The Best Way to Learn Astrology for Free!

Listen here:

Business Astrologer Georgia Stathis & Amanda Walsh share free resources for astrology students.

On this episode, you’ll learn…

🌔 Where to easily find astrology books for free.
🌕 The transformative power of community effort in building a timeless repository of astrological wisdom.
🌖 The crucial role of safeguarding astrological literature.

🌟 3 Weeks. 3 Legends. 3 Chart Reading Techniques for Unlocking Your Highest Potential.

In this workshop series, you will experience 3-weeks of back-to-back workshops including a 2 hour teaching and 90 minute live Q&A, focused on chart reading techniques that will help you overcome financial roadblocks, optimize your health, and find more fulfillment in your life.

You’ll also get to learn from 3 legendary teachers who have over 100 years of collective experience!

And you have the opportunity to custom tailor this experience for you and your unique needs… Learn more at astrologyhub.com/workshop

Transcript

Georgia: [00:00:00] The unique thing that I really love about the design of this is that, if you want to look up a topic, And, you know, astrologers are always looking for the topic, you know, whole sign. That's a big deal now. Whole sign charts or, uh, solar arcs or high legs or secondary progressions.

You just pop those keywords in the subject line and anything that we've loaded, whether it's a book that you can locate in a hard copy library, whether it's a copyright free piece that we have on the site that you can read, whether it's a magazine that's uploaded that we have. Copyright free assistance.

You can find it there or there's about 500 right now that are listed that go directly. They take you a link that will take you to Internet Archives, which is in San Francisco, and they're very well funded where you can borrow the book online for an hour for free. And several very [00:01:00] well known books are, are there, so you know, this, this is important because for those of you who are watching this, you know that when you want to find one of the older books, you go on to Amazon or someone else, and some of these old books are like 140.

This podcast episode is sponsored by Astrology Hubs Academy. Wherever you are on your astrology journey, we have a class that will help you get to the next level.

Intro

Amanda: Well, hello and welcome to the Astrology Hub podcast. We're so happy that you've decided to join us here today. I'm here with an Astrology Hub favorite teacher of ours, Georgia Stathis. She is a financial astrologer, but also practices all the different types of astrology. And so we're going to be talking today about the real story behind the Library of Alexandria.

[00:02:00] So this place that I know for me, it's always been associated with a great fire that burned down all of these texts and all this ancient wisdom, but George is actually going to shed some light on what actually did happen and why it relates to a project that is very near and dear to Georgia's heart and also

Something that we have decided to partner on with our upcoming health wealth and fulfillment series. So you're going to understand everything that I'm talking about here in just a second, but Georgia, welcome to the astrology hub podcast. It's great to

Georgia: have you here today. Nice to be here. Amanda. It's nice to be here with everybody today.

Thank you.

Amanda: Yeah. Great.

Background on the Library of Alexandria

Amanda: All right. So let's start with the history. The library of Alexandria. What was it and why was it

Georgia: so important? Well, it was extremely important. It was started by Ptolemy Soter, who was one of the Egyptian pharaohs, and it was started around 285 BCE, which is interesting, they say that he died in [00:03:00] 283 BCE, so about two or three years before his death.

Probably, this is his way of doing a foundation, I guess. And what happened is it was, it Became known as the central place in the world where scholars went, where research was done, where lots of information was passed through, lots of crossroads. And as a result of that, it became known as the great library.

And what was interesting about that, it was under the auspices, under the umbrella of a larger research institute called Museon, which actually in Greek means museum. Museon, which was named after the nine muses of the arts. And so it was flourishing and people came all over. They had probably the largest papyrus collection, which is our, our version of books between, they say, they say between about a thousand to 400, 000 papyruses.

Wow. And so it became an incredible resource for people to come and [00:04:00] study metaphysics, the ancient arts, all the things that we actually do as astrologers today, and many other things like science discoveries with whatever they were doing. And then what happened over time, which is what happens a lot, is Funding became less available, politics started to step into it, and they, the library kept going, but somewhere around 145 BCE, and for those of you who don't understand this, we're doing the numbers backwards, because before BCE is you do numbers backwards, and after is when the numbers go forward, so around 145, 146 BCE, what started to happen is the intellectuals who had gathered there.

This is a, it was an enormous intellectual center, scholars, perhaps we really don't know what, but they became very powerful and that was a threat. And so they started purging the scholars and the intellectuals and those [00:05:00] scholars and intellectuals began to go all over the world as a result of it and seeded The information that comes through in our Hellenistic and all the old ancient traditional things now.

So in a way, even though the library failed, um, there was a seeding of the universe, and there's a lot of stories about how it burned. Well, a portion of it did burn it was much further up about another hundred years later around 48 BCE, Julius Caesar when it was in the midst of his civil war. And so a portion of the library did burn down, and a lot of very important things were lost.

And. The reason we named our project the Alexandria Eye Based Project is because I've been doing this a very long time. And in the time when I started we had books, we had very few books by the way, and then we had lots more books. And over time what would happen is astrologers die. Or if the family members of astrologers die and, you know, I was in it alone about 20 years [00:06:00] and all of a sudden I was getting calls from so many different people around the world.

My mother left her books. Where do they go? You know, what about this? And so what I did, I tried to take these collections to The real libraries. I mean, the the brick and mortar libraries in our neighborhoods, but they would not take them. They don't have funding and probably if they've been other books, they might have taken them.

I don't know. The only way they would take these books and they still take any of the collections that we get if we were to get them is to sell them in friends of the library. for 10, 10 here, a dollar, they're splitting up collections. And for those of you who know about astrology books, one of the things about our industry is what a book is published, unless it's sold thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of copies, it'll get a one shot deal.

And so there's books going back to 1870s, books going back to the 1700s. We don't have all of these, we are not a brick and mortar library. We are actually, [00:07:00] uh, a find it library, if you will, a catalog library. We've got four librarians on staff, two project managers, and we have designed this project, which is dear to my heart because I don't, I love to read and I don't want to see this knowledge going away and where are we going to find it?

So I decided, actually, I was in a meeting at NCGR regional about 2009, I think was on the east coast, and I was very upset because I was also sending books to Australia. You used to be able to send books very cheaply through these big bags. You can't do that anymore. And so I brought it up in a meeting and said, people said, Oh, that's a really good idea.

We should do something about this. And then Christine Skinner, of the United Kingdom, who's a very good friend of mine, a wonderful financial astrologer, and who was on the Urania Trust board, said, let's go have tea. So we started talking, and long story short, several people were on board [00:08:00] with the board. We had meetings every month for six years.

I funded most of it, I still fund most of it, and Urania Trust has helped us, and we've had some donors that have been generous, five hundred and a thousand occasionally, and, um, we built this wonderful, uh, URL, really, alexandriaibase. org, which not only will uploaded,

It'll show you where you can find it in a hard copy collection, whether it's Robert Graves or Cali up in Washington or University of Illinois in Illinois. I mean, we only have so many people working only so many hours a week or month. And so we only have about 16, things uploaded at this point. But around 2015, we decided to become a foundation.

And we became a 501c3 nonprofit foundation, educational foundation, and we also opened a Schwab account, too, [00:09:00] so that, you know, people wanted to donate because in other countries, you don't get the deductions for donations in some countries, but in the U. S. You can do that. And this meant that if people wanted to help us, they would also get some sort of tax advantage as well.

So that helped us open up a few things as well. The unique thing that I really love about the design of this is that, which is very different than other databases. If you want to look up a topic, And, you know, astrologers are always looking for the topic, you know, whole sign. That's a big deal now. Whole sign charts or, uh, solar arcs or high legs or secondary progressions.

You just pop those keywords in the subject line and anything that we've loaded, whether it's a book that you can locate in a hard copy library, whether it's a copyright free piece that we have on the site that you can read, whether it's a magazine that's uploaded that we have. Copyright free assistance.

You can find it there [00:10:00] or there's about 500 right now that are listed that go directly. They take you a link that will take you to Internet Archives, which is in San Francisco, and they're very well funded where you can borrow the book online for an hour for free. And several very well known books are, are there, so you know, this, this is important because for those of you who are watching this, you know that when you want to find one of the older books, you go on to Amazon or someone else, and some of these old books are like 140.

You know, you can't get them the way you used to get them. Why not find it if you can online or find it in the library that we've uploaded. But it's a, it's a very tedious, it's a very long involved process. And everyone loves this. Amanda, everybody I talked to, we need the funding because we have to pay it.

We don't, our [00:11:00] people aren't doing this for free. I don't believe that if you're going to do a quality product that you shouldn't pay people and we pay our people, we don't pay them much. For a long time, we didn't pay them anything, but they still worked, and we have a budget that we do every month and every year, and, I don't know how much longer we can go because we've, we've, we're doing a lot, but I think it's extremely important.

I think this is an extremely important project because it's a preservation project, and not only is this a preservation project, it is a global project. Preservation Project. And it's not just for astrologers and astrology students and researchers. It's for people who want to know, not just the sun sign columns in the newspapers, but they really want to know a little bit more about astrology.

We have also on there uploaded not only the hard copy libraries that we know have collections, but we also have several online URLs, where people can go and find articles or [00:12:00] documents. As well. And finally, and I know I'm doing a lot of talking so forgive me. This is the most important piece I think that's an important piece under search the catalog, but we also have a thing called special collections and special collections is a separate piece that's built into the site itself.

Right now, one of our project managers has been scanning, for those of you who've been around for a while that are watching this podcast, you know, the old Mercury Hour, uh, it was the Chatty Cathy, like, magazine that astrologers exchanged, it was on mimeograph paper, and it was done, uh, Way back when, and we got some copies of that, and we've scanned them, and our project manager has a cover sheet for each edition to show what's in there, and what's really fun about this is you'll see people that are now very well known, like Stephen Arroyo, who wrote some beautiful books, Astrology, Karma, and Transformation, for example, who is at the beginning, and just [00:13:00] Chatting about ideas before he became who he became and and we will be having very soon Michael Irwin who had the original matrix library and founded the original matrix software has been in contact with us.

He is sending over 2000 according to Michael 2228 digitized interviews, etc. For us to upload in special collections. And that's coming sometime in the next six to eight months. I think that's about the time frame we're looking at and we'll have to go through it. Of course, you need funding to go through it to sort it, but he's done a pretty good job from what I hear.

So that's what we are. You know, we are a locator, a find it a place. We are not exclusive of the hard copy libraries. I mean, we would love to work in tandem with that. We've got several of Philip Graves in the UK. He has an incredible collection. He's the son of Robert [00:14:00] Graves, actually. And he has an incredible collection in the UK, and he, we're uploading his catalog right now.

So if somebody's in the UK, they can go and see the books. So, you know, this is why we call it the Alexandria. We're not going to be able to save everything. We know that. But I think that we'll be able to save a few.

Hello, everyone. My name is Georgia Stathis, and I'm part of Astrology Hub's upcoming Health, Wealth, and Fulfillment Workshop series, and my portion will be on decoding your chart, overcoming your blocks to abundance. What I'm going to try to teach you, and I think I will teach you, is how your Saturn placement can point to fears that may be holding you back, which keeps you from prospering financially.

The second thing we'll be covering is how your Jupiter placement, often said to be where you're abundant, can also be where you overdo a little bit or overspend. We'll also be talking about the 2nd and 8th [00:15:00] houses, and I will also be covering how the early family story can Make a person have a view of what becoming wealthy or maintaining wealth is about.

There's a lot of intricate little pieces that I'm going to share with you as well as some really fun tools on judgments, on possibility thinking, on making reasonable requests, but you have to attend the workshop to get those tips. Find out more about the workshop at astrologyhub. com forward slash Georgia workshop.

The Importance of Preservation of Astrological Information

Amanda: Okay, so the way that I understand this, Georgia, is that Essentially, there's all these books, there's collections of books, there's articles, there's now video interviews and all these things that have happened throughout time by some of the greatest [00:16:00] astrologers that have walked this earth.

And that if there isn't a place for us to find them, these, these books and things, that they'll just sort of disappear and just be in all corners of the world and we won't know where they are, we won't know how to find them, and the wisdom contained in those pages will be lost. Yeah, so this what I'm also hearing you say this has been a complete labor of love.

Nobody's made any money on this. No, no,

Georgia: nobody. No money

on this. This is

Amanda: part of the legacy that you're leaving. This is part of you and Christine and the people that have worked on this project. this is so important to you as. Um, I see you as the, the visionaries in the field that many of us are getting to follow in your footsteps, that many people are getting to stand on your shoulders because of the work that you've done, that all these, you know, other

Georgia: everybody, everybody, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And [00:17:00] so

Amanda: preserving, you know, the field and and what has come before us. The thing about astrology is it's. It's not like I mean, it's timely in the sense that it's like the study of time, but some of the practices that we're doing, these things have been around for, for a long, long time. And it would be tragic really

Georgia: to lose the,

Amanda: The insights and, and, you know, Georgia, you've been practicing astrology for decades now.

And Matt, like, can you explain to us? What it was like to be an astrologer in your twenties versus what it's like to be an astrologer

Georgia: now. It was terrible. I mean, it was terrible because first of all, there weren't many books. Right. No, I started, and we didn't have computers either, when we started, when I started.

I mean, I was studying it, uh, in my early 20s. I didn't start practicing until about 1977, and we, there were very few books, and some of the books that were written were, you know, they were, they were starter books, you know, I hate to [00:18:00] say cookbook, but they were a cookbook, and then there was this real amazing, um, renaissance, It's even before, it's even before the traditionalists came in with Hellenistic, which all came while I was teaching at Kepler from 2001 to 2008.

Before that, we were all pretty young and we were also in discovery because, for example, I'm a financial astrologer. There'd been some work done on that in the 1930s, but nobody really started working on that stuff until the early 1980s. And then you didn't have computers either. And Michael Erlewine was one of the first people who designed software for computers.

And then, of course, that burgeoned into PC, Macs, all kinds of things. So that was hard. You couldn't get the books. There used to be a little, uh, I remember over here in Walnut Creek, California, there was a little old lady who had this little tiny house. And it was a, she called it her Theosophical Library, and you could go over and borrow books from her, but you couldn't take them out of her [00:19:00] house.

You had to sit in the house and read the little books, right? Well, that went by the wayside. And then there was bookstores. Right. We had a lot of metaphysical bookstores all over the country, especially on the West Coast and the East Coast. And. People could go into the bookstores and buy the books pretty reasonably.

In those days, they were 5. 95, 6. 95. That was a lot for us, but you could get the books. And then those went by the wayside because now, you know, we're doing digitized ordering online, that's gone. So where do you go? I mean, there are still some bookstores. Um, it was just. Learning as you went, and you learned from the people that you went to classes with, you learned from the people who were writing articles.

They had a lot of little magazines at that time, like the Mercury Hour, Aspects Magazine, Welcome to Planet Earth from Up North. Of course, Mountain Astrologer was one of the first, and they're still going strong. And that's how you learn too, because those articles were in there, but [00:20:00] what happened to the articles?

You know, I mean, that's, that's the thing and you know, I just share this the other evening I was one of I was teaching one of my classes for China, I was teaching eclipses and I was because it kept her when I was teaching the undergraduate program we were very clear about having to name our sources.

And so I was naming some, what I call oldies but goodies, you know, Robert Jansky, who wrote the Eclipse book, which you can't get anymore, Buzz Myers, who was from Ohio, who was a brilliant Eclipse, he died way too young, he left a bunch of cassette tapes, okay, uh, Sylvia Jean Smith, um, and so when I did the lecture, I was done, and they were all very young, It was a young demographic taking the class, but David Raley, who heads No Door School, he's a contemporary of mine.

He said, Oh my God, I remember these people when I was in Atlanta, Georgia, 40 years ago, coming to speak at our classes. Yeah, [00:21:00] you know, and nobody knows who these people are, you know, if you mentioned Robert Jansky, I mean some of the oldies but goodies know, but a lot of the younger generation, and I don't want to disparage a lot of the work that the younger people are doing the younger people that are coming up are doing some amazing work.

And this is for them. Yeah, not only for them to have something a history, really say history, but it's also for their own work in some way to be held in in hallowed halls. of preservation. So down the road, you know, because look what's happening with the book burning right now. It's kind of like book burning right now.

All these books are being taken off shelves across the country. You know, where we can't read the things that we were able to read in certain cities. I mean, books that were our classics. That we, you know, not astrology books, but regular classic books. And, um, I think that that's a travesty. That [00:22:00] we can't have access to these things.

So this is another, maybe it's a little bit more of an activist stance too. I mean, if somebody doesn't do it, and I don't know if we'll be able to do it. We'll go as long as we can, and then we can't go anymore. But I know one thing if we can't go anymore, I intend to leave it in my estate that at least the website and what we've uploaded will be there for future because I, I mean, I don't want to get emotional about this.

But I get very emotional about the work we do. I think that we're catalysts, and I think that people are lucky to have astrologers in society, and regardless of how taboo it may be to some people, it's not so taboo anymore. It's Important and it can change somebody's life. You've had readings. I've had readings that changed my life.

I mean, oh my God, I never considered this idea until that astrologer suggested to me to at least open myself up to think [00:23:00] about it. Okay. And that's what literature is about any kind of literature. So, um, I know I'm being very emotional and I apologize, but Yeah. It's very, it's very emotional to me because it's hard to fund this every year, but you know, I'll be damned.

I'm going to do it. And until I can't. And, um, and I love what they're doing. I love our, I love our little tiny crew. They're like little mice, you know, little elves. They work all the time. And I know they're giving us a lot more hours than they're getting paid for because they're only allowed so many hours a month for the budget.

So that's, that's it. Georgia, thank

Amanda: you for sharing your heart and just how, how important this is. It's, it's hard to convey, I think, with, with all the, um, information that's like at our fingertips now with the internet, it's like, we lose some books and, but, but we're not talking about losing books. We're talking about lifetimes [00:24:00] of work.

It's irreplaceable really, and anybody, I'm sure,

The Power Resources Hold

Amanda: you know, you, you were an astrologer in your younger years. What's the difference between you as an astrologer then versus you an astrologer now? Like, what does the, what does having a lifetime of experiences, of giving readings, of studying, of researching, what, how does that change you as an astrologer?

And why

Georgia: is that valuable? Well, I I, I was always a, I'm kind of a loner and I always like to read and I'm, I'm naturally curious and I would go to meetings and come and I would, you know, hear people speaking about something I didn't understand, but I thought, Oh, this could be useful if I'm working with somebody and then I go find their book or go find their article.

Sometimes it didn't, it didn't ring with me, you know, like Iranian astrology. I love it. But it's not my thing, you know, I understand it and [00:25:00] that's what was very important is that I learned about things that I really don't use, but that I know about if somebody's referring to it, you know, and I know when we were teaching the undergraduate program, uh, as team teachers at Kepler for that eight years, we had the undergraduate program and the master's program that, uh, we had to teach with Vedic teachers, with classic teachers, I was a modern teacher and I learned by being with my peers, not everything about Vedic.

I did study it for two years. I studied horror for two years, which is the Ask a question. I'm not real good at horror. Lee Lehman's a lot better at that than I am, but I know about it and I can, and this is the thing that I I like about learning about all these different things is when you see something in a chart from your perspective, because you, you end up always using the techniques that work for you and your clients and the kinds of clients that you have.

But then you'll see something because you [00:26:00] read about something.

In that old book, which, by the way, for those who have huge astrology libraries in their own homes, this is also a very useful tool. Because if you want to find where that article was about that topic in your own library, and we have it uploaded, you could pop it in and it'll say, oh, it's in this book that's in your library in your own house.

Oh, office, right? Yes. So to get it and you go, Oh my God, this is where it was. I use it all the time. I actually had a very, I have a student in Mexico. She's very funny, very bright. She wrote an endorsement for us. It's so cute, but it was a little off, but it was cute. She said that she did a workshop. Uh, she did research on serial killers using astrology charts.

Wow. Yeah. He said that she used our database. to find books to help her with the workshop. Wow. [00:27:00] Yeah. See, that's the other way you can look at it for your own library that you own. Right.

Amanda: So some of these, um, you know, obscure topics, but then also real nuanced topics where you can get lots of different perspectives on a topic, and you can dive into some of the more historical aspects of that topic.

Closing

Amanda: Yeah, I mean, to me, it, it, we, we feel very aligned with your project, Georgia, that's why we're here doing this podcast. Thank you. We're asking all of you if, if this touches you and if you want to contribute to the Alexandria Eye Base project and help keep it alive so it doesn't go by the wayside because of funding like the Library of Alexandria.

You know, this is an opportunity to do that and you can do it as part of our health, wealth and fulfillment workshop series that we do have a pay it forward option. If you want to do a larger contribution, it probably be beneficial to do it directly through Georgia's. Platform is that [00:28:00] how

Georgia: would they do that?

Well, they can go to

Georgia: www. alexandriaibase. org forward slash donate. There is a, there is a donate button on the homepage. Okay. And the other piece too, we do have a Schwab account. If some people have stocks and they don't want to sell them and have capital gains, they can always give.

I actually give stocks each year to the Hellenic National Museum, which is another project that I'm involved in. My father started that and we donate, our company donates so much, so many stocks every year to keep their platform going. So that's what we've set up with, uh, Schwab is if somebody wants to donate.

Stocks in their estate. There wouldn't be any capital gains for the estate. I know this sounds so businesslike and we're talking astrology But you know, it's reality It's reality, you know

Amanda: It could make more sense because then you can write it off on your taxes if you go You know Or pay it forward.

We've [00:29:00] had we've had lots

Georgia: of people already contribute

Amanda: That are taking the workshop series and they're just adding another 10 bucks on or they're adding 20, you know They're just adding a little bit to their Their workshop series purchase, which is definitely an option. And we think all of you who are doing that and all of you who will do that.

And then if you're like, gosh, I'd like to throw in a couple hundred or 500 or 1000 or something bigger, just to be able to write it off on to be able to write it off on your taxes, go direct to Georgia because 3. And then you'll be able to write that off.

Georgia: Right. And if I might add,

for perspective, uh, we pay our librarians and our project managers 25 per hour. So, yeah. Well, 25 will pay for one hour of library or project manager time and the catalog process where they get the table of contents. We're trying to list all the tables of contents.

That's a slow project. Oh, yeah. So you can go in and see if that's. Something [00:30:00] you want to do, putting it, uploading it, uploading it to the internet, it's, it's, so that's the perspective, you know, whenever people give us a donation, we send a little note saying, thank you, you've just given us five hours of library time, because I think it's important for people to know, and the other thing you can do with any foundation, any non profit foundation, is if you choose to donate, you can always say, I want to donate it for this thing in your foundation.

You don't have to just blankly give things. You can actually name, which is for any donation. And I do believe that if we don't give back, we don't receive. And I always believed in tithing. This is a kind of tithing, if you will. Yes,

Amanda: absolutely. Okay, so Georgia is going to be teaching in our workshop series here very shortly.

She has this project that we're partnered with, aligned with, and wanting to just spread the word as far and wide as possible. It would be a tragedy for all of us [00:31:00] astrology students, astrology lovers, to lose access to where these great works are. So if you are inspired to contribute, you can, we're going to put all the links in the show notes.

So you can just, uh, refer right back to that. And Georgia, thank you for doing something that just

Georgia: obviously

Amanda: inspiration moved you and you and Christine jumped on it. And now you've created this project that benefits all of us. And, um, I'm, I'm happy to be able to spread the word. And I know that this amazing community of, of astrology lovers is.

The generous and wanting to support things and they consistently so thanks to all, yeah, all right. So, um, thank you so much for tuning in here today and thank you for being a part of our community. Again, check those show notes if you want to contribute and support Georgia and her efforts. And we'll look forward to seeing you in the workshop series.

Thanks for being here, everybody. Take care. Bye.