John Sandbach

John Sandbach is an astrologer and author, born on May 19, 1948 in San Francisco, California at 12:46 pm, Pacific Daylight Time. The son of a policeman father and a housewife mother, he moved to Kansas City, Missouri at the age of two, and lives there still. He began his astrology work in 1966, at the age of 18, at which time a consuming interest in mastering the art of astrology arose in him spontaneously. To satisfy this desire, he went to Linda Hall Library, one of the biggest science libraries in the world, to find books from which he could learn how to draw up charts of exact zodiacal planetary positions. After generous amounts of frustration countered with patience this was eventually accomplished.

His first paid reading came the same year. “My friend Dana knew someone that wanted me to do a reading,” he recalls. “I did the best I could and the woman was very happy with it. She gave me $15 and told other friends. My first clients were some of the wealthiest people of Kansas City.” His education in the art was, in his own words, extremely haphazard: self-taught at first, then taken under the wing of an astrologer named Joyce Price, and reading astrology books in the bath, over and over, until they were ingrained. Astrology has been his full-time occupation ever since.

For the next several years he attended classes at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and came close to getting a BA degree in art history, but quit school just before his last semester so that he could devote more time to his continuing astrological studies and astrological counselling business. He later took a two-year training course in Gestalt Therapy to refine his readings and to intensify his ability to relate to clients.

Sandbach has lived a highly varied life, focusing on astrology, metaphysics, psychology, painting, ceramics, and the writing of novels, short stories, and poetry, especially haiku. In the 1990s he completed the certification to become a bodywork therapist at the Wellspring School of Allied Health in Kansas City, and taught massage and energy therapy at that school for ten years.

He is known in the astrological community as an astrological theorist who takes a mystical approach to his work. He has contributed many new and innovative concepts and techniques to astrology, and bases his readings on a technique known as degree astrology, in which symbols for each degree of the zodiac, which he channeled, are used to interpret charts. The first of these sets he named the Chandra Symbols; over some twenty years he received three more, and gathered all four into The Circular Temple, the largest work yet written on degree astrology. He has also written a dictionary of astrological midpoints, Midpoints: A Kabbalistic Compendium, and a manual of astrology for beginners. The astrologer Noel Tyl, author of many textbooks on astrology, has referred to him as “an astrological genius.”

During the years he prepared written reports for clients he wrote over 10,000 pages of astrological analyses — more than two and a half million words. “Astrology is both an art and a science,” he says, “but for me it is primarily an art, and each reading I do is an individual work of art.”

He uses the art of fiction and poetry to express metaphysical ideas, and has written six novels and other shorter fiction works, among them the Azoth Quartet — Azoth, Zahira, A Painter and A Sculptor — which began as a 4,000-word short story and grew into an epic. He has written over 3,600 haiku in English and has had many of them published in Japan, and has published a book of his collected poems (other than haiku), which number close to 300 works.

“Astrology has helped me understand and accept that I’m very strange to other people,” he says. “Each of us has within us a spiritual spark that is the source of our love, joy and harmony. My life goal is to help people get in touch with that spark, for it is their ultimate teacher and guide.”

John Sandbach has written poetry since high school, when he found whole books by Gertrude Stein in the Kansas City Public Library and was fascinated to no end. Stein remains an influence; so do Barbara Guest, whom he counts the most consistent one, J. H. Prynne, and modern Japanese haiku — the Gendai haiku that care nothing for seventeen syllables or season words, and only for using a few words to evoke a striking picture.

He has written around 3,600 haiku. Many were published in Ginyu, the Japanese haiku journal edited by Ban’ya Natsuishi, and in 2002 the publisher Kazue Daikoku asked him for a book of a hundred of them: Step Into Sky, since reissued by Amazon. Further collections followed, and his poems other than haiku, close to three hundred, are gathered in a collected volume. He also writes ekphrastic poems, set going by paintings — Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Joan Miró — and variations on other poets’ poems, in the way a painter quotes a painter.

Three books of prose poems are forthcoming, one for each degree of the zodiac, 360 poems apiece: The Chandra Symbols, The Omega Symbols and The Azoth Symbols. His fiction includes six novels — among them the Azoth Quartet: Azoth, Zahira, A Painter and A Sculptor — as well as Black Moon of the Yakir, Abode and The Resident, and the short stories collected in Histories of Aab. All of John’s books →

A college teacher once told him, “You’re quite adept at writing good lines, and if you can do that, you’ll be able to be a good poet.” Years later Barbara Guest read two of his poems and said she really liked them; hearing that, he says, was the moment he felt he had actually become a poet.