Sagittarius, by Joanna Martine Woolfolk
Taylor Trade Publishing, 9781589795617, 92pp., 2011
I was a bit surprised when I saw Joanna Martine Woolfolk, author of The Only Astrology Book You’ll Ever Need, had written a book entirely about Sagittarius. After all, she should know better than to pigeon hole people according to their sun signs, our astrological chart and personality is far more complex than that. She addresses that concern in the introduction, and holds to the fact that while there is a lot more to our charts, we are our sun sign first, so giving her that benefit of the doubt, I continued.
Though a compact book it is fairly expansive in what it addresses. In the introduction she says “Basically, it’s all about you. Astrology has been described as a stairway leading into your deeper self.”1 and the first section of the book is geared that way, it’s all about the self. The standard things you’d expect are covered, the personality of a Sagittarius, career paths, health advice, but then it gets a bit more in depth than a lot of the basic books. She moves on to cover the decanates and cusps, your birth date itself, and combining the interpretation with your Chinese astrological figure. The second (very small) section of the book is a list of information about Sagittarius, what the glyph means, what parts of the body does it rule, colours, numbers, metals, and various correspondences. It also breaks down the aspects of Sagittarius, being a “Masculine sign,” being Fire, being Mutable, and so on.
So having read all that, how to I feel? I’m mixed about this book. I think on a whole it got more right than I would have expected for a book devoted to a single sun sign, there were parts that had me laughing at their accuracy, and parts that had me laughing at the inaccuracy. Oddly enough very little in between, which I actually appreciated, there was a relative lack of overly ambiguous language that could mean a lot of things. So what Woolfolk said was clear, and it was right or wrong, and no middle ground. Even though I disagreed with parts I was happy to see her willing to put it all up front and risk being wrong, rather than hedging her bets in nebulous talk. The correspondence section bothered me, as there were a few things that were just wrong. While I know there are other systems, her colours, her numbers, and a few other points seemed unfamiliar.
I would not say this a book to learn astrology from, and probably not even to augment your general astrological knowledge, but if you are a Sagittarius, or are deeply connected to one in some way it might be worth your time to go through this text, and look a little bit closer at the sign.
- p. xv [↩]
