the details about her life.
- [28:29]
B
Yeah, I feel like she experienced some sort of early core wounds surrounding death that left some sort of permanent impression on her, but also gave her. Because it's not just Saturn in the eighth house, but Saturn is squaring her Neptune in the eighth house. And it gave her some inability to cope with the reality of death. And she later in life would commonly like people that had died. She would claim that they were still alive somehow, both in her personal life, but also with celebrities and stuff like that. She would claim that various celebrities were still alive and hadn't really died. So there's this recurring theme throughout her life of this inability to cope with things like death, but also some fears surrounding things like time and age and other things like that that are all very Saturn coded.
- [29:27]
A
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think for a long time she would say that Howard Hughes was alive and he was living on a yacht or something. Don't quote me on that. She had a lot of things to do with yachts and sometimes I confuse them. But what's also so interesting about that book is that, you know, and this is only occurring to me now part of the book too, when she's very young and she experiences the death of her cat and her grandmother and this friend of hers is that she's beseeching God and saying, like, if you, you know, if you are so good, if you care about me, why are you taking these people away from me? And then there's also, you know, another part of the book where she is really just hard on herself about not being able to accept death and about, like, why can I not accept this? Like, why do I have this inability to really wrap my arms around this. And you know, later there's some YouTube clips if you ever want to Google Linda Goodman. But she would always tell people that she was 400 years old and that one of her later books was also about immortality. And so, yeah, like that conception of being afraid of death or like figuring out some way to kind of like circumvent the natural realities of the human body is definitely something that it seems like she grappled with.
- [30:39]
B
Yeah, that's incredible. And I talked a few days ago with an astrologer named Robert Glasscock, who knew her during the late 60s and early 70s, and he mentioned a side thing a couple of times that she didn't have any clocks around her house. And I thought that was a weird additional, possibly somehow related thing about just this almost like fear of time in some way. I don't know if that's an accurate thing. I can't ask her that. But it's weird recurring theme that runs throughout her life at different points. And you've mentioned the biography, the autobiography that she published towards the end of her life a few times. And I should mention that that was published right on a Saturn neptune conjunction in 1989, which is one of the things that I find so fascinating about it because it's this very bizarre semi autobiographical, but also written in verse or poetry and also imaginary and making up a lot of things. And then ironically now this year that Saturn and Neptune is conjunct again. We have a recurrence 36 years later. We have yearbook coming out on her and I've even seen a couple of other references to other things about her recently that are happening this year. So there's something about not just the Saturn Neptune conjunctions, but also the Saturn Neptune square in her birth chart that are all very interrelated in her timeline.
- [32:13]
A
Yeah, she's definitely. She's having a moment also just going back a little bit. And again, we can't talk to Linda, so I guess we don't totally know. But one person that I spoke with, and this is in the book, talked about how she was also really obsessed with looking young. And so this person showed me a picture of her and she's probably like in her 50s or 60s and she's got pigtails and with like ribbons and she's wearing pink. And so that was also quite fascinating. And I do wonder if maybe that echoes a little bit of this, you know, this sort of fear of death or grappling with death or. And perhaps maybe manifested in a kind of idealization of youth or Just wanting to look younger.
- [32:54]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, one of the things. She has Venus in her first house. And one of the things is she was really kind of, like, beautiful, or would you say strikingly pretty? Earlier in life, I felt like was one of the things that came up. Right.
- [33:12]
A
Yeah. And again, one thing that I think is both fascinating and kind of frustrating about talking about her is that she, you know, deliberately would sort of spin lies about her own life. You know, she would tell people that she was a triple Aries and she was 400 years old and so on and so forth. And so one thing that I did read about her was that she used to be, you know, in beauty pageants. And so certainly, like, that would make sense that that was something that, you know, she was proud of and that. And, I mean, I think she was a very beautiful lady in her younger years, for sure.
- [33:43]
B
Yeah. There's a picture on the back cover of the original book, and I think that's the one you use on the COVID of your book. So. Yeah, so that's going on. Oh, yeah. I wanted to mention in passing, since we're talking about all of this, but you actually. That Saturn Neptune conjunction that she published her autobiography on in 1989, you were born on that same conjunction a little bit like the year before that, in 1988, right?
- [34:10]
A
Yes, I was. Which I had no idea until talking about you with this podcast that that was even a thing. And I. I think that's kind of wild.
- [34:20]
B
Yeah, it's really wild. Cause it means she published her autobiography on a Saturn Neptune conjunction 36 years ago. And then the next time a Saturn neptune conjunction happened 36 years later was in 2026. And now another sort of autobiography or book about her was written, a biography, semi biography was written about her by you. And you happen to be born on that conjunction. That's a little on the nose astrologically in terms of stuff, but there's actually a lot of things, as we'll see today, that are surprisingly on the nose in terms of how the astrology lined up with her life.
- [34:58]
A
Yeah, wild.
- [35:00]
B
Okay. Yeah. So let's get into it. So, as we were saying, she worked in radio, and while she was working in radio, she met her second husband at some point in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Roughly. I think.
- [35:18]
A
Yeah, roughly around there. That's a murky area of time for Linda.
- [35:22]
B
I guess we should state that ahead of time because she was such a Saturn Neptunian figure. There's a lot of things that are hard to reconstruct about her biography because of the lack of clarity and sometimes deliberately making up of stuff that didn't happen or other things like that. So we're gonna do our best today, but sometimes all you can do is approximate. So her second husband's name, though, was Sam Goodman. And after marrying him, she ended up adopting his name, of course, and then becomes Linda Goodman. All right, so in 1963, I think Sam and Linda moved to New York City. And at one point, Sam brought home a copy of an astrology book that was titled the Coffee Table Book of Astrology by John lynch that was published in 1962. And this is what evidently initially sparked her initial interest in astrology. And then she got really into it and she decided to seek out classes and she started seeking, studying under a teacher in New York, an astrologer named Lloyd Cope. So this seems to be like the beginning of her really getting into astrology. But because that book came out in 62 and because she moves to New York in 63, I think this is when she's first getting into astrology is really like the early to mid-1960s, maybe as late as like 1963 or so.
- [36:58]
A
Yeah. And I also think, you know, to echo what you said before, I'd also heard, you know, she was certainly influenced by that book and by Lloyd Cope, but I also get the sense that she saw those, you know, sunshine columns in the newspaper, or not in the newspaper, sorry, at the grocery store. And so I think it was like perhaps coming at her from multiple angles. Also, the, you know, part of Linda is myth. And so, you know, the myth or sort of the thing that a lot of people attached to about her was that she wrote sun signs in a kind of fever. She was just in her bathrobe writing this book like it came directly through her. And so initially when, Icause I didn't quite realize that it was just a four year period that she studied astrology, but then I was like, well, I think she was an intense lady. So I don't know if that totally surprises me now that I have more info from you.
- [37:49]
B
Yeah, well, that becomes one of the questions is like, does she really only start studying astrology at this point? Which, as far as I can tell, seems to be the case from some of the facts that were said by different people. But if that's true, let's say hypothetically that she starts studying, let's say, push it to the earliest, let's say 63, that she starts studying, then there's only four or five years then before her first book is published in 1968. And so on the one hand, that brings up a bunch of stuff. It means she may have been a much earlier astrology student when she wrote the book than people might think or than the reader might initially believe based on this huge book talking about all the characteristics of the signs and how influential it became. But it's like a. As far as I can tell, that actually might be the case. But you do bring up an interesting question, which is maybe like most people, maybe she did have some familiarity with sun signs and news horoscopes in the sense of newspapers and things like that. But then she gets into astrology in the more advanced forms after. It's not really clear. It's somewhat ambiguous, I guess.
- [39:11]
A
Yeah, it is a little bit ambiguous. And that's kind of why I think of her as like. I mean, I feel like it's very Aries to say, like, I don't know that much about this topic and I'm not an expert, but I'll write a whole book about it. But I, I guess, you know, seeing her life unfold, it doesn't totally surprise me that she would have done such a thing and sort of like, you know, rammed into doing this particular study. But it, I mean, it actually does seem kind of incredible to me that she. I mean, I guess my other thought too is like, you know, having published a book, you know, it came out in 68, but, you know, there was like a lead up to actual publication. And so it.
- [39:49]
B
Right.
- [39:49]
A
Yeah, it probably really was only like four years that she was studying it, which I think is pretty incredible for I would say the, you know, not only the, the kind of loveliness of the writing that she did, but also I think how she was really able to have this, this study of personality and of character that resonated with so many people.
- [40:11]
B
Yeah, and four years is like the generous thing because you're right. There would have been a lead up time in terms of. Evidently she shopped the manuscript around to 17 different publishers who rejected it and then eventually got one. But there would have been a process of editing, of typesetting and everything else so that condenses it. So that when I talked to Robert Glasscock, who knew her in 1968, right after it came out, he said four years, it might be less than four years. And one of the things though is that's not actually that uncommon because I've seen different versions of that over the years, over the past, what, 20, 25, 30 years that I've been in astrology, where sometimes you'll have a new student that comes along that gets really into it. And that's actually most astrologers, when they really first get into advanced astrology, they dive into it and they want to learn as much as they can about it and it becomes sort of a consuming thing because it's so interesting and they find it so fascinating and they want to master it. But then there's different versions of some students sometimes who will very quickly start either doing consultations very soon after they've started learning it, or they'll start teaching sometimes really relatively quickly after they learned it, or in some instances they'll start writing on it and writing books or other things like that relatively soon. Because I noticed there's a tendency where there's often two types of people. There's sometimes people that will do all of that much quicker than they probably should a little bit early in their studies. And there's another type of person that will put that off much longer than they should and instead do the opposite, which is study for years and years and years, but still not think they're ready to do a consultation or still not write about it or talk about it publicly or what have you. So it usually goes one way or the other based on the personality or how conscientious the person is. But yeah, she may have been, and that may be one of the ironies, is that she was somebody that just studied for a few years or so before writing this book on it, which is really interesting because then the book just happened to take off and become the biggest selling astrology book of all time and became her legacy. And just to imagine then that provides a lot of context, understanding the whirlwind that she kind of went through.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah, I mean, in a way I think it is like, it's kind of like her life story is really wild in that way. And I also, I think as we unfold through her life, I think that becomes really important because I, and I, I would like one of like, if I could have dinner with anyone, I would have dinner with Linda Goodman and like ask her this question because I, I do wonder if like part of the tragedy of her life is like, like was she expecting this and was she able to like hold everything that came to her and like, was actually her fortune part of her demise? In, in a way,
- [43:16]
B
yeah, because she suddenly becomes like a millionaire almost overnight. It changes things very rapidly, including her marriage. They get separated and she starts having financial issues over the course of the next decade of spending too much or giving away too much and then going back and forth with that and then making a lot again. She also. One of my reflections late in researching this was that the book is released and it takes off, but then she has this huge pressure to write a follow up and it takes her like 10 years to do that. And she really struggles with it during that time. And in the interim I was reading through her recommended reading list and all of her astrology books are from the 1960s and then they kind of drop off in terms of the, the years of the books that she was buying new. And then in the 70s they pick up with all these metaphysical titles. And I feel like she increasingly wanted to become more of a writer on metaphysics and philosophy and spirituality. But what she was known for was astrology. So it almost in some ways became tricky. I don't want to go so far as to say a curse, but I noticed a divergence in her biography in terms of what she starts doing in the 60s with astrology initially versus what she focuses on and talks about the most later on.
- [44:43]
A
Yeah, and I mean, I think that's such a great observation and something that I didn't even think to look at when I was doing my research. But I think that's totally, I think that makes a lot of sense. And even just comparing sun signs and love signs, I mean love signs is like way more, woo. Way more out there, I would say, than sun signs. And I spoke with one of her editors about love signs and he talks about how, you know, there's all this front matter and which I'm sure we'll, we'll get to in just a moment. But you know, there were, I think it's maybe quotes from Peter Pan. Well, of course you have to have the rights to talk about, you know, you can't just like all of that is copywritten. And so he was like. So we were trying to like get these copyrights and she, you know, I think it was like the manuscript was due and she didn't have it in. And then when they turn it in, it's this thousand page thing with all of these quotes from Peter Pan and they have to try to get the rights to it. And so she. I think there's a really big difference between the two books and I think it reflects what you're saying, Chris, that perhaps she initially thought of herself as someone that got people to start thinking about astrology, but I actually think she was perhaps a little bit more, you know, in her personal life. And her interests, you know, interested in things that were much more sort of obscure or eccentric to the mainstream ultimately.
- [46:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely. There's a huge jump. And that's one of the things that makes the first book so charming, is she has this somewhat concise, engaging, beautiful writing style that's very simple and elegant and things like that. But then it starts shifting rapidly the further you go in her. Her chronology. And, yeah, in 1978, you get another astrology book, but it has this much larger introduction where she's going on much further metaphysical tangents compared to the first one. So something happened in between, and we'll get to what that is here in a moment. So with this first book, one of the scenarios is just. I think she may have been a newer astrology student, but she was somebody that was an excellent writer. And once she had learned the language of astrology, part of the first book almost becomes like a creative writing exercise, because although she was drawing on some empirical elements of citing different celebrities who were in the news at the time, there were certain signs, I think, when she learned the basic language of astrology, because it's like learning a new language. And there's certain people that have ease with languages, with picking up new languages like French or Spanish or what have you. And once you do that, you can kind of dive in and just start talking that language. And that's kind of what she did really well in that first book, was just take the different keywords and archetypal pieces and weave them together in a very beautiful and compelling way, I feel like.
- [47:43]
A
Absolutely. And I mean, she also. I mean, the book is kind of funny, too. I mean, she has anecdotes from people that she knows, so she has examples of a Taurus man and so on and so forth. Forth. And the other thing that's quite interesting about the book, too, is that I don't like. Certainly she's all about, like, we should understand each other. And I want astrology to help us, but I mean, she doesn't. You know, she will tell you about also the challenges and, you know, both the light side and the dark side of certain signs. And I feel like for me, as a reader, that really added to her credibility. And, yeah, I think charming is absolutely the word. It's a really charming book and it's very accessible, and it could fit in your purse or you could pass it around at a party. Whereas, Love Signs. It's a behemoth of a book.
- [48:29]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's get right into it. Let's talk about the book and the release of the book. So culturally, this was a really interesting time. The book came out in 1968, and it basically dropped right during the height of the 1960s counterculture movement. So it's like, for reference, this is the same era where the musical Hair debuted on Broadway in 1968, earlier the same year. And this is the one that the famous it's the Age of Aquarius song comes from from that musical. The Summer of Love had just occurred in San Francisco the previous year in 1967. The Beatles had just traveled to India in early 1968 to study transcendental Meditation. And Woodstock would happen the following year. After Linda's book came out in 1969, and I didn't know this, I just learned that the original title for Woodstock was Woodstock Music and Art Fair Presents an Aquarian Exposition. Did you know that? I had no idea that was.
- [49:30]
A
No, I didn't know that. But I absolutely love it.
- [49:33]
B
Yeah. So it's in this context that all of a sudden, In September of 1968, Linda Goodman's book, which was titled Linda Goodman Sun Signs Drops, is released and just explodes as this huge phenomenon. And one of the things that's interesting about this time period is that it was released in September 1968, and this was eclipse season, basically. And a series of eclipses started happening in late September, September and early October that were in Virgo on September 22, 1968. And then Aries in her rising sign not far from her ascendant and her sun, ironically, on October 6th of 1968. And, yeah, she basically ends up releasing this huge book that changed the trajectory of astrology during a set of eclipses during this time, which is stunning. And we'll seek eclipses, come up at a number of really important points in her biography. All right, let me show the chart for that real quickly, just because it's kind of stunning, also because I was just contextualizing it in terms of the counterculture movement at the time. But when astrologers talk about the 1960s, they usually talk about the, like the Uranus, Pluto conjunction that was taking place throughout the later part of the 1960s. But look at this. Like this eclipse, right when her Sun Sign books came out, it was a Virgo solar eclipse that occurred on September 22, 1968, and it was at 29 degrees of Virgo, almost exactly conjunct Uranus, which is also at 29 degrees of Virgo and not very far from Pluto. Pluto, which is at 22 degrees of Virgo, and Jupiter at 19 degrees of Virgo. And so this was the context in which her book came out. And then all of a sudden, quickly, over the next few weeks, would become this sensation and would become the first astrology book that would hit the New York Times bestseller list, which means it was selling a ton of copies. Yeah. So are there any other things about that context of the counterculture movement or what was going on at that time or any things that you can think of?
- [52:12]
A
I mean, I think the thing that I have to mention, Chris, is your note that just to note how rare it is for an astrology book to be on the New York Times bestsellers list. And the only other one was Chani Nicholas's. You were born for this in 2020, which I didn't realize, and I think that's pretty incredible.
- [52:32]
B
Yeah, I didn't realize that either. I mean, I'd always read that thing about Linda's being the first. But then I was like, okay, well, there's probably been a bunch since then, but I was looking it up today, and it's like, no, it's just Chani's, which I remembered because that was stunning to me. And Chani. Yeah. Has been. I don't want to make that. I was gonna say has been our generation's version of that. But she's not, because she's more advanced and complex as an astrologer in many different ways. But Chani's book hitting the New York Times bestseller list was a really cool event. And I remember going to Barnes and Noble and buying it, because she got it out right before the pandemic hit, just barely under the wire. It was like a buzzer beater. But I was looking up because I was like. I thought of a few other titles that could have been, but no other titles have hit in the same way. So that gives you another sense of just the enormity of what happened with Linda Goodman's book in 1968, 1969, that it became this sensation, especially because it was first published as a hardback and it was published by a smaller publisher because all the big publishers rejected it. So there must have just been this huge word of mouth that was explosive, and the book was flying off the shelves in order for a more expensive hardcover from an independent publisher to hit the New York Times bestseller list at the time. It means this thing was really being talked about by everybody.
- [54:02]
A
Absolutely. And I think, like we talked about before, I feel like that's still a little bit how Linda circulates. I feel like she does circulate through word of mouth. And I think, you know, whether that's for her astrological knowledge or sort of the charmingness of the book, or as I think we'll get to in a second, the kind of tragedy and sort of peculiarities of her life, I do think she sort of exists in that word of mouth kind of terrain where people are sharing her books sort of person to person, or you get them at a thrift store. But no, that's a really good point about Chani, too, that, like, because when I was writing this book, I was also thinking, you know, one of my big arguments was that I think we should remember Linda Goodman because I think she was kind of a precursor to some of the more pop esque astrologers of today. But I think you're right. Like, even Chani. Jessica Legnioto, you. You are not simply just talking about sun signs. Like, it's actually much more complicated. And I actually, like. I don't know, I kind of love that, that today we're not just talking, talking about sun signs. Really, anyone that I talk to about astrology now, they'll be talking about retrogrades and their Venus sign and these transits that they're having. And so I think that's really neat.
- [55:17]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And we can relate to what happened in Linda's time because we just had a version of that happen in our own generation, which is that in, like 2018, 2019, 2020, astrology suddenly started, surged in popularity and became really trendy again, sort of out of nowhere. And it was weird because we were documenting it at the time, and I did an episode talking about that with a couple of people right as it started, and whether this was actually happening or whether this was just like a media thing, but it was like, no, we happened to find ourselves in the surge and the nexus of a bunch of different events that were cultural and outside of our control that led to this boom in the popularity of astrology between 2018 and into the early 2000s. And then in that there's certain astrologers that do rise up that are doing work at the time and happen to write something that just hits on a cultural point much closer, like Chani did. And in our time, what happened that I was so impressed by is it became common for everybody to know what their big three is, their sun, moon and rising, which is incredible to me. But what happened in Linda's time is that was when it became common for the first time for everybody to know their sun sign. And her book, even though horoscope columns existed Prior to that and were getting more popular. There was something about her book that threw gasoline on that fire and accelerated it and made it so that everybody knew their sun sign, and so that even the phrase what's your sign? Became common after that point.
- [57:01]
A
Yeah. And I think part of her books, too, is that I think it wasn't even simply like, what's your sign? It was like, how do you deal with your boss? How do you deal with your child? And so even though she was just simply speaking about sun signs, I do think there's a point of being a little bit more granular with her work as well. And so, like, everybody could find something of use in this particular book, whether it was like, you want to flirt with a Virgo or you have a Sagittarius child and you don't know what to do with it. But that's a really great observation about how we went from sun signs to what are your big three? Or. I don't know. I have a friend that's always asking people what their Venus signs are, and that's really interesting.
- [57:43]
B
Yeah, well, that's going to be the next stage. I don't know. At some point, there'll be a. Like, it's starting to shift to, like, what's your big six? Or something like that. Like, it's starting to get up there. We'll see whatever the next version is of that. One of the things I was struck by in going back and rereading Sun Signs recently in preparation for this is right in the opening of the book, even though Linda is writing a pop astrology book that would help popularize the notion of sun signs, and it's restricted to sun signs. Right in the beginning of this, she starts talking about your full birth chart and that you really need to get your full birth chart calculated and that you're a combination of your ascendant and your moon and all these other things. So one of the things I realized that made her unique and part of the effect of her book is she didn't just popularize sun signs. She also probably popularized astrology, and she probably introduced millions of people to the concept that a birth chart or an ascendant or a moon sign even exists, because she mentions it right away at the beginning of the book. And in doing so, she didn't just create a boom in pop astrology, but she also singularly became the entryway for lots and lots of people into the more advanced forms of astrology and birth charts as well.
- [59:05]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's the very first word of the book, Someday, you will doubtless want the complete details of your personal natal chart. Meanwhile, you can be sure that studying your sun sign is an important first step. Yeah, and she does that, too, in love signs. Like, she'll talk about, you know, like, a particular romantic pairing that's maybe a little bit more challenging. And she'll say, well, you know, it kind of depends on what, you know, your. Your moon sign and your ascendant is. And so that's a. That's a great point, Chris. I gotta tell people that when I meet Linda Goodman, haters that listen, it's not just about sun signs. She's also pointing you to go see an astrologer and get your whole chart cast.
- [59:43]
B
Yeah, exactly. And I put out a call for astrologers the other day on Facebook just to tell me if they remember when Linda's book came out or when they first encountered it. And I have to say, so many astrologers were saying that they first got their first entry into astrology after reading her book. So it's hard to gauge things, but there's something there about it being this entryway. And all popular, let's say popular astrologers who attempt to write for the masses end up at that nexus. And some of them do a better or worse job of doing that. On the one hand, speaking to the general public about astrology, who doesn't have any technical background, and trying to simplify things and not use jargon and make it as accessible as possible, but then also occasionally referring to that this is just the tip of the iceberg of something that is vastly more complex. And we see Linda doing that, and then we've seen a series of other astrologers doing that in more recent times, the best example of which recently is Chani in her book how she simplifies the three planets, the sun, moon, and rising, but also mentions other things as well.
- [61:00]
A
Mm, absolutely.
- [61:02]
B
All right, so one of the things that happened is their book was really successful in the hardback version. And right away, at some point, there was a giant publisher, an industry giant named Bantam books, who swooped in and bought the mass market paperback rights to publish the paperback version, which eventually they did in 1971. And this further catapulted her book sales into stratospheric levels, even after it had already been huge. Because then once the paperback version comes out in 1971, suddenly it's everywhere. And it's in grocery stores, it's in drugstores, it's in airports, and even I was talking to Demetra George the other day to ask her her recollections, and she said she remembered seeing it at grocery store stores, you know, just as a paperback when you're checking out, that it was literally like, everywhere.
- [61:56]
A
Oh, my gosh. Can you even buy books? I've never. I don't know if I've ever seen a book at a grocery store. That's kind of incredible.
- [62:03]
B
Yeah, well, it's like. My closest analogy is I do remember, like, 10 years ago, for a period of time, like, Whole Foods was carrying some episodes of like or an issue of like, the Mountain Astrologer. So when you go to, like, Whole Foods, because they had done a cover story on Monsanto or something like that. So all of a sudden, the Mountain Astrologer, this really advanced astrology magazine, was at every Whole Foods in the country. And it was really blowing my mind. Or it used to be carried in Barnes and Noble, but otherwise, no, we don't have any cultural reference for what that would be like. To have an astrology book suddenly become ubiquitous and to have everybody know about it or be reading it.
- [62:46]
A
Oh, I mean, I feel like it'd be a different world for astrology. I feel like I would love to live in that world, but I do think that really speaks to how popular it was and how ubiquitous it was.
- [62:57]
B
Yeah, so much so that it even showed up in pop culture. Like, for example, I noticed There was a 1972 book called the Stepford Wives, which there's been a couple movies, versions of by Ira Levin. And there's a scene in the book where there's a character named Charmaine who begs the protagonist to look into astrology. And she specifically cites the book by name. She says, would you read Linda Goodman's Sun Signs? Just read it and see how right she is. So it's funny that it's just like it's showing up in cultural things from that time period as well. And eventually the book, like we said, sold 30 million, or her collected books sold 30 million copies. But most of those sales would have been this first book, Sun Signs, which was the one that was like, most wildly popular.
- [63:53]
A
Definitely. And I mean, I think it makes sense once we get to love Signs. I mean, that is a big old book. So I don't know if this is in your notes or not, but I don't know if that's would have been at grocery stores.
- [64:04]
B
Right. It's like a. Was it like a thousand page book?
- [64:07]
A
It's a thousand pages. It's like a couple bricks. It's like two bricks right up next to each other.
- [64:12]
B
I mean, I'm not gonna throw any stones. Cause my book is like 700 pages long, so I'm not one to speak. Okay. So the book was also translated in like 15 languages supposedly. So it was also, while it was primarily impacting the English speaking world, it may have had some impact on other countries as well. But I'm not as familiar there what that was or at what time periods.
- [64:39]
A
Yeah, I mean, I can say just anecdotally from living my life and being a Linda Goodman fan and meeting people in different countries, I'm always a little bit astonished, like, who has read Linda Goodman and where I see it. I've been traveling in Scandinavia the past few years for, you know, this other research project that I'm doing. And like, I've seen Linda Goodman in Swedish, I've seen Linda Goodman in Norwegian. I've met people that, you know, know Linda Goodman. And, you know, being an academic and going to conferences, I'm always, like, astonished how far her reach is. And so I, you know, I, I don't precisely know what those languages were, but I do know that she's known internationally.
- [65:18]
B
Okay, brilliant. Yeah. So this is having a worldwide impact on some level. And so one of the impacts that it had is it had a huge impact on the industry and on the astrological community as well. Where I was talking with Philip Graves, who is an astrologer from the UK who owns the largest astrology library in the world. And he had a book list from years ago of the number of astrology books that were published each year and through the early 1960s, it's relatively low. It's like 10 books or so fluctuating on astrology published each year. And then all of a sudden, after Linda's book comes out in 1968, the number of astrology books doubles or even triples in terms of the number of books being published. Because I think what happened is then all of a sudden seeing the success of Linda's book, suddenly other publishers, like bigger publishers, start looking for other ones or looking to try to recreate what happened or even publishing more advanced astrology titles so that other more advanced astrologers were suddenly getting book deals.
- [66:37]
A
Yeah, there's definitely a ripple effect from Linda.
- [66:41]
B
Yeah. So one of the people, interestingly, was her teacher, Lloyd Cope, got a book deal with Doubleday, which was a big. And published a book in 1971 titled you, Stars are Numbered. And Linda actually wrote the intro for him, which is kind of cute and kind of sweet and I had mentioned earlier that Linda used equal houses. Interestingly, Placidus became the common house system, or the default for most astrologers in the 20th century and early 21st century. But Linda was unique in using equal houses. And I believe that she learned that from her teacher, Lloyd Cope, is what I was told by Robert Glasscock. And it was interesting just that she was in that sort of lineage of this New York astrologer, and then sort of paid her teacher back in a way by writing an introduction to his book.
- [67:34]
A
Yeah, and maybe helping to get him a deal with Doubleday.
- [67:37]
B
Yeah, exactly. So that was cool. And then we also see other big books then being picked up by bigger publishers, like Alan Okun's 1971 book, an astrological Guide for Living in the Age of Aquarius, which was published by a publisher called Popular Library in New York. So one of my points that I realized is just the success of her book had this ripple effect on the entire industry of astrology. But it was such a rare phenomenon because of how her book intersected with this weird moment in culture and the countercultural movement of the late 70s, 60s and everything that was going on, that it was a really rare phenomenon. So it was really hard to recreate after that. I think her other publishers tried to recreate it with other people. They wanted to recreate it with her. She wrote a second book which also sold millions of copies, but it sold considerably less than the first book. So there really hasn't been anything like this necessarily since. Until, you know, the closest you get is chani's book in 2020.
- [68:43]
A
Yeah.
- [68:44]
B
Okay, so let's talk about some key factors of the book we were talking about. She has this really pleasant style. She uses this analogy at the beginning where she says that sun signs are like generalizations that people make about people when they're from certain cities, like New York or Texas. And I thought this was an interesting analogy, because I don't know if I've ever used someone make that analogy before.
- [69:08]
A
Yeah, I haven't either. But I think, you know, for somebody new to astrology, it's maybe a way to conceptualize of it.
- [69:16]
B
Yeah, it's a very general analogy. I just thought it was interesting how she's trying to make it understandable, but also explain this is not always true. This is not something you should take as axiomatic or in the sense of, obviously not everybody from a certain city may be whatever or whatever. But that making analogy of, I don't know, somebody from a big city versus somebody from a more rural area, and just maybe that there's different traits or things that might be more common based on the environment that you're growing up in. I thought was an interesting analogy to attempt to make, to try to convey vaguely what this idea was to people that may not even know about the idea of zodiac signs.
- [70:01]
A
Definitely. And I also wonder, too. I feel like part of what's interesting about sun signs is I feel like she's already speaking to people that might be skeptical, and she's trying to sort of rhetorically present this to them. Like she's giving her antithesis right away. And I think it's in sun signs where she even breaks it down a little bit, like your sun sign will be 80% accurate or 70% accurate.
- [70:26]
B
Yeah, she actually sort of overestimates it in terms of those percentages and in terms of what I. What I think most astrologers would normally say. But that's actually one of my reflections on her chart that I thought was interesting was I thought it was interesting that her sun is in the first house in Aries, in the sign of its exaltation on the ascendant. And something I've realized over the past decade about the ancient concept of exaltation is that ancient astrologers literally associated with it, with the idea of raising something up or extolling something to the highest extent. And ironically, that's exactly what she ended up doing in her life and work, was literally raising up and extolling the notion of the sun and its place in astrology above anything else in that way. And she did it right as an eclipse is taking place in her rising sign in Aries, in the first house near where the sun was in her birth. So there's something sort of symbolically interesting about that.
- [71:32]
A
Definitely. And I also feel like. I mean, she is an astrologer, that she had such a wildly popular platform. She wanted to write about other things. She wanted to write a highly technical book about astrology. She could have done that. But yet that isn't what she did for her career. So I think that makes a lot of sense that she. Yeah, she exalted this sign as much as she could.
- [71:54]
B
Yeah, absolutely. So she introduces each sign in its own chapter and gives an overview. And then she breaks the chapter into two separate delineations, one for men and one for women, of the sign. And then the rest of the chapter has separate delineations for the child, the boss, or the employee. And you had made a comment at one point in your book that it's like, it's a little tricky now because it's like she, obviously, she's somebody who was born in the 1920s and she's writing in the 1960s. So from our vantage point, there's a lot that is problematic or we would not necessarily do things the same way if we were talking about those things today in terms of gender roles and other assumptions that are being made.
- [72:42]
A
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I think she's totally a product of the 60s and 70s. And I think when I was quite young and being very excited, excited about Linda Goodman, I would share the books with my friends. And really the reaction I got was like, this lady, I mean, she is so dated. Like, why would you take advice from this woman? But I do. I mean, I still think there's like little nuggets of wisdom you can pull out.
- [73:05]
B
Yeah, I still think there's some useful things you would pull out. I mean, for me, this would not. I did mean to say at some point, like, I'm covering this from a historical perspective. And for me, this would not be the first book I would recommend to somebody for astrology at this point, I would recommend. Actually, Chani's book is my number one recommendation. I tell everybody to get at this point because it is so contemporary and fitting with the current times. But for Linda's times, the stuff she was writing about was actually somewhat cutting edge, at least from the perspective of somebody in the 1920s.
- [73:40]
A
Oh, absolutely. And I also feel like even the way obviously I think today these books are so dated when it comes to gender. But I do wonder if at the time, you know, for instance, talking about, like the Aries woman, who I think in a lot of ways is sort of archetypally not like super feminine. I do, you know, I wonder if that was actually something that was maybe seen as a bit more radical to say, like, this is a person who wants a career. This is a person who, you know, isn't going to be this like, super duper big mother. And so I wonder if, you know, how people, you know, took that and maybe it was actually seen as much more. Yeah. Kind of radical than obviously much more radical than we would see it today.
- [74:21]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I'm sure. I believe that. And there's things that are written today, I'm constantly reminded that will seem radical or seem progressive to us today, that in a few decades are going to seem regressive or backwards looking or old minded or something like that that we can't in some ways even anticipate because all of us are a Product of our time. And especially astrologers speak with the language of astrology in a way that seems contemporary to them. And Linda especially did that. That was actually one of the things unique and interesting about the Sun Signs book is that she wasn't the first person to do this, but she really did help to popularize using pop culture to teach a story astrology. And so she would cite contemporary celebrity examples to make the text more relatable, which essentially then made it up to date with whatever the latest trends were in the news or in celebrity culture, things like that.
- [75:29]
A
Yeah. And I also think. I mean, I am certainly not an astrological historian nor an astrologer, but just anecdotally, even looking at much older astrological texts, I find them quite difficult and a little bit alienating to think about, you know, these terms and thinking about things in the sky. And I think there was something really approachable about what Linda was doing where I think it sort of demystified astrology for a lot of people, which I think contributed to her popularity.
- [75:57]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And making it accessible and demystifying it and making it something that seemed contemporary, like a contemporary language, not an ancient language, not something where you had to pick up Ptolemy and try to read a difficult translation of an ancient Greek text from 2,000 years ago. That's like Citing or Vetius Valens, who's using examples of Roman emperors and stuff of his day. But instead, she was using charts of Abraham Lincoln was like an Aquarius or John F. Kennedy was. You know, I forget whatever JFK was and things like that, which made it instantly relatable. Yeah. So I think that was brilliant. At one point, she assigns different signs to different cartoon characters in the Charlie Brown cartoons in order to relate things in that way of what the archetypes were of different characters and in order to try to better teach, like, what the different signs mean.
- [77:09]
A
Yeah, she definitely had a Peanuts obsession. It also appears in Goobers. She has. I think. I feel like maybe it's a copyright violation that Charles Schulz never picked up on, but there is a. There is a Peanuts cartoon in Goobers, which I was always like, I don't know why this is there, but she did love Peanuts, I think.
- [77:25]
B
Okay. I'm trying to think of what the. What is the. Like, do we have a version of that of Millennials? If she did, what was our cartoon?
- [77:34]
A
Ren and Stimpy.
- [77:36]
B
Yeah. Or that's even more. How about the Simpsons? If you made an analog Simpsons or something like that. Yeah. Lisa's a Virgo or something like that. Although now even our references are dated because there's a whole generation that has no idea what that is.
- [77:52]
A
No, totally. I mean, Ren and Stimpy is very dated. And there's only. I don't think there's. That Maybe some spongebob.
- [77:57]
B
Spongebob. Okay. Yeah, that's a good one, because that's still in social cache with memes and some things like that.
- [78:04]
A
Yeah, and I think Gen z knows what SpongeBob is.
- [78:08]
B
Right? Okay, there we go. SpongeBob. So she's making the SpongeBob references in the 1960s. Yeah. So that made astrology more accessible. And one thing that's interesting about the book from a technical standpoint that I really noticed and flagged, is that when she's talking about the signs of the zodiac, she introduces the qualities of each sign of element of planetary rulership. But she's using strictly the modern planetary rulers already, which includes Pluto for Scorpio and Uranus for Aquarius and Neptune for Pisces. And what I find really fascinating about that is what Pluto had only been discovered in the 1930s, so it had only been around for like 30 or 40 years at that point, by the time sheYeah 20 or 30 years in terms of actual astrological discussions. And she's using it whereas other astrologers, even like alan Okun in 1971, there's still this discussion about whether to assign Pluto to Scorpio or not. And some astrologers are still hedging and still using dual rulerships of like, Mars is a co ruler of Scorpio and Pluto is like the new co ruler of Scorpio. Or Uranus is like a co ruler of Aquarius and the ancient ruler Saturn is like a co ruler of Aquarius. Or some astrologers are still even just using Mars straight up for Scorpio. So something that from a technical standpoint that makes her distinctive is like she's full on using the modern rulerships only, and she never mentions Mars for Scorpio. And I have to think that this must have had a major impact and influence in terms of helping to standardize the modern rulership. Suddenly, for the generation of astrologers that get into astrology or influenced by her book, it probably sealed the deal in terms of pushing way more modern astrologers towards adopting the modern rulerships exclusively. So that by the time I came into the astrological community in the late 90s and early 2000s, that was kind of a given. But it means that that switch happened pretty dramatically in a few Decade time frame, possibly or partially due to Linda, potentially.
- [80:33]
A
Wow, I didn't know that. I love that, though, for Linda.
- [80:37]
B
Yeah, well, yeah. So that's interesting in terms of the history of astrology and the techniques, because then that fundamentally changes how astrologers conceptualize and talk about the signs. If you're talking about Scorpio as ruled by Mars, that's different than if you're talking about Scorpio as ruled by Pluto, or if you're talking about Uranus as being primarily connected or Aquarius as being particularly connected to Uranus, that's different than talking about it as connected with Saturn, the ancient ruler. So there's something here that hasn't been talked about as much about a radical revisioning of the signs that's happening really rapidly at the same time. And this is something, eventually, that in the 1980s and 1990s and forward, there would be a revival of ancient astrology that would go back and start. Start going back to the older sources and adopting the ancient rulership schemes again, which is like a dialogue that's still playing out now over the course of the past couple of decades. But it's interesting that Linda may have been an unrecognized linchpin in terms of a pivot point away from the ancient systems and more firmly towards the modern ones.
- [81:54]
A
I wonder, too, what Lloyd copes, you know, if he figured into that at all.
- [81:59]
B
Yeah, well, that's my assumption. I ordered it and I haven't gotten his book yet. But my assumption is that she's so firmly into the modern rulerships, because that's probably what she learned from Lloyd and from whatever her primary source was in the mid-1960s. And so she's taking that for granted already, even though that's kind of a much more recent development, in the same way that like. Like Sedna or something was just discovered like 10 or 20 years ago. And right now, astrologers are not using that very widely. But if you just started learning astrology today and your teacher was a big Sedna fan and assigned it to Virgo, you would take that for granted, that that's just the way things are. And in that way, it's possible that that was something that she took for granted and didn't fully know how recent that was, as opposed to it being something that, I don't know, there was more thought put into, or something like that. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, that's worth exploring, but it's an important technical thing. So after she releases this book, she very quickly becomes literally the most famous astrologer in the world. And also, I mean, one of the things I was thinking about, she might become the most rich astrologer astrologer in the world. It's hard to gauge that. But she was making so much money from these books. That was just relative to what astrologers normally make primarily from doing consultations was just so much astronomically more. I talked to one astrologer who knew her back then in 1968, and he said when he met her after the book came out that he was charging $50 for an astrolog consultation. But then she said she was charging $300 for an astrological consultation. And in like $1968, when you do the price for inflation, when you adjust for inflation, that's something like $3,000 in today's terms. So she was charging a lot for consultations. So yeah, there's some scenario where she's also the richest astrologer in the world at that point, somehow.
- [84:18]
A
Mm. Yeah. And I think we see what she does with those riches and it doesn't turn out well for her. But I mean, I think to sort of live the life that she lived after sun size, I think she definitely had to have a lot of money.
- [84:33]
B
Yeah. So let's get into that and get into that transitional phase. So right away she starts working on a follow up. She promised a follow up book to her publisher, but she starts running into delays and it takes her 10 years to do it. And there's something about the weight of success during this period that I've been reflecting on that I feel like hit her at this point because it's like if that condensed timeline of learning astrology in the mid-60s is true, and then writing a book relatively early in her career, let's say four years into it, imagine the pressure or the weight of picking up a hobby, writing a book on it relatively quickly, and then it becoming an international bestseller once in a generation, not even a generation, once in a century book. And then being locked into that gig for the rest of your life, even as your interests evolve and even as during the course of the 1970s, it seems like she gets more interested in metaphysics and philosophy and spirituality and new age stuff. And also she wants to write poetry. She publishes a book on poetry, I think in 1970, right?
- [85:52]
A
Yeah. She had two books on poetry. One is Linda Goodman's Love Poems, Levels of Love Awareness. And then the other book is Venus Trines at Midnight. Haha. Astrological verses about lions, rams, bulls, twins, archers, other sun signs and you.
- [86:11]
B
Yeah, nice. Okay. So that's that she had this real poetic inclination. And that's again, it's partially the Saturn Neptune square. It's also like the ruler of her ascendant in Gemini in the third house. That was like a major thing for her. And. But I think she gets locked into this thing where she promised a follow up book on synastry and then she has to do that. But she starts running into some issues and she's wanting to. Her book list has all these metaphysical titles throughout the 70s that she's reading. And you can see in her writings this trend that happens over the next decade more towards kind of pontificating about metaphysical topics. But her publisher, she starts having tensions with them because she starts not delivering the second book and she fails to deliver the second book and it leads to them withholding the royalties at a certain point which then leads her into some financial difficulties. Despite her massive success, both because of that and both because she spends very lavishly. Especially she's reported in like by many different people to like give all of these gifts and buy stuff for like tons of different people. Right?
- [87:34]
A
Yeah, that is, I mean, you know, in writing this book there was so much where I was like, I can't verify this, like, I don't know if this is true. Like maybe this is a lie. But what was very clear to me is that she spent a lot. She had a lot of money. She spent like a ton of money. And she at various points in her life, just despite her mass, you know, accumulation of wealth, like didn't was broke. And so it was really like boom and bust. I also, I visited her house in, you know, her former home in Colorado. And I mean, you know, today it's quite, you know, it's sort of in shambles, but it's very clear that that structure was once very elaborate and it was very of her own cosmology. And so there are these stained glass murals of St. Francis of Assisi. In Clare there is a nativity scene where it seems like she was also very interested in Egyptian mythology. And so it's like baby Jesus and then there's like Osiris. And so she clearly was a spender and a gifter and was also broke at various points in her life.
- [88:38]
B
Yeah, it's like that Saturn in the eighth house once again is not just a death thing, but it's also financial matters, other people's money, debt, taxes, loans. Let me put her chart up again really quickly just to recheck in on that. Aries rising, Saturn's in Scorpio in the eighth whole sign house. And it's retrograde, it's squaring Neptune and the financial thing and giving lots of gifts freely, but also depleting her financial resources and running into financial problems. It's a really interesting. Yeah. Recurring theme that seems like it kept coming up at different points in her life.
- [89:24]
A
And it's really. I mean, that was also, in researching this, it was kind of baffling to me. I was like, how do you have all this money? And like, how has it gone? And there's also this rumor that for a while she was like living on the streets in New York. But I actually, Chris, I feel so affirmed by you looking at her chart where it's like, okay, like maybe actually, you know, this is all validated, dated by her natal chart.
- [89:46]
B
Yeah, I think it is in different ways with her natal chart, with that placement of Saturn in the eighth house, it's ruled by Mars in the third house. But there was another thing that came up that also drained her finances and became a major source of issues. And that's maybe what we should get into next, where she's trying to write this book, the follow up book. But she experiences a major tragedy in 1973 where in December of 1973, her daughter Sally committed suicide. And this was a huge turning point in her life because Linda was heartbroken. And immediately her ex husband Sam went to the morgue and saw the body and confirmed that it was Sally. And then she was cremated. But then Linda ended up flying out there and very quickly didn't believe that Sally had actually killed herself and started coming up with these very elaborate ideas and conspiracy theories that Sally had disappeared and that somehow Sally would come back someday. And she started spending all this money on private investigators to investigate the case and do all these elaborate things for years, for years and years, especially in the 1970s and 80s. And it became a dominant theme in the later part of her life.
- [91:28]
A
Yeah, I mean, and I think that's like where a lot of the money went is like she got this big advance and then it sort of drained it. And so, you know, she went right to the, you know, to the police station and sort of disputed the evidence that they had. And of course, at that point, her estranged second husband, I mean, he had identified the body. Later he would recant his definition, but, you know, it seemed like it was. It turned into kind of a big mess. And so, and, and what I learned from my research was that like, Linda didn't even at the time have the money to get to New York City, like her Sally was in New York. She was a student or had just graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She wanted to be an actress. And Linda was living in Colorado. And when she heard news that Sally had died, she didn't even have the money to get there. So it's like she had to call up her friends to be like, can you help me get there? And yeah, this is, you know, for me, I feel like such, like a great tragedy of her life. And also I think, why, I think she's a particularly interesting figure to look at because I feel like this also influenced the way that we remember and we think of Linda Goodman. And I think had this not happened, she maybe would be held in a different regard today by, you know, when we think about the history of astrology in the United States.
- [92:49]
B
Yeah, because it becomes a turning point. And it was something that she refers to frequently in her later writings where she does eventually. And then after this, she continues to struggle to write the book, but eventually she's kind of like forced to finish it. And she publishes love signs in 1978, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But at the beginning of the book, there's these two heartbreaking letters that she writes to Sally addressing her as if she's still alive and will come back and that she hopes, she says at one point that she was waiting for Sally to come back before finishing the book, but now she hopes that by publishing it that Sally will see it and come back or something like that. So it's there very prominently in her subsequent books from this point forward.
- [93:41]
A
Yeah, and I always, I mean, I find those letters really fascinating. If you look at Sun Signs, you can read them and they're, to me, one of them is like super cryptic. It's clearly a letter directly to Sally. But I also wonder too, you know, Linda was quite reclusive. You know, she didn't do a lot of interviews, she didn't do a lot of profiles. And the, you know, one profile that was done about her in the late, late 70s was quite critical of her. They sort of showed her as this bizarre, grief stricken woman, like, how crazy that, you know, she's looking for her daughter. And I, I feel like those letters at the beginning of Sun Signs both function as like a direct address to Sally, you know, come home, I miss you, I love you. But I also wonder if they function as a kind of, you know, message to her readers too, that like to, to say, like, this is a real, like, I am in pain and I want you to believe me because I think that the conspiracies that she spun about Sally's what she calls a disappearance are quite far fetched. And so I'm uncertain as to how much support she had in her community and from her family besides the investigators that she paid to try to find Sally.
- [94:57]
B
Yeah, well, and that's. Yeah, it's so tricky. And I know that was your. When you went into writing your thesis, it's like you really wanted to redeem her in a way. And to say that your initial thought was that you thought that she was being unfairly maligned in terms of her beliefs that Sally had disappeared and the way that she grieved as a woman over the death of her daughter. But then you struggled with that eventually, just because it became clear. I think for most people, when you research what happened, it becomes clear and clear that her daughter really did commit suicide. And that Linda developed a deep, not just obsession over the idea that she wouldn't, but just an inability to accept that and that she developed very elaborate and sometimes very dark fantasies in order to cope with it.
- [95:56]
A
Yeah. And I think in relationship to that, and then also her increasing Lee's sort of far fetched esoteric interest, I think she's interesting because at one point in time she was so mainstream, like we talked about. She was in the grocery store. And then increasingly she sort of gets unmoored and ends up really, you know, becoming this kind of eccentric figure. And I think part of that has to do with her daughter's death. And so I feel like Love Signs is the last book where she's sort of living within the realm of the mainstream.
- [96:30]
B
Yeah, absolutely. Her later writings become increasingly detached. It seemed like. I mean, one of the things I wanted to say here is the astrology. She mentioned Sally's chart sometimes, but the astrology wasn't the reason that she didn't think that Sally was dead. She just had some sort of, I believe, underlying mental health issues surrounding the topic of death, partially because of this recurring experience where she had actually experienced a lot of death in her life. And this seemed to be the final one where she kind of snapped in a way. But she had experienced, like you said, the death of her grandmother, the possible death of a young girl that she grew up with, which may have been a formative event. She experienced the death of her infant daughter in 1951 during her first marriage, which may have contributed eventually to its collapse. And eventually the death of her first husband, eventually, partially due to alcoholism, over grief of the death of Their infant daughter, potentially. And then, you know, to cap all of this off, her young, like Sally was only like 19 or 20 or something like that, right?
- [97:45]
A
Yeah, she was a very young woman. You know, in Goobers also, Linda speaks about having multiple miscarriages. And so, yeah, I agree with you, Chris. I mean, I feel like that is so much loss to sustain in your life. And I can't imagine to be a parent and to have lost two children, that must be completely devastating. And so that's how I also interpreted it. And I was like, yeah, I would maybe snap, too, if I was Linda Goodman.
- [98:11]
B
Yeah. I mean, I think people develop coping strategies to survive the immeasurable sadness of a loss like that. And I know that from people in my personal life that have experienced the death of children, that different people or other loved ones, different people develop different coping strategies for dealing with something like that. For Linda, with Neptune in her fifth house of children squaring her, Saturn in the eighth house of death, the way that she coped with it was by coming up with elaborate scenarios to deny that Sally had committed suicide. And also, that wasn't the only person that she came up with elaborate stories like that about. As we said, she also claimed the same thing about different celebrities, that they hadn't died who had. Like Howard Hughes, or sometimes even the inverse, ironically, where she endorses at one point in one of her books, the conspiracy theory that one of the Beatles had died and the one that's still there and alive is like an imposter or something like that.
- [99:21]
A
Oh, yes. I think she had. She had something with Paul McCartney. I think. Yes, I think it was Paul McCartney. She was like, Paul McCartney. The Paul McCartney of today is an imposter.
- [99:32]
B
Yeah. Which was like a famous conspiracy theory at one point, but she actually legitimately seemed to believe that. So she had this as a recurring theme in her life. And the most tragic one, though, was her daughter. And one of the things, I actually just cast the chart today, and I noticed stunningly that her daughter actually died on December 9th or 10th, 1973. And she actually died, I think, the day of a lunar eclipse in gemini, which happened December 9th. So I keep noticing this eclipse theme in Linda's life where her first book came out on an eclipse, her daughter died on an eclipse. And then eventually, one of the things we'll see at the end of the story is that Linda herself died on an eclipse as well. So I'm actually curious why that is in her chart. And the best thing I have is that she was Born the day of a full moon in Libra. Although it's kind of surprising, normally when eclipses are that tied in with a person's life, they're themselves born on one. So it's like a recurrence transit. But the best I can get is that she was born on a full moon, and those luminaries are really, really prominent for her.
- [100:52]
A
It's also so interesting to me, Chris, that, I mean, she was an astrologer at some point. I just wonder if she would have been reflexive and been like, wow, I have this thing in my chart that has to do with illusion and Saturn. But I guess perhaps not. Or maybe she did and she just didn't want to look at it or. I don't know.
- [101:11]
B
Well, I mean, I think she had moments of clarity at different points, but then I think she would tamp it down in order to survive. Because you mentioned one of those moments of clarity earlier in this talk where.
- [101:22]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [101:24]
B
She had some reflection about something. Or I saw an interview of another psychic or somebody like that on YouTube who. I didn't like the way he presented it because it seemed almost like he was scamming her or something like that. But he talked about her having a moment of realization at one point that she had thought up until that point that Sally was gonna come back in this life. But then she had a realization that maybe what she meant or was sensing, psychically or otherwise, was that Sally would come back in a next life, basically, or would be reincarnated. So I think she may have come to different points of realization, but then I think she would suppress it in order to not deal with the pain and the sadness and loss of what was actually in front of her.
- [102:19]
A
Yeah, and I guess I should also say, too. I mean, I'm just thinking aloud here. I also, you know, one thing, and this was never really confirmed. This was just my own musing from doing research about her. You know, she was a public figure, and she was known as being someone who had a lot of money. And so part of my speculation was, was that she was kind of preyed upon by people who knew she had this intense desire to find her daughter. And so perhaps they approached her or, you know, sort of hoodwinked her into saying, like, well, you know, we can find Sally. Give us X amount of dollars. And, you know, maybe she's in a convent, or maybe she's, you know, doing X, Y, or Z. And so it's. You know, it's possible that she maybe did have this sense with herself. But that she encountered people who, you know, didn't have her best interests at heart.
- [103:03]
B
Yeah, absolutely, because we know she was spending lavishly on. That's one of the things she blew most of her money on after this point is like private investigators and like psychics or other people to try to find in any way she could find her daughter, quote, unquote. But one of the first investigators she hired, he investigated and he was like, no, she died. She wrote an eight page suicide note. The ex husband saw the body and confirmed it. And then he's the one actually that says in one of the interviews that later the former husband, Sam Goodman retracted his confession. But the investigator believed that that's just because Linda showed up and was so domineering that he sort of gets pressured to reverse it, I'm sure, because she's in full on denial mode. But she fires that investigator because he's not giving her the answers she wants. And so she gets other investigators who do start concocting these elaborate conspiracy theories that get really dark at certain points. And she pays people lots of money who basically potentially are enabling or even exacerbating some of the mental health issues that she's already dealing with at that point.
- [104:31]
A
Yeah, and my sense, you know, from talking with some folks is that it was kind of like an Anastasia situation where they would approach her and say, oh, you know, we found this person who we think could be Sally. And she's in. I'm just making this up. She's in Florida. We found Sally in Florida. And so they would show her this person that, you know, possibly is Sally in Florida. And there were wanted advert or missing advertisements that are like really heartbreaking. But you can see in those missing advertisements the traces of what the conspiracy theory that Linda came up with. You know, in one of them, it talks about how they think that maybe she's had facial reconstruction. And so, you know, maybe she might look a little bit different, but she has a particular mole and she has, you know, a cap on this tooth. And so it's, it's actually, I mean, it's really, I think, a heartbreaking part of her, of her story, because, you know, you see her pain so plainly. And that's also what I think is really sad about those letters in love signs is that she doesn't. She sort of has some awareness of herself as a kind of pitiful figure and as a woman that's waiting for this person to return to her. You know, it's a retelling of the Peter Pan story where Sally Would come back like Wendy, you know, through the window to her. And, you know, I think for me, you know, as someone who was interested in her writing, I think that was like just really what tugged at my heartstrings and made me want to know more about her and to know more about her. Her story and to sort of get to the heart of what exactly was going on there.
- [106:06]
B
Yeah, for sure. And understanding. You made an analogy at one point in the book of other people, like Mary Todd Lincoln, for example, who also experienced a lot of death in her life and then of children of her husband and resorted to seances and other similarly what were viewed as kind of weird things at the time or things that were disassociative or I don't know what the term is. And I noticed, I looked up on a hunch, her chart, and she also had a Saturn Neptune square. So I thought there was an interesting connection there.
- [106:47]
A
That is really interesting.
- [106:48]
B
That is interesting in terms of different people coping with death in different ways. And the signature for this maybe being coping with it by. Because Saturn represents reality and cold, hard facts, and Neptune represents illusions. And when you put those two together, sometimes as a signature, it means there's some sort of illusion surrounding reality or sometimes an inability to. A blurring between what's real and what's not real. And over the past couple of years that we've been having this Saturn, Neptune conjunction forming in the sky, We've had literal versions of that. With technology, with the advent of AI generated videos that are literally creating videos where you can't tell that they're not real. But when this is in a person's birth chart, sometimes they can be given to scenarios that aren't real, which can sometimes include things like conspiracy theories or other things like that.
- [107:52]
A
Yeah, I mean, she loved a conspiracy theory. If you dive, I mean, it could be like a drinking game. You could read Linda Goodman's books and like, count, you know, drink every time you. You see a reference to a conspiracy theory, especially as you get later on in her literary works.
- [108:08]
B
Yeah, that was something I. I forgot because there's this crossover that happens in the 1980s with the new Age movement, where on the one hand, it's like you have the New Age movement, but you also have sometimes a crossover with the conspiracy theory genre. And in some authors, those get merged in this really unique way. And that's actually kind of how I came into astrology, because I got into astrology through some New Age books. They were primarily New Age books by an author named Dolores Cannon. But that incorporated a lot of conspiracy theories as well because she was like a regressive hypnotist that claimed that she regressed a patient. And it turns out that they were a student of Nostradamus. So they set out on this three book adventure to translate and all of his prophecies from the 1500s that are for some reason relevant to today. I was 15 when I found these. So I didn't have any conceptualization that sometimes people will just make up very elaborate stories that didn't happen or didn't exist. But there is this intersection in the new age community, especially of the 70s and 80s and 90s, where that was happening. And Linda ended up being central nexus of that or drifted towards that, that later in her life and career.
- [109:45]
A
Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. And I think that's, you know, it is very interesting because in those first two books and that's maybe why they were so mainstream. I don't really think we see inklings of that besides the book list in the back. But I think we definitely see that as we get closer towards the end of her life. And I think it's to her detriment, unfortunately.
- [110:11]
B
Yeah, yeah. I felt bad for her in a way that she drifted towards that. But then she wasn't just a victim of that though. But she also spread things, I think, that were not good or took actions that I think were morally not just questionable, but in some instances reprehensible. That I guess we can get into more in a bit. But maybe we should touch on Love Signs first. Or should we wrap this part of the discussion up?
- [110:50]
A
Let's see. I don't know if there's anything else to say about Love Signs. Let's see.
- [110:57]
B
She finally gets that book out in 1978. It receives. She received a record breaking $2.25 million advance for the book, which is the largest advance not just for an astrologer, but of any book at the time. Like a crazy amount of money. And it's a synastry book where she compares the sun signs of couples and it also provides alternating ones based on gender, depending on the gender of each partner. She leans into the animal totems like a lot. I was rereading some the delineations, like talking about Sagittarius being the archer and Scorpio being the scorpion and different things like that.
- [111:36]
A
Yeah, she has a great. I think it's in Love Signs. She has this great illustration where it's like the zodiac and all of the animals fighting with each other. And then after Love Signs, all of the animals are in harmony with each other in a circle. So yeah, it definitely leans into the sort of creaturely aspects of the signs.
- [111:56]
B
I was rereading some delineations and there was a noticeable dip I felt in the quality of the writing compared to the first book. And I was having trouble quantifying that. And I don't know if that' sthat may not be felt universally, but there's something about the first book that's just written really well and is really engaging. And I know it's harder because the second book, book was a much higher and probably realistically more laborious task for her to do hundreds of the different combinations or whatever it was. If you go through and compare each of the signs to each other in synastry, but then you also invert that for depending on the gender of the partner. So it's like a huge thousand page book. So she has a lot to do. But there's something a little bit more almost mechanical about the writing compared to the first book, if that's the right way to phrase it.
- [112:56]
A
Yeah, I would say Love Signs is a little bit more gestural. I also wonder too, I think that book is sometimes really funny just being a person who's dated other humans in the world and who has had some of these combinations. And so I also wonder too how, you know, I think she's curating a particular like, like experience. And I almost wonder sometimes if she's like kind of just trying to give you, like, here's like the best possible. Like here's like some of the things that may go wrong and like, here's the best possible way. I want to send you off on a high note. And I do, I. I do see what you mean. Where I think sometimes it gets a little. It's like the story isn't totally complete sometimes.
- [113:40]
B
Sure, yeah. And some of it she's doing theoretically. But there's some instances where she will cite anecdotes I noticed. But then I had a hard time saying, okay, that means she was drawing some empirically from experience. Cause she describes seeing a couple at dinner once and some interaction they had that was distinctive of both of the signs. But then I realized I can't actually rely on that as an observation she made. Cause it might be something she was making up for literary purposes to make the point. But there may have been some of that in terms of how she observed different signs interacting.
- [114:25]
A
Yeah, I also, that was one thing again, like, if I could have dinner with Linda Goodman. I would be like, so tell me, is all of this true? Or like. And sometimes she's purposely inventing things, but there are examples where we don't know where she got the information from.
- [114:40]
B
Yeah. So I guess we have to leave that as an open question and an interesting question, which is, to what extent is her second book based on empirical observations, which realistically, she couldn't have done thousands of observations, necessarily. It's a little unlikely. Versus how much is she. She writing those delineations out based on more theoretical principles of what happens when you blend these archetypal concepts, sort of similar to the first book. And the question we have of like, did she really write this after just, like, a few years of studying astrology, and therefore it's not entirely based on, like, decades of personal experience and observations, but instead is more of like a creative writing thing once she's learned the language and she's putting those blocks together in different ways. There's kind of an open question about that with this book as well.
- [115:38]
A
I mean, I see it sort of as a creative writing, like, yeah, I have this language. I'm gonna put this together, and I'm gonna apply these to some scenarios. She also, in that book, she has the conception of each sign's love mystery. And so that also weaves its way into the book as well. And she also speaks really, really broadly about what does it mean to be in Aries and in love, and what does it mean to be Scorpio and in love? What is the essential need for that person as well? And so not only did she have these pairings, but then she also has this kind of overwhelming theory of how we even think about sun signs and love as well.
- [116:18]
B
Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, general proviso, which I already stated earlier, but just, you know, she was born in the 1920s, so by today's standards, many of her delineations, especially for relationships, are dated and even problematic. So while I'm trying to cover this for historical purposes, I'm not necessarily endorsing her work or delineations or especially her philosophy, but it's still worth reading and understanding as part of the literature of, like, 20th century astrology and how astrologers were conceptualizing or how she conceptualized synastry and probably, I guess, helped to popularize the notion that there is such thing as synastry, that two signs that the way people interact or get along could have or could be reflected by your astrological sign. That's a pretty big concept. If we just think about it like conceptually, especially if you are like a blank slate and you're not taking that for granted as we do today.
- [117:27]
A
Yeah. And I also think too, I think there's something kind of thrilling about love signs where it's like, oh, I could make things work with a Pisces, even if I'm an Aries, and that I think it sort of gives the thrill of hope in romance and love and that you can sort of figure this out just by buying this thousand page book.
- [117:47]
B
Yeah. That you can figure out if you would be compatible with somebody you're interested in, or you can figure out what the pros and cons of your relationship are and adopt strategies that might be better for harmony between the two of you. Is one of the things as well about synastry or just that you might approach a book like that really thinking about or hoping for?
- [118:16]
A
Definitely.
- [118:17]
B
Yeah. So the book sells a lot and it becomes her second highest selling astrology book. It does sell considerably a lot less than the first book because the first book was just this crazy phenomenon and the second one doesn't exactly recapture the same cultural zeitgeist as the first one. But it's still sells like millions of copies, which is still like far and beyond any other astrology books for the most part. Before or since probably. All right, so now we get into the 1980s and we start to transition into the last phase of her life, basically. And in her subsequent years, her subsequent books, she wrote especially a book called star signs in 1987 that she got a large advance for, I think. And then she published this autobiographical book titled Goobers in 1989. But by this point in her life, she's really drifting away, I feel like, from accessible astrology into more discursive, somewhat sort of like metaphysical ramblings, I guess is how I call it. I'm not sure. How would you phrase it or how would you frame it?
- [119:33]
A
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, Goobers is. It's supposedly it's a channeled book apparently, and she says that she channeled it in the 70s and then it was published in 1989. But I mean, it's published by a publisher. I think it's Hampton Rhodes and which I think might. It might be her own publication company, so maybe it was even self published. But I know when I was researching that book or I got a hold of some letters that she would send to fans, these sort of like, like notes that she would write back to people that had written her fan letters and she said something like, you know, over 60,000 people have asked me, where is Goobers? And so I'm. It's interesting. Like I. I haven't met that many people who have ever read Goobers, but it is a little. And I read the whole thing and it's very long, it's like a thousand pages. And I think, you know, for a dedicated Linda Goodman fan, I certainly was attentive to. To it. But I think rambling is maybe a great way to say it. And I think it is a really good example of the wide breadth of esoteric topics that she's very interested in at this time. She also seems to have a kind of obsession with the Isis Osiris myth, which I also feel like also echoes this Saturn in the Eighth House, where it's about death and it's about trying to reconstruct Osiris and this sort of resistance to letting things be dead. And then also star signs on the back. It's the master astrologer's unparalleled spiritual and physical self help guide. And so a lot of it is about how to achieve immortality and about sort of metaphysical concepts all around us. She also, in this we can see, I think, her attentiveness as a poet. She has a whole chapter about what she calls lexigrams and looking at language and trying to decipher codes in language. And so I think, you know, for me, as someone who was interested in her biographically, it was interesting to see this wider array of things that she was interested in. But in terms of thinking of her in relationship to the mainstream, I think certainly it's not super accessible and I don't know how popular it really is among Linda Goodman fans.
- [121:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, Goober is the autobiographical book, so that's published in 89. And really both books are in the late 80s. They're published while Saturn and Neptune are forming a conjunction in the sky. And this is her at her most detached, in some ways her most discursive, certainly in the autobiographical one. And at the most detachment I feel from reality and from the accessibleness that her first book and even her second book of love signs really made her a name for. Made her a legendary figure for. And Guber's book, the autobiography, is also, it's like somewhat about a lover that she had had after her second marriage where she had taken a younger lover who was much younger than her by like 20 or 30 years, but then he left and then she claimed that he had disappeared at some point. And that shows up in some of the interviews about her at the time that she was claiming that a boyfriend had disappeared. But then years later, it's like she's writing about this guy who had left this long book that's like a thousand pages, that's almost kind of obsessing over him in a way. And that element is there at the same time in that book. Cause supposedly Uber is supposed to be her nickname for him or something like that, right?
- [123:39]
A
Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the whole sort of narrative crisis in the book. And it begins, actually, as I was researching it, I was very excited. I was like, okay, great. We're beginning in West Virginia. We've got some established reality. I love it. I need established reality. And then it just. It gets very unestablished very soon after. But, yes, that is sort of the central crux of the book, is that there is this lover, and then this lover leaves, and then this lover comes back at the end of the book. And so this is other. Another moment in Linda's life where I think we see her spinning a narrative that is not true. You know, in this People magazine article from the late 70s, she uses the word disappeared. You know, it's not like we broke up or we had a fight, and, you know, he's living his life in whatever state. And so when I read that initially, I was like, oh, he vanished. Kind of like, it seems like she's saying, Sally is. And then. So that's another point in her biography where, you know, there's a little bit of uncertainty around what exactly happened. And another thing that I think is quite interesting about Goobers that I wanted to mention is that, you know, what's fascinating to me about Linda Goodman is there is, you know, I think from her first two books, we can see her as very mainstream. Like, she's someone that's accepted by the status quo. And I think we see in Guber, she actually really doesn't think of herself that way. You know, there's a whole section where she talks about how she's, like, looking at the counterculture of the 60s and the 70s. And she's saying, wow, I feel. I feel really alienated from that. Like, I'm actually not as hip than that. And so, in a way, I almost wonder if, you know, these later books are actually a little bit more kind of like you're saying, like, she had the freedom a little bit to be who she really was. And I think she saw herself as a kind like somebody on the fringes of society.
- [125:29]
B
Yeah, one and the most unrestrained. Like, she gets Progressively more and more unrestrained the further into her book publication history. You go from that ramping up. That's like sun signs, love signs, star signs, and then ultimately goobers. But even star signs. One of the things about star signs, and she was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars or something for this as an advance, but the book sort of is presented and that was one of the things I was reflecting on in terms of her getting locked into this role as this amazing astrologer, this legendary astrologer, but really drifting towards wanting to talk about metaphysics and sort of pontificating about spiritual and metaphysical things is that that's what star signs is. It seems like it has very little to do with astrology, even though they titled it that, I assume to sell copies. But most of this book is her talking about religion and spirituality and metaphysical stuff and conspiracy theories. And she's giving health advice. She's saying cancer doesn't exist or that you can do different things to heal yourself without getting treatment. It's very much of a. More that she wants to be metaphysical guru in this book more than astrology content. And I have to imagine that that would have alienated her somewhat from the astrological community if she's no longer doing the primary thing that she's known for, which is talking about astrology in a relatable way.
- [127:15]
A
Absolutely. I mean, I think this book is deeply unrelatable. I mean, I just like some of the concepts, they just sort of been betray, you know, the realities of having a physical body. You know, she talks about fruitarianism and that ultimately, you know, that is the best way to be. She also, I mean, her conception of money is quite funny. I think there's a part in the book where she's like, you gotta. You gotta give that money away if you want that money to come back to you. Which I think maybe is what she. I mean, perhaps she lived by her own rules and she did that. You know, she also. There's something where she. She really believed in the healing power of. I believe it's grape juice. Like you should only drink grape juice because grape juice is a kind of elixir. You know, she was also diabetic. So, you know, I don't know if grape juice is an elixir if you are diabetic. And so I think here we can actually really see her sort of being unmoored from realities and what, you know, what does it mean to live in a body in this.
- [128:13]
B
Yeah. And in a way, ultimately that may have been harmful. Where she was a diabetic. And then she was advocating and either was or was off and on experimenting with being a fruititarian, which means only eating fruit, and that just does terrible damage to your body. And then eventually, by the early 90s, due to her complications with diabetes that she didn't treat, eventually she has to have like a toe removed amputated, and then eventually has parts of her foot or her leg amputated in 1993, and then eventually dies from complications from diabetes in 1985. But she's advocating some of these, honestly wacky and harmful health things in the 1980s, or even in an early 1990s interview that I saw on YouTube that's up, she starts talking about cancer and how radiation is worse for you than the cancer itself, or that cancer doesn't exist until you're told that it exists and just things that are really harmful. That for me, I'm thinking about the same time period my father died of cancer in 1989. And so reading some stuff about what she's saying about health topics that she has no business talking about is just kind of horrifying to me. And that's why when I see some of her later stuff, I feel like she went more off the deep end later in her life. And I don't want to malign her overly. I want to obviously recognize the good parts of her life and the challenging parts or different things like that. But I also want to recognize, and it's one of the reasons why I'm being cautious and saying openly, I'm not necessarily advocating this, even if I want to do a bio on somebody that was so prominent in the astrological community but also had some deeply problematic things.
- [130:16]
A
Yeah, I'm with you, Chris. I do not endorse star signs. I do not endorse being a fruitarian. Yeah. And I think that's what makes her a really challenging figure to think about is like, how do we talk about someone who did have these contributions, but then also in a lot of ways also promoted things that are quite harmful and just sort of betray what it means to live in a body.
- [130:41]
B
Yeah. And I mean, I guess I should say she was not. Even though this is weird and looks even weirder now. She was not uncommon for her time period because actually Steve Jobs was a fruititarian. And he ends up eventually that's part of what contributes to him dying is he was a fruitarian. And then eventually he got cancer, but he didn't want to be operated on, so he tried to deal with it through natural ways. Maybe it was like being a fruitarian, I'm not remembering all the details, but by not doing some of that stuff, there's speculation that he could have recovered from the cancer if he had just gotten the surgery and dealt with it immediately by. But by doing some alternative things may have made it worse. And so I'm just using that example because if somebody like Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer and one of the richest people in the world, can also have weird medical things that can have negative things, it's like that contextualizes Linda, that there was other people like that back then that had similar things. And there's, you know, there's lots of people like that today. I just released an episode about the hantavirus news recently, and I'm getting a lot of interesting comments about people's theories about whether viruses exist and things like that on YouTube. So she was somewhat like a product of her time, of what the New Age movement looked like in the 1980s, and was trying to participate in those conversations.
- [132:22]
A
Yeah, And I also think, you know, what is interesting about Linda Goodman is that, like, even though she actually promotes these, like, really wacky theories, you know, I. I do wonder, and I, you know, as a. As, like a biographer and a writer, I don't feel like I can. You know, I certainly can't diagnose her or make any kind of accusations about her mental health, but I do wonder how much it had to do with, like, control. Like, I want to control the things around me because there's been so much in my life related to death and grief that I cannot control. And so I think when I put it in that context, it maybe makes a little bit more sense why she would advocate for these things.
- [132:59]
B
Sure, for sure. Yeah. Wanting to be in control and wanting to. Yeah, I mean, there's that side of things also in wanting to create your own reality in some sense, which we see versions of that later that become popularized with the secret in the 2000s, for example.
- [133:18]
A
Definitely. Yeah.
- [133:20]
B
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. So one of the things that happens, though, during this time period, in the 80s and early 90s, towards the end of her life, is that there's somewhat of a stigma because she also became the epitome of a pop astrologer in terms of thinking about her place in the astrological community. And this is something that you reflected on a lot in your book in terms of initially wondering why she wasn't more highly regarded or talked about even by contemporary astrologers. And I think that one of the things I noticed is that by the late 80s and early 90s, she kind of became not just the epitome of a pop astrologer, but in some instances, like a punchline for later astrologers who sought to distance themselves from the simplified version of sun sign astrology. And I saw this exchange in one interview where she referred to Joan Quigley, for example, who was Reagan's astrologer. After she was outed as Reagan's astrologer. She made a comment at one point in an interview saying that she was a real astrologer, not a pop astrologer like Linda Goodman. And Linda heard this and shoots back at Joan Quigley and says something kind of snarky in an interview. But I thought that was interesting that two of the most famous astrologers of the late 20th century, like Linda Goodman, the author of Sun Signs, and Joan Quigley, the astrologer to the President of the United States, were not friends and kind of going at each other. But it had to do with this core issue of how Linda had become associated with pop astrology in some ways.
- [135:00]
A
Yeah. And I wonder if that was maybe the impulse towards going into some of these metaphysical topics is that she wanted to be maybe legitimized or seen as an expert on something. And really what she was cast as was this, like, you know, oh, bubblegum fluff pop astrology. I didn't know that about Linda and Joan Quigley that they had a little spat.
- [135:21]
B
Yeah, I just noticed it in an interview I was watching because I was trying to watch any interviews I could on her that are available over the past few weeks. And that was one that I noticed, just her pushing back against Joan quickly. And there's something about that that kind of hurt her. I think I noticed, because she also did. Even though I'm emphasizing that she got so much into metaphysics and everything else, she still conceptualized herself as a real astrologer. And she was still doing consultations through the 80s and 90s. And that's something I should say as well, that she was still seeing clients from what I've been told by different people, although that's an irony. In Star Signs, one of the things she says early in the book is that astrologers shouldn't charge for consultations because you shouldn't make money from something that's spiritual. But then later in the same paragraph, she quickly excuses and says it's okay to write and make lots of money from writing about astrology or metaphysical time topics, of course, because that's what she does. But I know there was one astrologer who pointed that out to me and said they were a big fan of Linda, but then they got rid of her books after they read that, because they were a struggling astrologer trying to do consultations and make it doing what they loved at the time. And it was weird to them to see the richest and most famous astrologer in the world who had done consultations kind of like doing that to other astrologers at that point. And some. Some way.
- [136:47]
A
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I find her relationship to money to be, like, very contradictory. And, like, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me in any way. I mean, the other thing that I think is kind of wild about Linda Goodman is that, like, she. I mean, she died from. From my understanding with, like, nothing. And so there are moments where I, like, I look at her life and I'm like, did she understand how money worked? So I think that astrologer's observation is really. Is really astute. It's like, you. This is like, this was sort of your key to, you know, like, fame and fortune, and yet, like, you know what. Exactly. Yeah. Her conception of it is very confusing to me.
- [137:23]
B
Yeah. You had pointed out that thing she says in Sun Signs. Because it's in the same. Star Signs. Because it's in the same section where she says that. She says it's okay to be rich and be a millionaire or even a billionaire, but you should give away half of anything you earn. And as I was reading that, I was wondering if that was how she justified the lavish gifts and stuff that she would buy for people. She would buy dishwashers or a briefcase or a car or other things, all sorts of gifts for people throughout her life. And if that wasn't part of how she rationalized that and her tendency to do that, or if that was part of her struggles with money is maybe there was a feeling of unworthiness or needing to give it away. I don't know if that's reading too much into it, but I'm curious what the psychological thing there was with that.
- [138:12]
A
Yeah, me too. Or maybe it was like, wanting to be liked. Like, I'm gonna give you this gift if you like me. But that's another question that I had, too, where I was like, okay, so you give it away. Does that mean in the form of a gift, does that mean to charity? Does that mean you throw it out on the street? And she doesn't really, you know, another. I mean, in terms of her. Her sort of metaphysical pontification, she's. She's A little bit imprecise in that way and maybe purposely so.
- [138:36]
B
Yeah. As well as contradictory. Cause like I said, it's like she's writing that in 87, but she's still doing consultations. So she's also not following in some instances the precepts that she's outlining. But that's part of the internal tension that runs throughout trying to understand her life. That can be kind of tricky. So in terms of the astrological community, something I was thinking about also in terms of that exchange between Quigley and her and between other astrologers and how she was regarded is like one of the things is she was born in the 1920s, but most of the generation that came in that she influenced was the Pluto in Leo generation that came in in the 1940s. So there's like this 20 year gap between her and the next generation that came in during the huge upswing in the popularity of astrology. And I have to think that there would have been some sort of disconnect between Linda's generation versus the one that came in in the 60s and 70s, and that her astrology may have looked different or somewhat basic or kind of dated to them because it wasn't having as much of a focus where things had shifted towards depth psychology and things like that, or towards counseling or towards in some instances attempting to raise the professional standards of astrology and different things like that. So maybe there was a theme of like, she didn't try as much to kind of like keep up with the times. And that also may have set her apart of basically the two books that she writes about astrology are in 68 and 78. And from that point forward she's writing about more metaphysical topics.
- [140:22]
A
Yeah. So I mean, maybe calling herself an outsider in goobers is actually maybe really accurate to how she was sort of seen.
- [140:33]
B
Yeah, that maybe some of those feelings of alienation, maybe she was aware of that or I don't know, it's tricky. But yeah, there's something there. So her book stayed in circulation though, and continued to sell. She maintained some sort of celebrity clientele where I'm told she had contacts in Hollywood that would sometimes contact her for advice on movie release dates or numerological expertise for the titles of books. There's a lot of references about her seeing clients, but we don't really know fully what clients she had. But some of the names that were mentioned in some of the newspaper articles were like that she had a connection with the famous actor Steve McQueen. Princess Grace may have been a client. Dionne Warwick was a client, and that Sunny and Cher somehow may have been a client at some point. And some of these may have been at the beginning of her fame in the late 60s and early 70s rather than later on. And there is an ambiguity about who was still around later. But those are some interesting names.
- [141:43]
A
Yeah. And that's really an area, too, where I felt very sort of murky about precisely who she was seeing or what. And maybe I think Joan Quigley is a really interesting example because she was the secret astrologer. And so I was curious, too. Perhaps that was part of it is like, maybe people wanted to keep it a secret that they were seeing an astrologer. And so she didn't publicly say. Or maybe they didn't publicly say.
- [142:07]
B
Right. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of those we'll never know, necessarily. But one thing that was interesting, I found a little factoid that I said her book continued to be in circulation and continued to sell lots of copies. And in 1995, when Tupac Shakur was in jail, his reading list included one of Linda Goodman's books. So it's interesting seeing the circulation of her books and how she continued to influence people through her original publications in different ways.
- [142:42]
A
I'm gonna tell everybody that now on my book tour. I'm gonna be like, guess what? Tupac loved her.
- [142:47]
B
Yeah. This is one of those. If there's an astrological version of Jeopardy. Where you'll nail someday just knowing that factoid.
- [142:54]
A
Oh, my gosh. Thank you, Chris. I'm gonna take it.
- [142:58]
B
All right, so her home in Colorado, people would show up there seeking a guru with answers and sort of like seeking out the famous astrologer. And sometimes she would engage and with people that would show up, and other times, she'd have to turn people away. That was something you touched on at one point. And you actually went out there and checked out her house at one point, right?
- [143:24]
A
Yeah. And I mean, Cripple Creek, it's little. It's like a teeny, tiny town. It's really beautiful. And her house, I mean, she had two homes in Cripple Creek. And they are obvious which homes they are because they have these really elaborate stained glass murals. And I spoke with someone who, you know, was actually a really big fan of Linda Goodman and moved to Cripple Creek to work with, like, to be close to her and ended up working with her. And they reported that, yes, there would be just, like, hundreds of people that would come and she would get letters and that she. You know, it's. I think it's so interesting to think of her in light of a story, astrologers today, where I feel like there are podcasts and Instagram and you have to have this virtual digital presence. And of course, Linda Goodman didn't have to contend with that. And that's maybe really not the figure that she was. I think she was maybe quite sensitive and quite reclusive. And so, yes, as you say, I think sometimes she was able to engage with people and sometimes she really wasn't.
- [144:21]
B
Yeah. And she was. Reclusive is a phrase or word that comes up a lot. So that must have been hard for her. And it's interesting because it's also like, you think about the Beatles traveled to India to study under Transcendental Meditation, under a guru, or there was so much of a version of that that was happening in the 60s and 70s and perhaps even 80s, that for some people like Linda, was that they kind of hoped she had answers to something in some way, either through astrology or what have you. So it's interesting. That role in terms of things or that role. But her health started to suffer due to the diabetes that was untreated. She had those amputations by like, 93. And then ultimately, Linda ended up passing away on October 21, 1995, from complications related to diabetes. And she actually died during an eclipse season just three days before a solar eclipse in Scorpio that happened on October 24th, which was in her eighth whole sign house. And the New York Times article, because she was so famous that the New York Times ran an obituary for her on October that was published on October 25. So within 24 hours of that eclipse. And it means nowadays, something we've noticed on the podcast over the years is every eclipse season, there's usually some famous celebrity that passes away. So that we've sort of seen some of those ancient notions be validated in this kind of mysterious way that even I was skeptical about at first, but it's a recurring phenomenon. But people alive at that time, then she would have been one of the celebrity deaths that dies on an eclipse that everybody has a moment and is like, wow, that really hits or impacts me because I read her book and it was so important or what have you. So it must have been a real moment, I imagine, for everybody around that
- [146:33]
A
time, and especially because there wasn't a lot of publicity about her, There weren't a lot of articles. And so her obituary would have been one of the only things, you know, where you would have seen her circulating in media unless you were someone who was reading Star Signs or Goobers, which at that point in time, I don't know how many people were reading those books.
- [146:54]
B
Right, That's a great point. So it's like she becomes reclusive, she falls into obscurity. Her last couple of books don't sell well, so that most people. The last time her name was really big in terms of release of a big book that made a splash was like 1978 and maybe the early 80s, when that book is still really popular and new. But then it means that there was like a 10 year gap. And then at some point people do hear about her passing away. And there's the New York Times obituary. There's also like a People magazine article that came out after her death that kind of talked about her life, but also really focused on her struggles towards the end of her life, especially regarding the loss of her daughter. Right.
- [147:40]
A
Yeah. And I mean, that's what I mean I think is quite interesting about her is like, you know, this. This interest, maybe an interest is the wrong word, but this contemplation of death and this refusal of death became part of her legacy. You know, in that particular article from Cynthia Sands, it's not about, you know, they could have, you know, just pitched her as this literary figure who revolutionized astrology and was this big pop cultural figure in the 1960s and 70s, but instead Sally and Linda's relationship to Sally becomes sort of the central crux of that remembrance. I also think it might be in the New York Times obituary as well. And so she wasn't just known for her literary work. She was also known as this kind of eccentric, grief stricken figure.
- [148:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. That's really tragic. And tough just in terms of that. But. But it's hard because of the reality of that. I know that was something that you struggled with, is wanting to see if those narratives were mistaken or overly biased or something like that, but that you kind of struggled with that. She really did struggle with this in the later portions of her life. And it was something that in some ways sidetracked her in a version of, let's say, an alternate reality where, I don't know, if she didn't have that loss or if she was more together later in life, would she have been more well known or well regarded still? I guess is an open question.
- [149:21]
A
Yeah. And I also think too, what I had to grapple with in this is, I mean, I had a total agenda. I was a Linda Goodman fan. And so I wanted some sort of recognition for her and to position her within the history of the American New Age and astrology. And I think, yeah, I definitely had to grapple with that of, like, why do we not think of her this way? And how did she sort of consciously or subconsciously contribute to that? And did she even want that? Was she someone that was interested in having this kind of enduring legacy and presence? You know, I also think during the 80s and 90s and into today, astrology became a completely different thing with thinking about software and professionalization. And I don't. I'm really uncertain, you know, if that was something she was interested in. Like, she was maybe really secure in her place as being an outsider and in writing her poetry and pontificating about esoteric facts. And so even though me as a fan, I had my own agenda, that's maybe not what Linda Goodman wanted.
- [150:26]
B
Yeah, that's a good point. In terms of being more reclusive deliberately, to some extent. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, well, and I meant to mention the obituary ran within 24 hours of that Scorpio eclipse, but then there was another eclipse that preceded that on October 8th, and that was in Aries, basically in her rising sign, just like there was an eclipse in Aries when the sun sign book first came out. So that was just weird in terms of how that tied in with the timing and in terms of the astrology of the most famous astrologer in the world and one of the most influential astrologers of the 20th century. And, of course, maybe all of astrological history having such a notable celestial event coinciding with her passing away in the same way that ancient kings and stuff and prominent people in ancient times. There's some speculations that may have been how astrology first started to originate, as some peopleastrologers in Mesopotamia started to notice an eclipse happening and a prominent person passing away. There's something really fitting and almost beautiful in a cosmic sense about eclipse marking her passing in the same way, just as it had marked the publishing of her book and kind of bookending her story in that way.
- [151:59]
A
This is why it's fun to talk to you, Chris. I had no idea as I was writing this, and that kind of blows my mind.
- [152:05]
B
Yeah. And I was finding it as I went, as I was reading your book and constructing, because, like I said, I'd always meant to do this episode. And it gave me a good opportunity to research all of this, not just with your book, but also in going through and reading all of her books, reading other articles and creating this outline, but also just looking at the astrology and I kept finding these crazy things in terms of the timing and in terms of her chart. There's a bunch of other things, but we'll skip that. We don't have to go into her chart anymore. Well, actually, do you want to glance at her chart just for a second?
- [152:43]
A
Sure, let's glance at her chart.
- [152:45]
B
Okay. Because I want to bring. Maybe we could bring a few things around now that we know her story. Maybe it would be appropriate, too. So she has Aries rising and the ruler of the Ascendant. One of the most important planets in the chart is Mars, and it's in Gemini in the third whole sign house. And the ruler of the Ascendant in ancient astrology and Hellenistic astrology often talks about what your life is directed towards. And it's said to be like the captain of your ship that's sort of pointing your life in a certain direction. And for her, it was in the third house of communication, in the sign of Gemini. And that was so much of her life. Starting out doing radio and writing and communicating, but then eventually becoming this famous writer and writing the highest selling astrology books of all time. So there's something really fitting and beautiful about that, just in that basic way.
- [153:51]
A
I love it. Yeah, that does bring it all the way around. I mean, that theme is there from the very beginning of her professional life.
- [153:58]
B
Yeah. So we've got that she had Jupiter in the 10th house in a day chart as her most positive planet. And this is the main indication for her just mega success in Terms of the 10th House of Career and social standing and sort of overall life direction. But then the ruler of her tenth house is that Saturn, which is placed in the eighth house of death and mortality and debt and other people's money with that square from Neptune. And I think this is the thing where even though she has that initial success with Jupiter in the 10th house, so much of her career and legacy later in life would get tied up with the death of her daughter and her inability to accept that, as well as her financial troubles and her issues with money and spending money and gifts and debt and other things like that. There were also some really major legal issues that she got into with her publisher. I think at one point after not delivering the book. Right.
- [155:06]
A
Yes. She had all sorts of problems with that. I think it was. I mean, I think it was kind of throughout her life. I think there was like a problem. And don't quote me on that, because I think that's. I think this is true, that I think there was maybe something with her first publisher with Taplinger, and then that her sort of fixer had to get her out of. And then she. I also think for maybe her second book, she, like, basically promised a lot of them, like rights or the money to different people, totaling like, over 100%. So she had some issues, for sure.
- [155:39]
B
Yeah. And it. And it's all. And it's tough and stuff, but it's just good. One of the reasons I'm talking about this so openly is just. It's really like learning about her life in Biography is a good example of different things in different placements that people can deal with in different ways, sometimes much less extreme ways, but at least learning something archetypally. In the same way that she used so many celebrity charts and would refer to them throughout her writings to learn things about how astrology works. So her moon was in Libra in the seventh house. And we see that she was born on that full moon. So it's striking that she's born on a full moon and then subsequent lunations play such a significant role in her life. I was interested that her fifth house of children is Leo, and it's ruled by the sun, which is in the first house. And something we've been seeing in the Houses series recently, where I've been going through each of the houses, is this pattern where when the ruler of a house is in the first house, sometimes the person's name becomes tied in with that house. So, for example, Maria Montessori had the ruler of the third house of education and the first house of identity and Self, and this schooling approach and system was named after her. Or Enzo Ferrari, who created the Ferrari car brand, had the ruler of the third house of travel and the first house of identity, and his name now becomes synonymous with travel or with cars. Or Trump has the ruler of the fourth house in the first house, and he initially was famous for throwing his name on buildings and stuff like Trump Tower, for example, Linda as the ruler of the fifth house and the first house. And one of the things I find so funny about that is her second book. One of the books she's most known for is Linda Goodman's Love Signs and the Fifth House and its notions with love, love and romance and sexuality and other things like that. So we've already talked about the sun and its exaltation and how she literally exalted and raised up the sun to this really large level in terms of putting that front and center in terms of astrology in the 20th century. And the last thing we mentioned, Venus in the first House and just physical things and appearance. But there was also, like some theme that was recurring that may also be tied in with the ruler of the fifth and the first. Where she wanted to. One of the biographies, it was like one of her children said she wanted to make people happy, I think, or something like that. Do you remember that?
- [158:23]
A
Yeah, I do remember that. I think one of her sons said something like that, that she wanted to make people happy. And I also. One of the interviews I did talked too about how she wanted. And I don't know if this quite connects, but to get people just talking about astrology and to see the good in other people and no matter what your sun sign is.
- [158:45]
B
Yeah, she says something about that in sun signs, that it actually makes you understand and empathize with people more if you understand where they're coming from. And I thought that was really beautiful, that that was part of her goal.
- [158:58]
A
Yeah, definitely.
- [159:00]
B
Which is also important because it's like an inversion of. Some of the skeptics are starting to attempt to create this rhetorical narrative that astrology promotes racism or space racism or something like that. But then to see the most famous sun sign astrologer saying, no, the purpose of this is not to prejudice people. The purpose is to actually develop greater empathy for people and where they're coming from.
- [159:28]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, she says it right in sun signs, you know, it's a happier world and people are pretty great. When you look for the rainbows hidden inside them, isn't that life's major problem understanding? No, I mean, I really do think she. And I think it might actually, like, as I say it, it might sound really superficial, but I do think she was genuinely interested in harmony and like creating that amongst people.
- [159:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And there's something about that Venus in the first house that I think is really significant there. In terms of that. The last thing just natal chart placement wise, is her Mercury, interestingly is there in Taurus in the second whole sign house. Although it's rising up to the Ascendant, it was rising over the horizon almost as she was being born. She was born a day after Mercury stationed retrograde, which makes it a much more prominent planet in her chart. Interestingly, as a writer and that she would end up making her income primarily through writing, ultimately in her fortune. But one of the things I found interesting is that. So her Mercury's retrograde and then by secondary progressions where it's a day per year. Each day of your life after you're born equals one year. Her Mercury eventually stationed direct in her life. And it came back to and conjoined. It returned back to its natal position at 2 Scorpio in the mid-60s when she started learning astrology. So there was this really interesting secondary progression thing. And her secondary progressions are just fascinating because she actually reaches her secondary progressed new Moon right when sun signs comes out in the late 1960s. It's this really beautiful if, you know, secondary progressions, like timing thing in terms of how her chart and timing turned out in terms of that.
- [161:23]
A
Wow.
- [161:25]
B
And then the last thing is just she has that Pluto in the fourth house on the ic and it's opposing the midheaven and Jupiter, and there's a few things with that. But I think I focused on Saturn in the 8th House of Death as some of her issues surrounding death and inability to cope with it. But there's something there with that Pluto placement as well that I don't fully understand. But I think it's doing something important because the fourth house can also be associated in ancient astrology with death and the end of a person's life. And having Pluto so prominent there by secondary progression. For example, her Mars, which is in Gemini, comes up and conjoins Pluto when Sally passed away. And so there was an activation of that placement, but there was also some kind of obsessive tendency as well. But I feel like there may have been something there earlier in life that we don't or can't know about that maybe speak to that placement and kind of experience, explain a little bit more and may explain what happened later in life and some of the issues she struggled with with death. But I'm not sure what that is, but it's sort of connected with things there.
- [162:47]
A
Yeah, interesting.
- [162:49]
B
All right. There's other things, but I think that that might be good for that little piece just in terms of giving additional perspective and sort of rounding out the biography. So now that's the attempt to create, as best as I can, an understanding of her life and biography. And because she has those Saturn Neptune themes so prominent, it's something that's hard to work out in detail because there's so much murkiness. And that's something that you really experienced in terms of researching things and doing your PhD thesis. But you sort of leaned into that and leaned into some of the Saturn Neptune themes. And you yourself were born on that conjunction in the late 80s and tried to approach writing about her through more of a literary lens, right?
- [163:52]
A
Yeah, absolutely. So when I was doing my PhD, I said, I want to do this project about Linda Goodman. And I remember I went and I spoke with a historian who was on my committee. And so I told her all about Linda. And I showed her, you know, the little sort of scant archive that I could find. And this professor very generously and very sweetly said, courtney, this is an impossible project for you to do a biography about this woman. You don't have enough information. It seems like there's lots of myth around her. There's lots of misinformation, like, I don't really know how you're going to do this. And so ultimately, what I decided was that in order to write about Linda Goodman, I, as a reader would have, or as a writer would have to lay bare my own experience. And that meant sort of showing all the gaps that I had encountered in her life and ultimately consciously fictionalizing and imagining parts of her life. So, you know, for me, I sort of struggled with the ethics of it, like, what does it mean to write about this person's life in this way? And I tried to be really conscious about flagging in the book that this is not a strict biography, this is a kind of product of my imagination. But I also think that Linda Goodman is someone who really courted the imagination and sort of lived in the world of fantasy. And I don't know if it would be possible. You know, I think if I was someone else, I think if I had known Linda Goodman, if I had access to a very vast archive, I probably could have done a more, much more historical sort of fact based excavation of her life. But for me, a fan, I felt like, yes, as you say, I had to lean into the kind of imaginative, foggy, sort of Neptunian ways, like aspects of her story, in order for me to tell her story. And so it's a little bit of a hybrid project. Part of it is my own exploration of Linda. Part of it is this is what I could find about Linda. These are some of my imaginings. And then part of it is also a sort of cultural critique of why do we not think of Linda Goodman today and how does she speak to this moment of the 1960s and 70s, right, yeah.
- [165:59]
B
And how do people cope with themes of grief and things like that, and dealing with some of your own grief surrounding your mother and the loss of her and different things like that. Your publisher first contacted me about doing the interview, and I was like, sure, yeah, let's do it. Because I'd been wanting to do an episode on Linda Goodman forever, and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to do that. And to research her life myself. And then I sort of put off reading the book until really recently, until the past week or two, and then read the book over the past week. And initially, I was surprised at the unconventional format, and I wasn't sure about it at all at first, because I was expecting more of a linear chronological biography. But then ultimately, once I surrendered to it and surrendered to this Saturn, Neptune type experience, I liked it. And I ended up liking the book. And I felt like it captured the essence in a way that I was surprised by, of trying to pin down a woman who herself lived kind of halfway between the real and the unreal real. So it may not be for everybody, depending on a person's disposition. But I think if you go into it with that in mind, it becomes a really interesting way to experience the current Saturn, Neptune archetype in transit, as well as what Linda herself had that recurred throughout her life and embodied in so many different ways, and in which her memory, in some ways still continues to reverberate through time with. In tandem with Saturn, Neptune transits as. We just have that outer planet alignment happening now, and we have this work and these discussions about her coming up again.
- [167:45]
A
Yeah. Well, Chris, I appreciate you sticking with it. I know it's. I'm sure there will be some people that will be like, this is gonna be a book about just Linda Goodman. And then they will read it, and then it's something totally different. So I appreciate that you stuck with it, but, I mean, I do think it's a moment to think about illusion. As you said before, we're living in a moment of AI slot and slop and chatgpt where this conception of what is the relationship between illusion and reality, I think makes Linda's story especially pertinent.
- [168:16]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And subjective and objective. And time and the boundaries between different things like Saturn and Neptune loves to blur boundaries and. Yeah, blurring the boundaries between memoir and biography and all these other things. It was like I said, I felt like I had an experience. And at one point it felt like Fear and Loathing in Sedona was my working title for it, which I said very lovingly. Yeah. So good job with the book and thanks for doing this with me. Congratulations. The book will be out tomorrow, May 12, 2026. So congratulations on the release of the book and thanks for doing this with me and joining me today to try to talk about Linda's life and to try to document the work of one of the most famous astrologers of our time and in history. I appreciate you doing this with me.
- [169:13]
A
Oh my gosh, thank you, Chris. This is like a total dream to get to talk to an astrologer about Linda Goodman and look at her chart. It's truly like I wish I had done this. This at the very beginning of the book. You illuminated things for me that I haven't even thought of. So thank you so much.
- [169:28]
B
Brilliant. Good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad we could collaborate to create this together. So thanks a lot for joining me today. Thanks everyone for watching or listening to this episode of the Astrology Podcast and we'll see you again next time. If you're a fan of the podcast and you want to get access to bonus content, then become a patron through my page on Patreon, where you can get early access to new episodes, attend live recordings and webinars, access the monthly Electional Astrology Podcast, the secret Astrology Podcast that's only available to patrons, or you can even get your name listed in the credits. Find out more@patreon.com AstroNYPodcast Special thanks to the patrons on our Producers tier, including patrons Kristi Moe, Ariana Amour, Mandy Ray, Angelique Nambour, Issa Sabah, Jeannie Marie Kaplan, Melissa Delano, Sunny Baz, Baz Kwatsi Alibarahu, Annie Newman, Ginger Sadlier, Berlin west, and Nikki Crawford. If you're looking for good dates to do things this year, then be sure to check out our 2026 electional astrology report, which is a guide to the most fortunate dates in 2026. You can get it at theastrologypodcast.com 2026report. If you're really looking to take your studies of astrology to the next level, then consider signing up for my Hellenistic Astrology Course, which is an online course in ancient astrology where I take people from basic concepts up through intermediate and advanced techniques for reading birth charts. There's over 100 hours of video lectures plus live webinars and Q and A sessions each month, and at the end of the course you get a certificate of completion saying that you studied with me.
- [171:05]
A
Me.
- [171:05]
B
Find out more information@theastrologyschool.com if you're looking to get an astrological consultation, then check out the new Consultations page on the podcast website where I have a list of astrologers I recommend for birth chart readings and other types of consultations. You can find that@theastrologypodcast.com consultations the astrology software we use and recommend here on the podcast is called Solar Fire for Windows and you can get a 15% discount on it by using the promo code AD AP15 at the website alabe.com for Mac users, we recommend the program called astro gold for macOS, and you can use the promo code astropodcast15 to get a 15% discount at their website, which is astrogold IO. And shout out to our sponsors for this episode, including the Northwest Astrology Conference, which is happening in Seattle and being livestreamed online May 21st through the 25th, 2026. Find out more information@norwac.net, as well as the United Astrology Conference, which is happening in Chicago this year September 3rd through the 9th, 2026. Find out more information about that at uacastrology.com. Sam.