by Will Morris
rSdnotspoe6au819863mg:fluf2tä5zt5681 8.202h lgtliMfm48r17f1 ·
In Memoriam: J. Lee Lehman, PhD September 9, 1953 – March 18, 2026
„Lee Lehman left this world this morning, and the astrological community is poorer for it — though richer beyond measure for everything she gave us and everything she set in motion.
I first encountered Lee in the conversations surrounding Kepler College, those earnest, sometimes urgent discussions about whether a genuine astrological education could take root and survive in the modern world. Lee cared about that question the way she cared about everything: with rigor, with loyalty, and without sentimentality. She wanted astrology to stand on its own feet, on its own terms, supported by scholarship that could bear scrutiny.
We met again at a Star Retreat in South Texas, and from that meeting a genuine collegial friendship deepened into something that shaped my professional life in ways I am still discovering. I enrolled in every program she taught, pursued certification in Medical Astrology through her at the School of Traditional Astrology, and what I received there was not merely a credential but a formation: a way of seeing the body, the chart, and the patient as a single coherent text.
J. Lee Lehman spent four decades doing what no one else in the English-speaking astrological world had done at her level of rigor: recovering the classical tradition from its primary sources and making it teachable. Her Essential Dignities in 1989 restored a doctrine the twentieth century had largely abandoned — planetary condition assessed through domicile, exaltation, triplicity, term, and face, not as decorative symbolism but as precise diagnostic instrument. Her Book of Rulerships, Classical Astrology for Modern Living, Martial Art of Horary Astrology, Traditional Medical Astrology, Classical Solar Returns — each volume was an act of excavation and translation, bringing the historical lineage forward without distorting it to suit modern tastes. Her doctoral training in Botany at Rutgers gave her a researcher’s instincts: care with evidence, precision with sources, skepticism toward received narrative. She read the historical record directly, in its primary sources, and taught others to do the same.
She also understood — before most of her contemporaries had the vocabulary for it — that the failure of quantitative research paradigms to evaluate astrology reflected epistemological mismatch rather than the tradition’s inadequacy. The consistent, transferable patterns of accurate recognition that skilled practitioners report had never been evaluated with methods adequate to their nature. She demonstrated this in her teaching constantly: the way she moved through a chart, held multiple simultaneous considerations without collapsing them into formula, and arrived at a judgment that was neither mechanical nor arbitrary. That was a form of knowledge. Her life’s work was an argument that it deserved to be treated as one.
In 1995 she received the Marc Edmund Jones Award at UAC; in 2023 the Charles Harvey Award from the UK astrological community. Both acknowledged what those of us who worked with her already knew: that Lee Lehman was the central figure in the restoration of traditional Western astrology in the English-speaking world.
Together we designed the Medical Astrology curriculum at Kepler College and co-taught the History and Foundations of Medical Astrology — tracing the tradition from Hippocrates and Galen through the Arabic transmission, the Renaissance synthesis, and the fragmentation of modernity. Teaching with Lee was an education in itself. She did not perform certainty she did not possess, and she did not tolerate imprecision in anyone else. If you could not say what you meant, she would wait — with a patience that was somehow also a form of pressure — until you found the words.
Beyond her books and teaching, she served as Research Director for the National Council for Geocosmic Research for twelve years, as Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kepler College, and as Program Chair for UAC in 1995 and 1998. She founded correspondence courses in horary and electional astrology and directed the Medical Astrology program at the School of Traditional Astrology. She understood that a tradition without institutions does not survive, and she built accordingly.
The chart she cast for the world, over more than forty years of practice and publication, was drawn with great care. The stars that informed it are still there. Those of us who were taught by her carry forward what she gave — not as museum pieces, but as living tools for a living tradition.
So long, big sister. Travel well with the ancestors. We are all better off for having known you.
William Morris, DAOM, PhD Riondel, British Columbia March 18, 2026″