Spirituality/Paganism & Magick: Wizards And Star Charts

The first thing a visitor notices when entering Richard Welborn’s home are the handmade mobiles of the planets that hang from the ceiling of his living room. They are arranged around an overhead light, making a representation of the solar system with the light as the sun. Welborn points them out and shrugs.

“Visuals are good educators,” he says matter-of-factly.

Actually, the planets and their movement through the sky are a central focus in his life. For 19 years he’s been a professional astrologer, helping people make momentous decisions through interpreting their stars. He starts by plotting a natal chart, which is a map of the position of the stars at one’s birth. The theory is that the magnetic fields of heavenly bodies affect us in unique ways, in much the same way as the moon moves entire oceans to produce tides.

“Until the child pops out of the womb the child is dominated by the mother’s magnetic field,” Welborn explains, “but once the child comes out, it cleaves to its own magnetic field, which is that moment.”

It’s easy to get the impression that Welborn was born to be an astrologer. His unkempt long hair and wiry frame makes it easy to imagine him as the official wizard in a medieval court. There is a timelessness about him that is somewhat fitting since his profession is one of the oldest in the world. The study of the position of planets and stars in the belief that they influence events on earth goes back to the time of the ancient Babylonians. The practice of astrology was predominant in Greece and Rome. In Asia, the ancient Indians and Chinese had their own systems of predicting by the stars.

But being a professional astrologer is an unusual line of work in this day and age, especially in conservative North Carolina. One might wonder how he got started in this profession. “I got into it actually by studying political science at Guilford College,” he says with a mischievous grin. “They didn’t know they were doing that. They were just teaching classical civilization. I was studying a lot of Latin, and you translate all these Greek myths in your Latin translations, so I was getting a good background.”

College might have given him his first exposure to astrology but the decision to pursue the study didn’t come until later, when he and a co-worker drove from Greensboro to Nags Head, in North Carolina, to have their chart cast by a professional. When he went into that reading he was skeptical but open minded, but the woman who read his chart was so accurate that he came out a true believer.

“After driving five hours home,” he says, “I didn’t even go to my house. I went straight to the Carolina Circle Mall where there was a Waldenbooks store that I knew had a metaphysical department. I bought twelve astrology texts and I was off.”

To hear him tell the story, you would think that a great weight was lifted from his shoulders on that day. On the car trip to Nags Head to see the astrologer, his companion had prodded him to think about his life. “She kept asking me what I thought my life was meant to be. And I did. All the way there I kept thinking that I was just born to serve. I kept thinking that I was meant to learn and to be able to help people with what I learn.”

At that point, though, he didn’t know how he was going to help people. Although he’d dabbled in the study of palmistry and Kabbalah (an esoteric form of Judaism), the thought of a mystical profession would never have occurred to him. He was much too southern, too dyed-in-the-wool bible belt, for that.

“I had a real strong religious background,” he explains. “I was raised Southern Baptist and, of course, astrology is out. Any metaphysical study is out, except for Jesus and ‘for God so loved the world...’”

But that visit with a small town astrologer helped him overcome that hurdle and changed the entire direction of his life. These days he sees clients on Sundays at Global Perspectives, a Greensboro business that specializes in “new age” products. At other times he sees people at his home near downtown Greensboro. People seek his help for a variety of reasons. Some are like him, seekers searching for direction in life. Others are more mundane, like real estate agents wanting advice on a certain property. Still others come to him because they are facing a personal crisis.

“I’m going to tell you how astrology can really help somebody,” Welborn says, suddenly turning very serious and to-the-point. “There’s three things. There’s the soul, there’s the mind and there’s the body. The soul is the mission. Everybody comes here with a mission to become something and your chart tells the astrologer what you came here to fulfill and become. That’s the soul mission.”

He pauses, leaning back in his chair and staring for a moment at the planets dangling from the ceiling. “The mind often gets disconnected from the soul mission. We’re supposed to be becoming a parent, an educator or a healer, or we’re supposed to be healing our own sense of identity. There’s a full array of things we come here to work on. Sometimes our minds get disconnected from that soul mission. That’s when a person gets their chart read. They knew it before they came for a reading. That might be why they came.”

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