Astrological Medicine for Herbalists with Judith Hill

Without further ado, let’s get right into this fascinating discussion on astrological medicine with Judith Hill. 

Sajah: Judith, it is a real pleasure to have you back on the Plant Path. It’s really great to have you back. Thanks so much for joining.

Judith: Thank you, Sajah. It’s a thrill. I couldn’t wait. I’ve been looking forward to this all month.

I’ve been thinking so much about our conversation, especially since presenting at and being part of your wonderful conference again this fall, the Herbal and Astrological Medicine conference that you put on. And, I have been thinking about this conversation, and I’m very excited to have it. 

So first, there are so many areas where astrology can influence our work with herbal medicine, from how we classify and understand the plants to how we apply them therapeutically to how we assess the people we’re working with and work with them in a clinical context. And I think one area of interest that really was the area that got me into studying astrology was pharmacy and studying alchemy and spagyrics, and the role that astrology plays in the world of alchemy. 

I thought it would be really fun to spotlight this topic a bit more: how astrology can be used in the preparation, formulation, and potentization of the herbal remedies we work with in a clinical context. So I’m curious if you could share a brief overview of how you see astrology used to influence herbal pharmacy and medicine-making. We’ll start there and see where it takes us.

Great, that’s fantastic. I think one of the most important contributions to herbalism from astrology is that time matters. And both herbalists and astrologers know this because herbalists work with nature, and present medicine, present science does not acknowledge this. Everything’s just the same. You can have a medicine at one moment. It should be just the same as at another moment. So there are four different processes that all benefit from time.

What’s wonderful is that these are simple methods that you do not need to be an advanced astrologer to use. When you first plant the seed is one time. When you harvest the plant, it’s another time. When you tincture the plant or begin your herbal crafting for an oil or whatever you want, it’s another time, where you make your super herbs because they’re now infused with these time influences. And then when you administer the medicine, and you begin your protocol, it is a very important time. So all four of these times have their traditional ways of working, and they can range from the simplest to the most complex.

Some of the most simplistic work with the Moon phases and Moon signs, and particularly common in the Renaissance period, was working with the Moon in various astrological elements. Fire, Earth, Air, Water, for very specific purposes, and so much fun to do. And so another more advanced technique is you wait until the Moon is conjoined the planet that delivers the therapeutics you want, such as if you want a good sleeping herb, you wait until it’s conjunct or exactly trining Neptune, the planet of sleep, or Venus.

Venus is also very sedative, and if you want to kick it up a notch, you wait until these are on certain angles. You have to be a good astrologer for this. Those are the planetary doors where the energy enters, and you make your super herbs. 

Anything in the world of astrology is all rabbit holes within rabbit holes, right? You can go down multiple doorways. Let’s start with the Moon aspect, because I think for the folks who aren’t too acquainted with the practice of astrology, the Moon is just a great, accessible means to get started understanding this. So you mentioned the phases of the Moon and the signs the Moon is currently in, based on the elements.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this at some point, too, because I know they do it in biodynamic agriculture. So, if you’re planting a root, wait until the Moon is in an Earth sign, etc., depending on which part of the plant you use. Now, I’m assuming what you’re talking about might be a little bit different. So I’m curious: when you’re determining the timing based on the Moon’s relationship to the signs, are you basing it on the element most commonly associated with the herb? Say the Water element with Cleavers or the Fire element with Cayenne, or are you looking at other factors there?

Yes and no. I’d say yes to what you said, but a little more prominent, another approach. And there are many ways to use the Moon, by the way. You know that too. So, say in Renaissance times, if somebody was very hot and they were suffering from heat, such as they were having signs of high blood pressure and their face was all red, and they were angry, and they were hot, or they were feverish, or having GERD, then you wanted a cold, wet remedy. They would make friends with the herbs. You could plant the plant under Water signs, and pick it under Water signs. But more importantly, they would give the protocol when the Moon was in a Water sign. And then they would take the marc, and they would throw it into water. And yes, they would do the opposite for a person who was phlegmatic.

If a person was filled with Water, they were spongy, they were solid, they were depressed, they were edemic, swollen ankles, low blood pressure, all the symptoms of too much Water in the body, they could again pick and plant seeds for a diuretic herb. Say, Cleavers.

There are a lot of good diuretic herbs, such as Dandelion root. And then they would pick them on a — they’d do fire, fire, fire. Plant them on Fire, pick them on Fire, and then they would give the protocol on a Fire Moon, that’s Aries, Leo, or Sag, and then they would take the marc and throw it into the fire. Now, if they wanted to kick it up a notch, they would wait until the Moon was conjunct Mars for the protocol or the creation of the herb. Planting an herb under Mars may not grow very well. The planets are stronger than the signs and stronger than the elements. So if you’re just working with elements, you have to know some things. Don’t do it if the Moon is conjunct transit south node, which is in the middle of Virgo right now. Just forget that, use another Earth sign. There are some little things to know, but, for all general purposes, I’ve had experiences with this. I tinker with this all the time.

Once, I was visiting a friend in a chateau in the woods, and she was a triple Fire sign.

And it was a double Fire sign that night. Try as she might, the fire would not light. We tried everything. The wood was dry. We tried several different methods. The atmosphere, the astral atmosphere, was just wet. 

Interesting. So it seems like the premise of it here is that the remedy, you’re planting, you’re harvesting, you’re preparing the herb, you are administering the herb during, when the Moon is in a sign or conjunct a planet that is bringing in the quality that you want to be delivering to the body. Is that a quick summary of what we’re doing here?

Yes. That’s perfect. Yes. You look for what you want, the quality you want. Then you craft your, what the Moon’s doing, or if you’re more of an advanced astrologer, the whole scheme and the natal chart, to serve your purpose. To serve your purpose, do it that way.

And so when we’re talking about, say, Water signs, maybe we’re wanting to, as you said, cool down too much heat and bring that Water element into the person. 

Would you also go down to another level of specificity and look at those three Water signs, Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces, and select which of those signs might be more suitable for that person? Say, if you want to address the mucosa or the stomach or bring a galactagogue formula, focus on Cancer, or if you want to work on the lymphatics, work with Pisces, or work with elimination and the bladder, work with Scorpio. Do you use the organ system correlations of the signs to specify the timing of the preparation further?

Absolutely. That’s a beautiful question. So one thing we have to teach people is that the signs are not the elements. The elements are not the signs. So the elements are energies in the universe, and the signs are individual entities that are composed of several inflows of energy. One of them being elements. 

So, for example, and I’ll answer the question Sajah in a minute. Even though all Water signs are supposed to be cold and wet, in truth, they each are a little different. Scorpio, in fact, is not so cold. It can be hot and wet sometimes, because Mars rules it. Every sign has its own unique idiosyncrasies. 

So there are four groups of elements. So there are four groups of three signs. There’ll be one anomalous sign. Does it fit the description of the whole element? Aquarius is the coldest sign in the Zodiac. And yet it’s lopped in with warm, moist Air signs. There’s nothing warm and moist about Aquarius or its diseases. And in fact, this was debated in ancient times because it was assigned by one person, Aristotle. And then he contradicted this assignment of hot and moist to Air. And his own writings, later, and his two students, I think, were Plotinus and Theophrastus. They argued and said, no, Air is cold. But it got stuck.

But no Air is not cold. And in fact, Libra is temperate. It’s not cold either, and Gemini blows hot and cold. But anyway, back to your question, Sajah, yes, you can pick a sign because it serves a body organ or a body zone, or a body function, such as how the three Water signs all have somewhat different functions. Scorpio governs the physical excretions from the body of all kinds, with its ruler, Mars. So if you want to enhance excretion, eradication, such as killing things, you want to get rid of candida, get rid of insects, Scorpio Moon couldn’t be better, especially if you get it lined up with Mars. However, it’s still making nice aspects to the other two Water signs, so it can be used to serve them too. The trine is very nice, and Water is great for the stomach, the breasts, and getting more lactation. You’re encouraging the sign to get more lactation going for Cancer’s sake. You encourage and increase that sign’s energy.

You sometimes don’t want that. Yes, for the mucosa, the lymphatics, the ECM, but what’s the downside of this? Why does this work? Is the answer. When the Moon is in a sign, she’s going to bring more blood flow, more fluid, and a little more electromagnetic energies of unknown kinds to that region. If you have swelling, tumors, or pressure, you don’t use the sign of the body part that you’re working on, as it will bring too much to it. You could increase the problem, you use a trining sign. 

Say if you had a swollen prostate, you don’t want to use a Scorpio Moon, which rules the prostate, because it’ll make it swell more. You treat it from Pisces, Cancer, or one of the sextiling signs like Capricorn. So there’s some trick to it. You want to be careful. In my books, I always say, let’s say you need more blood flow to your knees, you want to use a Capricorn Moon, you want to heal those knees up. But not if you had giant swellings in your knees. No. It’ll bring more swelling.

Interesting, okay. Because the Moon is gravitationally pulling vital force to that area, so if you have excess patterns there, or is it really specifically excess fluid accumulation there, you wouldn’t want to use the Moon?

That’s a really great question. I would say if there’s visible pressure or excess fluid, the Moon going through the sign will bring more, and you can do tests on yourself. I’m starting up a research group in January for the NCGR, and we’re going to do empirical tests on our own bodies of the Moon going through the signs, if I can get enough people to join.

Cool. That sounds awesome. I want to clarify one point there, too, about those trines. So it seems to me that, ok, you have an excess accumulation, you’ve used the example of the swollen prostate. We could see that as an excess accumulation of Scorpio. There’s too much vital force stuck there.

It seems to me that the trine, the way I have understood, is that the vital force seamlessly flows between those other two signs. It can easily flow from one sign to one of those trining signs. So is the premise that, by working on, say, Cancer or Pisces, it’s like a relief valve? Is it diverting that excess accumulation in Scorpio to more evenly distribute it to those other elemental signs associated with it? Is that how you would think of it? 

Actually, that’s a really brilliant observation and question. I’ve never been asked that before because you could get, because of the seamless flowing of energy, what’s happening is you increase nourishment to the body part from a trine or a conjunction. They’re increasing nourishment. 

Now, that could also increase swelling. Yes! And so in a case of say, swollen prostate, things take experimenting. It might be, in fact, better to try to work with the opposite sign and pull energy away, just like you do when someone’s having a migraine. You pull energy down to their feet. You put their feet in hot water with Cayenne in it to pull energy down to the feet.

So it’s possible that when dealing with a lot of accumulation, you want to work with the opposite sign, possibly a squaring sign. But when you want to nourish an asthenic organ or body part, or weakness, you definitely want to use trines. Conjunctions are best, then trines, then sextiles. And you don’t ever want to use an opposition, because that’s when the sign you’re working on gets the least amount of energy.

Right. It’s like a teeter-totter. And that’s the way I’ve always thought of it. You’ve got an excess here and a deficiency there. It seems to me that oftentimes when you have an excess in one, there is a degree of deficiency in the other, and by alleviating the excess here, that can tilt it, or by nourishing the deficiency here, that can shift it back. 

That’s the way I think of those oppositions. So it’s interesting to think about how the different ways one would remediate a particular sign are going to change depending on whether that quality is excess, weak, or deficient. Sometimes it needs nourishment, sometimes alleviation, and sometimes opposing qualities to balance it. Is that how you think of it? 

Absolutely. And what’s really quite remarkable is that I’ve seen none of this discussed in any of the ancient texts. What we are doing today is historic. I’ve never had a conversation in public with anybody quite like this. The fine nuances of the Moon, they would just say, don’t do surgery when the Moon is passing through the body part that rules the sign. But they wouldn’t explain why. Why? because it makes it bleed and swell.

And they would just say traditional do’s and don’ts, but not explain so much why. And there wouldn’t be any discussion about, when there’s swelling here, use the opposite sign. This is a very pioneering discussion today. I’ve never seen it before. Maybe someone discusses it somewhere, but this is really remarkable, the questions you’re putting out here.

This is why I’m so excited about this interview. I always have all this stuff running through my head, and sometimes I don’t have anyone to talk to about it with. And it’s interesting that you mention it, because I feel like that’s one of my, I don’t wanna say complaints, but one of my struggles with reading a lot of the older books.

As you said, they’ll give rules or say, this plant is ruled by this planet. And oftentimes, there isn’t an explanation for why. I’m the kind of person who really likes to understand the inner workings of things. I like to understand the mechanics and the rationale behind things. I don’t always take things at face value. So, I spend a lot of time thinking about the why. 

I love how you mentioned the surgery date thing, which, for the audience reading this, is a really great tidbit that Judith just shared regarding surgery timing. To not schedule or try not to schedule surgeries when the Moon is in the part of the body being operated on. Because it is much more prone to problems, as you said, because it’s bringing too much potential for problems.

I’ll make a remark on this and show you how thinking helps. So, for years, I read, from Ptolemy (140 AD), “Cut not with iron the body part that you’re operating upon if it’s ruled by the Moon.” And so that’s just standard that has come down since before 140 AD. 

Now I would think about that. Why is that? That’s because the Moon will bring blood and fluid and so forth, and create a lot more problems. But then I thought, but that would equally mean, and this is my own thinking, that the body part could be nourished the best when the Moon moves through that sign because it will bring the most oxygen and blood. Years later, I find an old writer, and I forgot who it was. It might have been Saunders, and he mentions you can use the Moon in the same sign, not for surgery, but for nourishment. There it was, they had the same thinking. They just didn’t always write it down.

And so I always find this happens. I’ll come up with something to think it out, and then I’ll find some obscure reference in some old text. Not always, but most of the time. So this is how it works. It’s simple. Moon brings fluid, blood, and electromagnetic currents, thereby nourishing the body part you’re after.

And if you want to have fun, watch the Moon going through Libra and Scorpio, and you’ll find that you urinate more at night, or that diuretics work twice as well as they will when the Moon is in Virgo or Capricorn. Aries will also set you off by the way, there are lots of little things to know, and you can, if the astute observer really watches this every month, they’ll find rhythms going on with their own body, like, one morning they’ll wake up, and their ears are swollen, the next morning they’re not or they always have. In my book, I have a friend who would always get nauseous on the same day of the month. I would watch her; she wasn’t a believer. I was just keeping my little diary on her because she had really difficult planets in Virgo. It wasn’t her stomach, it was her liver, and she was quite a drinker. So her liver would get touchy when the Moon would go through the sign of the liver. Stop drinking.

Interesting. I always say that following the Moon is one of the best ways to learn astrology. I tell people, if you want to really learn the science, just spend a year keeping really close track of the Moon because it’s what you’re feeling. 

I think that especially translates to, as you’re saying, what’s going on in the body. We all have those little, irritating health things that come and go, bothering us here and there. And boy, it can provide a lot of clarity by showing the patterns and rhythms, and give some insights into how you might approach or remediate it. 

It’s funny what you just said, Judith, about having these thoughts and pondering things or writing things or having an insight and then going into a book or an old text and finding that there, which is such a great feeling when that happens. 

I recently had this experience with one of your books. I’ve had this program, Botanical Constellations, for several years. We go through the 12 signs of the zodiac. It’s a relatively basic intro to medical astrology and herbalism course, using the signs as a template. And, I’ve been redoing it this year, and as I have gone about revisiting a lot of the teachings of the signs, I had this moment of I don’t really know if herbs, we tend to think of herbs being ruled by a planet. And I had, for a long time, translated that over to the signs: in a way, this is an Aries herb, or this is a Libra herb, or this is a Taurus herb. But after sitting with it and looking at the zodiac, and we were touching on this earlier, it’s all patterns, right?

I realized that plants are a little more complicated than it’s an Aries herb or a Gemini herb, but the plants are operating on an almost constellation of influences within the charts. I remember sitting there and pondering certain remedies. For example, one came to mind earlier this year when I was working through Taurus. I was thinking about Taurus and the throat and the thyroid and the Earth element and things that are Taurus. And I was thinking about going through thyroid remedies, and I thought of Black Walnut. And I thought, oh, Black Walnut, that’s a really fitting herb here because of all of its thyroid stuff. And I thought, what else is Black Walnut for? Oh, it’s anti-parasitic and anthelmintic, and it works as an alterative, purging the bowel, and it’s the great parasite expelling remedy.

That’s Scorpio, it’s interesting that this herb does a lot of Scorpio stuff, and yet it’s Taurus stuff too. Is it a Scorpio herb? Is it a Taurus herb? No, it operates on this axis. As I’ve been going through and revamping this coursework, I’ve been starting to see the herbs as operating not just on a sign, but also influencing these signs in relation to one another as an axis.

That has been a total game-changer in my whole approach to astroherbalism. So, I’m curious about your thoughts on that.

I have a lot of thoughts on it. And first of all, you talked about the axis. So Scorpio and Taurus do rule an axis. So just discovering that there’s a plant that works on both sides of the axis, that tells you something in the manner that often you figure out something, you can tell something’s going on by something that’s apparent, like something that’s hidden. They discovered that Pluto existed by watching perturbations in the orbit of Uranus, I believe it was, or Neptune.

So you’ve discovered some relationship, maybe between the thyroid and purging, or thyroid and a susceptibility to parasites. And I know that Black Walnut can also get rid of fluid in the body, that’s like ascites, really bad buildups of fluid, very quickly. So that’s more of a Scorpio function. But the buildup of the fluid is very Taurean and Water sign, Taurus also retains Water very much, as much as Water signs do. So you’ve discovered that there’s this axis, and maybe you just made a medical discovery, something’s going on related to parasites and thyroid. 

Maybe you look at that, but how I view this is, what I like to try to correct now is that most of us are still doing the old Medieval and Renaissance lists, that there’s herbs under Mars, herbs under Saturn, herbs under the different sign, and you’ll have 50 herbs listed under Venus or Mars. And what are you supposed to do? Just pick one? They’re all different. 

They were thrown into these lists willy-nilly by the authors for many reasons. So let’s just take Mars. So they’re put under the list because they have thorns or because they’re red or because they’re libidinous or because they deliver iron or because they’re picked in April or in Scorpio or Aries season, the ruler is Mars. Or because they look like a phallus, or because they have some mythological association with the God Mars. Okay, that’s not suitable today.  And it wasn’t suitable then. And so you know that these master herbalists, I mean, you read their works, they’re master herbalists, and they were master astrologers. These were their cheat sheets. Obviously, they did not mean us today to go, oh, I need a herb of Mars. I think I’ll choose horseradish. Okay, let’s just pick one.

Yeah, it’s a really sloppy approach to herbalism for sure. I love the way you break that down. Why were those put in the list? They really were, as you said, cheat sheets. It wasn’t meant to be a means for us to make therapeutic decisions based on those lists, right?

Yeah. And these were very, if you read their work, they were just masters at their craft and they were all what were called astrologo-physicians. They practiced what was called astrological medicine or astrologo-physic in the Renaissance. It was just as sophisticated a method as TCM or Ayurveda. It has been besmirched and buried. And so I endeavor to teach it at my school. But it is an old craft that combines herbalism and other remedials with astrological charts, with examination of the patient. So it’s a stool with three legs, and it was a real system, and they all learned it at the universities.

Love that. And I love that you have done so much to bring this back up to the surface. It’s one of those things where I feel like if there wasn’t the small handful of people out there trying to revive this, give it another 50-100 years, I could see it really just poof, disappearing. So I really tip my hat to you, Judith, and all the good work that you’re doing to restore this. Because I feel like one of the things about astrology is that the way people perceive it is based on a lot of misunderstanding, I think, and really just seeing it as this very woo-woo and crystal ball and forecasting the future. And I love how you say it, it’s actually really mechanical in a lot of ways. As you say, it’s a lot about astral mechanics, and in many ways it’s very rational, yet I think it’s good to have folks representing the tradition as a valid approach to working with people and to really just get them well.

That’s always my take, and I like to acknowledge that it doesn’t really matter what system you use to heal someone, so long as they get healed and the help they need. Whether you figure it out with Ayurvedic constitutions or TCM or acupuncture or astrological medicine, as long as they get well, that’s all that really matters at the end of the day, right?

Yes. And, we have been hogtied by the prejudice, mystery, and glamor surrounding the word ‘astrology.’ If we called it cosmos biology, it would not have this prejudice. Most people who have this idea that astrologers are nuts and they’re sitting there with a crystal ball have no idea. They have no idea what genuine astrology even is. No idea at all. In fact, all of the first uses of astrology were very practical, not psychological. They didn’t have time to be wondering about their childhood problems in those days; most people would be dead by 30 or 40. And the psychological switch that astrology took is very useful, very good. But it completely took over the field because of the vagrancy laws. Alan Leo was arrested twice around 1900 and 1911 and put in jail once. He was THE world’s astrologer at that time, the big name in England. And the vagrancy laws made astrology illegal. And astrology is still illegal in three states of the United States. I should have you know.

Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

It was illegal in my state until 1986, the state where I was working. And they were dragged off to prison occasionally under the vagrancy laws that were here, too. So Alan Leo told everybody during the era where Jung and Freud, in the early 1900s, were coming out with their seminal works, he instructed all of his followers to start doing these sorts of psychological consultations, and that they would escape the vagrancy laws. And this took off like a shot. People don’t need to go through psychology school. They can now do all these readings. 

In this pursuit, which has borne a lot of fruit, been very helpful to many people, and a lot of psychologists are astrologers now, but a lot of the earliest uses of astrology were medical astrology. So were electional astrology, many other uses, they got — the practical branches — they rather got forgotten. They never went away, but they got really pushed under the carpet so that when I was studying and coming up, I would have to go hunting all over town to find one book on vocational astrology or one book on medical astrology. To be able to use this as a practical craft, because I was surrounded by all these blue-collar men when I grew up, who all had great skills, and I wanted a skill. And so this is a real skill, and you learn to weave the planetary rays and pull the rigging this way, pull the rigging this way, and you watch it working.

We don’t all know how it works. There are wonderful theories and experiments afoot, research, but it does work. We didn’t know why electricity worked before we saw lightning, or we didn’t know what air was, but we could all breathe.

See, I love that you’re mentioning that because that’s a point that I make all the time. I hear a lot of folks who are very rational, reductionistic, scientific in their approach, and they say astrology is just a pseudoscience, and there’s no scientific proof of it. We don’t know how it works. And that’s the argument that’s made.

And I’m like, that doesn’t make any sense. We all have this supercomputer in our pockets and purses these days. Does anybody really know how it works? No, we don’t know how those iPhones work, but they work, and you trust in them. Most people do, right? We probably shouldn’t, but there are so many things we take for granted that we use; we don’t believe in them because they’re just there, and they work. 

When people say, “Oh, I don’t believe in astrology,” I think it doesn’t require belief. Do you believe in your electricity? No, like you say, it just works. And I feel like astrology is the same way. That word belief comes in, and I’m like, oh, I don’t really know if belief should even be a part of the conversation. It’s just whether you understand it or not.

Yeah. Sajah, that’s so true, and I don’t like letting people get away with this statement that there is no proof of astrology anymore.

There are many studies that show that signs, planets, and Moon phases have effects here on Earth in various ways. I spent 10 years in the research of astrology. We got lots of positive results. I also went up for a skeptics exam, and I was able to match five charts against five biographies, and I could do it again.

I’m busy now. I’ve been putting in for tests like this several times. Let’s construct some. There is a lot of really good evidence that there are mysterious influences. And I have personally known two scientists, Buryl Payne and Arthur Young, who spent a lot of time investigating some of these influences, especially Buryl Payne. And his studies are amazing. 

So we need more studies. But many studies that show positive results are just ignored. And the skeptics keep parroting that there’s no proof of astrology. That’s just not true. So let’s stop saying that and say, maybe we need more studies. But there are studies that show something is working, something’s going on. You can’t say it’s not true.

Totally. I would like to make the argument that, let’s see, it’s been used cross-culturally all over the world for how many thousands of years? It wouldn’t have stuck around this long if it didn’t work, especially as you’re talking about the original uses, which were very pragmatic, very practical.

It wasn’t an excessively psychological, esoteric, or spiritual kind of thing. It was very practical. If you have a tool you use for a practical reason, and you keep using it even though it doesn’t work, you will discard that tool. But if you use it and it works, you’ll keep using it. So I always say, I think it’s still around because it works, dang it.

Oh yeah, that’s a wonderful argument that some of these very intelligent geniuses wouldn’t have used it if it didn’t work. We use the same argument in courts.

If you have 50 people file in and say they saw somebody shoot somebody, even though they can’t find the guy, or they can’t find the gun, that is taken as a certain body of evidence because it’s so overwhelming. And so, there is an overwhelming body of evidence that something about astrology works and that the Sun affects us, that the Moon influences us.

How could they not? And I’ve always noticed that the extreme skeptics with whom I have had conversations, I’ll say, “How long have you studied astrology, sir?” It’s almost always a man. And they will say, “I haven’t, I don’t need to.” So I’ll say, I used to, I’m very skeptical by the way, I’m extremely skeptical, of many things. And so I’d say, “go and study for two years, enough to be able to read a chart, then come back and we’ll have a discussion. And if you still find it doesn’t work, your opinion will be respected.” 

But would you debate if physics works with someone who doesn’t have a clue about physics?

Exactly. I’m going to use that one from now on. That’s really good. And it makes perfect sense. How can you make an argument for something if you literally have no remote understanding of it at all whatsoever? You wouldn’t get into an argument with an astrophysicist if you have no understanding of it. So I love that approach. And it makes me think about — a segue here — there are certain things that I think we’ve lost over time, and I think we know a lot of things now that we didn’t know then. I think the reverse is also likely true. There were things that we knew then that we don’t know now that have been lost in the transformation of the world into its modern state.

So I’m curious, you were talking about these Renaissance physicians, these very well-trained master herbalists, master astrologers. What do you think they knew then that maybe we don’t know now, or that we’re maybe starting to know now, or understand?

That’s very good, Sajah. I have a lot to say on that. They knew a lot. These are not idiots. And first of all, we get back to that they knew that time mattered. Time has quality as well as quantity. Modern science sees time only as having quantity, though they’re starting to catch up, finally, with what they call chronomedicine, where they do include time, but they ignore all the discoveries of astrology for the last thousand years.

So okay, time matters, but they also made a few great discoveries. And one of the discoveries was Zodiacal Man, that the ecliptic can be divided into 12 portions, and these can be aligned to 12 zones on the human body, starting with Aries, the head, the first sign, and last sign to the feet, Pisces. And that these zones will be influenced by planets going through or afflicting those signs or aspects to those signs.

And you can watch this; it is so remarkably accurate over and over again. You can guess the physical problems. Works with animals, too. I’ve been blind-tested in some studies. So this discovery, Zodiacal Man, was a very great discovery. Now there’s another great discovery, which is that the planets have cosmic color rays and temperature, and they affect the body in several different ways.

The ancients gave it hot/cold temperature, moisture, dryness, and there’s a third way, which I learned from Matthew Wood related to herbalism, which is tense or relaxed.

But we also have fast and slow. Some planets are going very fast, and others are going very lente, very slow.

And these qualities, they worked out with great efficiency, and they’re very effective. That’s why I call it astral mechanics, and I teach how this works, as far as how to select gem remedies, for instance, it’s a very ancient tradition from India called upaye or planetary antidotes, and they would pick gems. There’s a system of gems that align to antidote or bring in more if you need it, take away if you don’t. You have to know how to pick the gem. And I do teach that. But the planets have these cosmic color rays, Sajah, that are so wonderful. And that’s how the astrologers in India feel they affect us. 

In the West, they felt that they had rays and that somehow they affected hot/cold, and they didn’t know how. There are lots of theories. The scientist Buryl Payne had a great theory. I’ve got my theories, I’ve got a whole idea of how it works. There are many theories as to how this works, but it does. And it is observable.

Mm, yes. So I want to share something that I’ve been pondering lately. I want to hear your thoughts on it with the Zodiacal Man, we were talking about patterns with the signs. And I’ve been thinking through, okay, you have your progression of Aries, Taurus, all the way down through Pisces, top of the head, bottom of the feet. But I’ve been starting to think more systems-related and how, and what started this was, as we were talking about earlier with the oppositions, and how there are interesting patterns that we see with the axes, right? And we were talking about Scorpio and Taurus earlier. 

Taurus is the throat, and you swallow the food. And then Scorpio is the bowel where you eliminate the waste, the bladder, where you eliminate the waste. The one that you shared, which totally blew my mind, was the whole dynamic with puberty. When puberty happens, you have Scorpio, which is the development of the reproductive system, and then the voice changes — that occurs at the throat.

But that started me thinking about these patterns more broadly, for example, in a systems context, with the elements, and looking at how the signs and parts of the body connect in different ways to form these systems. This is one of the things I loved about Ayurveda and Chinese medicine when I first started studying: being able to see connections between areas of the body that you might not see if you were just looking at them through a strictly anatomical perspective. 

For example, in Ayurveda, they say vata dosha relates to the nervous system, the respiratory system, and the colon. And we wouldn’t think those things are necessarily connected, but in Ayurveda, they’re connected through  vata dosha.

It’s not uncommon to see pathological patterns influencing those things. So I started looking at it with these systems, where, say, the Earth element, you have what I think of the nutritive system. Taurus is the beginning of that system with swallowing, the intake of nourishment. That which builds the body, bringing it in.

And then it goes to Virgo, and the liver takes it all in and sorts through it, and the small intestine, liver,  takes it all in. What comes in, what goes out, and what is it going to bring into the body — organizing it. And then at the end, Capricorn is the deposition of that into the deepest tissues of the body — the bones, the teeth, the structural parts of the body.

And I thought, wow, that’s really interesting, and I started mapping these out with the elements and then thinking it through with the modes. You got me thinking about the mutable cross and how it really is the best example of the nervous system, encompassing its different aspects.

I’m just curious to hear your thoughts on the connections. We tend to think of Zodiacal Man, just Aries through Pisces, top of the head, down to the bottom of the feet. But I’m just curious, what other kinds of patterns do you see with the zodiac and the areas of the body and the anatomy and the physiology? Can you speak to that a little bit?

Yes, I can. In fact, I wrote a book on it. Thank you for letting me talk about it. The 12 signs have all kinds of interrelationships. You have the elements, and Sajah gave a beautiful description there of Taurus to Virgo, to Capricorn. In fact, William Davidson pointed out that all the female signs — now female, there are six of them, six male signs. Female means centripetal, energy being pulled inward, and for the Water signs, often downward, towards center with the Earth signs.

And the male signs are centrifugal, putting energy outward, upward into the muscles and the nerves. You’re looking at bone, flesh. Water with the earth and the female signs. So you have the female and the male signs. And Davidson pointed out that all the female signs have to do with eating and digestion.

So, for example, the mouth, Taurus, and it goes down to the stomach — the next female sign, Cancer, into Virgo. Virgo is the gut. Oh, and the signs have the same, the body part thing has the same characteristics as the personalities of the signs. Virgo’s busy going, not this, we want that. And we’re going to throw that one out. We’re going to use this, we’ll repackage that. It’s the file clerk of the body, the liver, and the intestines, which are under Virgo, of course. 

Then it goes down to Scorpio, next, which is the colon, and now we’re going to excrete what we don’t want. And then the next one is Capricorn, where, as Sajah has talked about, it assimilates into bone.

And then Pisces rules the ECM, where all the wastes are being dumped into the internal ocean to be taken up by the lymphatic system, also under Pisces. It’s in the male system, all circulatory, neurological, and muscular. So we have many systems. And I think what’s interesting is, yes, they are similar to TCM in that TCM has its systems on the acupuncture points, but they’re completely different.

They’re astrological. So you have signs that are all set on squares to each other. Those are called the modes, the three modes. So three modes work with the four elements. Four times three is 12. You get 12 signs. So the elements are types of matter and levels of density of matter.

And the three modes, cardinal, fixed, and mutable, represent the rate of matter in motion. I’m the only one who says that, but it’s absolutely true. It’s what my teacher taught me. Rate of matter and motion. And these are somewhat similar to the doshas, vata, pitta, and kapha.

Cardinal signs are always at the beginning of a season. Boom. They start the element. They’re the quintessential element. It’s like Aries is fire being lit, and then fixed signs are always in the middle of a season, and the element is fixed very intensely, especially around the middle of the sign.

So, say we take the next, the fixed fire sign is Leo. You think of a pizza oven, or maybe nuclear energy. It’s contained fire. It’s burning very intensely, governs the gallbladder and the heart. And then we have Sagittarius, mutable fire. It’s happening at the transition or end of a season, and it’s dispersing fire, which is wildfire, and it fascinates me that both people who are famous in my day for burning their guitars on stage and starting fires on stage were Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison. They both were Sagittariuses.

Yes, they were. Oh, that’s great. I love that. I love how you said, and this is something that’s always been fascinating for me, and one of the things that got me into medical astrology from the get-go, was exactly what you said there. For me, the question was what is that dotted line between the body and the soul and the psyche?

How do we see a relationship between those? Because, for me, it was always a thing of here’s all the anatomy and physiology and physical health stuff over here. And then, the spiritual side of your health is over here. And then the psychological, emotional stuff’s over here.

For me, astrology brought it all together. You said it really well with Virgo, the nature of the sign as it is represented in the body physically is the same pattern of that sign psychologically, spiritually. There’s just one pattern of that sign, and it reflects on all levels within the person.

When you’re working with a person, do you find that being helpful to understand what might be going on with their health? For example, if someone has problems with their liver or problems with their small intestine, do you think that Virgo provides some keys to, perhaps, they are not navigating the territory of their life in a way that is, say, expressing the most virtuous aspects of Virgo?

Maybe they’re stuck in the shadow side of that sign, and the reason they’re experiencing those physical health problems is that they’re not integrating that archetype more fully into the psyche. Does that make sense?

You expressed that extremely well, and there’s the yes and the no of it.

So yes, absolutely. A sign pattern goes through spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical levels. And that’s actually the premise of my last book, the physical organs and their function mimic the part. One of the premises is that they mimic the character of the sign. So yes, Sajah, yes, you can have situations, or say a person is, I’m going to use Capricorn suffering from Capricorn problems.

Say they have skin problems and knee problems, and they’re having rheumatism, and they’re creaky, and they also have OCD or some part of what I call Capricorn syndrome going through the psyche, the personality, and the body. You see this all the time. So that’s the yes of your question. Absolutely. 

The no of the question is, we also have diseases that are perfectly physical and are not psychological. And how do I know that? I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me because we don’t make that argument for animals. When animals get a tumor or stomach ache or a bad tooth, we don’t say, oh, that’s because you aren’t being confident. Or we just say it’s physical. 

So humans also have an animal body. A body that is an animal in every way, but it’s a wonderful house for the human spirit. And so there are some conditions that are purely genetic, purely physical, but there is a whole world of conditions that are psychological, physical blended. So I’m a person who always thinks around that in a circle.

There’s nothing that’s ever without an exception. There’s nothing that’s always one way. I’ve been watching all these shows on how fat is horrible. You should never eat any fat. Then the other side is no, we need as much oil and fat as possible. Or the brain needs them, the hormones need them. What are you going to do?

And both sides have merit. So I always look at all sides of an issue. And what I’ve found in my life is that very little is just one way all the time.

Yeah, I love that. That’s a very balanced approach, which is definitely the way I strive to be in my approach to things, too. That’s one of the things that seems so confusing about this modern world: you get strong arguments on two sides of any issue, and both seem to have convincing evidence. People say my science contradicts your science, and this science contradicts that science. For example, when I was growing up, it was like, man, margarine was the big “healthy option.” Don’t eat butter, it’s too much fat; margarine, that’s the way to go. And then many years later, we all come to realize, oh, actually, oops, probably shouldn’t eat those hydrogenated oils. It’s just one of those things.

So I think of all the things that we say now, that 20 years from now we’ll go, oh, whoops, actually, that wasn’t true. What you said there, too, is like I say, it’s a two-way street. You can have something psychologically going on that trickles down and affects the body.

You can have something going on in your body that volatilizes up and affects the mind. And yeah, sometimes you just have a stomach ache because you ate something you maybe shouldn’t have, and you’re tired today because you didn’t sleep well that night. We don’t have to get too Scorpio about it and try to penetrate the deeper mysteries of what’s really going on here. Sometimes it’s just the Taurus simple reality of what’s right in front of you, right?

Yes. I feel exactly the same. When it comes to health, I like to observe nature and observe what the body wants and what primates do and what humans of all cultures do.

To answer a question, should we eat fats or not? Or what about milk products or not? Some cultures or ethnic groups have been eating a certain way since the ice age. And their bodies are different, and rules do not apply to every single population. Some groups can’t eat milk.

Some groups can eat it all day and never get high cholesterol. This is actually true. And then you have all kinds of paradoxes. The Eskimo paradox, the French paradox, the Italians, people who do all the “bad things,” they don’t get all the diseases we do. And I’d like to look at why is that?

There are a lot of things wrong with some of these tests. Such as, when they do these tests, they aren’t looking at what they’re eating it with. There’s a habit in the USA, which is go anywhere, to any restaurant, and any meat is always paired with cheese in a sandwich.

Sometimes on the plate, the sauces or the fish melt with the butter sauce. Milk products and meats are always paired, whereas in the kashrut laws in the Bible, you don’t do that. There’s a reason for that. Are they looking at this in their why we get so much cancer and everything, eating meat, what are they looking at?

What is the whole zeitgeist of the pattern of health? So some of these very big questions have been neglected, but yeah, we want to look at everything.

Yes. I’m curious to hear your thoughts about, how do I say it? I feel like the modern human being, the picture of health, has gotten increasingly complicated these days.

When I first started working with people, even 15 years ago, it was relatively straightforward a lot of the time. There would be one or two main issues to work on. And now it’s man, these days I work with people, and there are these sometimes very complex health problems where I have to do a lot of research, because maybe I’ve never heard of it. Or there’s some new name for a new disease that just came out, and I think of the modern-day clinical practice in comparison to the clinical practice of these Renaissance physicians we’ve been talking about.

I’m curious, how do you see this traditional practice of astrological medicine being applied in this modern world, with the modern patient, with all of these new problems people are facing? What do you think astrological medicine has to offer the modern-day patient as well as the modern-day practitioner?

Thank you, Sajah. May I be so bold as to say it offers the missing piece? It offers the missing piece, Jung himself is famous for having said that, one look at the horoscope, or two hours with the horoscope, was equal to something like 19 sessions on the couch.

So just the natal pattern of the chart gives you a very quick look at what’s weakest in the body, what’s excessive, what is needful. Combined with the psychological currents, emotional issues. Then you have timing — don’t let grandpa out of the hospital today, it looks like he’s going to have a fit two days hence. 

I saved someone’s life once by doing that. And, there are many time uses. I’ve seen many lives saved with the use of medical astrology. I could tell stories. There are times for good surgeries, times that are very dangerous for surgery, much more likely to go wrong. There’s help with fertility.

I think I’m the first modern astrologer to write about this in any detail. Patient-physician compatibility. Haven’t you ever had a doctor who, no matter what you did, couldn’t heal you? And he goes on vacation, and his assistant comes in and suddenly finds the exact thing perfect for you, or just touches you the right way, and you’re well? This is a very important part of medicine, matching the physician to the right person.

I know that this was done at the Rosicrucian Healing Clinic with the Heindels. They said they would always match in their prayer groups. They would always match people along astrological rhythms. And I know just how they did it. It’s very simple. Might be beyond our discussion here, but there are some things you look for as to compatibility. And, I will be teaching that as a main part of my upcoming class of medical astrology for health practitioners coming up in January.

We’re going to talk about that and how you can know. You might have a client or patient who’s bad for you and always drains you or makes you feel very tired for days and days. There’s always an energy exchange, a synastry between any two people. One person gives. One person takes. Sometimes you both give equally. Take equally. That’s usually not the case. 

So a physician usually needs a lot of surplus energy, especially chiropractors, and they often have it. That’s why they go into the field. They have energy to give. A person shouldn’t be healing others if they are very weak and have low vital force. They need to build that up first. They could get easily drained. So you want a good exchange. And every now and then, there’s that doctor who can make the patient ill. And astrology shows how that’s working, who’s gonna be good for whom pretty easily. It’s not a hard thing to learn. There are so many uses of this. 

When to start a protocol, what’s the right protocol? You’re not going to give a person a lot of freezing cold remedies whose body is already very cold. An example of this might be the sign Capricorn. Although a cold sign wraps heat inside, they don’t seem to sweat well. They can get really boiling hot in the center and get all kinds of heat problems. And so even though they may have pure cold or have cold hands or cold symptoms, like they may have a certain hard dry skin or something, you may not necessarily want to give them a heating remedy. You wanna really think about it.

I’ve seen a lot of this, and it’s, if you have granite, you know this big granite stone, which is like Capricorn, so that’s densified matter. Capricorn is astringent, so is its ruler, Saturn. Astringent and dry. Now, very important. Sajah, Mars is drying, Saturn is dry, but they dry very differently. Mars is fiery. It’s burning off the Water from on top, burns it up. But Saturn is pressing out the Water by pulling matter together. So it gets denser and denser.

All of a sudden, you have granite; the Water’s all pushed out. So when you have this quality, it traps heat. It can also trap Water in little pockets. And so if you get a person who’s very Capricornian and they’re having internal heat that they can’t release or they’re having edema, it’s this trapping factor.

So, how astrology can help medicine is by showing you what is actually going on mechanically, so you can pick the right method to help that condition. Oh, one other thing, it can show where there’s a nutritional deficiency very easily.

That’s fantastic. I love that because that’s the thing, right? You can have three people with the same symptom, the same displaying symptom, the same complaint, but with a different underlying root. I almost want to say root cause, but I feel like things are so complicated. It’s more of a rhizomatous network of causes that are contributing factors. 

The way I think of it is that the astrological pattern of a person helps to describe the underlying state of the organs and systems and tissues that then give rise to that symptomatic pattern.

Because the herbs don’t just treat the symptomatic pattern, they treat the underlying organs, systems, and tissues. And having clarity, in a lot of instances, differentiates whether your herbs are going to work or not. And I think that’s one of the most important things, as an herbalist, is to be able to decipher that within a person.

Now, when you were talking, another question came to mind that I’m curious to hear your thoughts on, which is, I think, that a lot of people misunderstand the way my work is when they hear that I use medical astrology. 

I think they have this picture in their mind of me doing an astrological consultation with people, looking through their chart and using their chart and talking about their chart, where that’s actually not what I do at all. It’s more of a behind-the-scenes, so to speak, reference that I’m using more in the case review, to clarify the information that I got through the intake process.

So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on how you see practitioners using medical astrology. Do you see them doing medical astrology consultations with people with their charts? Do you see them just doing their work kind of the way they have done it, but then having the chart used as a tool later on?

I also think of how busy some practitioners get. How can we weave medical astrology in? Practically, how to fit it into the consultation work itself. I’m curious what you’ve seen and how you like people to consider doing that.

Sajah, there are many ways to do it. And as you just said, there are practitioners who have a lot of time and those who see people constantly. And I know many practitioners now who use astrology in their clinics and offices, and one of them told me that after he’d learned these methods, all of a sudden, all these cases are very quickly and easily assisted or solved that were not before. He’s just astonished at the accuracy of it. 

William Davidson himself said, the great William Davidson, we all wish worship on his grave. He said, “You can see so much in the twinkling of an eye, it’s unbelievable.” Like reading a piece of music. It’s like that. So you have the practitioner who maybe just works on a few cases, and they can get hold of a whole natal chart, and they have time to deeply discuss the person, their case. They have time to study that chart to really meditate on it, the natal chart, and the transits. And it helps them know what’s going on. 

You also have the person who has no time, and that’s why we have what are called consulting charts. They do a chart for the very minute that they first either meet the person or for the time of the consult, and it tells them some things. I consider this a not-so-accurate method when compared to natal, and it requires a great deal of skill and a great deal of intuition. But for those who acclimate to it and get used to it, they seem to have good results. 

And I know a few people, this is what they did in the Renaissance, they couldn’t get hold of natal charts. And it was also illegal to read natal charts. So even though they recommended themselves to use a natal chart if you possibly can, they were largely using what are called the decumbiture, the moment of the lying down. And if they couldn’t get that, the moment the urine was brought to them, and if they couldn’t get that, the moment that the person arrived in their office, it was in that order.

And they do a chart for the moment. And they would use that to see what the basic forces were. And particularly if the case was mortal, how serious was the case? Because if the client died, they didn’t want to take the case. 

Remember, we’re talking about a time when the average lifespan for males in Shakespeare’s England was 21 years. People just died all the time. So death was normal, and their whole practice would be ruined if they didn’t get it right. So they were very concerned with the mortality, if you read the old cases. But they could also get a feeling for, was this a disease by Mars affliction, Saturn affliction?

They had their own techniques. I also teach these techniques; we do it all. But these techniques are useful when you can’t get a natal chart, and you also can see into public trends really well, what’s going on in the public, what’s coming up, is there going to be a certain, everybody’s going to rush into your office with the same problem this year?

But back to what you’re asking me, Sajah, there are also people who are just medical astrologers. They’re not being herbalists too, or they might be, but they do it backwards. They have the person at a reading. Yes. They give a scan of the body or an opinion on the case. They may recommend certain herbs for certain reasons to be okayed by a physician or licensed herbalist. And that’s a medical astrologer working, in a sense, chart first. And I’ve found in my observations of practitioners in cases that chart first works just as well as examination first. 

Matthew Wood and I did an experiment. We did it twice, and we had him doing tongue and pulse analysis in one part of the room. And I was doing the charts in the other half of the room. 

Yeah, that was cool. That was really cool. You guys were figuring the same stuff out, at the same time, separately on the same person. It was so cool. Yeah, I remember that. That was after one of the Renaissance conferences, I think.

Yes, it was after the Renaissance conference, and we were coming up with really similar results. And in many cases, the astrology was faster. Matthew was astonished because he had to go through all this tongue and pulse and everything.

It’s the heart, it’s the heart, it’s going too fast. And here’s an electrical problem with the heart, and really fast. Hypothetical opinion. We’re not playing physician. I do not do that. Hypothetical, of course. And we had so much fun. We’ve been wanting to do it again, and we were going to do it this fall, but something happened, and we were unable to. Maybe in the future.

Oh, it’d be awesome. I want to know about it because I wanna be there. Those are, I remember that very distinctly. I was like, man, this is really cool seeing someone do the pulse and the tongue and assessment and asking questions.

Kind of like the herbal way, the way a lot of herbalists do things. And then having you over there looking at the chart. Then you both are figuring out the same things using two totally different tools. It was really cool. 

Yeah. And it shows you, so I say, patient examination, tongue, pulse, palor, whatever you want to look at, ear wax, whatever you want. Vocal. They looked at everything. They would smell. They’d also do urine and fecal inspection in the old days. And so the English physicians were called piss prophets.

Yeah. Bring the jar of urine into the consult, eh? 

Yeah. And then, so you have all that. And then you have herbology and other remedials, which include gemstones, nutrition. In India, they can use many others. Using chants and mantras and yantras and so forth, and massage and all that, all the remedials. And then you have your astrological chart, your natal chart, and your transit chart. And your consulting chart if you want. And then you also have purely astrological remedials where you give a person something to channel or assist with the herb. That may be an activity, a type of mental thought, or something else they do with the stones. The gemstones are also pretty much purely astrological remedials. They work with delivering cosmic rays of different colors to the body field.

I’m curious, Judith, if you’ve got a notable story, a medical astrology story that you feel called to share that illustrates the potency and the ability of astrology to maybe see into something going on for someone that wasn’t otherwise able to be discovered by another practitioner?  Any story that pops into your head that you feel like sharing?

I’ve got lots and lots of stories, but I’m probably going to repeat myself because the ones that immediately pop to mind when I didn’t know the question was coming are the same ones, but they’re all so good.

So I always tell the one about the Neptune problem.

Yeah. I want to hear it again.

You know this one, it’s my favorite, but there are lots of them. There have been lots of new ones. I just have to remember what they were. But some really astonishing new ones. 

There was a woman, and she was a health practitioner, and came in, and she was basically dying. She was so ill, and the doctors couldn’t figure out why, and she couldn’t eat. She had no energy. She was getting very thin. And she’d been to several practitioners, and nobody could figure out what was wrong. 

It was right there in the chart, in the twinkling of an eye, as Davidson says. And it showed that the planet Neptune was in Aquarius, and it was crossing over her ascendant and exactly on the north node of the Moon, meaning too much energy coming in. And in the sign Aquarius, which means the air, something in the air.

And it was a very close conjunction. Neptune works by about one degree. It was all just, I said, that’s gotta be it. I said, “It looks like you’re being poisoned somehow through the air.” And she told me later that she thought I was nuts and left. She left, and she called me a few months later, and she said, “You know, you solved it.” I said, “What are you talking about?” She said that none of the physicians could figure it out. She said, “You figured it out.” 

She said some workmen came to her house and they discovered that she had a gas leak and that the only reason she wasn’t dead was that she slept with her window open. Poisoning through the air. Perfect.

Now, please don’t rush me with chart readings. I have no time for them right now. I refer them out right now because I have too many programs. 

Oh yeah. Neptune, right. Like that kind of mysterious, invisible cause of disease. It’s something that is difficult to pinpoint; it’s mysterious.

And it rules gases and poisons, and Aquarius rules gas, and Aquarius rules things moving in the air or through tubes. And you memorize these things. You memorize them, and then they come to mind when another client has a similar problem.

And you said Neptune was transiting over that north node in Aquarius?

Yeah. And her ascendant. So the reason why…

On the ascendant, oh, got it. So that’s the body basically, right?

Yeah, the body. And it was the tightest conjunction and only the thing that would explain it …mystery. For concealed things, you go to Neptune, always. So Neptune conceals. It also rules weird viruses. It could ave been a weird virus in her circulatory system, also ruled by Aquarius. So you know, it could have been leukemia, but there’s an intuitive factor, you tune in on the chart. And then I just thought poisoning through the air, and it came to me instantly. And that’s the intuitive factor. Because there might have been, Sajah, maybe three or four other choices, but I knew it was the Neptune because no one could figure out the problem.

Oh yeah. Shrouded in mystery. 

Well, Judith, this has been an amazing exploration. I feel like we covered all sorts of really interesting territory here. I feel like I could keep going on and on. But I want to give you an opportunity to share more about your work and what you do.

Can you tell everybody where to find you and what you do over there at The Academy for Astrological Medicine? 

Yes. Thank you, Sajah. I’d love to do that. I’m the president and founder of the Academy for Astrological Medicine, directed by Melissa Behm, my wonderful director, and we teach all six, really seven branches of astrological medicine there, including ancient methods and modern methods, including remedials.

We have Medical Astrology 101, which is now turning 15 years old. We teach the transits. We teach how to do timing for surgeries and fertility. We teach everything that anybody would need to know, who wants to know a little bit or know a lot. 

And we are having a class for the beginners, Medical Astrology for Health Practitioners, where I hope to have people who attend leave with some very simple methods that they can understand right away.

We also have a summit every year, the Herbalism and Medical Astrology Summit, for which Sajah is always a guest speaker and very popular. And we have research forums and discussion forums and a whole lot of fun over there. We really support all of our students. So that’s what we do over there. 

Thanks, Sajah, for letting me talk a little bit.

Oh yeah, you’re welcome. I want to encourage everybody to go check out Judith’s work over at the Academy for Astrological Medicine. 

And, I just want to say thank you to you, Judith. I know you’ve got a busy schedule and a lot going on, but I do really appreciate it. I honor you for the great work that you do. You’ve been an incredible encouragement for me and my work, helping me to learn all of this. 

You are my teacher, and I really respect you and want to honor you. Thank you for all the incredible work you’re doing not just to preserve this tradition of practice, but also to evolve, advance, and modernize it while maintaining the integrity of the tradition itself. It’s very important work, and you do an incredible job with it. I am a changed person, not just as an herbalist, not just as a practitioner, but as a person; this work has really changed me for the better. So I want to thank you so much for everything that you do.

Oh, Sajah, it’s been a pleasure and an honor, and I want to say you’re one of the few on the planet who is also linking hands to bring back the estranged spouse of herbalism, which is very much the use of astrological medicine.

So thank you, and thank you for having me. It’s great to work together here; that’s always what makes it go around.

About Judith Hill
Judith Hill is the Owner and Founder of the Academy for Astrological Medicine and an award-winning author of fourteen books, including her latest: The Twelve Zodiac Sign Syndromes of Medical Astrology: Expanding Our View of the Seasonal Wheel.

She produces The Renaissance Medicine Conference and has created many well-known astrology courses. Hill was possibly the first to introduce Western Medical Astrology to Szechuan, China. She is a Chartered Herbalist with Dominion Herbal College. Hill documented the natal and transit health influences of the Lunar Nodes and the medical impact of eclipses by sign and conjunct natal planets and created the first polarity-based nodal eclipse calendar. An internationally recognized researcher, Hill has published significant statistical research on astro-genetics and astro-seismology and has served as the Educational Director for the San Francisco NCGR, and as the private assistant to the great physicist Arthur Young at The Institute of the Study of Consciousness and advisor/designer for Joan Margalith for her pioneering Infinity radio show.