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Rochelle "Rockie" Gardiner was an American astrologer. Her syndicated astrology column, The Rockie Horoscope, appeared in a variety of publications (mostly alternative weekly newspapers), on her own website, and she also gave custom astrological readings for individuals.
She was born in 1938 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Lawrence, New York, on Long Island. Gardiner was a Sagittarius. She attended Syracuse University and graduated from Barnard College.
Following graduation, she worked as an editor of children's books at Doubleday Publishing, along with Arthur Miller and Shirley Jackson.
In 1958, she married Peter Gardiner, a pioneering film director of psychedelic "pop films" that were predecessors to music videos. Peter and Rockie had a son, Jeremy, born in 1963 and in 1966 the small Gardiner family moved to Los Angeles, California, where Rockie discovered an interest in astrology.
Peter died in 1968 and Rockie remained single the rest of her life. Rockie died unexpectedly following a brief illness on October 31, 2008, Halloween Day, at 11:11 a.m.
Rockie's astrology column, The Rockie Horoscope, first appeared in LA Weekly in 1983. Rockie typically wrote a general forecast for each weekday telling about the overall astrological influences and how they would affect a given day. She would also write a general forecast for the week ahead. These would be followed by weekly sign readings for the individual sun signs.
Her columns were known for their humor and wit. She frequently included pop-culture references to celebrities, politics, professional sports and pop music. Rockie famously predicted that U.S. President Ronald Reagan would die in office and that George H. W. Bush would assume the position, as well as that Jesse Jackson would be a vice-presidential candidate.
Sometimes, when she had not gotten around to updating her website, she would take down the old information and post the following message: "Rockie is soaking up atmosphere and astrological insight."
Newspapers that carried her column included: The Improper Bostonian, LA Weekly, The Las Vegas Weekly, The O.C. Weekly, The Philadelphia Weekly and The Village Voice . It was even carried in Vogue magazine. In addition to her newspaper column and website, she also sold customized sign readings to individuals.
Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that propose that information about human affairs and terrestrial events may be discerned by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Different cultures have employed forms of astrology since at least the 2nd millennium BCE, these practices having originated in calendrical systems used to predict seasonal shifts and to interpret celestial cycles as signs of divine communications. Most, if not all, cultures have attached importance to what they observed in the sky, and some—such as the Hindus, Chinese, and the Maya—developed elaborate systems for predicting terrestrial events from celestial observations. Western astrology, one of the oldest astrological systems still in use, can trace its roots to 19th–17th century BCE Mesopotamia, from where it spread to Ancient Greece, Rome, the Islamic world, and eventually Central and Western Europe. Contemporary Western astrology is often associated with systems of horoscopes that purport to explain aspects of a person's personality and predict significant events in their lives based on the positions of celestial objects; the majority of professional astrologers rely on such systems.
The zodiac is a belt-shaped region of the sky that extends approximately 8° north and south of the ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of the year. Also within this zodiac belt appear the Moon and the brightest planets, along their orbital planes. The zodiac is divided along the ecliptic into 12 equal parts ("signs"), each occupying 30° of celestial longitude. These signs roughly correspond to the astronomical constellations with the following modern names: Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.
A horoscope is an astrological chart or diagram representing the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, astrological aspects and sensitive angles at the time of an event, such as the moment of a person's birth. The word horoscope is derived from the Greek words ōra and scopos meaning "time" and "observer". It is claimed by proponents of astrology that a horoscope can be used as a method of divination regarding events relating to the point in time it represents, and it forms the basis of the horoscopic traditions of astrology, although practices surrounding astrology have been recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century. Horoscope columns are often featured in print and online newspapers.
Western astrology is the system of astrology most popular in Western countries. Western astrology is historically based on Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos, which in turn was a continuation of Hellenistic and ultimately Babylonian traditions.
In astrology, sidereal and tropical are terms that refer to two different systems of ecliptic coordinates used to divide the ecliptic into twelve "signs". Each sign is divided into 30 degrees, making a total of 360 degrees. The terms sidereal and tropical may also refer to two different definitions of a year, applied in sidereal solar calendars or tropical solar calendars.
Electional astrology, also known as event astrology, is a branch found in most traditions of astrology according to which a practitioner decides the most appropriate time for an event based on the astrological auspiciousness of that time. It differs from horary astrology because, while horary astrologers seek to find the answer to a question based on the time the question was asked, electional astrologers seek to find a period of time which will result in the most preferable outcome for an event being planned.
Astrology and astronomy were archaically treated together, but gradually distinguished through the Late Middle Ages into the Age of Reason. Developments in 17th century philosophy resulted in astrology and astronomy operating as independent pursuits by the 18th century.
Karl Ernst Krafft was a Swiss astrologer, born in Basel. He worked on the fields of astrology and graphology.
Margaret Anne Lake, best known by her stage name Mystic Meg, was an English astrologer who had a regular astrology column in The Sun and the News of the World.
Sydney Omarr was an American astrologer and an astrology consultant to the rich and famous. His daily Sun Sign Horoscope column appeared in more than 200 newspapers and his annual forecast books for each sign of the zodiac sold over 50 million copies.
Mary Alice Kemery, popularly known as Linda Goodman, was a New York Times bestselling American astrologer and poet. She wrote the first astrology book to make the New York Times Best Seller list.
Sun sign astrology, or star sign astrology, is a modern simplified system of Western astrology which considers only the position of the Sun at birth, which is said to be placed within one of the twelve zodiac signs, rather than the positions of the sun and the other six 'planets'. This sign is then called the sun sign or star sign of the person born in that twelfth-part of the year. Sun sign astrologers take this basic twelve-fold division and relate all the current movements of all the planets to each other, using traditional rules to divine meanings for each sign separately. Because the Moon has the fastest apparent movement of all the heavenly bodies, it is often used as the main indicator of daily trends for sun sign astrology forecasts.
Jonathan Cainer was a British astrologer. He wrote astrological predictions six days a week for the Daily Mail, and forecasts for three Australian newspapers: the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Melbourne Herald Sun, and the Perth Sunday Times. Cainer's predictions were also published in Hello, the Auckland Sunday News, the Botswana Echo, and Misty Magazine (Japan). It has been estimated that over twelve million people read his predictions.
Richard Harold Naylor, better known as R. H. Naylor, was a British astrologer, and the first sun sign astrologer. His horoscope of the newly-born Princess Margaret for the Sunday Express, led to a regular column that was soon copied by other British newspapers.
Hellenistic astrology is a tradition of horoscopic astrology that was developed and practiced in the late Hellenistic period in and around the Mediterranean Basin region, especially in Egypt. The texts and technical terminology of this tradition of astrology were largely written in Greek. The tradition originated sometime around the late 2nd or early 1st century BC, and then was practiced until the 6th or 7th century AD. This type of astrology is commonly referred to as "Hellenistic astrology" because it was developed in the late Hellenistic period, although it continued to be practiced for several centuries after the end of what historians usually classify as the Hellenistic era.
Ibrahim Yousef Ibrahim Hazboun is a Palestinian astrologer who was born in Bethlehem city in the West Bank. He is a well-known figure in the Middle East.
Astrology consists of a number of belief systems that hold that there is a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events or descriptions of personality in the human world. Astrology has been rejected by the scientific community as having no explanatory power for describing the universe. Scientific testing has found no evidence to support the premises or purported effects outlined in astrological traditions.
The AstroTwins are American astrologers and authors. Together, they have written four books on astrology, they are the featured astrology columnists for Elle.com, Refinery29, Elle Australia and MindBodyGreen, and they publish their own website, Astrostyle.com.
Élizabeth Teissier, née Germaine Élizabeth Hanselmann is a French astrologer and former model and actress. Between 1975 and 1976, she created a daily horoscope on French television channel Antenne 2, and in 1981, she launched the Astro Show television programme in Germany. Her personal clients included former President of France François Mitterrand, and she has published several books on astrology. A test that compared her predictions against common sense and chance failed to show any evidence of her having any special powers.
Patric William Walker was an American-born, British astrologer. Walker's columns, famed for their literary style, appeared in numerous publications throughout the world, leading to claims that he had a readership of one billion.