South African Astrologer Made Ancient Healing Academic

A Johannesburg boy who grew vegetables at age six and asked questions about spirit and fate became the astrologer who convinced medical schools to take traditional healing seriously.

Rod Suskin died in Cape Town on July 18 at age 63, leaving behind a legacy that forever changed how South Africa's medical students understand their patients' beliefs. For four decades, he worked to elevate astrology and traditional healing from dismissed superstitions into respected fields worthy of academic study.

His transformation began at 19 during a university psychology module. Sent to observe traditional healers in what's now Eswatini, Suskin met sangomas who immediately recognized him as a fellow diviner, not just a curious student from Johannesburg.

That moment chose his path. His sangoma teachers gave him unexpected instructions: don't adopt African divination tools like throwing bones. Instead, read tarot cards and birth charts, the tools of his own European ancestry, while staying anchored in African spiritual traditions.

By 26, Suskin had abandoned his psychology degree to work full-time as an astrologer. But he never stopped being a student.

Decades into his career, he completed a master's degree in cultural astronomy and astrology at the University of Wales. His dissertation explored sangoma cosmology, giving scholarly weight to knowledge he'd absorbed through years of training.

Why This Inspires

Suskin's real breakthrough came in lecture halls, not consulting rooms. He taught at University of Cape Town and Stellenbosch medical schools, showing future doctors that Western medicine, astrology, and traditional healing weren't rivals fighting for territory but different instruments answering different human needs.

Medical students who might never have encountered a sangoma found themselves learning to ask better questions of patients moving between two worlds of treatment. Suskin taught them that respecting cultural beliefs wasn't about abandoning science but about understanding the whole person sitting across from them.

He worked from precise planetary positions at a client's exact birth time and location, nothing like newspaper horoscope columns with their 12 broad categories. Colleagues and clients remembered his patience, his intellectual rigor, and his gentle conviction that people, trees, and planets all shared a single source.

His brothers Joseph and Danni recalled him as "quiet, studious, super-intellectual, independent," a description that fit the six-year-old growing vegetables as much as the scholar bridging continents of healing traditions.

Suskin proved that ancient wisdom and modern education could sit side by side in the same classroom, taught by the same teacher, serving the same hope: that healing comes in many languages, and all of them matter.