Hi Folks, I’ve been ill with vertigo from an inner ear infection, so I’ve been reading alot and posting little. I will try to get those tasks more intune in the days that follow. Thanks.
Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American cultural anthropologist who studied under famed Franz Boas at Columbia University. He received the University’s first doctorate in anthropology in 1901 on the importance of the bear in the Arapaho culture, and tying it into the story of the Big Dipper 1 The Big Dipper is the oldest constellation known to humankind, and is traced to the Sumerians where it was Bear hunting party. Kroeber’s linkage of the Arapaho’s Bear Story to it was of extreme historical and anthropological importance. .
He was the first professor of Anthropology at the fledging University of California, Berkeley, and played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as Director from 1909 through 1947. His influence was profound and was hailed as “Dean of American Anthropologists” during his lifetime.
He was born June 11, 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, to a pair of German Protestant immigrants. He died around his daughter’s birthday in Paris, 1960 right before she married Frenchman Charles LeGuin on Christmas day there. An interesting coincidence.
It was his work with Ishi, thought to be the last California Yahi Indian., that was path breaking though Ishi may have been of mixed ethnic heritage, with a father from the Wintu, Maidu or Nomlaki tribes, thanks to his second wife, and Ursula’s mother, Theodora Kracaw Kroeber, biography Ishi in Two Worlds, even though Ms. Kroeber never met Ishi.
Kroeber’s relationship with Ishi was the subject of a film, The Last of His Tribe (1992), starring Jon Voight, actress Angelina Jolie’s father, as Kroeber.
Astrological tells
Kroeger’s ascendant is 13 Sagittarius 38, giving him the Hyperion Symbol of Prajapati, a Vedic Sanskrit god, who births the later Hindu gods. It is an image of when the urgrun of existence is captured in the endless chain of sons, fathers, grandfathers or anthropology itself, and highlights the importance of making the potential of men, manifest. Prajapati is associated with Brahma, born from a golden egg and who created the earth and all things on it.
He has a Grand trine in Water from Jupiter in the eleventh to Venus in the seventh to the North Node in the second, This would have made him rather aloof from people, perhaps even his children, and tend not to identify with them as much as he did others. It would have also encouraged him to seek out esteemed feedback — i.e. feedback from colleagues, associates who had standing, or whom he admired.
Professor Kroeber is a locomotive temperament type. His focal determinator is also his lead planet, Jupiter at 24 Scorpio 09 Retrograde, or the Hyperion symbol of an Egyptologist translating hieroglyphics for others to read
His Line of Motivation was a biseptile, or 102 degrees 50 minutes apart , making Mars in the seventh house of Cancer, as the most exact sphere away, key to how he matured. For Kroeber, this encouraged him to go into anthropology, a subject far different from anything he identified with at home, move to California where he knew no one, and divorce and marry one of his students and start a family anew. He was heavily dependent upon change as a catalyst for his growth.
His Line of Vitality from Moon to the Sun is trine, an easy aspect that gave him good looks and charm. This helped him immensely in his career.
His Line of Efficiency from Mars to Venus is vigintile. both in Cancer and both in the seventh house again reinforcing the Line of Vitality’s charm and adding the ability to get without asking what he needed.
Finally, his Line of Culture, from Neptune to Uranus, is square, one of the few squares Kroeber has in his chart, and all of them in the modern generational planets. This fits in with his desire to study, work and return to a more primitive time and peoples, a period before industrialization where personal alliances (kinship), alliances and skills were more valued, and indeed in his most ambitious work he tried in Configurations of Culture Growth (1945), to unite psychology, sociology, culture and anthropology into a grand logical and philosophical construct.
Footnotes:
- 1The Big Dipper is the oldest constellation known to humankind, and is traced to the Sumerians where it was Bear hunting party. Kroeber’s linkage of the Arapaho’s Bear Story to it was of extreme historical and anthropological importance.
