Queer Kinship among the Stars: H.D., Silvia Dobson, and Astrology

“I’ve seen the request for someone’s Sun, Moon, or rising sign become a tender shorthand for ‘I’d like to know you better’ and the invitation to talking about astrology be shorthand for ‘I’d like to hear you imagine yourself beyond how I was taught to perceive you.’”

Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology (2021)

In the introduction to her 500-page unpublished manuscript, A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the writer, teacher, astrologer, farmer, and herbalist Silvia Dobson recounts her first correspondence with H.D. in 1933—a “rapturous” fan letter sent to a poet whom she did not know was “a man or a woman? Alive or dead?” (fig. 1, fig. 2).[1] “Were these tender fiery miraculous poems written in Greece, the USA, Paris, Rome, or from across Lethe water?,” Dobson wondered (3). She closed her note with an effusive felicitation: “May this find you on whatsoever far Atlantis isle or exotic Xanadu in which you dwell” (3). Months later to Dobson’s surprise, a “Mrs. Richard Aldington” wrote back with an invitation, no less:

Come and see me but telephone first. I live above Jaegers shop. 26 Sloane Street. Use the side door beside a window bulging with bras, panties, stockings, suspender belts. I liked the Atlantis touch, but this is a prosaic world (3).

Dobson was so enchanted by H.D.’s reply that she “carried this magic note around for so long that it disintegrated through constant scrutiny” (3). When H.D. and Dobson finally did meet, their first encounter was nothing short of dreamy: the pair gathered in H.D.’s drawing room lined with Persian rugs and damask curtains, drank Earl Grey tea, ate petit-fours, and read tarot cards. They were “both nervous,” according to Dobson (5). When H.D.’s amber-beaded necklace broke, the women “went down on [their] knees to pick up glittering scattered gold” (5). “A star pattern; maybe someone's astrology chart,” Dobson suggested (5).

This first magical meeting of H.D. and Dobson would spark a nearly thirty-year-long friendship that would last until H.D.’s death in 1961. While in the months following their initial encounter H.D. and Dobson would embark on a short-term romance, the foundation of their lasting friendship was built upon the chance object of their initial kismet: their shared fascination with astrology. As Dobson explains: “We found we had both scoffed at astrology, studied the subject, found the processes seemed to work. Interpretation baffled me, yet I enjoyed calculating zodiac birth maps. H.D., correlating mythology with astronomical knowledge, would decipher character traits from my chart set-ups” (5). H.D.’s relationship with Dobson, and the pair’s shared investment in astrology, bears relevance for two well-established areas of H.D. studies: first, H.D.’s research and practice of occult wisdom traditions, and second, her long-standing interest in psychoanalysis as a system of self-exploration and collective healing. Although both of these subjects have received a great deal of critical attention in H.D. scholarship, the significance of the queer kinship ties that H.D. forged with Dobson by and through astrology—at an especially pivotal time in her life when she was simultaneously undergoing psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud (more on that below)—have been largely overlooked.  In this post, I offer a series of provocations aiming to explore how H.D.’s friendship with Dobson and the pair’s approach to astrology served as an access point to alternative modalities of relation, knowledge-making, and care for the poet. In collaboration with Dobson, H.D. found within astrology a queer counter-therapeutic discourse that informed her experiences with psychoanalysis. The friends’ practice of astrology bolstered H.D.’s purchase to resist what she understood to be the limitations of Freud’s work, and it nurtured within her a queer phenomenological orientation to the “prosaic world” of the interwar period. In turn, H.D.’s relationship with Dobson and the pair’s common investment in astrology emerges as a critical nexus for further investigating how H.D.’s queerness intersected with her esoteric and psychoanalytic interests. 

Astrology was for H.D, as it might be for us, a deviant wisdom tradition: one that relied upon forms of sense- and knowledge-making that ran counter to the dominant phenomenologies and epistemologies of a modern world architected by Enlightenment-era notions of rationalism and individualism. In our current times, despite the resurgence of astrology’s popularity among Millennials and Gen Z, astrology maintains a dubious status, one that contemporary artist, theorist, and astrologer Johanna Hedva suggests is a “deviant form of knowledge, because, since the Enlightenment, [astrology] has been systematically removed from the canon of what is deemed ‘legitimate’ knowledge.” In an interview that I did with Hedva about the intersections of astrology and care, Hedva further explained,

Astrology has persisted as a sort of fugitive practice; like witchcraft or magic, [it is] similarly trying to make a meaning that goes against what is considered the “right” or acceptable kind. All these practices that are considered quackery or woo-woo—magic, witchcraft, astrology, tarot, divination, necromancy—all of them have been so denigrated as being legitimate forms of knowledge that to be interested in them at all, you have to seek out these underground spaces (Hedva interview).

Naming astrology a “fugitive practice,” Hedva points to the radical potential of esoteric traditions to sidestep dominant epistemologies by “trying to make a meaning that goes against what is considered the ‘right’ kind.” In underscoring astrology’s power to challenge narratives of legibility, as well as binary formations of “right” versus “wrong,” Hedva’s approach to astrology prompts us to consider why it has reemerged within our own moment as a tool for individual and collective meaning-making.

Indeed, interest in occult knowledge and practices reenter the cultural zeitgeist precisely at moments in time when existing social and political systems are losing their strongholds. According to the popular astrologer, Chani Nicholas, who first rose to fame on Instagram and then through her best-selling book, You Were Born for This (2020) and subsequent app, Chani: “Astrology comes into vogue at times of great change societally because we’re breaking open a paradigm of what we thought worked for us.”[2] Even though astrology has arguably entered the neoliberal capitalist mainstream (in part because of Nicholas’s marked success), it maintains close ties to communities engaged in minoritarian struggle and worldmaking. On this note, Christopher Lee contends that “astrology, despite its enmeshment in the colonial trappings of New Age consumerism and appropriation, offers an informal but critical resource through which participants can navigate everyday suffering, forge trans/queer community, and push against normative forms of care and healing.”[3] Lee further posits that Hedva and Nicholas (along with the contemporary astrologer Alice Sparkly Kat) position “astrology as a lifeline for queer people, people of color, and those living with chronic illness and disability” (166). If astrology still holds a subversive potential to challenge dominant scripts of sociality and care today, what might it have offered two queer women—H.D. and Dobson—in the 1930s?[4]

In the early years of their friendship, H.D. would correspond with Dobson on the subjects of astrology, psychoanalysis, and queer identity, sometimes all in the same letter. In a remarkable letter from May 31, 1934— following a whirlwind trip that Dobson and H.D. took to Venice earlier that spring—H.D. directly addresses Dobson’s sexuality in the context of psychoanalysis, taking measures to clarify what sounds like a miscommunication regarding H.D.’s suggestion that Dobson undergo analysis (something which Dobson eventually did at H.D.’s urging and with Bryher’s financial support): “It is impossible to explain [psychoanalysis],” H.D. writes, “It is hardly a question of you being a . . . Lesbian. . . . / The Lesbian or homo-sexual content is only a symbol-note, I did not say ‘symptom.’ . . .  How you love is more important than WHO you love? And how that love helps or hinders you” (H.D. in Dobson, A Mirror for a Star, 3). As H.D. continues, she changes the subject to astrology: “I will be so happy for some more zodiac talks. I have worked a little but stolidly. It is such a good source to draw on, when in doubt about people” (17). She tells Dobson that she is collecting “dates” from her “old aunt” so she can work on her “parents maps” (17). She then answers what seems to be an inquiry of Dobson’s about a traumatic event in H.D.’s childhood, around her ninth year—likely this is something that Dobson inferred from her astrological calculations of H.D.’s natal chart. “Yes, there was a terrible accident to my father when I was 9 or 10, but at 9, the big change came,” H.D. explains, “we moved from a cozy town to the country, a complete psychic break from my little friends, life, school—a great shock to me in some way to me, that drove me in, introverted me” (17). In this poignant example of H.D. and Dobson’s correspondence, H.D.’s orientations toward both psychoanalysis and astrology are evident. She fluidly moves from one to the other, interweaving them into makeshift queer therapeutic discourse, at first for Dobson and then for herself.

In another letter from September 12, 1934, H.D. cautions Dobson about her style of drawing the symbol for Jupiter, which H.D. felt inadvertently resembled a swastika: “You make Jupiter with points, it is really two Zeds, a very nice and confidence-making double symbol, so suitable; when you point it like that, it suggests the Swastika. Please don’t” (fig 3; H.D. in Dobson, 47). H.D.’s warning starkly situates her letter to Dobson within the urgency of their historical moment, reminding us that the pair’s early correspondence unfolded against the backdrop of a mounting fascist threat. Not unlike today, when astrology’s rise in popularity corresponds with increasing political instability, H.D. and Dobson were drawn to an esoteric tradition of meaning-making at a time of unrest. Their early letters further evidence what Nicholas suggests is the paradigm-shifting potential of astrology: we turn to astrology precisely when the center does not hold, so that we might find within the break an entry point to other modes of being, knowing, and relating.

When H.D. and Silvia Dobson met in February 1934, H.D. was on a hiatus from analysis with Freud. A number of personal traumas and the collective devastation of World War I had brought H.D. to Freud in 1933—the stillbirth of her first child, a near-death encounter with influenza, the death of her father, her brother killed in combat, several failed romances, and the horror of war. Creatively drained from these losses, H.D.’s identity as a poet was jeopardized in the midst of the world’s uncertain future. Turning to Freud, Susan Stanford Friedman explains, H.D. sought to “fortify herself against the war terror she felt in her very bones would engulf the world once again.” [5] Yet, poring over A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror in the Beinecke Library’s reading room, I could almost feel the pages of H.D.’s initial letters to Dobson vibrating with the excitement of a newfound kinship. The dynamic between the two women felt so alive—full of a sense of possibility that ran counter to my established sense of the war-torn and traumatized H.D. of the early 1930s. This was the spark of a queer kinship, unfolding, as it were, amongst the proverbial stars of astrological discourse. Dobson is clear that these are “not love letters” in the conventional sense of the phrase; yet, the mutual care and curiosity between Dobson and H.D. is palpable.[6] I would emerge from the reading room on those days quite starry-eyed myself, wondering how the H.D. of Dobson’s letter, full of giddy questions about astrological charts, aspects, and transients, squared with the one undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud.[7] What did it mean for H.D. to have been orienting toward both psychoanalysis and astrology, toward both Freud and Dobson, at the same time? In Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), Sara Ahmed writes that “orientations shape not only how we inhabit space, but how we apprehend this world of shared inhabitance, as well as ‘who’ or ‘what’ we direct our energy and attention toward.”[8] To Ahmed, “To be orientated is also to be turned toward certain objects”—those that help us to find our way (1). While astrology is not an object in a material sense, it seems that for H.D. and Dobson, it was, nonetheless, what Ahmed calls an “anchoring point” (1). Such points “gather on the ground, and . . . create a ground upon which we can gather,” Ahmed explains (1). Ahmed’s conceptualization of “orientation”  leads to a theory of queer phenomenology that “might start by redirecting our attention toward different objects, those that are ‘less proximate’ or even those that deviate or are deviant” (3). According to Susan Stanford Friedman, H.D.’s dual orientations—more specifically her pull towards both psychoanalysis and esoteric practices like astrology—were not competing but rather complementary. They both aligned with the writer’s deliberate resistance to “mainstream religious traditions.”[9] Moreover, as forms of self-seeking, both the occult and psychoanalysis captured for H.D. that “dual dimension of modernism: the awareness of fragmentation and the consequent search to create new meaning” (Friedman, Psyche Reborn, 178). Friedman’s interpretation relies upon an understanding that psychoanalysis and the occult were reciprocal discourses for H.D. However, turning to H.D.’s investment in both the occult and psychoanalysis through the lens of her friendship with Dobson, I wonder if and how these orientations were juxtaposed. In other words, was H.D.’s relationship with Dobson and their joint interest in astrology a subversive foil to her dynamic with Freud in analysis, rather than a mere complement?

Writing many years later in Tribute to Freud, H.D. reflects that she sought out Freud because she wanted to “free herself from repetitive thoughts and experiences”—and, at the same, H.D. describes a grand vision of psychoanalysis, beyond the scope of her embodied life, that is generated by and through a critique of Freud’s disregard for the what H.D. referred to the au dela, or the other side.[10] Freud thought H.D. was symptomatic of megalomania—a mental illness marked by delusions of grandeur. H.D. was neither convinced nor deterred by his diagnosis. Rather, she was confident that her mystical insights—informed by years of esoteric study in astrology, tarot, kabbalah, and other wisdom traditions as well as her remarkable knowledge of Greek and Egyptian mythologies—gave her purchase to forms of understanding, even within the domain of psychoanalysis itself, that were simply inaccessible to Freud. “About the greater transcendental issues, we never argued,” H.D. wrote about herself and Freud, “but there was an argument implicit in our very bones” (13). While H.D. and Freud surely had their differences, many scholars, including myself, have written about the generative nature of H.D. and Freud’s dynamic (H.D. even called it “a most luscious sort of vers-libre relationship”) (H.D. quoted in Friedman, Analyzing Freud, xiii).  Indeed H.D. was in awe of Freud, calling him “the real, the final healer” (H.D. quoted in Friedman, Analyzing Freud, 100). She deeply believed in the project of psychoanalysis, confident it would “save mankind.” Yet, her relationship with Dobson provided a space for H.D. to explore a therapeutics of care that transcended the often rigid and hierarchical diagnostic protocols of psychoanalysis (Tribute to Freud, 71). Animated by a spirit of play and a shared curiosity about otherworldly dimensions, H.D. and Dobson made astrology “a ground upon which [they] could gather.” Upon this ground, H.D. stood as she went head-to-head with Freud during the second half of her analysis in 1934.

The energies of play and curiosity that guided H.D. and Dobson’s forays into astrology are found not only within their letters and Dobson’s manuscript, but also within two other striking artifacts held at the Beinecke Library, which I will call H.D.’s horoscope notebooks. These notebooks, likely created in 1935, were a collaborative project of H.D., Dobson, and Dobson’s sister, Mollie, a gifted illustrator (fig. 4, 5, 6, and 7). Dobson calculated the charts found in the notebooks, Mollie created the illustrations, and by and large, H.D. “read” the charts therein. An index in one notebook indicates natal charts for the members of H.D.’s inner circles past and present at the time, among which are Bryher, Freud, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot (fig. 7). We can imagine H.D. utilizing these charts to meditate on her relationships and important life events that made their way, often circuitously, into her writing.

The co-creative energy that animates these notebooks also pulses through Dobson’s manuscript. A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror is a coauthored text: it is a compilation of H.D.'s correspondence, paired with Dobson’s annotations.The collaborative spirit of the manuscript is further highlighted in the chiastic structure and reflective imagery of its title: H.D., conceivably the prominent figure of “the Star,” is synergistically linked to Dobson, “the Mirror”; these roles are positioned as mutually important by way of the chiasmus. What’s more, with its evocation of a celestial body and its reflexive gestures, the title accentuates just how significant astrology was, as a practice of contemplation and relation, to H.D. and Dobson.

 In the article, “Stars —They’re Just Like Us!” (2016), the editors of n+1 suggest there are “[therapeutic] reasons to love astrology,” especially for queer folks.[11] They write,

Queers are no strangers to structural critique, but some might relax their standards, like a lot of people do, for palliative and campy alternatives to existing theories of subjectivity—alternatives so reliably unreliable that they at least feel honest, and less likely to trick us than those that arrive in the guise of religion, theory, or politic.

H.D. and Dobson were not casual horoscope readers; they took astrology seriously, and practiced it with care, finding a measure of reliability in composing and deciphering charts that I think moves astrology past the limited terrain of “palliative and campy alternatives.” Yet, they delighted in how astrology provided a vernacular for exploring identity beyond ready-made constructs of gender and sexuality.  In the opening pages of A Mirror for a Star, A Star for a Mirror, Dobson wants us to know: “H.D's Sun sign is Virgo 17.40. September 10th, 1886. Mine Gemini 9.60. May 31st 1908. Mercury, who is Hermes, rules both these signs . . . H.D's ascendent came as Sagittarius 9.50. a mutable Fire sign. She seemed pleased with this. I also thought I had Sag, rising” (5). Dobson writes to an astrologically-fluent audience who might appreciate the significance of these placements. As H.D. wrote to Dobson, “[astrology] is such a good source to draw on, when in doubt about people (17).” Similarly, the n+1 editors remind us that the language of astrology provides “a nice opportunity to critique taxonomies of identity in general … ‘Is Alex a man or a woman?’ Alex is an Aries.”

Like H.D. and Dobson, I am also a Sagittarius rising. That we would all have Sag on the ascendant makes perfect sense to me, but don’t ask me how and why. (True to Sag form, however, I read this as fodder for a bawdy joke about three Sag risings walking into a reading room).[12] The part of me that aligns with astrology is, as Lee has written elsewhere, a little “phantasmic and aspirational, seedy and spectral,” maybe even “a little trashy.”[13] For Millennials and Gen Z, I think, astrology operates in this wondrous/nebulous/ridiculous way: it defies our understanding as it confirms it, leaving so much to marvel/scoff/laugh at, all at the same time. A chuckle followed by a quiet hunch or an eyeroll, a wayward orientation to meaning rather than a straightforward knowing. This might be why astrology feels “honest”—to use the n+1 editors’ word—in a way that other so-called legitimate ways of making sense of oneself and the world (“religion, theory, or politic,” for instance) do not. Today, when we keep our kinfolk’s charts in close reach via astrology apps, we can envision H.D. turning to her horoscope notebooks, marveling at the connections and compatibilities, wondering what the stars had in store for her and her friends.

            If astrology is a deviant practice of fugitivity, as Hedva says, (who, by the way, is also a Sag rising), then what might this mean when placed alongside psychoanalysis, which had its own fugitive impulses on the cusp of World War II when the rise of Nazism threatened Freud’s work altogether? Thinking of fugitivity within a radical Black tradition of emancipatory flight, Fred Moten writes that “fugitivity . . . is a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. It’s a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument.”[14] Moten attends to a theorization of Blackness that certainly does not map on to H.D.’s experiences as a privileged white woman—yet the “desire for the outside, for playing or being outside,” is something that I recognize in the queer kinship ties that H.D. was forging with Dobson as she was undergoing psychoanalysis with Freud. In her sessions, H.D. often countered Freud; as she explicitly states in Tribute to Freud, “the Professor was not always right” (18). Part of H.D.’s nearly lifelong engagement with psychoanalysis was premised upon maintaining an outside to it, and her explorations of the occult—and her queerness—were ways that she played at the edges of what Freud wanted psychoanalysis to be: a revolutionary, systemized science. On November 10, 1934, H.D. wrote to Dobson, “Now I feel so very, very happy to have followed my ‘star.’ [Psychoanalysis] is, don’t you think, a true aquarian science— along with X-ray and television and those things—science plus something uncanny or super-natural, not science in the old sense of the word.” (H.D. in Dobson, A Mirror for a Star, 71). Utilizing the language of astrology to qualify psychoanalysis, H.D. at once credits it preternatural elements while unmooring it from the strictures of the rational. Entangling these discourses, she morphs both astrology and psychoanalysis into fugitive practices that resist easy categorization in a celebration of the uncanny. While the significance of H.D.’s relationship with Dobson opens up lines of critical inquiry to be pursued in additional interpretative contexts, such as within H.D.’s literature (and moreover, within Dobson’s writing), from a brief look at their dynamic friendship and its related materials we can glean how astrology fostered their kinship and engaged them in a vernacular of possibility. Grounding their friendship in collaboration, curiosity, and care, H.D. and Dobson make astrology a queer phenomenological practice—one oriented to experiences and insights that might grant us a glimpse beyond the purview of this immediate world.