Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [109]
If Righter was the stargazer to the rich and famous, he had a rival in another California arrival, Sydney Omarr, who in the 1950s and ’60s was considered the thinking man’s astrologer. With his gaunt frame, pencil-thin mustache, horn-rimmed eyeglasses, and intense gaze, the younger man could have been taken for a comic-book villain—the kind of mad scientist who vows, Those fools at the university will never laugh at me again! To Omarr, the future of astrology belonged to “ethical astrologers,” as fluent in psychology as in the stars. The same issue of Time that anointed Righter the high priest of American astrology called Omarr a less flamboyant, “highly intelligent younger astrologer who has given up most of his private practice to devote himself to writing and promoting the cause.” While Omarr actually maintained his private practice and, like Righter, published a popular newspaper horoscope column, the bookish forecaster did commit a fair amount of time to debating scientists and critics. He also made inroads with people not often associated with astrology. In 1960, Omarr wrote a short, intriguing book on the theme of astrology in the life and work of writer Henry Miller, titled Henry Miller: His World of Urania. Miller, who considered himself a practicing skeptic of astrology, took the book seriously enough to contribute a substantial foreword, calling astrological analysis “of inestimable aid to those who are tormented by the question of their proper role in life.”
The Magic Boardwalk
Like Righter, Sydney Omarr was a native of Philadelphia, though possessed of a more modest background: He was born in 1926 to a clan of Jewish grocers with the family name Kimmelman. Sidney (as his name was then spelled) hung around local magic shops during the school year and spent summer vacations with his mother and sisters in Atlantic City, New Jersey, an urban beach town with a similar pedigree to Coney Island. Wandering the boardwalks at age fourteen, he discovered the same Professor A. F. Seward who had inspired the astrologer Zolar. Sidney loved watching the “scholarly-looking” Professor Seward sell dollar horoscopes to vacationers. And those dollars added up: Damon Runyon reported in a 1937 column that Seward owned a hotel and several apartment buildings in Miami Beach.
Seward attracted attention wherever he went, in a specially customized thirty-two-foot “land cruiser” sporting astrological symbols, brocade draperies, wooden griffins, and seven Magnavox loudspeakers. Behind the wheel, Sidney saw the image of the man he wanted to be. At fifteen, Sidney Kimmelman changed his name to Sydney Omarr, adopting the surname from Doctor Omar, a fez-wearing rogue (and “Doctor of Nothing”) portrayed by movie idol Victor Mature in a 1941 caper, The Shanghai Gesture. The teenage occultist hit upon the unconventional spelling—adding an extra y to his first name and r to his last—through the magic of numerology, a hugely popular occult practice whereby names were converted to numerals (which had their own mystic interpretation) and sometimes altered to effect a desired outcome. Sydney probably never realized that the “ancient” art behind his new name also originated from his family’s New Jersey vacation spot.
Number mysticism had its earliest roots in the Hebrew and Greek cultures, where numerals and letters shared common symbols and were sometimes seen to harbor hidden meaning. The dilemma for curious Americans was that English letters had no numeric equivalents. But an Atlantic City metaphysician remedied that. The first record of modern numerology (though it was not yet called that) appeared in the early 1900s in the writings of Sarah Joanna Dennis Balliett. Married to a local homeopathic physician, she was