Jim Lewis and the Origins of Astrocartography

When people discuss astrocartography today, Jim Lewis's name is unavoidable. He didn't just popularise the technique — he invented it, named it, and spent his career making it accessible to the broader astrological community. Understanding his story is essential context for the ongoing trademark dispute over the term he created.

Who Was Jim Lewis?

James A. Lewis was born in 1941 in New York and spent much of his professional life in San Francisco. He was a working astrologer, writer, and entrepreneur who became deeply interested in the question of how geography affected human experience. Lewis wasn't the first to notice that a person's planetary positions change meaning depending on where on Earth you're standing — but he was the first to systematise the idea into a coherent, mappable method and create a commercial product around it.

Developing the Method

Lewis began developing his locational astrology system in the early 1970s. His core insight was this: while the planets' positions in the zodiac don't change based on your location, the angles those planets form relative to the horizon and meridian do. A planet that was rising on your eastern horizon in New York might be directly overhead — at the midheaven — if you'd been born in a city further east.

Lewis worked out the mathematics to calculate these angle lines for all major planets across the full globe, then mapped them geographically. The result was a world map covered in curved planetary lines — each showing where a specific planet occupied a specific angular position at the moment of any given birth.

He called the system Astro*Carto*Graphy. The asterisks were his stylistic trademark; the underlying word "astrocartography" became the generic name for the method itself.

The 1976 Launch

Lewis launched his Astro*Carto*Graphy service commercially in 1976, selling printed map reports directly to consumers. This was pioneering for its time — a personalised astrological product delivered by mail. The maps were accompanied by detailed written interpretations for each planetary line, and they became popular in astrological circles throughout the late 1970s and 1980s.

Lewis also lectured extensively, wrote articles and booklets on the subject, and trained other astrologers in the technique. His book The Psychology of Astro*Carto*Graphy, co-written with Kenneth Irving, remains a foundational text in the field.

Mainstreaming Locational Astrology

Before Lewis, locational astrology existed in scattered, informal forms. His systematisation and commercial distribution turned it into a recognised specialty within the broader astrological profession. By the time the internet arrived in the 1990s, astrocartography was already well-established as standard professional terminology — used by practitioners, schools, and publishers who had no association with Lewis's specific brand.

Lewis's Death and the Term's Legacy

Jim Lewis died in 1995. After his death, his company and intellectual property passed through various hands. But the word he created — "astrocartography" — had long since entered the public domain as professional vocabulary. No one "owns" it in any legal or professional sense. It's used globally, across all schools of astrological thought, in textbooks, software products, conference presentations, and countless online resources.

Why This History Matters Now

In 2025 — thirty years after Jim Lewis's death — a France-based astrologer named Kristine Odegard registered "Astrocartography" as a trademark in France. The move has been widely condemned as an attempt to claim ownership of a generic term that Lewis introduced and the profession collectively developed over five decades.

The irony isn't lost on the community: Lewis spent his life opening this method to the world. The current controversy is an effort by one practitioner to close it back down.

Read the full story of the trademark controversy, or understand the legal case for why the trademark is invalid.