Grand Trines by Barbara Watters

[Kepler's drawing of a Grand Trine]

Barbara Watters on Grand Trines ...

" … I haven’t missed out on the “fun” of the grand trine. I was born with 2 of them in my chart. I have only studied astrology for 43 years. I haven’t yet decided what I think of grand trines. I told you that the ancient and classical astrologers considered it evil.

"Marc Edmund Jones, when he was a missionary on the Bowery, found that the charts of the drunks and drifters who came to church to get warm abounded in multiple trines and sextiles and lacked hard aspects. I am not responsible for those observations or opinions. They are worthy of consideration because they are contrary to a commonly accepted view and because they were expressed by astrologers devoted to their art.

"Years ago I did a study of mental illness and found the grand trine so over-represented in the charts of schizophrenics and manic depressives that I had to end up naming it one of the signatures of psychosis.

"Now please don’t say I called you psychotic because you have a grand trine. I’m sure all but a few were and are depressingly sane. "Sex and the Outer Planets" a book she wrote] is not a statistical study of individual aberrancies. It is a historical study of social cruelty enforced by law and custom against individuals and the misery this causes.

"Please don’t take my word for anything like the prevalence of grand trines in alcoholics’ charts. I came to this conclusion during 30 years of active practice with many alcoholic clients - perhaps several hundred. It seemed to form a pattern. Perhaps after 30 years of practice with several thousand clients, you will come to a different conclusion, which would be fine. Astrology is an art, not a science. Rembrandt was a great painter, but that doesn’t make Van Gogh a liar."