Pat Morimando: A Good Memory of a Dear Friend

PAT MORIMANDO was a former Board member of the New York City Chapter and a long-term friend of NCGR. She gave one of her first lectures at one of our first New York conferences Crisis Counseling with Astrology way back in the late 70s. So moving was her presentation on coping with Neptune transits and counseling those in Neptunian crises that she was asked by Weiser Publishing to write a book on the topic. And so came The Neptune Effect.

Reverie about the early days of my friendship with Pat and some time spent with her surviving husband, Bill, had me take another look at this long-ago treasure. How innovative she was back then integrating Jungian concepts with astrological thought, and pioneering the use of counseling techniques in astrological consultations. And it’s all right there in this nifty little book. Not only does it remain insightful, but it also provides a glimpse of those early days of combining psychology and astrology. Pat was also a founding member of the Association of Astrology and Psychology, now defunct, but again, a sign of the development of astrology just a few short decades ago. Pat’s other admirable contribution via her position as Research Director for NCGRNYC was our Focus Group Reports. She facilitated small groups of people with the same planetary configuration, such as the Saturn-Neptune conjunction in Libra square Uranus in Cancer in the early 1950s, and transcribed and edited the interviews into an intimate account of their experiences of these dynamics. The work compares and contrasts them, and in honor of Pat’s efforts, we hope to make these Focus Group Reports available to members again in the near future.

Pat was notorious for her dark sense of humor. Life’s ironies were not lost on her. So, surely she would have gotten a kick out of passing away just before the recent station of Neptune, the last one before He sails into Pisces.

By her own Jupiterian nature, Pat would call herself as lazy as the day is long, and in her last working years before retirement, she could be found nightly at her table in Maurizio’s Café in the West Village, reading Tarot cards for the regulars and smoking her Marlboros. When asked about that, she roared with laughter Ha! After so many years of so much work at astrology, the cards are easy as pie and fun! Astrology is a lot of work!! So much to appreciate and so much to miss.

John Marchesella

 

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CREDITS:Memorial written by John Marchesella, originally published in NCGR Jan-Feb 2011 Memberletter. Created by Liz Houle.