Planetlines

Introduction: This tandem lecture given in 1978 at a conference of the National Astrological Society in Tucson was a natural outgrowth of the investigations Jim Lewis and I made of Helen Boyd’s U.S. chart within the year or two after the publication of her book, The True Horoscope of the United States, in the mid-1970s. Most of the examples given here are straightforward, but they are also relatively few, partly because each of us was working by hand in those ancient pre-computer times. Jim was not able to get his map operation computerized until around the time we did this lecture, while I would have been investigating the progressions by eyeballing photostats of ancient nautical almanacs, and doing the final calculations with a calculator or a circular slide rule, pencil and paper. As a widely-traveled lecturer with a unique product (Astro*Carto*Graphy) that gained him both recognition and respect, Jim probably brought the Boyd chart much wider attention than it otherwise would have had, since the chart’s primary defense and documentation were sidereal. This lecture lays out some of the background relating to what piqued and held his interest, and aside from some minor grammatical corrections to make the transcript understandable, and an occasional note to fill in useful information such as missing dates, I’ve left it intact, even though I don’t necessarily agree with everything I said then. Additional notes follow, adding some details and explaining where my thinking may have changed on certain points in the intervening years. A note on the illustrations: The maps used to illustrate Jim’s points are screen shots from AIR software’s Locality Maps program. Technically, the two are not quite equivalent, but the AIR maps have a good appearance and are easier to work with in this environment.

It seems appropriate here to look at the declaration itself. Spellings are as in the original.

I am somewhat bewildered by Boyd’s assertion that there was no controversy over this resolution. The first thing I noticed when I looked at the Journal is that the Declaration was debated “by paragraphs.”