Opening Your Cosmic Toolbox

 

If you want something fun for a friend or yourself, this is worth looking at. Don’t be looking for a lot of depth here, however. The material on numerology and how it relates to astrology is particularly good. Though I should warn you – the author doesn’t agree with the numbers traditionally assigned to the planets. I found her analysis of the numbers to make sense, but you may not. For one thing, she adds Chiron into the mix. And again, I found that ok, but you may not.

The astrology section is pretty basic. The author tries to lighten it up with some clever descriptions; for example, the signs as pizza toppings. Clever, but I had some resistance to some of it: Pisces as mushrooms, for example, which to me are very earthy – and Cancer as green pepper; Capricorn as bacon, despite her use of analogy “because Capricorn likes to bring home the bacon.” So overall, I’m not too sure if this clever little story would be a help or a hindrance to new astrologers. The “one in a hole” story that follows is much better in terms of conveying how astrology works.

But it’s really the numerology that shines in this book – and the correlations between the numbers and the planets. Conkel does an amazing job with these, and if you don’t look at them currently, you might after reading this.

There is also a good section on Chinese astrology.

There are a lot of fun ideas to play with here, like finding your predominant chakra by looking at the letters in your name and looking at the numbers in your address. So expect to have fun with this book, above all else.

As for the astrology, I think she might have done a better job had she not been so determined to be cute, but despite that, there’s probably enough here for a beginner to get his or her feet wet.