Lineage
Henry Miller
New York, 1891 — Los Angeles, 1980
An American writer in perpetual quest of being. It was through him, in 1972, that everything began for Samuel.
An American writer, born in New York on 26 December 1891 and died in Los Angeles on 7 June 1980, he developed very early a deeply rebellious spirit and refused any conformist way of life. He lived on a multitude of small jobs while pursuing his literary and metaphysical quest. In 1930 he came to Paris, where he lived until 1939. It was there that he published his first book, Tropic of Cancer (1934), to which Tropic of Capricorn (1939) is the counterpart. In them he retraces his life in New York and Paris — notably his passionate, tumultuous relationship with June Smith — as he does in the trilogy The Rosy Crucifixion (Sexus, 1949; Plexus, 1953; Nexus, 1960). His relationship with Anaïs Nin during his time in Paris is a significant episode of his emotional life. Miller’s work expresses one man’s quest to become himself. While it is true that sexuality, in sometimes rather raw terms, is present in his books (they were banned in the United States until 1961), it was always the quest for being that drove him, and not pornography, as right-thinking minds liked to claim. This path toward becoming a free man earned him the stature of a spiritual sage. He greatly influenced the “Beat Generation” and, no doubt, in a certain way, the counter-culture movement of the 1960s.
As I recount in the article “From Henry Miller to Dane Rudhyar”, the “encounter” with Henry Miller turned my life upside down and directed it toward the quest for being. In all his books, Henry Miller speaks of the meaning of life and refers to many authors, thinkers, and even spiritual figures who were themselves beacons lighting the road of seekers. Among others, he cites Dane Rudhyar and speaks at length of astrology. A Devil in Paradise recounts his rather difficult and at times comical relationship with an astrologer he had known in Paris, Conrad Moricand.
For a year, I roamed the streets of Paris on the trail of Henry Miller. I lived in a maid’s room on the rue de Rennes and worked mornings part-time as an “archivist” in a company near the Gare Saint-Lazare. In the afternoons I set off in search of Miller; I read his books as well as the authors he spoke of. And since he spoke of astrology, I began to study it. At that time, in the early 1970s, one could find almost nothing but books of traditional astrology — Hadès, Antarès, Julevno, Choisnard… It was not exactly what I was looking for, but I studied them abundantly nonetheless, which I do not regret. Only André Barbault stood out in that deterministic landscape, and his work — notably his famous Traité Pratique d’Astrologie — was, for a few years, until I met Germaine Holley, my bedside manual.
For that, I give thanks to André Barbault for having been a guide at one of the stages of my path as an astrologer and seeker. To return to Henry Miller, I should mention a book devoted to the study of his chart by an astrologer he consulted while living in Paris: Henry Miller et son destin (Henry Miller and His Destiny) by Jacqueline Langmann. This book, annotated by Miller himself, was, in the end, my very first manual of interpretation. No doubt I also owe him my personal way of approaching astrology. “Objective” astrology — that is, purely theoretical and technical, applied only to the charts of great men and well-known figures — holds for me only a primary interest. It is, certainly, an excellent exercise in technical application, and I use it daily to study the charts of people in the news: politicians, television presenters, artists, and so on.
From this point of view, it plays an important role. Yet transpersonal astrology is, above all, a path of evolution; this is why it is wholly connected to the great teachings of humanity to which Rudhyar constantly refers. For each of us, it is a matter of growing in consciousness, of awakening and transforming our personality so that it becomes the channel of Consciousness, in order finally to reach what the Hindus call “liberation”. That is what Henry Miller, in his own way, was seeking.
His work is thus the testimony of that quest, and so it is of his own experience that he speaks in his books. But speaking of himself in the way he does refers us back to ourselves and urges us to seek the true meaning of our own life. I have made my own this sentence he wrote, which appeared as an epigraph to an issue of the magazine “Planète” devoted to him in 1970: “A genuine artist throws the reader back upon himself, helps him discover within himself the inexhaustible riches that belong to him. No one can be healed or saved except by his own efforts. The only remedy is faith. Whoever uses creatively the Spirit that is within him is an artist.” The astrologer is thus an artist (we do speak of the art of interpretation), and it is his duty to bear witness to his journey and his experiences in the light of astrology. The training in transpersonal astrology offered by the CRET is, for this reason, more than the learning of techniques: a plunge into oneself, beginning with the study of one’s own birth chart.