D Kyle Pierce

Oct 16, 2025

It has been almost seven years since the death of Robert H. Schmidt, who translated ancient Greek astrological texts that had been long neglected by academia. From this work of more than two decades emerged the philosophical and theoretical foundations of what he called the System of Hermes. He was a gifted scholar, a bit of a provocateur, and a man on a mission. He was my friend and philosophical mentor. I began writing a tribute years ago but never quite completed it, until now.

When Robert spoke wistfully of the “swashbuckling philosophers” of an earlier era, he might as well have been describing his own intellectual kinship with Hermann Graf von Keyserling. Both men embodied a particular type of scholarly adventurer, bold enough to illuminate territories that conventional scholarship had abandoned or never dared to explore. In their different eras, each carved out spaces where serious intellectual work could flourish beyond the increasingly narrow confines of institutional academia.

The parallel between their lives extends beyond their intellectual sympathy. Schmidt’s Institute for the Liberating Arts, hosted in their spacious Cumberland, Maryland home with his wife Ellen Black, echoed Keyserling’s famous School of Wisdom at Darmstadt in both spirit and function. Where Keyserling gathered Europe’s intellectual luminaries in the 1920s for extended dialogues on consciousness and culture, Robert and Ellen’s weekend salons and annual conclaves drew serious students of ancient wisdom from across North America. These gatherings, legendary within astrological circles, preserved something of the older European tradition of sustained intellectual conversation -- events that might stretch across several days, where ideas could develop organically rather than being compressed into conference presentations or seminar periods.

Both men understood that recovering lost forms of knowledge required more than casual interest; it demanded the kind of institutional commitment that mainstream universities were unwilling to provide. Keyserling’s School offered a space where Eastern and Western philosophical traditions could meet on equal terms, free from the prejudices of established academic departments. Similarly, Schmidt’s Project Hindsight represented perhaps the most ambitious scholarly undertaking in modern astrological history -- a systematic effort to recover the authentic voice of Hellenistic and medieval astrologers through rigorous translation of Greek and Latin sources.

Schmidt’s philosophical formation at St. John’s College proved crucial to this endeavor. His intellectual lineage traced directly back to Edmund Husserl through Jacob Klein, the German phenomenologist who fled Nazi persecution to find refuge at St. John’s. Klein transmitted to his American students Husserl’s fundamental methodological insight: the need to “return to the things themselves,” to bracket one’s assumptions and encounter phenomena as they actually present themselves rather than through the lens of inherited theoretical frameworks.

Klein corresponded with Martin Heidegger -- also student of Husserl’s -- for many years; both he and Schmidt were influenced by Heidegger’s focus on ancient Greek thought. This phenomenological training proved perfectly suited to Schmidt’s later work with ancient texts. Rather than imposing modern astrological concepts onto classical sources, he developed an almost archaeological sensitivity to the specific technical vocabulary and conceptual structures that ancient practitioners actually employed.

The linguistic dimension of this work cannot be overstated. Like Keyserling, who argued that different languages literally shaped different modes of experiencing reality, Schmidt understood that careful attention to ancient terminology was essential to recovering how classical astrologers actually thought. His translations revealed a sophisticated technical vocabulary that had been largely lost or misunderstood in modern astrological practice. Terms like “katarche,” “kleros,” and “aphesis” carried precise meanings that contemporary astrology had either forgotten or distorted. Schmidt’s meticulous work -- extended into Latin sources by Robert Hand and Robert Zoller -- demonstrated that ancient astrology possessed a conceptual sophistication that rivaled contemporary academic disciplines.

This commitment to linguistic precision reflected a deeper philosophical conviction shared by both Schmidt and Keyserling: that consciousness itself was historically conditioned, and that recovering earlier forms of awareness required patient attention to the specific ways that past cultures organized their experience. Both thinkers saw in these traditions alternative ways of organizing human understanding that might offer resources unavailable to modern thought.

Schmidt’s achievement with Project Hindsight must be measured against the magnitude of what had been lost. For centuries, serious engagement with classical astrological texts had virtually disappeared from Western intellectual life. The few scholars who maintained interest often lacked the technical astrological knowledge necessary to understand what the ancient authors were actually discussing. Conversely, practicing astrologers typically lacked the linguistic and historical training needed to work responsibly with classical sources. Schmidt’s unique combination of philosophical rigor and practical astrological knowledge enabled him to bridge this gap in ways that had not been possible since the Renaissance.

The limitations of both projects are perhaps as instructive as their achievements. Keyserling’s School of Wisdom, despite its initial brilliance, struggled to maintain intellectual coherence as it became increasingly eclectic. Schmidt’s work, while groundbreaking in its precision, reached primarily specialized audiences within the astrological community rather than achieving broader intellectual influence. Yet these limitations should not obscure the genuine significance of their contributions. In an age of increasing academic specialization, both Schmidt and Keyserling demonstrated that serious intellectual work could still flourish outside established institutional channels.

Schmidt’s legacy lies not merely in the texts he recovered but in the methodological example he provided. His demonstration that ancient sources could yield their secrets to patient, phenomenologically informed investigation offers a model for how contemporary scholarship might engage more responsibly with traditional forms of knowledge. Like Keyserling before him, Schmidt showed that the choice between rigorous scholarship and openness to unconventional wisdom traditions represents a false dilemma. The swashbuckling philosopher, it turns out, is not an anachronism but a perennial necessity -- the scholar bold enough to ask questions that polite academic discourse has learned to avoid.

Robert Schmidt’s work has woven itself into the fabric of modern astrological thought, influencing thinkers worldwide, whether acknowledged or not. His recorded lectures and translations are available at Robert Schmidt Astrology.

(Astrological note: Keyserling was identified as an astrological “counterpart” of Schmidt’s by virtue of an unusual convergence of aspect events that they both share: Venus squaring Saturn just as Mars perfected a trine to it.)