About Town: Astrologers Align Their Stars in Redmond

Jeff Jawer and Rick Levine are shooting stars in the astrology community. With millions of followers and backgrounds rooted in psychology, both are well-known astrologers who teach, counsel individuals, hold retreats, and write columns and books on astrology both jointly and individually, but they remain rooted on the Eastside.

Levine says the daily sun sign horoscope column he writes, which is distributed by Portland-based Tarot.com is purported to be the most widely read in the world, with more than 20 million people reading it in five different languages. Jawer also writes a daily column for Tarot, and each of them has a busy astrological counseling business that they operate from the Eastside. Their own website, StarIQ.com, which they launched in 1999, has numerous members and was a hot commodity during the Internet boom.

Together, the two write an annual astrological forecast book, Your Astrological Guide, for Sterling Publishing, a division of Barnes & Noble—the 2012 edition was recently released, and they are finishing up their eighth manuscript for the year 2013.

Much of their work is done in the local constellation of Redmond. On the first Wednesday of each month, they can be found at , riffing together somewhat free-form on their interpretations of the coming month’s astral activity. For about an hour, they talk about what the activity could mean not specifically for individuals, but how it could come to play in community, economical and political dynamics.

“It’s not personal—it’s a cosmic weather report. We’ll talk about the collective patterns for the month,” Jawer said, adding that for him, doing the monthly talk is akin to being a well-versed studio musician. “Our only preparation is a piece of paper with some planetary positions on it. You get the music in front of you and you just play. The yoga of our professional lives is interpreting the signs.”

The monthly event, which the pair has been doing for about three years now, is live-streamed by SoulFood Books through its website, and Jawer and Levine post the video the next day on StarIQ.com. During the second portion of the evening, they do a few short personal readings for attendees who choose to put their names and birthdates into a lottery.

Though Levine, who lives in Redmond, and Jawer, who recently moved to Bellevue from Redmond, seem to be very in sync (Levine says he sometimes has to clarify that he and the married Jawer are not romantic partners, but business partners) the two have a relaxed way of showing the opposite sides of each other’s interpretations as well during their events.

Though both write sun sign horoscopes, which Levine and Jawer refer to as “pop” astrology and are the stuff of newspaper and Google horoscopes (Levine’s daily horoscope is the one used by Google), to them that is just scratching the surface of the insights people can gain through awareness of cosmological conditions.

“People’s misconception is that the tip of the iceberg is the iceberg,” Levine says.

Jawer said he believes stereotypes are common when people think about astrology, and emphasizes that it’s not meant to be a belief system. He also says it’s not a means of denying responsibility.

“Astrology is not something to believe in, any more than a carpenter believes in a hammer. It’s a tool for describing life in its own terms,” Jawer said.