It was a crisp October day in the upscale bucolic village of Litchfield, Connecticut. I was visiting my seventy year old mother, when on an ‘afternoon outing’ we stumbled upon the kind of bookstore that barely exists anymore. Wooden beams framed the small cluttered interior of the room overflowing with books and a woodstove warmed the chilled air. I felt excited; maybe there would be something here for me.
I would have checked out the astrology section first, but instead bumped into a table, over which hovered a curious sign: “People Forgotten in History,” and there she was—a woman staring from the cover of a book directly into my eyes. It was a slim book with the simple title of Annie Besant followed by the subtitle: Passionate campaigner for social and political rights, seeker after spiritual truth, and a woman of extraordinary personal courage. I looked at her face—young, earnest, intense, with dark eyes set between high cheekbones and framed with short curly brown hair. But it was her direct stare that defied any attempt to return her to the slush pile of books on the table.
So “Annie” came home with me that day, and after dinner, I returned to my childhood bedroom and began to read. It wasn’t until dawn that I finally put the book down; finished and mesmerized. Her story captured me, not just her struggles and defeats, but something about who she was—was so like me—although her life was so large and mine so small. Could this be just co-incidence and serendipity? It felt as if there was a sweet synchronicity resonating between us.
That next morning my words were a torrent of jagged emotion as I tried to tell my mother about Annie: “When Annie was very young she was a minister’s wife in a poverty-stricken area of England—and she was so anguished over the poverty and suffering she saw—that she came to the idea that what women needed to know was about birth control: to not have a life of continuous child bearing! So she found and distributed a booklet on contraception—in 1875—which so enraged her husband that he brought her to trial where the courts declared her an unfit mother for corrupting the morals of the young. Can you believe it?”
My mother was busily spreading butter on her toast. “They took her children away from her!” My voice hovered between a scream and a plea for understanding. Mother got up to go to the kitchen to get more coffee. I took a deep breath and lowered my voice to a rational level. “And after that she led the match girls in a strike in London that changed everything for them—they were being poisoned by match chemicals, working 10 hours a day for a pittance!” No comment. I wrapped my hands, tightening my grip, around the chipped coffee mug I had long ago made for her. She poured me more coffee.
Mother sat down and raised her eyelids. “Life is cruel, but what can we do? Were you reading all night? That’s not good for you honey, and now you’ve got to go back and leave me here, again.” She sighed. I felt the usual twang of guilt, but this time it was layered with a hopeless anger that we would never connect. Mother always felt abandoned when I left her home in Connecticut for Rhode Island.
Returning home to Newport, I made straight away for the Redwood Library on Bellevue Avenue. Here in this private old library there must be some dusty volume on the life of Annie Besant. I inquired; there was indeed such a book; the librarian handed me a faded red tome called “The Passionate Pilgrim.”
Opening this hard-covered book I saw that it hadn’t been signed out of the library for over 15 years—but—there on the inside cover of the book was her full birth chart! I gasped. Annie was born on Oct. 1st 1847 at 5:39 pm, and I was born Oct 1st 1947, at 5:34 pm —the same day, exactly 100 years and 5 minutes apart. We were both Libras with Aries rising, and many aspects in our charts were similar. A shiver went through me.
