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Was reading this fascinating review of Doctor Of Love – James Graham & His Celestial Bed in the Literary Review
“…Flushed with success, (James) Graham returned to England where he gained an unlikely supporter in the celebrated historian, Catherine Macaulay. The press could not believe their luck: the bluestocking and the charlatan had joined forces, and while Macaulay’s reputation sank, Graham’s soared. When Catherine, in her late forties, married his 21-year-old brother, Graham had all the proof he needed that he was able to rejuvenate the sexuality of older women….
“…Graham’s great emporium, the Temple of Health, which stood next door to David Garrick’s house on the Thames, was a hotch-potch of swirling smells and scientific paraphernalia like electrometers, lodestones, rods, tubes and magnets. Soon he was making enough money to open the Temple of Prolific Hymen in which he could house his ‘medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed’, guaranteed to ‘insure the removal of barrenness … but likewise to improve, exalt, and invigorate the bodily, and through them, the mental faculties of the human species’. For £50 a night, couples lay on a mattress stuffed, in true Graham style, with wild oats and hair from the tails of stallions, gazing up at a vast dome containing the figures of Cupid and Psyche. Odours and essences, which may have contained ether or nitrous oxide (laughing gas), were exuded while mechanical music was piped out of the pillars from an organ incorporated in the bed’s head….”
Sooooo our Love Doctor Graham was born on June 23 1745 – no time i can find – which makes him a Cancerian with Pluto currently opposing his Sun…(the astro keeps working). Sans time, there is no way to figure out exciting midheaven/ascendant/exact moon stuff but he did have a really cool Mars in Libra trine Mercury-Venus in Gemini trine Uranus in Aquarius Grand Air Trine. Moon conjunct North Node in Aries and Mars in Libra on the South Node.
Interesting astro for a pioneering, original and apparently intensely charismatic celebrity-medical entrepeneur. And I love the sound of that bed – why are more mattresses not filled with wild oats???
October 17 was the birthday of Elinor Glyn, sensational writer of clit lit in the early 20th century…She coined the term “it girl” and pioneered bonkbuster fiction…Had seriously scandalous & interesting personal life AND did bloody well for herself…Her Mercury (always the first thing to look at with such successful writers and cultural stirrers) was opposite Neptune…She had a fantastic Grand Air Trine involving: Midheaven in Aquarius trine Sun-Saturn in Libra and Uranus in Gemini…Total sense for someone so unconventional and yet break-thru.
Philip Alexius de Laszlo
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