Lynn Bell is a Paris-based astrologer whose work spans multiple cultures as a speaker, teacher, author, and consultant in astrology. She is a world-renowned, master astrologer with over 40 years of experience. She specializes in psychological and spiritual perspectives with a specific interest in family systems, as well as mythological and archetypal themes.
Known for her creative depth, Lynn has lectured at conferences all over the world. Her archetypal approach fuses psychology and spirituality. She lectures and teaches seminars around the world, from Western Europe to far-off lands like Bali, Mexico, Australia and South Africa as well as the US, and most recently in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In the UK she teaches for The Faculty of Astrological Studies Summer school in Oxford, and the LSA, as well as the CPA, and she continues to consult from her home in Paris.
Early Life and Introduction to Astrology
Lynn Bell got interested in astrology very young; she was reading the horoscopes in the newspaper and was desperately looking for some way to explain the behavior of people around her! By the time she was eleven or twelve, she was certainly aware of what a sign was and what they meant.
She bought the few astrology books she could find, then ended up learning palmistry because she found Bentham’s Laws of Scientific Hand Reading. It was a back door into the language of planets. There weren’t any esoteric bookstores in the neighborhood she lived in, and she didn’t really meet an astrologer until she was much older.
Lynn was a vociferous reader as a child, and would read anything you put before her, including cereal boxes and newspapers. So she discovered her horoscope when she was very young. Then her mother, who liked to go to garage sales, must have brought home Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs or some other astrology book. She started noting the birthdays of everyone she knew.
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Education and Influences
Lynn was studying literature and had a minor in sociology, and she was looking for something that would make sense of the world to her. She would go into bookstores and pick books off of shelves and read whatever she could get her hands on. After graduate school, she had what she calls her esoteric period where she haunted a bookstore in Cambridge, Ma. she would read everything on the shelves and occasionally she would buy something. She read the Germans, the Ebertin school, and occult writers like Steiner, When she read a book, she would internally say, “yes, I agree”, “no I don’t agree with that.”
She first studied Jung when she was enrolled in Independent study, on Myth and Literature as an undergrad and her professor knew she was into astrology. He gave her Jung’s ‘Symbols of Transformation’ as part of her independent studies. So she read Jung and she started working on her dreams when she was about twenty. She came into the relationship with symbols through that personal experience and deep inner work. She also kept journals for many years. But she was reading a lot of esoteric subjects along with that even at that time.
Everyone she read influenced her but this was a long time ago, so if the only book you find is Alan Leo, it takes you in such a different direction from what you might find today. There was no such thing as psychological astrology then. It didn’t really exist. She suppose Rudhyar is who she would have been closest to but she didn’t find him until much later.
At that point she knew quite a lot of astrology and she was already doing readings. After graduate school, she had what she calls her esoteric period where she haunted a bookstore in Cambridge, Ma. she would read everything on the shelves and occasionally she would buy something. She read the Germans, the Ebertin school, and occult writers like Steiner, When she read a book, she would internally say, “yes, I agree”, “no I don’t agree with that.”
Career and Major Contributions
Lynn Bell began her astrological career with her first chart reading at twenty-one. She then did the usual thing, waitressing, odd jobs, but she wouldn’t say she ever had a real job. She started working after school when she was fourteen but she never really had another profession.
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Centre for Psychological Astrology Press published it in 1999. She started teaching for them in 1995. And before that time she was doing most of her teaching in France, and the psychological piece really comes from her personal journey and the work that she did on herself and some of it has to do with the timeframe. It was very common-most of her friends were in analysis, most people did some kind of work on themselves. And she tend to think that this is fundamental for doing astrology, that you need to explore your inner issues to be a really good astrologer for other people.
As a master consulting astrologer with a multi-layered approach, Lynn’s work combines psychological and spiritual perspectives. Her interest in working with familial patterns first emerged from work with clients. After personal work in analysis, her training in Eriksonian Hypnosis led to work in family systems, and later, several years of ongoing research groups on the charts of families. Her book on planetary patterns in families, Planetary Threads, was first published in 1998.
Lynn is interested in many aspects of astrology, from mundane cycles to archetypes and mythology, the relation between soma and psyche, to reflection on the psychological implications of traditional astrology. Her expertise in Solar Returns resulted in publishing Cycles of Light in 2005. She is also one of the co-authors of the Mars Quartet, and numerous journal and magazine articles.
She has been a featured speaker at many of the major astrology conferences in the world: UAC, ISAR, the World Congress in Switzerland and the FAA in Australia, as well as many other venues in the UK, Europe, Mexico, and the US. Outside the world of astrology, she has often collaborated with Caroline Myss, and her CMED Institute.
Once she decided she was actually an astrologer, she devoured every astrology book she could find. And of course, astrology was very, very different in France. At that time it was much more traditional, much more predictive. psychological astrology was a distinct minority along with the humanist astrologers following Rudhyar’s work. So at first she was pretty much in her corner with astrology, following her own path. eventually, she found good friends among the humanists led by Alexander Ruperti. On the other hand she discovered André Barbault’s groundbreaking work on Planetary cycles. Later, there was a great flowering of psychological astrology in France.
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She first studied Jung when she was enrolled in Independent study, on Myth and Literature as an undergrad and her professor knew she was into astrology. He gave her Jung’s ‘Symbols of Transformation’ as part of her independent studies. So she read Jung and she started working on her dreams when she was about twenty. She came into the relationship with symbols through that personal experience and deep inner work. She also kept journals for many years. But she was reading a lot of esoteric subjects along with that even at that time.
Relocation to France
Lynn was in her 20’s when she moved to France. She had never felt at home where she grew up in Chicago. She really didn’t have a feeling of having a place she belonged. She don’t think she has that sense of home in the way a lot of people do. It probably has to do a lot with the kind of family she grew up in. she desperately needed distance from her very difficult family.
When she went to Europe for the first time, her grandfather, who was Greek, had moved back, around age 80. She was running away from a relationship, and decided she needed to go see the world. At the end of that first trip she ended up in France. By a series of coincidences she met people who became close friends, and a little over a year later she was back, to stay.
She had studied French in high school, and a little bit in college. That was a huge advantage. At first she was an illegal immigrant, she had no job, no place, but she had friends to stay with. She went with the intention of staying at least two years, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to integrate into another culture and learn the language in less than that time. It was such hard work; it’s really exhausting to learn another language. You have to go to bed early every night. There’s a certain moment where your brain can’t take anymore in, and I’m a communicator, so being able to speak is completely fundamental to me. She was able to give her first reading in French about a year and a half later.
Differences in Astrological Practices
The French are much more intellectual, trained in cartesian thinking. Perhaps the greatest difference is that they are drawn to theory rather than practice. There are great innovators like Barbault or Gauquelin, brilliant thinkers like Luc Bige, Joelle de Gravelaine. There is a lot of depth in the french community, a deep interest in cycles, in the Black Moon Lilith, and recently a great deal of work on myth and symbol.
The French are much more intellectual, trained in cartesian thinking. Perhaps the greatest difference is that they are drawn to theory rather than practice. There are great innovators like Barbault or Gauquelin, brilliant thinkers like Luc Bige, Joelle de Gravelaine. There is a lot of depth in the french community, a deep interest in cycles, in the Black Moon Lilith, and recently a great deal of work on myth and symbol.
Planetary Threads: Patterns of Relating Among Family and Friends
One of the premises also is this idea that family gives you a task that may not just be individual, that may be a task that connects you to them. And there’s a certain point in life where your individual path bumps up against unfinished business from the family.
Lynn Bell’s book, Planetary Threads, focuses on family dynamics, but not just family dynamics, but also other areas and interpersonal relationships in a person’s life, including things like friendship and how that can be analyzed through the birth chart, both through basic placements in a person’s birth chart and how sometimes that can characterize different dynamics that they have with different people in their life, but also by comparing the birth charts of two individuals in order to see the dynamic between them through the synastry and things like that.
Especially in terms of family members, part of the premise of the book is that the family contributes in some way to our experience of ourselves and that it’s one of our first environmental influences as soon as we’re born. You know, we have certain family members in our life, and we have both different ways that we’re perceived and experience based on placements in our chart and we’re also gonna have different dynamics with them based on our synastry with those people, and in some ways that’s gonna inform or alter.
One of the things that’s fascinating is to think about people who get switched at birth and how they develop. It’s the old ‘nature/nurture’ story of how much of who we are is shaped by those other people around us, who are described in our chart in some way, but who won’t be exactly the same; because as we know the symbols of the chart have a whole bouquet of possible meaning or possible manifestation.
Sometimes I ask people the question, “Why this family? What did you have to do with these people?” And in some cases the answer is not much on a fundamental, and you’ll meet people-often Uranians-who have never felt that this was the place they were meant to be. They’ve always felt ‘other’ or different from the tribe they came in with, and that’s a very interesting way to begin life. For other people there’s a sense of debt or, “I need to make sure it’s okay for these people who I spent my childhood with-I need to take care of them,” and obviously when they say that you can hear planets like the Moon or Neptune. And again, I hear this in the way that people talk to me, but often I see it in the chart, and I see what people are carrying from family.
Identifying a pattern is the first part of the work; then understanding what the pattern means takes a lot of time.
This book that you published, Planetary Threads, this version of it is a revised and expanded version that was published in 2013 by Ibis Press of a 1999 publication by the Centre for Psychological Astrology Press.
Cycles of Light: Exploring the Mysteries of Solar ReturnsSolar returns have been used by astrologers since Greco-Roman times to define the patterns and trends of each forthcoming years. Sadly underrated and often interpreted simplistically in modern astrology, they have not yet found their rightful place in a psychological approach to astrological symbolism. This book, a transcript of a seminar given for the Centre for Psychological Astrology (CPA), brings a fresh yet profound approach to solar returns, rooted firmly in astrological tradition, yet enriched with the sophistication of modern astrological and psychological perspectives. Both eminently practical yet philosophically far-reaching and thought-provoking, it will be a revelation to all astrological students and practitioners. In addition to the lively format of the seminar transcript, there is an appendix including further examples of the application of solar returns to actual lives. There is little current literature on solar returns satisfactory to those seeking greater depth and accessibility from this ancient yet perennially useful approach to interpreting the cycles of individual unfoldment.
Books by Lynn Bell
- Planetary Threads: Patterns of Relating Among Family and Friends (1998, revised 2013)
- Cycles of Light: Exploring the Mysteries of Solar Returns (2005)
- The Mars Quartet (co-author)
Awards and Recognition
- 2016: Charles Harvey Award for Service to Astrology
Table: Lynn Bell's Key Contributions
| Area of Focus | Description |
|---|---|
| Family Systems | Exploration of planetary patterns in families and their impact on individual development. |
| Psychological Astrology | Integration of psychological insights with astrological symbolism. |
| Archetypal Themes | Use of archetypes and mythology to understand astrological influences. |
| Solar Returns | In-depth analysis of solar returns to define patterns and trends in forthcoming years. |