From the Ministry to the Zodiac

John Thomas was born in Wales on 9 November 1826. As a young man he studied toward a career in the ministry, but by his own later account he found himself unable to reconcile that path with the psychic and clairvoyant abilities he had begun to discover in himself, and he chose the latter. Writing afterward under the pen name Charubel, he built a career as an astrologer, herbalist and clairvoyant consultant, and for a time led an occult teaching order of his own devising, which he later dissolved. He also edited several periodicals over the course of his working life.

He died on 11 November 1908, two days after his eighty second birthday. His best known work continued to circulate after his death: a 1907 edition paired his original material with separate commentary by the younger astrologer Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old), keeping the book in print for a new generation of readers who had never encountered Thomas himself. His decision to set aside the ministry for clairvoyant work was, by the standards of Victorian Wales, a genuine break with respectability, and he wrote afterward of having weighed the two paths seriously before choosing the one that matched what he actually experienced rather than the one that was expected of him. As Charubel he built a modest but committed following through his periodicals and his private consultations, working alongside better known figures in the British astrological revival of the later nineteenth century without ever becoming as widely known as they were.