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The impending conflict [first world war] was seized upon by the astrologers hanging out in London, among whom was Walter Richard (Gorn)Old - Sepharial. Some of the pamphlets he published at the time were discovered by this author in the New York Public Library. They carried not only their dates of publication but also the dates of accession into the library. (And if any researcher is interested in reviewing the contents of these pamphlets, it is suggested that he hurry since they are decomposing and beginning to crumble into dust).

All the royal houses of Europe and Russia (as well as that of Turkey) came under the observation of Old at one time or another. He predicted the fall of them all, but his specialty seems to have centered around the house of Hohenzollern - that of William II, whom he castigated in his usual flowery terms as "the Beast."

Old's denunciations of William II, quite deserved to be sure, reached a virulence seldom found in public documents.

Old also turned considerable attention to the Russian tsar. He published several castigations directed at the aging Franz Joseph, who had sat on the throne of the AustroHungarian empire longer than Victoria sat on hers in England and whose annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 led directly to the outbreak of the "Great Devastation," as Old was to put it.

Writing in 1914, OId indicated it was unlikely that Nicholas II of Russia would survive the war and that at the time he reached forty-seven years of age there would be a great revolution that would probably see the end of the dynastic succession in Russia. Further, that country would not emerge from the war with any measure of success, and what had happened in St. Petersburg in 1905 would likely be repeated more effectively in 1915.

The chilling story of Nicholas II and the Russian royal family is familiar history.