Early Encounters of the Mantic Kind

I was fifteen and had recently arrived at North Sydney Boys High School. There was a maths teacher there who made an unusual offer.

If we would allow him to take a print of our palms he would give those of us who did, a free palmistry reading. I signed up and a day or two later the maths teacher rolled some black ink back and forth on a glass slate and I pressed the palm of my right hand onto it and then onto a piece of paper. The reading was set for a few days later.

In those days I was crippled with unpredictable moods of shyness which would come and go seemingly at random. When one of these lockdown phases was on me, my speech would become very hard to understand due to extreme low volume mumbling.

I mention this because I had hardly spoken to the maths teacher before the offer to print my hand, nor did I in the time waiting for the reading. If I did say anything to him it was in that mode of near invisibility and silence, so, to my mind there was no logical explanation for his opening statement when I sat across from him with the print of my hand on the table between us.

“Yeah, well the first thing that struck me about this was - an actor.”

I fell off the floor.

How could he possibly have known? I mean, I knew. Knew that I wanted to be an actor more than anything in the world, and I also knew that it seemed like an impossibility.

When I met this mathematical palm reader there could not have been the slightest indication that I would ever be able to stand upright on a stage, let alone present anything worth watching on it. It was my very first contact with the mantic arts.

By the way, I’ve just come across a podcast given by the incomparable George Hall whom I was immensely privileged to have as an acting teacher at The Central School of Speech and Drama in London ⎯ more on him in later posts, but now at 100 years of age and still working, he still has a lot to say! Google if you’re interested.

The maths teacher went on to tell me all about my fifteen year old self, strengths, weaknesses, predilections, preferences and so on. I sat there with my lower jaw approaching the floor, but internally all kinds of lights were igniting inside of me. It was a strong validation. I was seen and there was understanding flowing from this mysterious man.

The mood of imprisoned shyness dissolved and I was suddenly able to speak and release the quite opposite side of my teenage nature which was Mercury on steroids (I didn’t know that’s what it was then), suddenly I was all loquacity and asking questions, springing from, “How did you do that?”

His answers were mildly evasive. The question I should have asked but didn’t was “Well how exactly do I become an actor?” ⎯ I might have saved myself five years if I had received a practical answer then. But my curiosity which later became a fascination was about the strangeness of this encounter.

I enjoyed maths basics but when we began to embark on quadratic equations and calculus I just about reached the limits of my ability, so after this event, which was so releasing in my understanding of myself, the maths teacher and I settled back into a respectful indifference seeing as I had little in the way of mathematical talent to offer and his extraordinary function in my young life was complete.

In fact, had I had more mathematical ability and more understanding of physics I might have followed my first passion which was astronomy. As an infant child I was fascinated by the solar system ⎯ at that time Jupiter was thought to have 13 moons, now it’s known to have more than 60. I was about 11 when the nodal axis in my chart - you know, the bit that highlights your destiny ⎯ came to life and gave me the call to become an actor.

There was more than one indication in the chart of the transits and the way it interacted with my natal chart when that happened, mainly I’m going to put it down to five planets and the north node in Aries all trine by sign to my natal Sun in Sagittarius where transiting Mars was putting in a shot of energy.

Soon after the amazing palmistry reading, I went bushwalking with a couple of mates. We were caught in a locust storm. It was impossible to walk through it so we sat and waited for them to move on. While we sat I got bashed in the eyeball by one of these leaping insects. After a while the locusts passed on, my eyeball swelled up and I began to feel weird. The following morning I was vomiting green slime and had to be taken to hospital, ending up on the mens medical ward with what turned out to be viral meningitis. I was there with men who seemed impossibly ancient, which is to say that many of them were about the age I am now.

I arrived in the North Shore hospital late at night and was installed in a hospital bed with crisp sheets. The elderly gentleman in the next bed was still awake, and even though I was hallucinating with fever I did hear his words.

“Do you know what they’re going to do to me son?” He said in the inimitable laconic drawl of the senior Australian male.

I couldn’t guess.

“They’re going to cut my testicles off.”

Now that is a challenging thing for any man to hear at any time, but to a fifteen year old boy dipping in and out of delirium, it was a very unnerving. My body was undergoing the 400% increase in its testosterone level that releases the standard male hormonal chaos at puberty. I remember spinning into a delirious panic before I finally passed into phantasmagorical sleep.

It turns out that there is an astrological correspondence ⎯ the story of what Cronos (AKA Saturn) did to Ouranos (AKA Uranus)⎯and the consequence ⎯ the birth of the Erinyes (The Furies). And then the generational repetition when Jupiter (aka Zeus) also took up the sickle agains his mythological father Saturn (AKA Cronos) which then gave us the birth of Aphrodite.

Oh and by the way these stories are not infrequently told by distinguished lady astrologers for their mythic, symbolic and psychological values. I have told my own children not to take these myths literally.

I was on the ward for several weeks gradually recovering. My Australian school days were over, but my vocational call to become an actor had been confirmed. And it was the start of a lifelong fascination with approaches to things beyond the physical.

Cut forward to the early 1980s when I had just graduated from The Central School of Speech and Drama. On a recommendation I visited a psychic. Once again her opening remark was impressive.

“Welcome to the entertainment industry.”

Again, how did she know?!?

Some way into the conversation she said, “There’s something else for you to do after you’ve been an actor.”

“Oh?” I said, “What’s that?”

“Well I’m not going to tell you.”

It was a brilliant reply. Because it planted a seed of watchful flexibility. In hindsight I realize that I am one who’s been trying to do something else since the day I started.

House painter, network marketer (more than once), indie film producer … the usual stuff. I’ve tried them all. I signed up for a parachute jump once, but then canceled when an acting gig came through and I thought I should preserve all my limbs so as to be able to move about the stage.

But the most delightful fortune teller I even knew, was Marie, the pixie-like Scottish sculptress, who worked in her studio in the basement of a large house in Swiss Cottage, London. I used to visit her for tea and after we’d have tea she would read the tea leaves.

The readings were always the same: “There’s some good news … and a little money … and someone interesting comes in … now I want you to make a wish …” And then she’d slap the tea cup and examine the new pattern of the leaves. And then she would exclaim “Oh yes!”

It was always an affirming and somehow validating experience. Like when Tarot, or Astrological, or psychic reading goes well. If done rightly, it should give you a sense that you are living your life path in a way that makes sense, and the universe is full of possibility and that “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will …”

One time, Marie told me, she slapped the tea cup too vigorously and it separated from its handle and smashed against the wall.

That can happen too.