It’s my birthday this weekend, and as a student of astrology, I always love to gift others on their birthday with a reading from my favorite book on the subject: Grant Lewi’s 1935 classic, Heaven Knows What. Lewi has been described as the father of modern astrology in America and in this book he pioneered chart synthesis with 144 Sun/Moon sign delineations and aspect cross-references that he developed on the basis of thousands of questionnaire responses. Everyone whose chart I’ve interpreted using this resource have come away stunned at how accurate the interpretation is–including me.

Lewi’s top level view of astrology begins with your Sun/Moon combination with other planetary influences and aspects secondary to that. I was born with the sun in Aries and the moon in Scorpio (and just for a bit of additional spice, Scorpio rising), and here’s his spot on analysis.

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Well, whatever may happen to you, good or bad, life is never going to be dull. Between your own aggressiveness and vitality, your conviction of your own worth, and the way you are able to make the world believe in it, you will have your ups and downs, but you will never lose that zest for living which fills you with energy and inner drive. Although not by any means always happy (you have a way of brooding over secret matters, real or imagined, of which even those closest to you have little knowledge), you none the less give the impression of competence and ability, of holding the strands of your life firmly in your hands and of doing with them pretty much as you please.

Even in adversity, you are undismayed for a combination of faith in yourself, and in some higher power which you may or may not call God, or Luck, surrounds you with a kind of aura of invulnerability. You seem so competent and capable that you are likely not to get nearly as much sympathy from the world as others do – and you don’t want sympathy. You scorn it. Ready enough to give it to others (though in a rather detached and impersonal manner), you would consider yourself humiliated if sympathy were offered to you.

You are able to take care of yourself, and do, and are proud of it, and resent any implication that you can’t. This justifies your pride both to yourself and to the world. You have a turbulent nature, and in many ways lead a turbulent life. If you are born low, you go high; if you’re born high and secure, you’re likely to go low and jump back again. There’s a steel spring in you that stays wound up, waiting for the emergencies of life, for you are not really ambitious in a worldly sense. You want security, comfort, activity, excitement, perhaps, but you are content with these.

You like recognition, but for its own sake rather than for wealth. Your rewards in life are deeply intimate and personal, and the conviction of your own worth is of more value to you than all the money or property in the world. Thus, as an artist, though you may, through your vitality and your ability to magnetize the public, achieve some degree of fame and recognition, you pursue your art from a truly inner sense of well-being in a task well done, in a Self properly realized and expressed.

But at the same time that you are expressing yourself in this or in some other way, there are deep wells of secret things that you do not express at all: ideas, ideals, dreams, imaginings, that never come to the surface and would surprise your friends if they knew of them–if they were not prepared never to be surprised by anything you may do. This great fund of secret ideology provides inspiration if you are an artist of any kind, and magnetic force to your personality, either in business or in social matters.

You are pretty set in your ways, very inflexible when your mind is made up, determined without the appearance of being stubborn (though of course you are stubborn), and able to convince people peaceably even against their wills.

You are exceptionally loyal and devoted in matters of love and stick to your friends through years and years. You are capable of demanding little and giving much but you won’t be imposed on. You have a sure instinct for the chiseler, the sycophant, or the fawner who may seek your friendship merely to be helped by your money or your influence. Him you detect and scorn. But you will give the shirt off your back for a worthy person, though you have in general little interest in causes. You will help individuals and let the causes take care of themselves.

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If you’re not completely asleep by the time you finish this and are intrigued, email me with your birthdate, time, and place (all info will be on your birth certificate), and I’ll find your sun/moon sign and send you a link to where you can read your profile from Lewi’s book. It’s pretty effing amazing.