On pseudo-Dr. J. Heber Smith’s booklet The Transits of the Planets
– written by Philip Graves, LMAFA, November 3rd, 2024
One of the greatest mysteries of 20th century American astrological literature abides in the anomaly inherent in the publication by the American Federation of Astrologers in the 1950s of a 43-page large-format booklet credited to Dr. J. Heber Smith and entitled The Transits of the Planets.
The anonymous editor claims to have reproduced without edits an original manuscript by Smith, a character deeply etched in the folklore of the modern history of astrology in the United States thanks to his having reputedly taught astrology to Evangeline Adams.
J. Heber Smith was born in 1842. Already in 1988, the A.F.A.’s own longstanding research director, James Herschel Holden, had cast doubt on the authorship attribution of the A.F.A.’s own edition of this booklet, writing in his book Astrological Pioneers in America (co-authored with Robert A. Hughes):
He is said to have been the author of a treatise on transits that is still in print, but from internal evidence this seems doubtful.[1]
By the time of the publication of Holden’s definitive Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers by the A.F.A. in 2013, he had narrowed down Smith’s date of death to 1898, a fact that he had not yet established when Astrological Pioneers of America was published in 1988.
In his entry for Smith here, Holden clarifies his doubts considerably, strengthening their expression into one of outright denial:
Dr. Smith is commonly said to have written for Evangeline Adams a treatise on transits that is still in print, but from internal evidence this is not correct. The treatise in question appears to have been written around 1915-1916 by someone who was born perhaps on 7 March 1876. And it appears to have been addressed to Marie Juliette Pontin (q.v.), whose natal planetary positions are mentioned in the text, rather than to Evangeline Adams.[2]
Holden, in his entries for Pontin in both Astrological Pioneers and his Biographical Dictionary, gives her own dates of birth and death as 1st July 1873 and 9th May 1928 respectively, indicating that she died at the age of just 54. But he also has this to say about her in his Biographical Dictionary:
A treatise on the effects of transits to positions in the natal horoscope that is falsely attributed to Dr. J. Heber Smith (q.v.) would seem from internal evidence to have been written for Pontin, since her natal planetary positions are mentioned, although the treatise is usually erroneously said to have been written for Evangeline Adams (q.v.)[3].
Holden does not list any works by Pontin in either book. But new evidence to which he seems to have lacked access shows that she wrote a very scarce book entitled A Manual of Astrology: Planetary Aspects and Transit Effects, which she appears to have self-published in 1924. I have recently taken delivery from esoteric bookseller Veronica Link of Veronica’s Books of a very ragged original printing, which shows that the book was cheaply produced on thin, poor-quality paper that has not withstood the ravages of time at all well, with many pages disbound and chipped at the margins. The text is nonetheless complete in 85 pages.
That it is not a unique manuscript is clear from the existence of a scan of the complete text of another copy, also ragged but with different defects, uploaded by a user of the Internet archive at https://archive.org/details/manual-astrology-pontin-1924/page/n1/mode/2up. At the time of writing, browsing the scan of that copy over the Internet is slow and clumsy, with each page taking a while to load, but the entire text can be downloaded as a PDF and then browsed offline much faster, which is exactly what I did in order to compare the text with that of the early large-format edition of Transits of the Planets credited to Dr. J. Heber Smith and published by the A.F.A..
A note first of all on the dating of the A.F.A. edition. My copy is undated in print but was published at 6, Library Court, Washington, where the A.F.A. established its headquarters around 1959; and this remained the A.F.A.’s address until the organisation moved to its present address at Tempe, Arizona in 1975. It is therefore most likely that my copy dates from the early 1970s or the 1960s. However, since first posting this article, I have seen evidence in Anthony Louis’s blog post on this topic from July 2022 that he is in possession of an earlier edition dating from the A.F.A.’s time based at 327 A. Street S.E., also within Washington. In the November 1959 edition of the A.F.A. Bulletin, it is announced in a brief article about the organisation’s 21st birthday that it is now based at 6, Library Court and that Ernest Grant, who had been the executive secretary and treasurer and had been consistently listed as being based at 327 A. Street S.E., had recently retired. It therefore seems most likely that Anthony’s copy of the publication is the first A.F.A. edition and that it dates from the 1950s, with the latter part of the 1950s seeming more probable, although the A.F.A. was in fact at 327 A. Street S.E. from around 1945 onwards.
The comparison of my copy of the A.F.A. edition with Marie Pontin’s book proved to be truly startling, demonstrating conclusively that the text published by the A.F.A. and credited to Dr. Smith was merely a lightly edited extract from Marie Juliette Pontin’s own book of 1924, comprising most of the second half of the book but none of the first half, and with a few other pages of extraneous material appended at the end.
While the attribution of the material to Dr. Smith could well be seen in one light as an act of intellectual fraud by whoever edited the edition published by the A.F.A., it should probably not be presumed that the editor was acting in bad faith purely for reasons of marketing the book as a lost work of the 19th century by a legendary teacher to Evangeline Adams, although this is one reasonable interpretation. It is not clear whether the editor of the A.F.A.’s edition was working directly from a complete edition of Ms. Pontin’s book or indirectly from a secondary copy thereof, which, if this were the case, could easily have led the editor of the A.F.A.’s edition into a genuinely held false belief that what was being edited was a manuscript by Smith.
In her foreword, Pontin declares of the contents of her book:
These notes have been compiled from notes of Dr. Heber Smith, of Evangeline Adams, of Alan Leo, of Walter Gorn Old, of Walter Sampson, and from personal experience; and are designed to amplify and to express in more modern terms and phraseology the ideas obtained from Ptolemy, Placidus de Titus, and Lilly, Sibley, Gadbury, and the earlier writers on Astrology.
With these words, she immediately dismisses any misconceived notion the reader of the later A.F.A. excerpt from the book might have that she had merely reproduced a manuscript by Smith. No, far from it! She wrote her own book, and Smith was just one of several sources for the intellectual material that went into it. Not only that, but she shows deep knowledge of the history of astrology by the standards of her time in listing five of the most important historical authors alongside the modern ones from whose writings she has primarily worked.
Any reader still doubting at this point that the book was written by Pontin and not (as Holden mistakenly although understandably thought) for her I would refer to the tables of contents to the two Yearbooks of the American Academy of Astrologians edited by John Hazelrigg and published in 1917 and 1918 respectively. In both volumes, Pontin contributes her own original articles. Her contribution to the 1917 volume is entitled Directions and Transits. Her piece in the 1918 volume is entitled Mundane Astrology.
Pontin was clearly not, as she has often been miscast in received accounts, a petty rival to Evangeline Adams who had a book written for her by Adams’s teacher because she was not clever enough to write one herself and wanted to outsmart Adams at her own game. She was a learned and experienced astrologer and astrological writer in her own right. And she credited Adams herself as one of her sources for her book. That’s not what I call spiteful. It’s courteous and proper. Pontin was mixing with Hazelrigg’s exclusive set of intellectual astrologers as part of the American Academy of Astrologians, and having material approved for publication by them, alongside George McCormack, Henry Clay Hodges (Alvidas), Dr. George W. Carey and Hazelrigg himself.
I can’t help seeing in the misattribution of half of Pontin’s book to Dr. Heber Smith for the past 65-70 years a form of antiquated and disgraceful misogyny that may have induced an anonymous editor in the 1950s to present the content of her writing on the transits as that of a man from the 19th century because that somehow gave it more seeming gravitas with the book-buying public. This lie is long overdue for correction, more than 35 years after Holden first put his suspicions in print in the late 1980s.
The received lie about the book falsely attributed to Dr. Smith may include a half-truth at best – Smith was one of Pontin’s influences when she wrote her book, but only one of several, not the only one, and nor is there any evidence in her book that she merely parroted his words verbatim either.
Let’s take a closer look at where Pontin’s original book and the partial reprint falsely credited to Heber Smith diverge, and what they have in common:
The first half of Pontin’s book is not focused on transits at all, but rather on natal chart aspects. None of this material is in the A.F.A.’s edition credited to Dr. Smith.
Then on p. 47 of Pontin’s original edition, the material on transits begins with ‘The Transits of the Planet Mercury’. This material is textually almost identical to that on p. 1 of the A.F.A. edition, but not quite. The A.F.A. edition has an added short section headed ‘Mercury to the Aspects of Venus’, absent from Pontin’s edition. Additionally, minor copy-edits have been made to Pontin’s text by the editor of the A.F.A. edition, for instance removing some punctuation and splitting long sentences into two, and minor edits to wording. So it is not quite Pontin’s authentic text, but a slightly modernised edit thereof.
Some of the headings have even been changed. For instance, where Pontin has ‘Venus in the conj. and evil aspect Neptune’, the A.F.A. edition has changed this to ‘Venus in evil aspect to Neptune’, removing all reference to the conjunction! At the end of this delineation, Pontin credited Walter H. Sampson as a source for her notes on it. The A.F.A. edition has removed this attribution, which must have been inconvenient when Sampson was not active until the 20th century.
On p. 83 of Pontin’s edition, the paragraph starting ‘The transits of Neptune are very subtle’ ends with a sentence ‘However, here is an attempt to outline them as best I can’. This sentence has been completely removed from the A.F.A. edition.
Pontin’s edition ends with the paragraph starting ‘On the other hand’ and ending ‘remarkable has happened’ on p. 85 (part of the section on Neptune transits). This occurs also in the A.F.A.’s edition, from pp. 36-7, but after this, the A.F.A.’s edition continues with new sections not found at this point in Pontin’s book: one headed ‘Transits’ (pp. 37-9), and one giving keywords for the signs (pp. 40-42). As this material is ostensibly not and never was in Pontin’s book, being absent both from the online scan and from the original printing now in my library, I would suggest that it must have been added by the editor of the A.F.A.’s edition from unnamed other sources.
It is clear from the evidence that, just as Holden consistently and correctly maintained, the A.F.A. edition credited to J. Heber Smith was not Smith’s work, but nor was it the work of another writer on Pontin’s behalf, as he ultimately thought. It was instead an extract from Pontin’s own book of 1924, lightly edited, and with a few other pages of extraneous material appended.
Where that extraneous material itself comes from is anyone’s guess for now. If the A.F.A. edition was in fact reproduced in all innocence from a mislabelled third-party copy of part of the content of Pontin’s book, then perhaps there lies the answer to the origin of the extraneous material – glosses and commentaries from the original copyist of the printed edition. On the other hand, it is hard not to see the intrusion of an editor’s voice with publication in mind in the evidence discussed above of the changes made to Pontin’s text, many of which look very deliberately designed to make the text more palatable to readers of the 1950s and beyond, and more in keeping with the claim that it was all Smith’s work and not from any other source.
A later reprint of the A.F.A.’s edition, in a smaller size format, with the material distributed across more pages, remains available from the American Federation of Astrologers, still credited to Smith. It is to be hoped the next printing will be relabelled to acknowledge the true authorship of the work by the woefully overlooked Marie Juliette Pontin. An even worthier project would be to reproduce the entire original text of Ms. Pontin’s book, including the hitherto missing first half, and without the edits introduced by the editor of the A.F.A. edition.
Although this perhaps should go without saying for anyone who has been involved with the A.F.A. more recently, I wish to add here that the organisation has come a long way since the 1950s; and whoever may have been personally responsible at that time for sweeping Ms. Pontin under the carpet, it is absolutely inconceivable that any such fraud would be knowingly perpetuated by the organisation as it is today. It retains my wholehearted support for its dedicated service to astrology and astrologers.
We are left with one puzzle to resolve: why did Holden believe that the text as reproduced by the A.F.A. had been written by someone other than both Pontin and Smith, someone born on 7 March 1876? The new evidence I have uncovered for the sourcing of the text previously attributed to Smith in Pontin’s own book strongly suggests that he was mistaken on this assumption, but I have not yet looked closely enough at the text of the two different editions to establish his reasoning for it, although it seems to have led him on a wild goose chase in search of another anonymous writer who was neither Pontin nor Smith, since he lacked access to the original printing of Pontin’s work.
[1] Holden, James H. and Hughes, Robert A., Astrological Pioneers of America, First Printing – American Federation of Astrologers, Inc., Tempe, Arizona, 1988, p. 146
[2] Holden, James Herschel, Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers – American Federation of Astrologers, Inc., Tempe, Arizona, 2013, p. 665
[3] Holden, James Herschel, Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers, p. 579