Bennett, Sidney Kimball (1892-1958?)

Prominent figure in twentieth-century astrology. Bennett was born in Chicago on February 10, 1892. Although biographical facts are scarce, he seems to have started his study of astrology around 1915 and to have become a professional in the early 1920s. His first book, Your Birthday and the Year Ahead, appeared in 1928.

During the late 1920s, a series of events came to radically alter his view of astrology. He had received complaints from clients that his predictions for them had not worked as expected. He turned away the criticisms as the result of faulty birth data, which led to mistakes in the placement of planets in the horoscope chart. However, privately he had noted that the failed predictions had derived from his use of what astrologers termed progressions, an old tool for manipulating the chart. (Progressions are based on the notion that there is a relationship between the first day of a person's life and the first year of that person's life. In like measure there is a relationship between the second day and the second year. Thus by examining on the chart the same number of days after the person's birth as the person's age in years, the astrologer supposedly can make some judgments about the present and the immediate future.)

Then two events, one the death of a client in an accident and the other a failed business trip for which Bennett had had high hopes, led to his discarding progressions altogether. He moved on to develop a system based on the solar return (the sun's return to its position in a birth chart, which occurs every seven years), which he called the "Key Cycle."

Bennett functioned publicly under the pen name Wynn. He began Wynn's Astrology Magazine in 1931, and for the next two decades it was one of the most influential in the emerging field. He also contributed a column to the New York Daily News and wrote a number of popular books. He retired in the 1950s, and his last days are undocumented. Dal Lee, in Dictionary of Astrology, reports a rumor that Bennett ended his own life in Australia in 1958, but that event is unverified.

Sources:

Holden, James H., and Robert A. Hughes. Astrological Pioneers of America. Tempe, Ariz.: American Federation of Astrologers, 1988.

Lee, Dal. Dictionary of Astrology. New York: Coronet Communications, 1968.

Wynn [Sidney K. Bennett]. Astrology, Science of Prediction. Los Angeles: Wynn Publishing, 1945.

——. Astrology, Your Path to Success. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1938.

——. The Key Cycle. 1931. Reprint, Tempe, Ariz.: American Federation of Astrologers, 1970.