“Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs,” chalk pastel sketch by Maria Theresa Maggi
I still have the copy of Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs that was gifted to me by a family friend when I was 19. As you can see from the sketch I did of it, the top is marked with moisture rings from coffee cups and the spine is peeling away from the pages. It’s hard to turn the pages since the spine is mostly unglued but when I pick it off the bookshelf carefully it still holds all the magic it once held for me when I was young.
I only knew Mrs. Brennan as the pleasant mother of my younger sister’s friend, someone who with her calm, soothing voice and pleasant manner, always seemed to soothe my more nervous mother just with the sound of her voice. We all went to the same Catholic parish and we lived within blocks of one another. Mrs. Brennan was diagnosed with MS and for a time during that year lost her eyesight. In trying to remember how I came to start visiting her at home, I think it must have been that my Mom dispatched me to bring a casserole, or check in on her in some way. Or perhaps I went in person on my bike to fetch my sister back home.
What I found there was something altogether different: perspectives and conversations that would actually alter the course of my life, though I didn’t know it at the time. I would later wistfully think I was letting go of them, only to have them return with the force of a soulful mandate another nearly 20 years later (with perfect astrological timing).
Though Mrs. Brennan had suffered with the loss of her sight and other symptoms, you would not know it from talking to her. In fact she was happy to describe that in order to get her eyes and brain to work properly again, she simply knew she had to retreat to her room, in the dark, and lay there with her eyes closed and rest, no demands, until she recovered her eyesight. And that’s exactly what she did, despite the fact that she had 3 children and a very taciturn police detective for a husband. She did not negotiate with anyone how to do this, she just told them in her melodious voice that she loved them all and this was what she was going to do.
The first conversation with her I remember was in her small kitchen where she relayed this story. It’s also where she made her delicious tamales, one of the ways she quietly honored her Latina heritage. It also seems to me I was one of a few people who were already around her table, and I had been invited to sit down and join in. I was flattered and felt honored to be included at a table of adults who wanted to know what I thought and did not expect me just to be there to clear or fill the coffee cups.
They talked about things we never talked about at home, metaphysical things that fascinated me. Perhaps that’s where I first heard of Edgar Cayce and why I wrote my term paper for freshman English at the City College about out-of-body experiences. It seems to me now that these friends of Mrs. Brennan must also have gone to a metaphysical church or meeting place that she had started to attend (and that she invited me to once where a clairvoyant reader told me an older woman with red braids was looking out for me. I remember being astounded at recognizing my paternal grandmother in the description). I so loved that Mrs. Brennan saw no disjunction between what she was learning there and attending mass in our parish.
Astrology was part of those conversations around the kitchen table. Though I had always been curious, these conversations are where I took my first deep dive. Linda Goodman’s book was pressed into my hands. And one of the friends said she’d calculate my birth chart for me. I remember that at first it had seemed I was Pisces rising, but then it turned out she had calculated it upside down and I actually am Virgo rising. This still delights me. For years, the copy of Linda Goodman’s book Mrs. Brennan pressed into my hands had this upside down corrected chart in it, probably until it tore apart at the creases and was lost to time.
Before I started to learn about the intricacies of my own birth chart, Linda Goodman was my tour guide into the signs. I remember bringing it to work with me at the family department store where I was a clerk, and pouring over it while sitting on the old couch in the tiny break room at the back of the children’s department where I ate my lunch.
Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs was published in 1968, a few years before women were granted credit of their own and Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. Even the way the identities are broken into chapters speaks to an assumed heterosexual norm that we know is too limited today. The hierarchy is implicit in such ordered designations as “The Aries Man,” “The Aries Woman,” The Aries Child,” The Aries Boss,” The Aries Employee,” all down through the twelve signs. And yet. . .
I learned in a wikipedia article about Linda Goodman that she assumed that name during WWII when she hosted a radio show on which she read letters between soldiers and their loved ones, interspersed by popular songs of the day. A native West Virginian, she also worked as a journalist and a speech writer for Civil Rights leader Whitney Young, who brought the National Urban League to the forefront of racial justice and voting rights. She was also a poet. Her Sun Signs was the first book about astrology ever to make the New York Times bestseller list.
Although the way she structures and informs her astrological insights is couched in conventional roles we bristle at today, there is something authentic that comes up through and beyond those constraints. Perhaps it is her own identity as a poet and her use of quotes from Lewis Carroll to describe the feel of a chapter in a particular sun sign that for me highlights a transcendent truth amidst the outdated confines. And that truth can be scathingly funny and brilliant. My favorite example of this is in the Chapter “How To Recognize A Virgo” (which happens to be my rising sign). Goodman writes:
“I still have the ten page letter from a Virgo housewife, written in a tiny, precise handwriting, in which she carefully details all the reasons why the descriptions of her Sun sign don’t fit her, never realizing that the very form and very length of her hairsplitting complaint was giving her away.
‘I’m just not neat,’ she wrote, ‘My house is terribly sloppy.’ But then she continued, ‘After all, I do have two very small children, who constantly makes messes which drive me crazy. I pick up after them every second of the day. ‘ (She then proceeded to itemize her endless chores, one by one, very carefully) [Here I have to smile at Goodman, the Aries, telling the story]. ‘I’d like to be neat, but what can I do with the children and all?. ..(Naturally, she carefully included a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply) The last line in her letter wondered, ‘Can you tell me why the descriptions of my sun sign do not fit me at all?’ Someday I plan to have those pages framed and hang them on the wall under a symbol of Virgo.”
I still laugh every time I even think of this. And I get my other friends with Sun in Virgo or Virgo rising to laugh about it too.
Back when I was learning from Goodman’s insights for the first time, I see myself punching in at the clock in the department store, my mind full of passages like these after reading this introduction to the Capricorn woman,, beginning, as they all do, with a quote from the works of Lewis Carroll:
“So she got up and walked about—
rather stiffly just at first,
as she was afraid the crown might come off:
but she comforted herself with the thought
that there was nobody to see her,
‘and if I really am a Queen,’ she said,
as she sat down again,
I shall be able to manage it quite well in time.
There’s no such thing as a typical Capricorn female. She can be a museum curator who wears granny glasses for real, or she can be a dancer, who wears a glittering G-string for fun. . .”
While this passage goes on to talk about Capricorn woman’s ambition to snag the right man, just this intro about being unsure at first of how to wear my own crown and that there is no such thing as a typical Capricorn woman set me ablaze with self-recognition and possibility. I was also comforted by her descriptions of taking teasing too seriously, and the weird aging twist that makes Capricorn women especially grow “young” over the years. I decided it was okay to be patient with that process, instead of wishing I was more carefree as a youngster. It gave me something to look out for, even if I did not know how in the world it might happen. I recognized myself in her way of saying that Saturn people take a long time to come into their own. And now that I think of it, the foundation of my astrological vocation resides insetting up the possibility for others to look into the mirror of their astrological sign or birth chart and recognize themselves in a way that gives them fundamental permission to develop their unique expression of it. It’s still my intention when I write the horoscopes here on Maria’s StarGarden. And so I thank Linda Goodman for showing me how to see myself in the parts of her descriptions where I truly recognized my essence and began to learn to embrace it.
I had to jostle my ancient edition of this book around more than usual to type these quotes, and by the end of that effort, the spine, at last, came completely away from the book save for a thread, exposing the endpapers decorated with circles and stars. I sense a profound symmetry between its unraveling spine and reclaiming or collecting the disparate threads of memory about how my identity as an astrologer emerged.
“Golden Endpapers,” pastel sketch by Maria Theresa Maggi
Mrs. Brennan has long passed away. But I thank her, too, for pressing this book into my hands so long ago, and encouraging me to widen my understanding of the possibilities. And though I didn’t know any of this at the time, she was showing me a way to have faith in my own ways of healing. When I did find my way back to astrology in my 30’s, I feel certain she was there to cheer me on. And when I was diagnosed with MS at 40, she was there, too, to help me trust myself.
Linda Goodman’s spirit still inspires me to look at life with the stars (and a twinkle) in my eyes. Her first astrology book was the first of many books by other authors that would open up for me how I see into the beautiful spectrum of possibilities between the geometry of experience and our creative free will.