André Barbault

André Barbault was one of the great modern minds of our own craft, a French astrologer who spent nearly a century (1921 to 2019) returning astrology to daylight. He wrote with clear, modern language where others hid behind occult fog, bridging the stars with psychology and world history, and drawing openly on Freud to link the planetary symbols to the workings of the psyche. He pioneered computer-assisted interpretation with Astroflash in 1967 and founded the journal L'Astrologue. His crowning prediction, a Kremlin upheaval timed to the Saturn-Neptune conjunction of 1989, he had announced decades in advance.

How fitting his chart. Sun and Moon both in Libra, the Venusian sign of the Scale, gave him the born mediator's eye for balance, symmetry and fair proof, forever weighing the two sides of a question. Both luminaries sat in the eighth house, the phoenix realm of buried things, death and rebirth, so his gaze was drawn always to what lies hidden and transforming. His Aquarius Ascendant was the perfect mask for a reformer, the eccentric genius, the black sheep among astrologers who beat to his own drum and dragged an ancient art into the future.