|
Alfred Witte, (1878-1941)
Innovative astrological reformer, he is spiritual founder of The Hamburg School of Astrology and its highly effective system
of modernized astrology. Witte was born 02-MAR-1878, at 9:12 PM, local time (20:32 GMT), in the North-German city of Hamburg, where he died 4-AUG-1941. There, too, he served his municipal career as surveyor. Noteworthy
job-related task: Surveying the swampy land of Hamburg's then airport-to-be. ”ENDING-AGE-OF-PISCES” AS STIMULUS… Begun well before World War One, Witte's practical astrological work, disappointed him.
It failed to meet his reliability standards. He noticed too often how common-practice horoscope readings did not adequately indicate impending powerful events in a nativity's life, nor did they convincingly account for
all telling events that had already occurred. What he came to view as the swampy and foggy fields of Piscean-Age astrological lore, theory, and malpractice, pushed him to near-dispair. Still early in the 20th century,
Alfred Witte set out to either achieve professional self-respect or quit astrology. With clarity, boldness and supported by precise and paintstaking verification efforts, he drained the conceptual swamp he had
encountered and provided us with astrological high ground. His insistence that a horoscope must be able to account clearly for all actualised life events of the ”native” paid off. His resultant work is a genuine
extension of classic astrology. Quoting British astrologer Charles Harvey from the early 1970's: ”Alfred Witte possessed one of the most fertile original and productive minds astrology has seen in the past 100 years.
His development during World War One of the concepts of 'midpoints' and 'planetary pictures' and the use of the 360° disc marked the first major progress in Western astrology since the Middle Ages.” Thereby, astrology
can be viewed as reconfiguring itself (with a little help from friends) to serve the coming New Age with its Aquarius/Leo (”front-burner”/”back-burner”) axis. Alfred Witte and his two associate pioneers were undeniably
among those 'helping friends'. The arrival of planet Pluto into human sight-based consciousness in 1930 came after Witte's fundamental reforms were already achieved. Pluto, of course, ”had been there right along”, but
humanity and its astrologers had long been in a fog about it. THE WINDS OF AQUARIUS
February 8th was the birthday of two very influential Aquarians: Thomas Edison the 'light bulb inventor' and Evangeline Adams the ace
astrologer who was born ten years before Alfred Witte. She clearly related to the 'New Age axis' (Aquarius-Leo), with her Sun in Aquarius and her Leo Moon in close opposition. Her (then still unknown) 14°06'-Taurus
Pluto exactly squared her Sun/Mars midpoint at 14°08' Aquarius. She legally yanked astrology (in a turn-of-the-century New York City court) out of false association with illegal 'fortune-telling' and crystal balls. The
trial judge, wisely, had tested her ”practice” by having her do a horoscope chart and delineation right before his eyes, in court. It was for a person specified only by birth data. That birth data belonged to the
judge's son. The reading she gave the judge was so sound that the judge said: ”Not only did you prove that astrology is a science but you have given me valuable insight into the character and life of my own son.” That
account was verbatim from my beloved late yoga teacher Fay M. Jordan in Closter, N.J. Her lawyer father-in-law had been active in that particular trial. Before that court case, the practice of astrology had been illegal
in new York City, due to its classification under 'fortune telling'. Since then fortune tellers have protected themselves by placing large 'ASTROLOGY' signs in their windows or at their doors. Witte's first published clarion call to his astrologer brethren in Germany was in 1913.
I view it as Witte's unique response to both the five-month incursion of Uranus into Aquarius (from January 12, 1912 to August 1st) and the begin, on November 12, 1912, of a seven-year Uranus passage through that same
sign. Overtly, that Uranus-passage-through-Aquarius puts a frame around World War One. With all its demonic fears, misplaced love, confusion and ”secret-deals”, WWI was the concluding violent mass-psychosis of the
Piscean Age. The November 1912 Uranus move into Aquarius, kicked in, as it were, with the pre-WWI election of Woodrow Wilson to the U.S. presidency. It exited, again pointing to Wilson, in 1919, when he received the
Nobel Peace Prize, essentially for his having launched large-scale humanistic ”Aquarian Age” ideas, such as ”I will keep them out of the war”, ”The League of Nations”, and his famous ”Fourteen Points” which included
open treaties, freedom of the seas, no economic barriers, disarmament, and self-determination of national borders by the people living on the land. U.S. President Wilson was the only prominent head of state who, before
and during gruesome WWI, smelled the refreshing air of the approaching Aquarian Age. In 1913, he called his Presidential political program the ”New Freedom” and referred to it as ”nothing short of a new social age, a
new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.” A horoscopic indication for Wilson's sensitivity towards ”the Aquarian Age spectrum” is his mid-Aquarius conjunction (exact!) of Venus and
Mars, preceded by his Aquarius-cusp moon. Those three out of ten planets in Aquarius must have been saying SOMETHING NEW! That same Uranus passage through Aquarius (1912-1919), also, was the creative inception time for Witte's astrological reforms and for what became his astrological
study group in Hamburg, now Astrologische Studiengesellschaft Hamburger Schule e.V. His evolving work went beyond Evangeline Adams' furtherance of astrology. Alfred Witte propelled it directly towards the scientific
method with its basis in accurate observation, mathematical accounting of the facts and the extensive use of equations and formulas.
It is worth remembering that one of his early students, now known worldwide for ”cosmobiological work”, had adopted Witte's original midpoint
work, specialized in it and made it popular. Composites, also derived from ”midpoint-thinking”, do define a common axis but defacto ignore the many constituent ”sensitive points” pioneered and verified by the Hamburg
School. The school encourages specialization, aware that no individual astrologer ”can know it all”. The writer sees the ”Hamburg School” as doing bona fide pro bono ”social work” and as upholding Witte standards.
Witte-Astrology is the compound of all the Witte techniques. Nonetheless, even though each technique can stand on its own specialized feet, the compound is more than the sum of its parts. Witte-Astrology rigorously
discourages haphazard work methods and vastly expands the scope of the systematically investigatable. It is thus a modern system for modern working astrologers, certainly not for shooting-from-the-hip
”astro-entertainment”.H. C. Grymz |
