Alice O. Howell papers

Alice Orcutt Howell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the daughter of Penelope King and Reginald Wilson Orcutt. From the age of five, she lived abroad with her parents, traveling through thirty-seven countries on four continents by the age of eighteen. They lived in hotels and boarding schools, never staying more than three months in one place, and Howell became fluent in English, French, German and Italian. She earned a Deutsch Diploma at the Buser Institute in Switzerland with a major in German literature and a minor in World History, and later took postgraduate courses at the New York School for Social Research. Disillusioned with traditional Christianity and searching for spiritual meaning, beginning at age thirteen Howell read the holy books of many of the great religions, including the Bible, the Koran, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, and the Tao Te Ching, as well as Greek and Norse mythology. She also studied the work of Jung, Freud, St. Ignatius and William James, as well as that of prominent astrologers. In 1944 she began a serious study of astrology under Marc Edmund Jones. She married Douglass Morse Howell and with him raised four children. She taught English and History in private schools on Long Island, New York for eighteen years, and also worked as a secretary to several people, including Norman Cousins, Editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and Walter Russell, sculptor and physicist. During World War II, Howell worked in the U.S. Office of Censorship, censoring German and French mail in New York City.

Beginning in mid-life, Howell's interests in religion, astrology and psychology coalesced and her life took a different turn. Her most important professional contribution has been to "prove astrology a useful diagnostic adjunct to Jungian psychology", and for many years she taught the subject to analysts at the Jung Foundation and at the C. G. Jung Institutes in Chicago and Los Angeles. Howell has traveled the world, lectured widely, led many seminars, and is the author of nine books: Jungian Symbolism in Astrology (1987), Dove in the Stone: Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace (1988), Jungian Synchronicity in the Astrological Signs and Ages: Letters From An Astrologer (1990), How Like An Angel I Came Down: Conversations With Children on the Gospels (1991), Web in the Sea: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of the Soul (1993), Beejum book (2002), Lara's First Christmas (2004), Heavens Declare: Astrological Ages and the Evolution of Consciousness (2006), and From the Archives of the Heart: Collected Poems (2010). In 1980 she married her second husband, Walter A. Anderson, who died in 1998. Alice Howell died in Monterey, MA, on October 28, 2014.

[source: interview with Howell by Kate Scholly in the Dec/Jan 2009 issue of Mountain Astrologer]