The Secret Language of Birthdays: Your Complete Personology Guide for Each Day of the Year

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More recently, Alexa Chung, the British TV host, model and fashion designer (Nov. 5, “The Day of Actuality”), gushed to a writer from Harper’s Bazaar that the 365 detailed personality profiles are “so spot on, it’s insane.” For example, some signs are associated with the fire element, which represents an intuitive person who has a lot of energy, but is also short-tempered. For years, Mr. Goldschneider had asked people he met for their sun sign and date of birth, assembling a database of personality traits he supposed were natally based. Mr. Elffers, now 72, turned his ideas into a book, “ The Secret Language of Birthdays.”

The bestselling companion book to the groundbreaking The Secret Language of Birthdays, The Secret Language of Relationships offers a fascinating look into why we are drawn to certain people. Goldschneider divides the year into 48 “weeks,” showing the personality traits for each period. With an amazing 1,176 combinations of personalities, you can better understand any relationship in your life. Granted, I know its not real but its amusing to see how accurate it is about the kind of person I am. Gary began his extensive career in the public eye with weekly performances on WCAU radio’s Children’s Hour at the tender age of two. Reciting Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and other famous poets, he later did scripts and commercials which laid the foundation for public speaking and college lecturing later in life. Gary is internationally known as the bestselling author of The Secret Language of Birthdays, The Secret Language of Relationships, and the Secret Language of Destiny.

Like Mr. Elffers, Aron does not believe in astrology. But he has heard from countless people over the years, he said, who have marveled at the way the birthday book gets to the heart of their favorite subject: themselves. This approach is less deductive than inductive, for example, the question asked is not how Virgos are perceived. But what are people born on September 12 like? The 366 personality profiles in The Secret Language of Birthdays are based on a combination of astrology, numerology, the tarot, and Gary Goldschneider's many years of observation of more than 14,000 people, including contemporary and historical figures. Goldschneider's theory of "personology" proposes that all of life is cyclical: people born on the same day occupy the same point in the year's cycle and thus share certain characteristics. In fact, popular astrology found in magazines and newspapers is far more common, as it is based on “Sun-sign astrology”, in which we are given advice based only on what sign the Sun was in on our date of birth. (for example Gemini). .Aquarius or Scorpio), regardless of the special day. The secret language of birthdays, although accepting many of the generalizations made about sun signs, in a way reverses the above procedure, marking first the days, then the periods (see pp. 32 to 79), and Finally marking the signals.

Although Gregory seemed to have solved the problem, a snake lurks in the grass for birthday gath­erers, since only those Catholic countries under the influence of Rome (France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Luxembourg) immediately followed his lead. The Protestant countries (or parts of countries in the case of Holland or Germany) made the change at different timesthereafter. The biggest problem, how­ever, rests with British birthdays, since the British did not go along with the proposal until 1752. Of course, a British old style (OS, Julian) birthday from the seventeenth centwy can be con­ve1ted with certainty to a new style one (NS, Gregorian) by sim­ply adding ten days. However, which birthday should be used for a seventeenth century British figure like John Milton—­December 19 (NS) or December 9 (OS)? And furthermore, what do we do about those figures like George Washington in whose lifetime the changeover took place? Should Washington's birth­day be observed on February 11 (OS) or February 22 (NS)? Our mission is to foster a universal passion for reading by partnering with authors to help create stories and communicate ideas that inform, entertain, and inspire.Many people have long suspected, as astrologers believe, that the day you were born affects your personality. While no one knows exactly how or why, birthdays do tend to be uncannily accurate predictors of psychological tendencies. The Secret Language of Birthdays by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Effers describes in detail the characteristics and quirks of personality associated with being born on a particular day of the year. By looking at the characteristics of manypeople born on a given day, and correlating what weknow about them with basic principles of psychology and astrology,personology seeks to explore certainrecurring ideas, actions, concepts and themes which those born on this day--now, in the historical past and in the future--are seemingly fated to encounter. After considering famous people born each day, studying them, reading about them, following their lives as well as the family, friends, and acquaintances the author knows, and taking a moment to look past all those apparent differences Ignoring what makes them true individuals, a simple question is asked: What is it that they all have in common?

And yet, when Mr. Elffers was asked about his own birthday (Nov. 21, “The Day of Elegance”), he started talking like it was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. “I’m a cusp. And Gary has a special place for the cusp, because that’s the mixture of two and therefore there’s a lot of turmoil and creativity.” Personology posits this central analogy: a day is a year is a lifetime is an age. It modifies conventional astrology in two ways—first in the empirical, earth-orientecl emphasis described above, and, second, in thinking about each sign as simply a fur­ther evolution of the one before it. In this way an astrological sign is really nothing absolute in itself but rather a spoke in the great wheel. Dane Rudhyar was the most important astrologer of our time to propose and clarify this idea. Sun-sign astrologers have mostly commented on human personality by applying some generalizations about signs to people. Certain sentences from my own entry (Sept. 29, “The Day of the Charged Reactor”) rattle around my head. Reading that Sept. 29 people “seem to have difficulty getting it together” is one reason I spent my 20s laser focused on my career. Learn what famous personalities were born on your birthday....Study your astrological sign and your personology profile....Your strengths, weaknesses, and major concerns will be illuminated while you are given practical advice and spiritual guidance. While you study your profile, you will find it hard to resist examining those of family, friends, colleagues, and favorite celebrities.Many have suspected that your birthday affects your personality and how you relate to others. Nineteen years and over one million copies later, The Secret Language of Birthdays continues to fascinate readers by describing the characteristics associated with being born on a particular day. And being born on a particular month describe one's personality.. Ms. Newman said, “We’re still selling tens of thousands of copies a year,” and she expects the book to have “a renaissance,” because of the interest among millennials in astrology, the secret lives of plants and other New Age subjects. In the same way that the medieval alchemists taught "As above—so below," the followers of George Gurgieff (such as Rodney Collin in his book, The Theory of Celestial Influence), held that the cyclical revolutions of the electron around the atom (in the micro world of 1x10-10) relate to the revolutions of the planets around the sun (in the macro world of 1x10+10). At each step of the way, from the world of trillions to billions to millions to thousands to tens, or vice-versa, from the very small to the very large, revolves another world, and near the middle, the zero point, lies our world of everyday life. Newton's laws were mainly formulated for this near-zero-point world, but had to be modified as science examined increasingly larger (stellar) or smaller (microscopic) universes. The final complication, that of nineteenth century Russians (Russia did not change over until the 1917 revolution), is met in the following way: nineteenth and twentieth centrny birthdays are given NS, since virtually the entire rest of the "civilized" world was operating on the new calendar system. Thus, Tchaikovsky's birthday is always given as May 7, although he was actually borntwelve days earlier, Russian OS time, on April 25. Thus, bringing astrology, history and psychology together in concentric cycles or spirals--stressing evolutionary rather than static models for the individual--is at the heart of personology. The personality types presented under the twelve signs, forty-eight periods and three hundred and sixty-six days (including the leap year extra day) are flexible and fluid, each evolving from one to the next, constantly in motion, constantly changing, rather than fixed in stone." pg. 9

Although Gregory seemed to have solved the problem, a snake lurks in the grass for birthday gath­erers, since only those Catholic countries under the influence of Rome (France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Luxembourg) immediately followed his lead. The Protestant countries (or parts of countries in the case of Holland or Germany) made the change at different timesthereafter. The biggest problem, how­ever, rests with British birthdays, since the British did not go along with the proposal until 1752. Of course, a British old style (OS, Julian) birthday from the seventeenth centwy can be con­ve1ted with certainty to a new style one (NS, Gregorian) by sim­ply adding ten days. However, which birthday should be used for a seventeenth century British figure like John Milton--­December 19 (NS) or December 9 (OS)? And furthermore, what do we do about those figures like George Washington in whose lifetime the changeover took place? Should Washington's birth­day be observed on February 11 (OS) or February 22 (NS)? Historically seen, we may be looking at a partial explana­tion for why similar personalities are born in different time periods under the same sign, cusp or on the same day. The cyclical unfolding of repetitive "incarnations"—much like Yeats's gyres-suggests a cettain personality type arising at ahigher or lower level of the spiral, but always in the same loca­tion in any given year. As stated, at the heart of the personology theory is an underly­ing cyclical orientation. Of the three areas of study most inti­mately involved in its formation—astrology, history, psycholo­gy—only astrology requires one to think cyclically, probably because of the great wheel of the zodiac itself which is based on the spatial metaphor of the three hundred and sixty degrees of the revolving heavens above us. History is often taught as if it proceeds in a straight-line-dates are presented to us like beads on a string that stretches from the indeterminate past to the unfathomable future. Yet Hegel in the nineteenth century presented a different view of history in which cycles and dialec­tics underlie dynamic, interactive systems (an argument against a straight-line approach). The parting meditation for my day reads, “What do you see when you live at the center of the cyclone?” — an ominous phrase I’ve been trying to parse for two decades. Out of all the books in the three I respect by Goldschneider, I love the Secret Language of Birthdays a little more since it appeals to everyone compared to just a few. Destiny is something everyone pursues but it is a general description given without any details to the person and as for relationships, well relationships are different among everyone and so the general is for a general understanding how two people will mesh.Gary Goldschneider began his study of human personality with an interest in biographies and psychoanalytic theory. Before deciding against a career in medicine, for three years he attended Yale Medical School, where he studied psychiatry. During this time he discovered his deep and abiding interest in astrology and its symbolic relationship to personality.