John Addey was born in Barnsley, Yorkshire in the UK on 15 June 1920 at 8.15 am and died at the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, London at 5.17 pm on 27 March 1982.
[3] Initial treatment required an 18-month stay in hospital, and it was during this enforced period of immobility that his energies turned inwards towards the two areas of study which were to occupy him for the rest of his life: philosophy and astrology (he had been interested in both from his mid-teens).
After leaving the Amubulance Unit (where he had met Betty Poole, whom he married in 1946), Addey worked for a time as a private tutor in Wiltshire before taking up a teaching post at Queen Mary's Hospital for Children, where for many years he taught young polio patients who often were hospitalised for long periods.
Starting from the great Platonic statement (Timaeus, 37d) that "Time is an image of eternity flowing according to number", Addey identified astrology as "the study of effects in the world of flux and change" in a 1958 article, 'The Search for a Scientific Starting Point';[5] and later articulated the fundamental law – "all astrological effects can be understood in terms of the harmonics of cosmic periods".
[6] In other words, the temporal world is only truly understood when it is seen as making manifest the great eternal ideas – Platonic Forms – in ordered cosmic periods.
[8] Addey's view was that constructs such as the twelvefold zodiac and house systems were unable to evaluate many of the effects of cosmic periods.
His harmonic techniques presented a far more subtle and refined way of studying the complex pattern of the numerous cycles that make up the world in which we live.
[10] Another source, a standard college textbook on the philosophy of science, provides a chapter with descriptions and graphic illustrations from one of Addey's studies as an example of astrological research.
"Addey found that, as the planetary position at birth changed, the personality traits (determined from biographies) varied smoothly as in a spectrum...
He was some way through a further book, A New Study of Astrology when he was taken ill in the winter of 1982 – this was completed by Charles Harvey and Tim Addey some years later (Urania Trust, 1996).