00:00:00
Speaker 1: Warning. The following episode includes talk of magical texts, boxing the mafia, and how a child preacher who railed against astrology found his path in the stars. Sensitive listeners take care.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: At the very beginning of this show, we set out to find people with unusual stories biographies that upended our understanding of astrology. And so my colleagues Mary and Mitra, they went looking for all sorts of folks, right like finance bros who believed in astrology, cheesemongers used the stars to guide their process, towns that have built their entire identity around astrology. And then one day Mary said to me, I think that is a community of ex evangelicals who fled the church and now they put their entire faith in the stars. And you know, I was immediately fascinated, right like, how do you walk away from one set of really strong beliefs and then dive headfirst into another. What type of person decides to do that? And what are the circumstances that help you find your faith again? And that's how we found Sam Reynolds.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: I went to an astrologer to set up a gemini.
00:01:30
Speaker 2: Sam is an extraordinary person and the truth is he's got a story I can't stop thinking about. At birth, his parents were told he wouldn't walk as a child. He wasn't supposed to become a preacher in college. He wasn't supposed to question his faith or take comfort in astrology. But Sam's kind of defied expectations at every point of his life. And what makes them so fascinating to me at least is that in this search for faith and love and a truer understanding of humanity, he moves with such grace and assuredness and the past. For him it never seems to be a mistake, like just a stepping stone to where you were always meant to be. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast, I'm Mongaish articular. Welcome to Skyland Drive, minnesot too. Sam.
00:02:54
Speaker 3: My name is Sam Reynolds. I'm from Buffalo, New York. I currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have been a practicing astrologer for twenty years, and I got into astrology trying to disprove it. I was born with multiple birth defects and being able to function, to walk, to do the things that the doctors predicted I wouldn't be able to do. They said that I would be developmentally delayed. I wasn't, and so I became assigned as a miracle baby by my family.
00:03:28
Speaker 2: Sam was raised as a Southern Baptist, so he grew up knowing that on Judgment Day he would have to stand before God and account for his life.
00:03:36
Speaker 3: I did feel a calling, literally, hearing a voice in my head, you know, a calling into the ministry saying I want you to preach. So I went to my mother's friends church and the pastor took me under his wing. My father didn't fully believe me because I actually was a boxer at the time, and so I was boxing and he kept arranging fights for me, and I was like, no, I don't think it's right to kind of beat people up on Saturday and then go preach about love on Sunday. And he didn't believe me. So my mother suggested we write him a letter of resignation, and I wrote him a letter telling him that I was going into the ministry, and he was like, oh, I guess.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: This is real.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: I preached my first sermon on my mother's birthday, September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty. Maybe there were about seventy people there, my parents were there and I saw something I had never seen. After I preached, my father stood up and testified and he started to cry. My father didn't cry. I knew my father had a complicated life. When I say a complicated life, my father was into the numbers racket. Before we had state lotteries, there was an underground mostly seen as criminal news, work of people who would get people to play the numbers for money. I mean it's tied to the mob, to the mafia, and so my father, my father killed people. So for him to cry, I mean that was you know when you talk about Tony Soprano, you see it on TV. He literally lived that life. And I think that was probably just the first time out of maybe two times ever saw my father cry in his life.
00:05:30
Speaker 2: Sam was only twelve when he became a preacher, and he fully absorbed this evangelical lesson that astrology is a sin. He even preached a sermon warning against its evils. Besides, the one time he did look up his horoscope, he couldn't tell which sign he really was because his birthday fell on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius, and as far as he was concerned, it was a sin that didn't even make sense.
00:05:54
Speaker 3: By the time I went into the ministry, I was already convinced that astrology was hogwashed. You know, people asked me what signer? You know, I'm the sign of the Cross. My first year of college, I thought it would be cool to take religion classes. Technically that was a mistake because it made me start questioning my religion. I started to have a crisis of faith. I started talking to different ministers because I was like, well, how can I really preach sincerely when I'm confused. Some of the ministers I talked to they were like, it comes with the job, kid. My idea was to take a step away from the ministry until I would recoup my faith, But my faith never came back. By the time I was twenty two, I had become an atheist.
00:06:54
Speaker 2: Newly liberated from his old beliefs. Sam headed to Temple University, where he enrolled in the Africa American Studies graduate program. While he was there, he fell for one of his classmates. There was just one problem, and.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: She was really into astrology, and I was like, uh, you know, well, if I had to choose between being an Iraq nid a scorpio and a centaur. Clearly, I'm a centaur.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: How could sem possibly impress this woman a Gemini who teased him about not knowing his own sign.
00:07:22
Speaker 3: She's like, no, I think you're the bug.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Finally he remembered something.
00:07:26
Speaker 3: There was a book when I was younger that my great grandmother had. It's called the six seven eight Books of Moses. It's supposedly a magical text.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: He figured his crush would be blown away by a copy of this strange book, so he starts making calls and finally tracks it down at a North Philly bookstore. But when he goes to pick it up.
00:07:48
Speaker 3: This guy starts talking to me about astrology and he's an astrologer. At first I was like, and let me just get the book, man, but then he's like, oh, you ever had your chart done? It was like hmm, okay, I agreed to get the reading. For the first fifteen minutes, I was convinced this is BS and he's like, oh, it looks like your mom had some problems while carrying you. In my head, I said, no shit, sir, a lock. I mean I'm four to nine. Chances are I didn't have the normal birth. And then he said, oh, well, it looks like you're a pretty smart fellow. But again, I was thinking, I told you I was in a PhD program, and then it happened. He said, it looks like the complications I talked about with your mom may have been from some involvement with your mother, your brother, and your father. What do you mean And he's like, yeah, some issues with your father and your brother happened, and then it adversely affected your mother. What I had learned two months before is that my brother, when he was eight years old, my mother was making kissing faces at him and playing with him. And he said, oh, you're doing me like Daddy was with that white woman last night. And she's like, what are you talking about? And she's like, Daddy was in the front seat with this white woman making kissing noises and doing all this stuff and huffing and puffed, and he thought I was sleep but I was just in the back of the seat listening and looking at them. And she was devastated. She caught the flu early in her pregnancy with me. I guess compromised immune system from emotional distress. So what that astrologer was describing was pretty much exactly as it happened, and I don't know how he did that. You know, it was blown away. And so for me, astrology became this other way of understanding oneself that was independent of the political sphere. Even I was like, well, maybe it's an interesting way of asking questions.
00:10:01
Speaker 2: These days, Sam still uses astrology to ask questions, but he's found a lot of answers too. He's a mentor to young astrologers just starting out and a co founder of the International Society of Black Astrologers. He's developed a perspective that's totally him, thoughtful, intellectual, and most of all, driven by a desire to connect.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: Astrology is the net cultural experience of thousands of years of looking at the heavens and their correlations in terms of finding significance in our life. Now you could say, well, you're just manufacturing it sure like everything else in your life. I'm curious about people. I always have been. I wanted to understand how people think, why they make the choices that they do. Astrology gives me a way to have discussions with people about themselves. It becomes a conversation about how the astrology illuminates their lives, rather than I would say dictates their lives. The word consider comes from Latin for con which means with and sadira stars, but means to think with your stars. So I see astrology as a way to have a conversation, which is more way of reflecting on yourself and your desires and your character. The young Sam would be horrified by me being an astrologer, But what I think would soften him is recognizing some measure of his dream for his life, which was to be communicating and messaging people around the world, being able to do what I do and support myself. I think that was make him proud. But he'd probably like, well, why can't you do that for Jesus? So I'd probably be like, yeah, that's a longer conversation.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: Often there's a finality to the way people read astrology, that what's destined to happen will happen. But Sam, as he puts a he doesn't use an astrological chart to read your life as a finished biography, but instead as a work in process. I love how there's an openness to Sam, the way he believes so deeply, but how he'll always listen with an open mind, how he doesn't hesitate to take in your questions and your qualms and to truly consider them because he isn't afraid to change in his mind as long as he's thinking with the stars. That's it for this week's episode of Skyline Drive. Special thanks to my team here, Mary Mitro, Mark, Anna and Threw for working so hard over the holidays to pull the show together, and Botany as always for the incredible soundtrack. Also thank you to the wonderful Sam Reynolds for making time for us to visit Sam on the web or book of reading with him. Be sure to go to unlock Astrology dot com. That's unlock astrology dot com.
00:13:42
Speaker 4: Also a quick shout out to my pal Laura Mayer, who did this episode's warning. Laura not only helped us set up.
00:13:48
Speaker 2: Things when we started Kaleidoscope, but also.
00:13:50
Speaker 4: Dropped one of the biggest shows of the year, Shameless Acquisition Target. It is so funny and if you want to know everything about the podcast industry from one of its consummate inside, it is essential listening.
00:14:04
Speaker 2: We'll be back with full length episodes next week, starting with a writer who just wants to know.
00:14:09
Speaker 3: I had a question about like, who's going to die first?
00:14:13
Speaker 2: My mom and our dad because there's an answer that I want.
00:14:19
Speaker 3: It's so dark.
00:14:20
Speaker 2: I mean, it is dark, but it's also way more fun than it sounds. That's it for this week's Minisot. Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: Warning. The following episode includes talk of magical texts, boxing the mafia, and how a child preacher who railed against astrology found his path in the stars. Sensitive listeners take care.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: At the very beginning of this show, we set out to find people with unusual stories biographies that upended our understanding of astrology. And so my colleagues Mary and Mitra, they went looking for all sorts of folks, right like finance bros who believed in astrology, cheesemongers used the stars to guide their process, towns that have built their entire identity around astrology. And then one day Mary said to me, I think that is a community of ex evangelicals who fled the church and now they put their entire faith in the stars. And you know, I was immediately fascinated, right like, how do you walk away from one set of really strong beliefs and then dive headfirst into another. What type of person decides to do that? And what are the circumstances that help you find your faith again? And that's how we found Sam Reynolds.
00:01:27
Speaker 3: I went to an astrologer to set up a gemini.
00:01:30
Speaker 2: Sam is an extraordinary person and the truth is he's got a story I can't stop thinking about. At birth, his parents were told he wouldn't walk as a child. He wasn't supposed to become a preacher in college. He wasn't supposed to question his faith or take comfort in astrology. But Sam's kind of defied expectations at every point of his life. And what makes them so fascinating to me at least is that in this search for faith and love and a truer understanding of humanity, he moves with such grace and assuredness and the past. For him it never seems to be a mistake, like just a stepping stone to where you were always meant to be. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast, I'm Mongaish articular. Welcome to Skyland Drive, minnesot too. Sam.
00:02:54
Speaker 3: My name is Sam Reynolds. I'm from Buffalo, New York. I currently live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I have been a practicing astrologer for twenty years, and I got into astrology trying to disprove it. I was born with multiple birth defects and being able to function, to walk, to do the things that the doctors predicted I wouldn't be able to do. They said that I would be developmentally delayed. I wasn't, and so I became assigned as a miracle baby by my family.
00:03:28
Speaker 2: Sam was raised as a Southern Baptist, so he grew up knowing that on Judgment Day he would have to stand before God and account for his life.
00:03:36
Speaker 3: I did feel a calling, literally, hearing a voice in my head, you know, a calling into the ministry saying I want you to preach. So I went to my mother's friends church and the pastor took me under his wing. My father didn't fully believe me because I actually was a boxer at the time, and so I was boxing and he kept arranging fights for me, and I was like, no, I don't think it's right to kind of beat people up on Saturday and then go preach about love on Sunday. And he didn't believe me. So my mother suggested we write him a letter of resignation, and I wrote him a letter telling him that I was going into the ministry, and he was like, oh, I guess.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: This is real.
00:04:22
Speaker 3: I preached my first sermon on my mother's birthday, September twenty eighth, nineteen eighty. Maybe there were about seventy people there, my parents were there and I saw something I had never seen. After I preached, my father stood up and testified and he started to cry. My father didn't cry. I knew my father had a complicated life. When I say a complicated life, my father was into the numbers racket. Before we had state lotteries, there was an underground mostly seen as criminal news, work of people who would get people to play the numbers for money. I mean it's tied to the mob, to the mafia, and so my father, my father killed people. So for him to cry, I mean that was you know when you talk about Tony Soprano, you see it on TV. He literally lived that life. And I think that was probably just the first time out of maybe two times ever saw my father cry in his life.
00:05:30
Speaker 2: Sam was only twelve when he became a preacher, and he fully absorbed this evangelical lesson that astrology is a sin. He even preached a sermon warning against its evils. Besides, the one time he did look up his horoscope, he couldn't tell which sign he really was because his birthday fell on the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius, and as far as he was concerned, it was a sin that didn't even make sense.
00:05:54
Speaker 3: By the time I went into the ministry, I was already convinced that astrology was hogwashed. You know, people asked me what signer? You know, I'm the sign of the Cross. My first year of college, I thought it would be cool to take religion classes. Technically that was a mistake because it made me start questioning my religion. I started to have a crisis of faith. I started talking to different ministers because I was like, well, how can I really preach sincerely when I'm confused. Some of the ministers I talked to they were like, it comes with the job, kid. My idea was to take a step away from the ministry until I would recoup my faith, But my faith never came back. By the time I was twenty two, I had become an atheist.
00:06:54
Speaker 2: Newly liberated from his old beliefs. Sam headed to Temple University, where he enrolled in the Africa American Studies graduate program. While he was there, he fell for one of his classmates. There was just one problem, and.
00:07:07
Speaker 3: She was really into astrology, and I was like, uh, you know, well, if I had to choose between being an Iraq nid a scorpio and a centaur. Clearly, I'm a centaur.
00:07:16
Speaker 2: How could sem possibly impress this woman a Gemini who teased him about not knowing his own sign.
00:07:22
Speaker 3: She's like, no, I think you're the bug.
00:07:24
Speaker 2: Finally he remembered something.
00:07:26
Speaker 3: There was a book when I was younger that my great grandmother had. It's called the six seven eight Books of Moses. It's supposedly a magical text.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: He figured his crush would be blown away by a copy of this strange book, so he starts making calls and finally tracks it down at a North Philly bookstore. But when he goes to pick it up.
00:07:48
Speaker 3: This guy starts talking to me about astrology and he's an astrologer. At first I was like, and let me just get the book, man, but then he's like, oh, you ever had your chart done? It was like hmm, okay, I agreed to get the reading. For the first fifteen minutes, I was convinced this is BS and he's like, oh, it looks like your mom had some problems while carrying you. In my head, I said, no shit, sir, a lock. I mean I'm four to nine. Chances are I didn't have the normal birth. And then he said, oh, well, it looks like you're a pretty smart fellow. But again, I was thinking, I told you I was in a PhD program, and then it happened. He said, it looks like the complications I talked about with your mom may have been from some involvement with your mother, your brother, and your father. What do you mean And he's like, yeah, some issues with your father and your brother happened, and then it adversely affected your mother. What I had learned two months before is that my brother, when he was eight years old, my mother was making kissing faces at him and playing with him. And he said, oh, you're doing me like Daddy was with that white woman last night. And she's like, what are you talking about? And she's like, Daddy was in the front seat with this white woman making kissing noises and doing all this stuff and huffing and puffed, and he thought I was sleep but I was just in the back of the seat listening and looking at them. And she was devastated. She caught the flu early in her pregnancy with me. I guess compromised immune system from emotional distress. So what that astrologer was describing was pretty much exactly as it happened, and I don't know how he did that. You know, it was blown away. And so for me, astrology became this other way of understanding oneself that was independent of the political sphere. Even I was like, well, maybe it's an interesting way of asking questions.
00:10:01
Speaker 2: These days, Sam still uses astrology to ask questions, but he's found a lot of answers too. He's a mentor to young astrologers just starting out and a co founder of the International Society of Black Astrologers. He's developed a perspective that's totally him, thoughtful, intellectual, and most of all, driven by a desire to connect.
00:10:25
Speaker 3: Astrology is the net cultural experience of thousands of years of looking at the heavens and their correlations in terms of finding significance in our life. Now you could say, well, you're just manufacturing it sure like everything else in your life. I'm curious about people. I always have been. I wanted to understand how people think, why they make the choices that they do. Astrology gives me a way to have discussions with people about themselves. It becomes a conversation about how the astrology illuminates their lives, rather than I would say dictates their lives. The word consider comes from Latin for con which means with and sadira stars, but means to think with your stars. So I see astrology as a way to have a conversation, which is more way of reflecting on yourself and your desires and your character. The young Sam would be horrified by me being an astrologer, But what I think would soften him is recognizing some measure of his dream for his life, which was to be communicating and messaging people around the world, being able to do what I do and support myself. I think that was make him proud. But he'd probably like, well, why can't you do that for Jesus? So I'd probably be like, yeah, that's a longer conversation.
00:12:23
Speaker 2: Often there's a finality to the way people read astrology, that what's destined to happen will happen. But Sam, as he puts a he doesn't use an astrological chart to read your life as a finished biography, but instead as a work in process. I love how there's an openness to Sam, the way he believes so deeply, but how he'll always listen with an open mind, how he doesn't hesitate to take in your questions and your qualms and to truly consider them because he isn't afraid to change in his mind as long as he's thinking with the stars. That's it for this week's episode of Skyline Drive. Special thanks to my team here, Mary Mitro, Mark, Anna and Threw for working so hard over the holidays to pull the show together, and Botany as always for the incredible soundtrack. Also thank you to the wonderful Sam Reynolds for making time for us to visit Sam on the web or book of reading with him. Be sure to go to unlock Astrology dot com. That's unlock astrology dot com.
00:13:42
Speaker 4: Also a quick shout out to my pal Laura Mayer, who did this episode's warning. Laura not only helped us set up.
00:13:48
Speaker 2: Things when we started Kaleidoscope, but also.
00:13:50
Speaker 4: Dropped one of the biggest shows of the year, Shameless Acquisition Target. It is so funny and if you want to know everything about the podcast industry from one of its consummate inside, it is essential listening.
00:14:04
Speaker 2: We'll be back with full length episodes next week, starting with a writer who just wants to know.
00:14:09
Speaker 3: I had a question about like, who's going to die first?
00:14:13
Speaker 2: My mom and our dad because there's an answer that I want.
00:14:19
Speaker 3: It's so dark.
00:14:20
Speaker 2: I mean, it is dark, but it's also way more fun than it sounds. That's it for this week's Minisot. Thank you so much for listening.
