Saturday, May 30, 2015Publish and Perish? |
A number of years ago, an astrologer named Andrea Winchester published a three-part series of featured articles in the Mountain Astrologer print magazine. The articles detailed and provided examples illustrating a fascinating theory she had developed linking astrology and the Enneagram into an elegant little system she dubbed "Enneastrology". I had found links online mentioning her articles, and I ordered the physical back copies of the magazine so I could read the articles. In my limited research into the theory, it seems to work. If, in fact, it is a good theory (and I suspect it is), it has radical implications for both astrology and the Enneagram as well as personality-description systems in general. But by the time I had discovered the references to it online, the physical magazines had been long out of print and the penetration of the theory into the astrological community was, from what I could tell, zero. Luckily for us, Andrea (with whom I briefly corresponded years ago) has since posted a small web site describing the rudiments of her theory. Were it not for this and the links from the Mountain Astrologer site, her fascinating ideas may have vanished altogether. Similarly, I've recently run into a couple of long out-of-print books that hint at the actual function of Pallas. While these books do not approach the volume of the research I've done and some of its more radical conclusions, they represent (in my mind) accurate thinking about Pallas which has been lost. It is only by accident that I've come to know about them. How much other significant astrological research is mouldering away in a basement, lost to us forever? I've heard through the grapevine that Georgia Stathis is attempting to create a knowledge base to preserve such research. In the meantime, the astrologer who conducts independent research may be facing a difficult choice: 1. Publish in print, get paid for content, and risk having said content disappear forever. 2. Publish online. Your content may live forever, but you may forgo its income potential. I've been leaning (mostly) to the latter option. The content I've been posting for years now is not necessarily intended for a mass audience (the audience is small) but is for the purpose of preserving the information so that the next astrological researcher interested in related topics doesn't have to "reinvent the wheel" but can begin from a highly developed knowledge base. Write to me at "alan" + "@" + "zot.net". Weblog Index Home |