The Zodiac Affairs

“His approach to women never failed – he let their horoscopes tell him how to turn them on.”

The Zodiac Affairs looks epic, really. But, without a physical or digital copy of the 1970 publication, it’s difficult to parse.

Questions: Is this fiction? The cover blurb is written as if it were fiction but – unusually – it doesn’t even hint at a plot. If it were a novel, it should be something like “…he let their horoscopes tell him how to turn them on but then he met his match in the Plutonic Mafia Princess.”  Or “His approach to women never failed until the day of the typo in Virgo.”

If it’s meant to be non-fiction: Sex-Scopes – The Never-Fail Approach To Turning On Every Lady Of The Zodiac. And why is the woman between Gemini and Capricorn crying on the phone? It doesn’t seem to have been comprehensively planned out, perhaps because the author was happily married at the time, making research difficult.

Hans Holzer was an Aquarian ‘ghost-hunter’ and the original paranormal media personality, best known for investigating – and popularizing – the so-called Amityville Horror. He was also a significant inspiration behind Ghostbusters, particularly the concept that so-called ghosts were connected to electro-magnetic fields and that “ghosts have feelings too.”

“Hans Holzer understood the rules of ghostly behavior perhaps better than anyone else,” said the producer Leonard Nimoy, aka Doctor Spock. “It was his business to investigate hauntings. While he might not have been frightened by ghosts, most of the people who called on him for help were.”

While he has a reliably spook-adept Jupiter-Neptune in Leo, the most striking aspect of Holzer’s personal astro is Mercury rising in Capricorn. It also squares Mars, adding extra oomph. He was relentlessly inquisitive and a crazily prolific writer, producing 1.5 books a year, every year.

But the mid-70s, when Uranus was squaring his Mercury, were particularly prolific. In 1976, for example, he published five books: A psychic detective thriller, an account of the most significant hauntings from the American revolution, the “inside story of a beautiful woman with the ability to see into the future,” an atlas of extra-terrestial landing spots and a guide to psychic dreaming.

These days, his legacy is continued by his daughter, indefatigable Aries and “second-generation ghost-hunter” Alexandra Holzer:“I use all my tools including myself because I am an open individual who is not closed off to the possibilities of what life offers and why we are here.”