Review of Asteroid Name Encyclopedia
Mark Pottenger
Asteroid Name Encyclopedia
by Jacob Schwartz Ph.D.
Llewellyn Publications, 1995
St. Paul, MN
416 pages, $19.95
Jacob Schwartz has done a tremendous service for all astrologers interested in asteroids. For a couple years, I have been recommending a book to people interested in a lot of asteroids. That book, the Dictionary of Minor Planet Names by Lutz D. Schmadel, costs about $70 from Springer-Verlag. Jacob’s new book will be more useful for most astrologers at a fraction of the cost. The Dictionary has the full citations of exactly what association the astronomer who named each asteroid had in mind, except for 124 for which original material has not been found. It covers asteroids numbered and named through September 1993, with the main listing in numerical order. Jacob’s new Encyclopedia gives shorter paraphrases of the citations in alphabetical order, covers names through December 1994, and gives additional information and lookup tools of interest to astrologers. At this point, the only reason for an astrologer to get the Dictionary would be if they want the longer citations.
There is a foreword by Demetra George and an Introduction by Jacob with quite a bit of interesting information. In the main alphabetical listing, Jacob gives other meanings of the words, geographic locations with the same names, and similar names that might be associated in addition to the original citations from the astronomers who named the asteroids. After the main alphabetical listing come a number of useful tables and listings. There are a couple pages of glyphs (mostly created by astrologers who use particular asteroids a lot). There is a full numerical list of the asteroids. There are epoch 1993 node placements of all of the asteroids (in zodiacal and alphabetical order) for people interested in the nodes. There is a bibliography. Of special interest to astrologers is the index Jacob created. It is not limited to the names of the asteroids, but covers almost every topic within each citation or definition. For reasons of space, the index refers to the asteroid numbers, so you have to do a two-step process to reach the actual text in the alphabetical listing, but it lets you find connections and associations you would probably not be able to find any other way, such as finding thunder gods from several cultures.
I do have a small bit of errata that I found only because of a computer project. There were a few typos in asteroid numbers in the alphabetical listing. Alden is 2941, Amber is 2933, Child is 4580, Korinthos is 4357, and Shcherbakovia is 3886. All but Korinthos have the correct number in the numerical list. 4356 in the numerical list should say Marathon.