The Lens of Astrology / Part 1

Interview with Liz Greene, by Nicholas Campion


Liz Greene and I met in London on August 14, 2001, to discuss her work in astrology - and her attitudes toward it. In Part One of this interview (which appeared in The Mountain Astrologer, Dec. 2001/Jan. 2002), we talked about Liz's thoughts on the current Saturn-Pluto opposition. In Part Two, we cover her background in astrology and her conclusions concerning its nature and practice.


The original article appeared in the American astrological magazine "The Mountain Astrologer" (Feb/Mar 2002). The edition is still available on their website


Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4


Nick Campion: Liz, a fairly crucial question to start: How exactly did you get into astrology? Was it a gradual discovery or a sudden revelation?

Liz Greene: It was probably more sudden than gradual. I don't remember a time when I wasn't conscious of astrology; going back to childhood, I think it was always there. I had no issue about it, but when I was at university, I went to an astrologer to have my own chart done, and that was really the kick off. It intrigued me, and I wanted to know how it worked, so I started teaching myself.


Nick Campion: You must have been in your early twenties.

Liz Greene: I was nineteen. I had some friends who were going to see Isabel Hickey, and they said, "Why don't you go and get your chart done?" So, she was the person. She seems to have been the main astrological figure on the East Coast of the United States at that time. A lot of people knew her, including Howard Sasportas and Darby Costello[13]. Many people passed through Isabel Hickey's portals. She was a fairly die-hard theosophist, very esoterically inclined and quite dogmatic. But her astrology was sound, and her belief system suited the times.


Nick Campion: And what were you studying at university?

Liz Greene: Psychology.


Nick Campion: Was that your major long-term interest?

Liz Greene: Yes. It started when I found a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams at the age of twelve.


Nick Campion: So, you were a child prodigy?

Liz Greene: Well, I was certainly a child Freudian!


Nick Campion: Was discovering Freud a real revelation?

Liz Greene: It was a major revelation. Suddenly the penny dropped. It wasn't that everything Freud said immediately made sense to me, but the presentation of the fact that human beings have another side that they don't know about - that there are unconscious processes always at work in them - made perfect sense. I knew that anyway, but nobody would believe me. So, here was a piece of writing that confirmed what was clearly visible to me at a very young age. I started investigating. I started reading anything I could on psychology, as well as any literature that dealt with psychological issues. My inspiration was mainly psychology and psychologically inspired literature rather than astrology.


Nick Campion: Was your psychology degree Freudian-oriented? Was it behavioural?

Liz Greene: It was behavioural.


Nick Campion: Rats in cages?

Liz Greene: Yes, rats in cages. And lots of sociology and statistics, which I hated. But I think I understood, even then, that it was necessary to have a piece of paper, a qualification, so I put up with it.


Nick Campion: So, you discovered astrology while you were studying for your degree. Did astrology then open something up when you were nineteen, like the discovery of Freud had when you were twelve?

Liz Greene: Yes, certainly. Astrology made sense of psychology. Exactly as when I discovered Freud, something suddenly went "click". Astrology showed me aspects of ourselves that we don't normally notice, facets of life which we don't usually understand.


Nick Campion: And so you saw an immediate connection between astrology and the psychology you had already been studying. At what point, then, did you discover Jung?

Liz Greene: I read Jung at some point in my teens, but it didn't quite make sense in the same way as Freud. But I went back to his writing in my twenties, and then it clicked.


Nick Campion: And that took place in the light of astrology?

Liz Greene: Yes.


Nick Campion: Were you, at that time, working in the professional world of psychology?

Liz Greene: After I took my doctorate, I did fairly conventional, orthodox psychotherapy, including some Freudian techniques. I hadn't done any formal Jungian training at that point. I didn't do that until much later, in 1980. Before that, I did some training with Ian Gordon-Brown and Barbara Somers at the Centre for Transpersonal Psychology in London. That began to give me what I wanted - something that was very deep and thorough, that I could get my teeth into and work with in depth.


Nick Campion: Psychoanalysis gave you that depth?

Liz Greene: Well, yes, Jung's version of it. I am not a Jungian any more than I am any sort of -ian or -ist, but I felt the training had more scope to help people than the Freudian training.


Nick Campion: Jung himself drew so much from astrology and the esoteric traditions that it is perhaps easier to bring the two together than is the case with, say, Freud and astrology. You moved to London in the early 1970s. I remember seeing your name in Time Out, the London listings magazine, as teaching astrology classes for an alternative organisation and thinking: "Oh, I should go to those" and then getting swept up in something else.

Liz Greene: That was in 1975-76. The organisation was called Gentle Ghost.


Nick Campion: Since then, in all your years of teaching and working with astrology, have you come to a working definition of it?









Nick Campion: You open Relating with a powerful quote from Gerhard Dorn, talking about the unity of everything:

Knowest thou not that heaven and the elements were formerly one, and they were separated from one another by divine artifice, that they might bring forth thee and all things? If thou knowest this, the rest cannot escape thee. Therefore in all generation a separation of this kind is necessary'. Thou wilt never make from others the One which thou seekest except first there be made one thing of thyself.[15]





Liz Greene: Yes, in small or large quantities.






Liz Greene: Yes.















Liz Greene: Yes, I think it is.











Nick Campion: So, when astrologers say in conversation, as they do so often: "Oh, I'm having a bad time because I'm having a Saturn transit," would you regard that as a wrong thing to say?

Liz Greene: Well, I say it too. But I know what I mean when I say it. To talk like that doesn't really communicate what is going on. It is shorthand. We don't have a bad time because of a transit. The transit is just a symbolic signature of what we are experiencing. It isn't causing it. I am not in the business of going around correcting everyone's speech, and I say it too: "What a rotten day! Saturn's on my whatever." It's shorthand.





* * *

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4


© 2001 Nicholas Campion - all rights reserved


Nick Campion is Past President of the Astrological Association of Great Britain. He has been a student of astrology since the early 1970s and has taught the subject since 1980 - for London's Camden Institute, the Faculty of Astrological Studies, and most recently, for Kepler College. He is also currently a graduate student in the Study of Religions Department at Bath Spa University College, England. Nick is the winner of the 1992 Marc Edmund Jones Award, the 1994 Prix Georges Antares, and the 1999 Spica Award for Professional Excellence. His books include Mundane Astrology and The Book of World Horoscopes. Information about these books is available on his Web site:


[13] Liz Greene and Howard Sasportas founded the Centre for Psychological Astrology  together in 1983. Darby Costello is a lecturer at the centre.

[14] Richard Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and one of the U.K.'s top writers of popular science books. He is also a militant atheist materialist and a strong public opponent of astrology, as well as of all paranormal claims and metaphysical and religious beliefs. His attack on astrology is available on the Astrological Association's Web site:

[15] Liz Greene, Relating: An Astrological Guide to Living with Others on a Small Planet, London: Coventure, 1977, p. 1.

[16] Ibid., p. 274.


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