Jim Kershner’s This day in history » On the Web: spokesman.com/topics/local-history

From our archives, 100 years ago

Professor F.F. Nietzel, astrologer, was arrested and fined for drawing up a horoscope for an undercover Spokane police detective.

He was fined $25 under the city’s vagrancy law, which prohibited fortune-tellers of all kinds.

Yet Nietzel disputed the very idea that astrology was fortune-telling. He said it was merely the working out of a mathematical problem by studying the sky. A horoscope, he said, showed what the stars had already predetermined.

Meanwhile, the National Astrological Society immediately announced that it would take on Nietzel’s case as a test case and take it all the way to the state Supreme Court if necessary.

Nietzel said he wasn’t surprised by all of this hubbub.

The Spokane Daily Chronicle quoted him, in full German dialect, as saying, “Mars iss der planet of war, and ven dis trouble came Mars vas in der twelfth house of der sun, vich means der house of imbrisonment and misfortune.”

A smart-aleck reporter then asked if this meant the judge “couldn’t help” but fine him $25. Nietzel “saw no humor” in this idea.

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(From the Associated Press)

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