100 Years: The Life and Work of Serafin Lanot (Part 1)

By Ime Morales
Photos by Kat Palasi (wwwkatpalasi.tumblr.com)

Serafin Lanot

Lanot's former office

As part of our research work on the life of Filipino astrologer and writer Serafin Lanot I, together with my friends from my astrology group (Astro Friends), trooped to the home of the Lanot-Lacabas to dig through the family library and go through the old journals and books of Serafin Lanot. There we discovered old certificates, rare books on astrology and even antique astrological equipment.

The facts we unearthed, together with information gathered from books, Internet sources and interviews, helped build the report that I wrote for AFP in 2012. One year later, these materials also served to form my presentation on Serafin Lanot on the occasion of his 100th birthday. Finally, I am using the wealth of information culled from our collective research effort to write this entry for the website of AFP.

For serious students of astrology in the Philippines, it is important to know who came before us and understand how they made sense of astrology in the light of our own social context. Serafin Lanot, in particular, made a mark because he placed the Philippines on the global astrological map. Every Filipino astrology student should read him, study his philosophies and think about his ideas.

As a schoolboy, he read up on astrology

Lanot's desk name plate when he
was director of the Bureau of Printing

Born on August 21, 1913, Serafin Lanot was already writing verse and reading up on astrology as a schoolboy in Boac, Marinduque. His mother was a psychic, his father was a politician and the former mayor of Boac. During his childhood and adolescence, he worked as a bootblack, pan de sal peddler, boatman, copra carrier, sacristan, and road foreman.

Serafin Lanot's natal chart shows that both his Sun and Mercury are in the 9th House of philosophy, or the search for meaning. People with this planetary position usually end up as journalists, philosophers, astrologers, among other similar occupations.

He became a freelance writer, book author, and a regular columnist on astrology for the Manila Bulletin. He also became the editor of This Week, the Sunday Magazine of Manila Chronicle. He was the poetry editor for the Sunday Tribune Magazine when he was only 19. Later on, he put up a printing press, Tamaraw Press, which printed the works of poets and writers without charge. During the time of President Diosdado Macapagal, Serafin Lanot became the director of the Bureau of Printing.

He authored 2 poetry books: Songs of the Brown Man and Primer of Life, and a collection of essays and other writings called The Family that Gets Pushed Around. On March 29, 1980 Lanot received recognition from Malacanang as an outstanding member of that generation known as the Writers of the Thirties.

Poetry and astrology go hand in hand

He said that astrologers help people in their daily lives by revealing to them their weaknesses and strengths. He said, "If you want to be good at astrology, you have to be a poet. In drawing a composite picture of the subject under study, you have to use a controlled imagination, to be able to read what the placements of the planets reveal about the character of the subject. Your mind, your emotions, your sensitivity come into play as you peer into the life that's shaping up in the horoscope. You have to be a sort of artist, a compassionate one, a father confessor, since you must unobtrusively advise the subject on how to realize his self-fulfillment."

According to Lanot, the position of the modern astrologer is that the idea of a free will is itself something that cannot be scientifically proven, and that a lot of forces we are not always conscious of can inhibit or impel or shape or otherwise determine the choices or decisions that we make. We do not think as freely as we think we do, he said. "What your horoscope reveals are your tendencies-tendencies which can be either controlled or accentuated, whose effects can be either minimized or maximized. If you know what you are, you can make-or not make-the revelation come true. This will require spiritual guidance, emotional control, intellectual discipline. Not everybody is gifted enough to exercise and take full advantage of the heavenly tendencies he is born to."

Read Part 2