Lee's Astro Blog

Is Horary Really Technical?

2011-04-16T06:17:00.001-04:00

Call this an "open answer" instead of an "open question." There are many ideas that natal astrologers hold about horary that are frankly just plain strange. They are also largely artifacts of ignorance, which is not necessarily the fault of the person holding the opinion, but may well be the fault of their teachers, and of many of the people who have authored books on natal astrology.

Today, I received an e-mail from a person who was simultaneously intrigued and nervous about studying horary, because she was afraid it is too technical for her to grasp. Here is my response.

I don't see horary as any more technical than a host of things I have studied. What I would say is that horary is actually very procedural. All that means is that you call a spade a spade.

In natal, does saying that Leo is a fire sign mean natal is technical? Because, within the classical period, natal astrology was every bit as "technical" as horary.

So I guess I'm not sure what you mean by "technical." Does it run by rules? Yes! But what about that makes it problematic?

Imho, the following statements are true:

1. Most astrology books and astrology courses are written by well meaning people who don't know how to either write or teach. This is not a reflection of their moral or intellectual worth, but simply a statement that you can hardly expect people to intuitively know how to do either skill well. The same thing happens in martial arts, when people study for a while, and then are thrown in as teachers, without teaching them how to teach. The results are rarely satisfactory for either party.

2. Part of the evidence for 1 is that the knowledge conveyed is inadequate when it cannot be applied outside the examples given in the book/class. Many authors make statements that are so vague that they either apply to every chart, or no chart, and the poor student is left to wonder what they misunderstood. It is always easier to believe that you cannot understand the author - which is your fault! - than that the author got it wrong.

3. The real problem in writing and teaching is that most authors and teachers are not actually thinking about how to engage in astrological reasoning, and instead are attempting to teach only by applying their own knowledge as if it were drawn out of a barrel randomly rather than systematically applied.

4. If you don't teach systematically, nobody learns anything, except by attempting to reverse engineer.

5. Good teaching requires a defined curriculum, where the student is clear about what the purpose of the instruction is, what is expected of her or him, and what constitutes closure, at least in that particular course. Classes which continue indefinitely have a habit of becoming either entertainment or dependencies, rather than learning.

So, to my question to you: what is wrong with "technical," that this should be an impediment to learning?

Do you have problems following an instruction like, "Raise your right hand?" Because that is technical.

Do have have a problem with logical reasoning, like, "If the Moon is in the 8th house, then the Querent may be thinking about death?" Because reasoning is technical.

Are you concerned that you could never learn all the "rules?" No problem. Nobody does. As with law, the important thing is not memorizing, but knowing where to look them up.

Do you have a problem because you don't know why that statement about the 8th house might be true? In that case, I'm afraid no astrology will ultimately be satisfying for you, because while it may be possible to historically date the statement, no astrology brings you to the primary cause or complete truth about anything.

Is the comment about technical really a statement that you are afraid to put your astrological knowledge and reasoning to the test of a crucible in which you have to declare a judgment than can be then declared to be either right or wrong? In that case, then how much faith do you really have in what you have learned?

Beyond this particular person's concerns, the other great dig at horary is that it legislates against free will. It doesn't. Fate is merely the statement of what happens when you have neither the time, the will, nor the inclination to exercise free will. And that's the problem. The exercise of free will takes energy, will, and time, commodities that are often in short supply. And of all of them, the exercise of the will, or intention, is probably the commodity in the shortest supply. People are not encouraged to really think carefully about their options and make a considered choice between options that have been seriously studied. We are encouraged to pick between the red or the blue on impulse, not think about whether we really wanted that new car, or whether it is a good choice based on environmental considerations.

The expression of free will is difficult, because we have to think, we have to question, and we have to discover a path that nobody tells you to take, and nobody gives you very many points for choosing. I am completely in favor of free will, just as I know it is in short supply.

Horary "works" because it is the measure of how things will unfold in the absence of free will. Thus, horary is not an opinion about free will, but about how people operate when they themselves have abrogated free will.

The Arizona Shooting

2011-01-10T15:58:00.000-05:00

©2011 J. Lee Lehman

Before anything, I have to express my personal dismay that we even have such astrological moments to interpret. Shooting politicians is not a mark of a civilized society, no matter what the Hatriots, who have furthered their careers and pocketbooks, may think. Rhetoric kills.

I have to admit to a personal connection: my parents had retired to Green Valley, AZ, a town just south of Tucson. Accordingly, I have visited Tucson numerous times. My parents had bought from Giffords' family business. I know the addresses given. Giffords was elected the year after my father died, but I have no doubt he would have voted for her.

It took a while to sort out the chaos surrounding the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords two days ago. The time has been given from 10:00 - 10:11 am, but the difference is not that meaningful in examining the chart. Can it tell us anything useful about the event, and what will come of it?

At 10:00 am, Saturn is much closer to the 8th house; at 10:00, the Moon is much closer to the Ascendant, but with either chart, these are the two great symbols we see. When I first read the reports, and learned of the death of Judge John Roll, I wondered whether in fact he was the target. We have since learned otherwise.

Chart for the shooting of 20 people.

How should we view the chart astrologically? I would propose that one very good way to do this is as a decumbiture. There are two major unknowns at this point: the prospect for Giffords' recovery, and the disposition of her alleged attacker. Quite honestly, I am far more interested in the former than the latter.

If we do so, here's what we can see. From what we know at this point, Giffords was the target of the shooting, and, as the "subject" of the event, the 1st house. She was most certainly not the only victim of this event, but what we can all agree is that, had it not been for the murderer picking her as a target, all the other people would be alive today. Those other victims, I suspect, are shown by Saturn, so close to the 8th house cusp.

The Moon is right at the Ascendant. (Remember, the time uncertainly means that the Moon could have still been in the 1st house, but conjunct the Ascendant nonetheless.) The Moon rising in electional astrology represents change - and this certainly represents a change in her status! The partile conjunction of Jupiter-Uranus, with the Ascendant being ruled by Jupiter spells out the suddenness of the event.

The good news is: the Moon and Jupiter (as ruler of the 1st) are not in approaching aspect to Venus, ruler of the 8th. This would be the primary argument for her death: if the Ascendant ruler of the Moon was approaching an aspect to the ruler of the 8th. In fact, the Moon was separating from the square to Venus.

The next consideration is the degree of her recovery. I think she will make a good one. Jupiter is dignified in Pisces and, given the relatively late degree, it is also dignified in Aries. With the Moon separating from, rather than applying to, Neptune, I believe her medical team is able to read her condition well. The 6th house, her "disease," is ruled by the Sun, which is peregrine. When the ruler of the 1st is stronger than the ruler of the 6th, it means that the patiet's vitality is stronger than the disease. This is alo encouraging.

Jupiter also rules the 10th house of treatment, which is a good thing for her. There will be some bumps along the way, but this would take a thorough analysis of the critical days to examine this question further. But with the Ascendant in a mutable sign - those which used to be called common - I should think that her recovery won't be as fast as we would hope, but with the dignity of her ruler, I think we will be heartened in the end.

The 1848 Uranus-Pluto Conjunction and Franz Joseph of Austria

2010-07-07T13:11:00.000-04:00

©2010 J. Lee Lehman

1848 rattled Europe more than anything since the French Revolution – and for many of the same reasons. To begin with, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's Communist Manifesto was published. Riots, uprisings, revolutions and protests broke out across Europe: France, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and the Balkans. The California Gold Rush began. Switzerland, France and the Netherlands got new constitutions. And Wagner began writing Der Ring des Nibelungen (the Ring Cycle). And furthermore, the Irish potato famine was still running its course, resulting in staggering death and emigration.

Examining the chart for 1848 for Vienna (the angles will obviously differ in other parts of the globe), the Sun was in a partile conjunction to the South Node! One of the symbols of the Sun is the king: and here, authority figures were being destroyed – or at least challenged. In much of Europe, this conjunction occurred in or near the 10th house cusp, reinforcing that theme. The Aries Ingress was just a few hours after a Full Moon eclipse. The very powerful signature rocked the establishment of the time – but mostly, it didn't break. By now, Pluto was at 25 Aries – it had mostly run its course through the sign. The remainder of the period would be devoted to the reactions of the establishment to the challenges of 1848. The German rebellions were done by 1849. Hungary declared independence from Austria in 1849 – but that failed because Austria was victorious – with a little help from Russia. The new republican government in Sicily was extinguished in 1849. And in 1851, Louis Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly, a move which allowed him to declare himself Napoleon III the following year.

When we compare 1848 and 1849, here drawn for Vienna, we see the difference between the South Node and Saturn afflicting the Sun. What's the difference, since both are malefics? The South Node is destructive – and that eclipse doesn't help. Lest you assume that this is a common occurrence – think again. From 1500 – 2050, this
is the only year that the Sun was partile conjunct the South Node at the Aries Ingress. In two other years, the South Node was within a one degree orb, but in Pisces: 1513 and 1755. 1513 was the year that Machiavelli wrote The
Prince, an influential document on the nature of kingship! 1755 was the year of the Lisbon Earthquake, one of the deadliest earthquakes ever, especially when one factors for the relative population size then and now.

By contrast, there have been five other Aries Ingresses since 1500 where Saturn was within two degrees of conjunct the Sun. Here's how they worked out:

1555 (Saturn in Aries) featured the Diet of Augsburg – the congress of German princes which stabilized the existing religious division of the princes between Catholicism and Protestantism.
1643 (Saturn in Pisces) was during the English Civil War. Obviously, Charles I was afflicted!
In 1702 (Saturn in Pisces) William III died; his daughter Queen Anne succeeded, becoming the last British monarch of Stuart descent before the Hanoverian Succession
In 1761 (Saturn in Aries) George III was crowned following the death of his father the previous year.
In 1908 (Saturn in Aries partile conjunct the Sun) there was both the Young Turk Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire, which succeeded in restoring an earlier system; and the ascension of Emperor Pu Yi in China, often called the Last Emperor.

As one can see from the list, the presence of Saturn conjunct the Sun alone doesn't depose a king. With the exception of 1643, these were all peaceful transfers of power – or confirmation of power, in the case of the Treaty of Augsburg. One does get the sense that it may be setting up a final run, so to speak.

Austria was a good case in point. The political unrest of 1848 cost Metternich his job. The Emperor Ferdinand was ineffectual, the Hungarians were already rebelling, and also portions of Austrian-ruled Italy. The military wanted a strong Emperor, so they arranged for Ferdinand to abdicate, to be replaced by Archduke Franz Joseph, his nephew. The unrest of 1848, not to mention the war on two fronts, meant that Franz Joseph was initially forced to grant a new constitution in 1849 – and to give the impression that he was a moderate or a reformer. Austrian forces were victorious in Italy, and Franz Joseph obtained aid from Russia to defeat the Hungarians. He then repudiated the constitution, and ruled from the position of absolutism, until his death in 1916 – not quite the last Emperor, but within two years of being so.

Franz Joseph's ascension occurred under the Libra Ingress of 1848. Here, we see Saturn-South Node prominent at the MC, with the Sun at its Fall at the IC – not an auspicious place, for a new reign. But Saturn blanketing the MC does not suggest that reform was really on Franz Joseph's mind. The MC ruler was Jupiter in Leo – that looks far more like the absolutist that he became than the reformer he at first appeared to be. And he became quite popular, the people represented by the Moon in Leo is approaching the conjunction to the Emperor.

The Saturn-South Node conjunction at the MC did show that things were beginning to unravel. Franz Joseph's only son died in a tragic event, probably a suicide. His next successor, his nephew Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, triggering World War I, as we saw in the last chapter. Yet Jupiter has dignity by Triplicity: he had a long reign personally.

The chart for 1849 for Vienna shows that Austria's enemies, ruled by Mars in Aquarius, were not so strong as Austria – Venus in Taurus. That Venus also ruled the 9^th – and there, his strategic alliance with Russia sealed the victory over the Hungarians.

As an aside, we have already seen that legislatures are ruled by the 11^th. Here, the ruler of the 11^th – the Sun – is at the Portals of Death – the 7^th house cusp – open enemies, not only death. Franz Joseph's victory over the Hungarians effectively killed the power of the legislature.

Thus, we see that, while the Uranus-Pluto conjunction of 1848 had the promise of rebellion about it, that rebellion wasn't stable, and in the immediate future, produced a conservative backlash. Uranus allows people to have a taste of change - but it does not give the guarantee of change.

What is a Spiritual Disease?

2010-06-19T17:09:00.000-04:00

In the Martial Art of Horary Astrology, I outlined some of the classical rules for determining whether a disease was physical or spiritual in nature. To reproduce the table on page 157, here is the traditional distinction.

Table One. Typical configurations for physical and mental diseases, as described by Lilly and others.

Physical	Mental/Spiritual
Ascendant and Moon afflicted; their rulers not afflicted.	The Ascendant and the Moon not afflicted; but their rulers afflicted.
Mars or Saturn afflicting the Moon, but not the Ascendant.	Mars or Saturn afflicting the Ascendant, but not the Moon.
Jupiter in the 1^st or 6^th	Ruler of the 9^th or 12^th in the 6^th (witchcraft)
Ruler of the 1^st in the 6^th	Ruler of the 6^th is Mercury (witchcraft)
Moon or Ruler of the Ascendant in the 12^th.	Ruler of the Moon or Ascendant in the 12^th.

One of my medical students recently asked me about this table, noting that this does not express his experience. I have to admit: this doesn't express my experience either. And it is precisely this point that I want to discuss.

First, I would express the following: it is a mistake to take any author as being 100% right about anything, whether an astrological author, or an author in any field. I would add a corollary: it is extremely important to understand the historical context of astrological method in order to understand whether or not the method even applies. Here, I think this point is the crux to understanding the problem: that our modern contours of disease do not map one-on-one with older theories of disease.

This week, I have been working with two women about health issues: and by chance (!) they both have ten degree Virgo Moons. Accordingly, both have had Saturn transiting their Moons, so by Lilly's rules, they would both manifest physical diseases. With Saturn separating from the conjunction, we are reminded of two things. First, that Saturn transits often have a "whole-sign" influence, where, even though the transit is officially over for both of them, the "mess" is still being cleaned up, as the Saturn completes its transit of Virgo. The second is that often Saturn shows the development of the disease, not necessarily its culmination.

The younger of the two has been diagnosed with throat cancer, and has just had her surgery scheduled. In her case, Taurus is the sign of her 6th house cusp, certainly appropriate for the nature of the cancer: and suggesting that this disease is signature for this chart: not an incidental event, but part of the major theme of her life. Saturn in Cancer is in her 8th - the disease cancer could be the cause of her eventual death. (That is not the only possible scenario, however.) But in her solar return, the most afflicted planet is the ruler of the Ascendant - arguing for a mental/spiritual disease at this time.

Now there are those people, especially within the New Age movement, who argue for the mental/spiritual side of cancer. I forcefully disagree. Not only has there been a massive increase in cancer in the 20th century correlating with the increased use of a series of carcinogenic substances like benzene, but there has been research for over eighty years pointing out these correlations. (For a fuller exposition of this, please see: Davis, Devra Lee. The Secret History of the War on Cancer. New York: BasicBooks, 2007.) With greater exposure to chemicals, more people are getting cancer - whatever their psycho-spiritual state.

It is interesting that in the 17th c. works on astrological medicine, the emphasis was on predicting whether the patient would be cured or die. It was not on diagnosing the disease by any disease categories still in use. Thus, William Lilly or Richard Saunders had no "model" for cancer. So we are somewhat off the hook about trying to explain how to use astrology within the context of soaring cancer and diabetes rates. But would Lilly and Saunders view this patient's cancer as physical, or mental/spiritual? They certainly knew cancer. Lilly describes caring for his employer's wife who had breast cancer, and it is a wrenching description.

And yet - there is also testimony to the psycho-spiritual aspects of cancer. (for an interesting exposition of these ideas, see, for example, Schulz, Mona Lisa, and Christiane Northrup. Awakening Intuition : Using Your Mind-Body Network for Insight and Healing. New York: Harmony Books, 1998.) Schulz's experience as a medical intuitive argues for at least a spiritual dimension to the process.

How do we square these two approaches? In all likelihood, our intrepid patient was exposed to chemical toxicity - something that is nearly impossible not to envision, given the chemical load which is being discovered in everybody. (For more information on chemical load, see Baker, Nena. The Body Toxic : How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-Being. New York: North Point Press, 2009.) She, like the rest of us, is walking around with a chemistry set of substances in her body. She hits a solar return in 2009 with a Venus-Mars conjunction at the shipwreck star Scheat, just shortly after Saturn completed the transit to her Moon, and with the South Node in the 6th. The cancer starts growing. Her natal 6th house shows the place. The 2009 solar return has that transiting Saturn opposite solar return Moon, so again, the problem is of the body. And yet, the ruler of her Moon and Ascendant is in the 12th, being afflicted by Neptune. So we see a mental/spiritual connection as well. So we have a mixed physical and mental/spiritual disease - which happens a lot. Mixed astrological messages again!

Our second Moon at 10 Virgo has cataracts and glaucoma. The doctors have already been doing eye surgery on her, reflecting the fact that Saturn had been in Virgo for a while. In her 2009 solar return, the Moon was afflicted by Uranus, but the dispositor of the Moon was afflicted by Neptune. Mixed indicators again.

It's harder to square the issue of mental/spiritual aspect to glaucoma and cataracts than for cancer - although still some might argue for some metaphor around seeing. But I would merely add that this woman is 83 years old. Does age trump metaphor?

Another woman I worked with on cancer, this time with natal Moon in Pisces, received her diagnosis just as Saturn had transited into Virgo. Her cancer is one that was unheard of until the 20th century, and has been correlated with chemical exposure. In the year of her diagnosis, the solar return Ascendant was not afflicted, but its ruler Saturn was in detriment in Leo, in a partile opposition to Neptune, and posited in the 8th house. That affliction to the ruler of the Ascendant makes this a spiritual disease by the old rules, but I'd call it chemical exposure, which sounds pretty physical to me. Her natal Moon is afflicted by Saturn, so at least there we have the physical affect: and her Saturn is in Virgo, so we begin to see something of the timing.

In all these cases, we get a somewhat mixed read for physical vs. mental/spiritual. So what is going on, and are the classifications even meaningful?

To answer this question, I think we have to return to to sociological context of the old rules. From the Roman Empire to the 16th century, the prevailing European model for "health care" was the contract for a cure. In this legal system, a patient and a healer actually created a legally enforceable contract, whereby both parties stipulated what a "cure" would look like (for example: being able to walk, but perhaps with a limp), along with the price for the cure. If the healer couldn't effect a cure, then the patient didn't need to pay, except for medicines. This practice put a premium on the healer being able to not only diagnose a disease, but also that it could be cured on a physical level. This contract explains the popularity of astrological medicine, which could help to determine the curability of a condition. If a patient's condition could not be cured, there would be no payment - so the physician was anxious to know whether a case was worth the effort.

Within this system, the answer is obvious: a physical disease is not one caused by physical means, but one that can be cured by physical means: herbs, baths, surgery, etc. A mental or spiritual disease was one which should be referred to other practitioners - because then prayer, exorcism, talismans (i.e., magic), or other non-physical means of cure would be appropriate.

Once we understand the context, then we can also realize that the boundaries between these categories of disease morph in different historical and sociological circumstances. We may understand cancer as a primarily physical disease: but then, spiritual insight may help in some cases.

Every time you look at a list of astrological rules: for determining the rules for marriage, or for whether the patient will live or die, or for moving house, the student of astrology is almost always confronted with a chart that has mixed messages. This can be very frustrating, especially early on in the learning curve, because the budding astrologer doesn't know what to do. Oftentimes the answer is: both arguments are true. A disease can be both physical and spiritual. Going down one path without the other produces an incomplete, partial or temporary recovery.

The 960 Year Cycle that Couldn't

2010-04-26T11:01:00.001-04:00

Great conjunctions are any series of conjunctions between superior planets only. This is the system in Western astrology that moved the study of mundane past the yearly agricultural cycles into the longer cycles necessary to understand culture as an historical process, not merely a seasonal one.

The idea of longer periods was not new: the Babylonians had divided the world into three time periods as early as 1000 BCE.^¹ But it wasn't until a couple of centuries later that the Babylonians achieved the ability to predict the planetary positions in advance: an impressive technological advance, but one that drew away the power of the gods and goddesses to write new messages in the sky.^²

What differed with the Arabic material was greater precision in the ability to calculate forward and backward, and its relation to only one astrological phenomenon: the successive conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn. The full Jupiter-Saturn cycle was declared to be a great mutation of 960 years, which, at 20 years per conjunction is a total of 48 total conjunctions, averaging 240 years per element. Quickly doing the math, 12 conjunctions per element should mean four conjunctions in each sign per pass – but this doesn't work out so neatly in practice. For example, in the just completed Earth Triplicity mutation, there were actually nine conjunctions in Earth – three to each sign. According to Masha'allah (fl 762- ca. 815) in On Conjunctions, Religions and Peoples, each change of element (mutation) was associated with changes in government.^³ These ideas were further elaborated to include both political and religious changes.^⁴ Not only was the Triplicity considered, but also the Quadruplicity:

“If their [Jupiter-Saturn] conjunction is in the tropical signs, it indicates universal changes. If it is in the fixed , it indicates the firmness of their condition, and the changes will be toward prosperity. If it is in the corporeal , the matter in this case is middling, and this indicates that at the time of their conjunction most of the prosperity is in the countries of Jupiter, and the corruption in the countries of Saturn.”^⁵

It is almost impossible to overemphasize how important the triplicity of the conjunctions was in interpretation. Abu Ma'shar (c. 787-886) discussed this in detail in his work, On the Great Conjunctions.^⁶ He specifies that the sign in each triplicity that is furthest from Aries is strongest: thus, Sagittarius is the strongest fire sign, and the same for Pisces, Aquarius and Capricorn. This idea of the relative strength of the three signs within an element is also applied in medical astrology.

Abu Ma'shar was clear in stating that the understanding of the Jupiter-Saturn cycle was concerning beginnings, because this combination brings order. Mars added to the series shows destruction, which produces the end of things.^⁷

How accurate is this description of the cycle using our modern astronomical equations? The results are shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Iteration of the “960 year” Jupiter-Saturn cycle in practice. This shows the first conjunction within the fiery Triplicity in each era.

Year	Position	Years elapsed
25 BCE	3 Leo	--
769 CE	0 Leo	794
1603	8 Sagittarius	809
2338	2 Sagittarius	735

The first problem we encounter is the presumption that the first instance of the Fire signs, considered the starting point of this cycle, would always fall not only in Aries, but in the first Face (i.e., 10 degrees) of Aries, or at least some fire sign. It doesn't. For the cycle beginning 1603, none of the conjunctions occurred in the first ten degrees of Aries. So does that mean that round doesn't count? We're still in it in 2010!

If we restrict the positions to the first Face of Aries, and not the first conjunction in the Fire signs, then we get the following results:

Year	Position	Years elapsed
114	6 Aries	--
908	4 Aries	794
1702	6 Aries	794
2497	4 Aries	795

Table 1a. Iteration of the “960 year” Jupiter-Saturn cycle in practice, allowing only Aries as the starting Fire sign.

Here we see that the presumed length of the cycle of 960 years leaves a little bit to be desired when it comes to accuracy! Either, you can have a fairly regular cycle of about 784-785 years using the "Aries only" rule, or you can have an irregular length progression of the signs through the elements, beginning with the first occurance in the element fire. In practice, this doesn't really change very much, except that we note that the transition between elements can sometimes be a bit messy, with a couple of backs and forths – and this challenges the definition of the cycles, especially since Aries is not necessarily the first Fire sign in these progressions. It also challenges history, because contemporary astrological writings confirm that 1603 was treated as the beginning of the new cycle.^⁸

What are we to do? I think the first thing is that we simply have to acknowledge that the cycle isn't as regular as it was historically proclaimed. I am reminded of how the ancient Chinese wanted to base their calendars on the 12 year Jupiter cycle – except that it isn't precisely 12 years! Or how the ancient Egyptians used the Sothic cycle based on the heliacal rising of Sirius – giving a 365 day year precisely that also slipped over time.

This brings up the point that “almost equal” doesn't make it as a calendar system over time. In this case, I think we need to go with the actual usage: first time in an element for the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, it's a mutation. First time in a fire sign, it's a great mutation – the beginning of the entire cycle. Now, we can all use our computers to figure out the cycle length – we don't have to guess.

Footnotes

1 “BCE” stands for “Before Common Era” and is the currently preferred term for what used to be called “BC.” The date source is: Campion, 1994, pp 86-87.

2Campion, 2008, p 75.

3 Kennedy, E. S., et al. The Astrological History of MashA'allah. Harvard Monographs in the History of Science. Cambridge, Mass.,: Harvard University Press, 1971.

4 Burnett, Charles, Keiji Yamamoto and Michio Yano. Al-Qabisi (Alcabitious): The Introduction to Astrology. London: Warburg Institute, 2004.

5 Abu, Ma'shar, Keiji Yamamoto, and Charles Burnett. On Historical Astrology : The Book of Religions and Dynasties (on the Great Conjunctions). Islamic Philosophy, Theology, and Science,. 2 vols. Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2000, p 55.

6 Abu, Ma'shar, Keiji Yamamoto, and Charles Burnett, 2000, beginning p 31.

7 Abu, Ma'shar, Keiji Yamamoto, and Charles Burnett, 2000, p 7.

8See for example, Edlyn, Richard. Prae-Nuncius Sydereus an Astrological Treatise of the Effects of the Great Conjunction of the Two Superiour Planets, Saturn & Jupiter, October the Xth, 1663, and Other Configurations Concomitant : Wherein the Fate of Europe for These Next Twenty Years Is (from the Most Rational Grounds of Art) More Than Probably Conjectured, and the Success of the Present Design of the Turk against Christendome Occasionally Hinted At. London: Printed by, 1664.

The Pope and the Sexual Molestation Scandal.

2010-04-01T15:48:00.001-04:00

The extent of the child molestation scandal against a series of Catholic priests is just breaking, and increasingly, the Pope is being implicated as yet another church administrator who wanted the problem to go away. For this, we can examine the Aries Ingress for 2010 calculated for Vatican City, although the scandal broke a bit before that. It is difficult to come up with a chart for the problem itself, because some of the cases being discussed date back to the 1950s. But also, one has to acknowledge that the church policy of celibacy may have some bearing on these cases. While it may be in the interests of the Catholic hierarchy to attempt to distract people from the heinous crimes and cover-ups within their ranks by focusing on the fact that so much of the molestation can be called homosexual, feminists for years have drawn attention to the fact that rape is as much or more a crime of power as a crime of sex.

There's so much to see in this chart! The Sun-Saturn opposition straddles the angles, thereby indicating that this is one of the hot spots where the Aries Ingress will have a great effect. This fact alone suggests that, this time, the scandal cannot be swept under the rug. But there are further arguments that confirm this. The Moon is partile conjunct the 9^th house cusp. In most charts, we'd hardly read this – but the subject of our inquiry is a Church – a 9^th house matter. Normally, we would read Moon in Taurus as wonderful – but this Moon in Taurus is conjunct Algol – the Head of the Medusa. The Medusa – a female chthonic symbol – the old goddesses of fate and fury: the ones that could wreck havoc and were the most feared of the female deities. It would be so easy to simply leave this as a symbol of “beheading” of the Church – a powerful symbol that, before this is over, Benedict must go. But I think both Benedict and the rest of the Church hierarchy have vastly underestimated the rage that these stories of abuse followed by cover-up have generated.

This idea is further supported by the South Node in the 10^th – the destruction of the Head of State. In Vatican City, the Pope is the head of State. But with the Sun trine Mars, I have no doubt he will go down fighting. I also don't doubt that he earnestly believes that he has done nothing wrong.

Armageddon Now!

2010-02-26T22:07:00.002-05:00

In Christian-dominated cultures, there seems to be a continual waiting game for Armageddon - the end of the world. From the teens on, people debate how many of the signs in Revelation are present - and thus how close we are to the End of Times. I remember very spirited debates about this when I was in college.

What the passion of youth doesn't seem to notice is that this has been a debate ever since Revelation was written. Early Christianity expected that the End of Time was right around the corner: the later Christian establishment had to recontextualize the mission once it became clear that people were there for the long haul.

Other cultures have not viewed time in such a linear fashion. Aristotle posited no beginning or end. Many cultures, such as the Vedic one, see time as cyclic or circular, so "beginning" and "end" are simply relative positions. In a cyclic perspective, even the destruction of the world may be seen as a cyclic event: after destruction comes the new creation.

Astrology shares cyclic time with many cultures. So why should astrologers get caught up with End of the World scenarios? The answer is: we are also embedded in all the rest of our cultural matrices. It's hard for us to buck the trend.

As we look ahead to the aspect patterns for the next couple of years, it's worth remembering that we are not the first humans to face aspects this difficult. Yes, we are overpopulated, overconsuming, overpolluting - but that doesn't mean extinction is only a heartbeat away.

As we approached the year 2000 (in many respects, an arbitrary designation, being 2,000 years from: exactly what? Not even the birth of Jesus!) it seemed to me that the hype was too enthusiastic. But it occurred to me that it was diagnostic of something very important underneath. For all that astrology is cyclic, Christian astrologers, or astrologers born Christian, find it difficult to erase the arrow of time from their mentality. In this system, there is a creation of the world (whether by God or the Big Bang), there is the incarnation of Jesus (although this may be dismissed or minimized by Post-Christians), and then the End of the World. Those of us living now missed the early Big Events - unless we count reincarnations, of course.

How could our lives be important and ultimately meaningful if we miss the ending as well, falling merely somewhere in the middle? Our egos drive us to the position that if there must be an end, then we must be part of it. The idea that the world could go on without us is just simply unacceptable. In the words of Tom Lehrer, "We will all go together when we go!"

So please, let us remember as these aspects approach fruition that maybe the point is to survive, to learn, to make choices - and to go on. It's just that the special effects for that scenario aren't nearly so cool

Critical Thinking in Astrology

2010-01-18T08:03:00.002-05:00

I have visited this subject several times in these public forums - here, and on You Tube, but I am very concerned about the way that astrology is taught.

One of the effects of the fact that astrological education is ad-hoc, is that many extremely well-meaning people have taught it over the years. Enthusiasm may be necessary for good teaching, but it does not make a good teacher by itself. Many people who have taught astrology for years, but had no formal training in education themselves, have adopted the general idea - simplify the concepts, then have everybody do their own charts, and watch the ah ha! moments accumulate. Then follow this up with continued work with everybody's transits or progressions, family or famous, and therein lies an astrological education.

Sadly, no. What this method of teaching conveys to 90% of the attendees is that astrology "works" - but that wasn't in question! The problem is: much as people find their own charts and those of nearest and dearest compelling, this does not provide systematic training. It's like the lab in a biology course without the lecture part - no theoretical framework to hang it on. I may be known for giving a lot of practical examples in my own teaching, but you cannot do the examples without providing a coherent system to go with them - because every chart is different, and then people don't know how to apply your methods to the unknown chart.

A good teacher has to understand curriculum as well as how to approach a chart. There was a considerable trend in the 70s and 80s to simplify the astrological vocabulary. This trend originated primarily out of the work of a very few teachers who had taken on the job of teaching astrology from the ground up to groups of people who could best be described as of New Age persuasion - all in the course of a long weekend or a week.

Now let's be honest: you cannot really learn astrology that way. You can learn a few rudiments. But these ideas were being presented as full systems. As full systems, these had the potency of a fifth of scotch thrown into a reservoir. Nobody's getting drunk on that!

Why did this happen? Well - among other things, my experience as a teacher of biology, martial arts and astrology over forty-somthing years tells me that Americans hate to memorize. So if learning is going to be "fun," just take the memorization out! You're then left with people who have oversimplified concepts, and some cookbooks at home that they use to look up a reading. These people are not success stories in the realm of astrology.

Learning astrology is hard: but it doesn't have to be made harder by inappropriate teaching. Good teaching doesn't leave out the memorization: but then, it has to teach how to logically and systematically engage the concepts and derive a meaning by logical application of those concepts as they relate to the circumstances at hand, which themselves are also analyzed.

This is the key. But it must be applied rigorously.

New Year's Resolution

2010-01-02T09:48:00.002-05:00

Maggie asked me yesterday if we were too old to make resolutions. But then, since I don't have a Capricorn Moon, maybe this doesn't bother me!

One of my resolutions that has achieved additional force each year is to try to be more honest: not just with others, but with myself. Now, some of you may think I have too sharp a tongue to begin with! But one of the features of the decade of the fifties (age, not birth year, although right now, they correspond) is that you discover that there really are things that you will not have time to get back to. Not that there is no future, either! But one learns that one really should prioritize and not waste the time remaining on useless endeavors. Strangely, this makes time seem to speed up.

At any rate, my subject for today is that I want to skewer one of the most insidious phrases in astrology:

"It works for me."

We've all used it - and it's time to stop.

Here's why: what does it actually mean?

Does it mean that you don't know why it works, and haven't bothered to investigate?
Does it mean that you've never examined the history of the technique you're being asked about, so you don't know its original basis, logic or context?
Does it mean that you know it doesn't work for other people?
Does it mean you are just thinking off the top of your head, and you don't know what else to say?
Are you such an important authority that what you say is sufficient answer?
Are you simply trying to get your audience to move on?

Now I've used the expression too, so I'm not just being critical of others. But I began to expunge it from my vocabulary about ten years ago. The thing is: when we give talks, classes, or write articles, we are mostly in teaching mode. And when you are teaching - you need to know that there are things you can say which inspire learning and curiosity: and there are things that shut people and learning down. Argument by authority, which is what this used to be called, is one such shutdown. If you say that, how do I disagree with you without challenging your integrity? And it's not your integrity - it's your method that I may be questioning.

But if you join me with a New Year's Resolution to get this out of your cliches, then what do you do to substitute for it, or help to train you to choose other phrases? Here are some suggestions:

I have found...
I have not yet had an opportunity to study the history of this technique fully, so I can only give you my preliminary results....
When I attempted to apply the methods of ___, I found I could only get results by doing this....

It is not inappropriate do do something different or new. Even as august an authority (in my book) as William Lilly not infrequently made reference to the "Ancients" doing X, and then Lilly would propose Y. The point was that Lilly told you that the Ancients did X before he then proposed Y. In other words, he put all the cards on the table.

In my job as Academic Dean at Kepler College, I often have interviewed people who wanted to challenge some of the astrology courses that we teach. Oftentimes, my first question is to ask people to name five astrology authors they have read and enjoyed. Then I ask them to distinguish between the work of those authors. More frequently than not, they cannot - or they think that by saying that So-and-So is transpersonal and Thus-and-Such is Jungian, they have answered my question.

If you do not study your sources well enough to tease out what they are actually doing that is different from other sources, then how can you actually distinguish what is unique in your own work? And how can you hope to enlarge your horizons?

Critical Method in Astrology

2009-06-22T15:05:00.003-04:00

Some time ago, I did a Youtube presentation about critical thinking in astrology. I didn't expand on the idea then - but I should have. Here are some additional thoughts.

When I look at how astrologers think compared to other groups, I am struck by a simple fact: astrologers are about as wet as it's possible to be. What do I mean by that?

Almost all astrologers are way better at accumulating techniques than in culling them. Why is this significant, and why should this matter? Consider this. You read a series of books on astrology, and learn about, let's say, progressions and solar returns. Then Life throws you a curve. Your run your techniques to try to understand what is going on - and a portion of the time, they show you exactly what you expect to see (at least in terms of explanation!) - and a portion of the time: they don't. So what happens in this case? Chances are, you go off in search of another technique. And with the number that we have in astrology, chances are: you'll find one!

And then what? This is the question that astrologers don't ask. Can you keep adding techniques indefinitely? If you could, then professional astrological readings given by people who have been in astrology for decades would be hours in length, while readings given by relative newcomers would be short. This isn't necessarily true - professional astrologers are clearly finding a way to find the techniques that give them bang for the buck, ignoring the ones that don't. But this is easier for someone doing a lot of readings - you can see what is working consistently, and what isn't.

But what of the astrology buff - the person who may be passionately interested, but isn't making a living at it? With more occasional charts, it may be very hard to sort out the best techniques. In fact, this can be a very difficult position to be in, because not being able to winnow down the techniques can very easily lead to confusion.

How frustrating can it be to read book after book after book, attend conference after conference after conference? And then instead of getting clarity, you can never figure out exactly how to do it, because each time you try, there seems to be too many conflicting possibilities. One gets the sense that you know that there is something there, but it's hard to pick it out in practice. So you think that the speakers or authors that are demonstrating it just have some magical ability, that it seems to work for them.

I would like to propose a working axiom that would make almost everybody's astrological learning curve easier. It's very simple: perhaps astrology doesn't have to explain everything. Consider how this simple idea can free you up phenomenally.

Consider, for examples, how geneticists don't feel they have to explain all of intelligence. If a person seems to be brighter or dimmer than might be expected, geneticists don't have to run out and try to find some other genetics analysis to try to explain it: they can simply say: there must be an environmental effect. A meteorologist doesn't have to go to a conference to find a new technique when a forecast is wrong: he or she simply says: either there must be a factor I didn't take into account, or perhaps my weightings were wrong - or even that my forecast was only statistical to begin with!

What we collectively do which other knowledge areas don't is to create a tent big enough to capture all possible outcomes - no matter how unlikely. We never stop to think that the odd case may simply be better explained by something other than astrology. Instead, we risk sacrificing what accuracy we have by focusing too much on the out-liers: those one-in-a-million shits that may be real - just not likely. We don't stop to consider that the astrology that can deal with the oddballs may be embarrassingly bad on the routine.

Hope in the Time of Pluto in Capricorn

2009-05-23T18:14:00.006-04:00

Note: this was given as a talk at NORWAC 2009.

Hope in the Time of Pluto in Capricorn

So Pluto is now in Capricorn for the next fourteen years – until 2023-2024. It's a good time to re-examine the recent pass of Pluto through Sagittarius, and also to look ahead and to speculate about what we might expect from Pluto in Capricorn. What suggested my topic title is the concern within our community in contemplating the next few years, especially in light of the so-called end of the Mayan calendar.

The Mayan calendar had several components, but the one that people mean when they talk about the end is what is called the Long Count. The Mayans used a 260 day year, a 360 day cycle, a Venus cycle, and others, but the Long Count correlates to ¹/₅ of the precession cycle of the equinoxes. While there is some disagreement about the exact correlation with our Gregorian calendar, the best guess is that the Mayan cycle will end on December 21^st, 2012.

Does that mean that the world comes to an end? Well, considering that our species is considerably older than the 25,771 years of the precession cycle, much less the ¹/₅ section which has been in effect since 3114 BCE, I’d say you better keep paying on your bills and taxes in 2012.

But how is it that this question of the end of the world even came up? Such a speculative question will have an equally speculative answer, but let me point out two theories, both of which are directly related to the fact that our society still “thinks” from a Christian perspective, even if the reality is far more pluralistic.

It was the Christian perspective which took the creation story of the Jews, and tacked on the other end: the eschatos, or end of the world. Aristotle and most of the ancient thinkers didn't believe in either a beginning or end of the world. Dualistic religions like Zoroastrianism saw a battle between the Light and Dark Sides of the Force – with neither side dominant forever. Within a dualistic religion, there would be an “end” to the dominance of one side, but that's not the end of the world. However, Christianity became obsessed with the End of Times, especially because of Revelation, the New Testament book devoted to it. The early Christians thought The End of Times was right around the corner. Every time period since, there have been folk who have delighted in showing how the latest wars and economic disasters were foretold, and this really is IT. Why here? Why now? My personal theory is that this has to be the end of times, because my life is so important, that how could I miss the only really juicy moment in time left to me? Westerners have never understood the Eastern critique of ego as unimportant or illusory – instead, we have magnified our egos into something so compelling that most Christians believe that their very personalities persist in Heaven or Hell for all time. Unless the End of Times is now, then maybe I'm not important enough to experience it? You mean – Life could go on without me? Unthinkable!

But apart from this rather grosser concept of personal involvement, a subtler form of the “beginning to end” cosmology of Christianity also remains. Despite the fact that astrology is intrinsically cyclic, astrologers continue to think within the arrow of time. And then we impose our thought patterns on other cultures, like the Mayans. If a society thinks in a cyclical fashion, then the end of a cycle is also the beginning of the next one, and neither perspective is “better” - and “beginning” and “end” are arbitrary points on a circle anyway! So the end of the Mayan calendar is also the beginning of the Mayan calendar.

But I know you are still wondering: what did happen in 3114 BCE? It’s hard to tell, because of chronology construction issues, not to mention that the Ancients' Post-Intelligencer wasn’t publishing yet, but this does correspond more or less to the beginning of the Kali Yuga and maybe the lifetime of Enoch, as well as the earliest construction on Stonehenge. Looked at in this light, the end of the previous Long Count doesn‘t look like a disaster.

Ah! You say, but aside from the Mayans, what about the phenomenon of Saturn in Libra, Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries over the period 2009-2013? This is even being called a T-square, but please look at this diagram. I have created a graphic ephemeris from 1986 to 2034, in part to show the entire period of Pluto in Capricorn. This diagram shows Saturn on out.

When you move back from the moment, you may be struck by how the period from 2009-2013 doesn’t look like the worst period on this ephemeris: 2017 looks more active, for example.

If we are to understand just how significant our egoic place in life is within the greater stream of human existence, then we need to look at previous examples of whatever astrological configuration is of interest – and see whether there are lessons there to help elucidate the meaning. To help us understand this more clearly, I want to examine not only the last two passes of Pluto in Capricorn, but that slice of Pluto from Sagittarius through Aquarius. Because, in order to understand a sign transit, we also have to see what cards a sign is dealt by the previous sign – and how the following sign has to clean up afterwards, so to speak. However, as we examine earlier periods, we need to remember always that astrology acts within the matrix of the society of the time. What a pass of Pluto in a sign can bring is dependent on the resources of that society, whether economic, environmental, or spiritual.

Pass One: The Early Modern Period 1502-1516

As our period opens, Lorenzo di Medici – that great patron of arts and philosophy who commissioned Ficino's translations of the Corpus Hermeticum – is already dead, having died in 1492. Ficino himself died in 1499. The Americas have already been discovered. In the 15^th c., the Portuguese and Spanish Empires are the great world powers. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 had split the world between the them. Oh, yes – and at this point, every Christian in Europe is a Catholic – there have been occasional rebellions, but none of them have been successful, and most have been ruthlessly suppressed.

Here is a long view of the outer planet cycles of this period. On this chart, you can see several hot spots: 1505 and 1524 especially. More about 1524 later.

What happens in around 1505? Young Martin Luther is so terrified by a lightening storm that he promises the Virgin that, should he survive, he will become a monk. He does – and he does. Michaelangelo's David had just been publicly installed in Florence. Queen Isabella of Spain died in 1504.

This period had an opposition of Saturn in late Cancer and Neptune in late Capricorn.

From the standpoint of exploration, this period of Pluto in Sagittarius from 1502 – 1516 marked the time of the devastation of populations in the Americas: through environmental destruction, slavery, and deliberate policies of genocide.¹ It was also the time of the introduction of New World plants and animals, such as turkeys, potatoes, sugar and corn into Europe. Columbus' last voyage to the Americas was in 1502. The first smallpox pandemic in Cuba began in 1516, just as Pluto was moving into Capricorn, and it jumped from there to the rest of emerging Hispanola. These major epidemics had run their course by the end of Pluto in Capricorn.

However, let’s examine this issue of religious genocide in a bit more detail. Here we have the chart for Ferdinand II, King of Aragon, and, from 1503, Holy Roman Emperor, and, who, with Isabella, was responsible for not one, but two, genocides: that against the Native Americans, and that against the Moors in the Iberian Peninsula.

A cursory view of his chart reveals Pluto in a familiar-looking place in Leo, with Uranus, Neptune and Saturn in familiar signs, even if this combination of degrees doesn’t look quite right. There are two dangerous indications in his chart that show something of the religious fanaticism that would condone, if not encourage, genocide as a religious policy. The first is that very Pluto conjunct the 3^rd house cusp. There is a traditional association of religion with both the 9^th and 3^rd houses – but Rob has pointed out the association of the 3^rd house specifically with heresies. Here, with the context of the time and place, the Pluto marks extreme religious intolerance.

The second argument of Ferdinand's intolerance was the Moon conjunct the fixed star Yed Prior. These days, Yed Prior is at 2 Sagittarius tropically, but in 1452, it was in Scorpio. My friend Diana Rosenberg points out that this star is in the left hand of Ophiuchus where he grasps the serpent – Diana says,

“The left hand of Ophiuchus, a shamanic healer, makes this a particular area of progress and innovation in medicine, surgery and public health. There is a very dark side to this area of the zodiac, and their physical prowess can be used for more sinister ends; seemingly open, optimistic, and friendly, they are nonetheless very private people, often have "skeletons (or arsenals!) in the closet" and are frequently embroiled in conflict and controversy. Avaricious, critical, argumentative, sarcastic, hypocritical, intolerant, excessively fond of power (“control freaks"), they may blame others for their problems, feeling aggrieved and even paranoid, working hard to make sure they will be victorious over their enemies.”²

Ferdinand and Isabella came to power in an era of general religious toleration in the Iberian Peninsula. Political factions rarely divided out easily along religious lines - until after they united Spain. At their crowning, their regalia recognized the diversity of their kingdoms, a diversity that cruelly evaporated shortly thereafter.³

Genocide for religious reasons sounds an awful lot like the dark side of Pluto in Sagittarius. However, plagues have long been associated with Saturn: and so I have to presume that the plague part is Pluto in Saturn’s sign – and the disease struck mainly after 1520, when Pluto had transited into Capricorn.

It actually seems somewhat surprising to our ears that the date we consider the quintessential discovery date – 1492 – falls with Pluto in Scorpio. The idea that Pluto in Sagittarius marked such a tremendous expansion in knowledge of the world is not so surprising. What may not at first seem so obvious is that this massive increase in awareness of the rest of the globe had absolutely no discernible impact on anyone's religious faith in Europe. Instead, the conquistadors walked side-by-side with the friars, who saw the discovery of new peoples only as an opportunity to expand the Faith. And all the while, back in Europe, serious Christians were questioning the wealth, avarice, and sexual improprieties of the Catholic clergy – matters that would shortly come to a boiling point as Pluto changed signs.

Now one can make a considerable case for the birth of Protestantism as being a Pluto in Capricorn affair, just as one can make a case for Pluto in Virgo being the Space Race to the Moon. As you can see, Pluto flirted with Capricorn in 1516, then stayed there in 1517. Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the Church door October 31^st, 1517, almost universally regarded as the (successful) birth of Protestantism – although there were other church reformers before him. This Pluto in Capricorn religious reform cycle ran through into 1532 – which was the crisis of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn – leading to the secession of the Church of England from the Church of Rome..

You might recall that earlier when we were comparing other eras to the present one, we noted an interesting confluence of outer planets around 1524. Actually, you didn't need the outer planets (as we know them) to pick out this period. This is the New Moon in February 1524, also parenthetically, an eclipse. This stellium in Pisces continued through and past the Pisces New Moon. And the contemporary astrologers didn’t even know that Neptune was part of the pattern. Note the Pluto in Capricorn, of course – but what a 9^th house! This chart is set for Italy – both because of its stark importance still as the axis of Christianity, and because the big European event of the time was the invasion of Italy by France. Observe the close proximity of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. This is enough to allow one to unequivocally classify this as a Triple Conjunction.

This major conjunction had been noticed by astrologers decades beforehand because of the number of planets living in Pisces that Winter and Spring. This actually spawned one of the first waves of prophetic pulp literature at the beginning of the era of the printing press, with all sorts of popular broadsides, pamphlets and books purported to have been written by astrologers, saints, and seers, forecasting the end of the world by flooding. Mostly, the professional astrologers were pretty conservative in their predictions.⁴

So what happened? Well – it was a wet year. France was in the midst of invading Italy at that point, and deforestation as a result of the invasion collaborated with the weather to produce erosion and flooding that did have a severe impact on some of Northern Italy’s flood plains for some years afterwards.

But events? Some skirmishes around Cape Fear, fighting between the Spanish and French, and incursions by Spanish conquistadors in modern El Salvador. There was a siege of Marseilles, and the invading French army besieged Pavia.

Ok.. These are perhaps some interesting events, but do you get the sense that this was an earth-shaking year, one worthy of all the hype about a flood of biblical proportions? So what happened when it wasn’t the End of the World?

On the astrological front, it wasn’t entirely pretty. While the pro’s had mostly stayed away from the more sensational predictions, a number of the less scrupulous claimed astrological plumage, and so astrologers were blamed. Coming in the wake of Pico della Mirandola and Gianfrancesco Pico’s Disputations Against Astrology, astrology’s reputation was tarnished.

But the serious astrologers also realized that aspect patterns were not the be-all and end-all. After all, Ptolemy didn't use them at all, favoring eclipses and lunations. While interest continued in the use of major conjunctions, it was not the exclusive focus. In the 17^th c. William Lilly wrote on eclipses,⁵ and yet Richard Edlin⁶ and John Goad⁷ wrote on major conjunctions in mundane, and the use of aspects in weather prediction respectively.

And furthermore, no matter how important a specific Jupiter-Saturn conjunction might be, each one was understood to be part of a larger 960 year cycle. And lest you think that the existence of a 960 year cycle was merely an idle construct or theoretical statement, consider: when the Great Schism in the Catholic Church resulted in a multiplicity of Popes, one of the French Cardinals, Pierre d’Ailly, used that 960 year cycle to predict the end of the world as occurring in 1789 – and that therefore, humans had to resolve the Schism, not God.⁸ I have to say that I consider it extraordinary that a French Medieval prelate could come up with the year 1789 – the year of the French Revolution – certainly the end of the world as he would have known it!

So we arrive at the end of Pluto in Capricorn in the 1520s, and what have we seen? Surely, the largest theme is religious, first with the expansion of missionary work in the New World with Pluto in Sagittarius, followed by a breakdown in the unity of the Church with Pluto in Capricorn. But this fissure does not reduce Christian faith. For the moment, I am deferring discussion of Pluto in Aquarius in the 16^th c. - but more about that a bit later.

Pass 2: The Enlightenment Era

We can begin with the Seven Years War, also called the French and Indian War in North America, which featured fighting in Europe, North America and Asia, involving both the mother countries of Europe and their colonies.

In the Aries Ingress for 1756, when the war started, note that Pluto was stationary at 18 Sagittarius at the MC. The war dragged on for seven years – with the map of Europe ending up where it began, but France lost most of her overseas colonies. While seemingly a stalemate, Europe enjoyed internal peace until after the French Revolution. The war ended in 1763 – as Pluto was going into Capricorn!

If no technical state of war ensued, this Ingress was nonetheless met by another seven year conflict – a little known one called the Regulator Movement, which can be considered both a forerunner to and a catalyst of the American Revolutionary War, and ran from 1764 to 1771. And here I get to tell the deeds of my adopted state, North Carolina, where a citizen’s uprising challenged the entrenched colonial government over extreme corruption and frequent double taxation. What had happened in North Carolina was a complete severance of relations between the Upper Class and everyone else.

Here you see Pluto at the Southern Bending for the Aries Ingress of 1764 – and a Pluto position that just might look a little familiar to us today. Now if this is a true progenitor to the American Revolution, then consider its successor…

One thought is that the US Revolutionary War stands as a great event for Pluto at the end of its period in Capricorn in the 1760-1770s, as Henry VIII’s rebellion against Rome did in the 1510-1520s. One a religious event, the other a political one – and yet religion and politics mingled in each case. There is a certain symmetry there. And there also is an astrological explanation for the distinctions between the American and French Revolutions most famously made by Hannah Arendt⁹ – that the American Revolution should be seen as in its earlier meaning, as with the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary – a return to a better time. It is in this sense of “return” that we understand the use of the word “revolution” as a synonym for “solar return.” Arendt pointed out that the colonial Americans did not see themselves as creating an entirely new system of government, but as re-establishing classical ideals, especially those of Athenian democracy. That ideal is enshrined in the neo-classical architecture of the early federal buildings of Washington DC, or Jefferson's Monticello – a hope for a perfect melding of the best of Greek and Roman architecture and politics. By contrast, Arendt pointed out that the French revolutionists rapidly went beyond a more participatory democracy to a deliberate reconstruction of society from the ground up, eliminating not only the Crown, the aristocracy, but much of the Church as well. This New World Order had nothing in common with the old regime – and it was the French Revolution, not the American one, that changed the meaning of the word “revolution” to meaning a break with the past, rather than a cyclic re-establishment of Things-as-They-should-Be. The stark contrast in France between the old and the new terrified the rest of Europe, leading to an upswing of conservatism that itself was only toppled beginning with the revolutions of 1848 – a time of Pluto in late Aries.

The U.S. Revolution with Pluto in Capricorn was pragmatic, idealistic, and innovative in creating new structures – and it did not shake the foundations of Old Europe, since the revolution was specific to the emerging United States. It was also successful, in that the United States was created as a stable country. Across the sea in France, the Revolution of Pluto in Aquarius began as idealistic, and then rapidly became ruthless destruction – and was ultimately unsuccessful, because, within 15 years, France was a monarchy again.

But this period was not just about Revolution. Because this era marked the period known as the Enlightenment, and there are major philosophical, as well as religious, changes. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while not the original author of the phrase “Noble Savage,” nonetheless upended the Christian concept of original sin by positing that Natural Man was the one with the morals – that civilization had degraded us morally. He laid out his ideas in the period from 1754 to 1762¹⁰ – when Pluto was transiting from roughly 12 Sagittarius to 1 Capricorn. Rousseau’s Pluto in Capricorn work, Social Contract, certainly has the look and feel of Pluto in Saturn's sign!

We can thus see that in both the 16^th and the 18^th c. passes of Pluto in Capricorn, that there is a mix of religion and politics. But if it seems that the 16^th c. pass was primarily religious, while the 18^th c. pass was primarily political, think again. Because 1776 also marked the death of David Hume, the first philosopher who can truly be called an atheist within the modern definition of the term. Until the 18^th c., atheism was a derisive term, but nobody could actually believe it possible to not believe in God. Hume’s philosophy, promulgated under Pluto in Sagittarius and Capricorn, did not require a God, Demiurge, or Clockmaker. This represented a radical departure in Western thinking. So here, the period of Pluto in Sagittarius saw the introduction of the flip side of belief: atheism. Later, this seed germinated, and in the 19^th c., atheism became one dominant theme in European intellectual discourse.¹¹

While society was unraveling in France, English boys of the Upper Class were doing the Grand Tour of Italy – rediscovering Rome, the erotic mosaics of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and glorying in paganism generally. This flirtation with other religious streams led to still further interest in world religions and the quest for the original religion. With Pluto in Aquarius continuing the desirability of something old, this interest in original religion is hardly surprising.

The fact that things were not going so well philosophically for Christianity does not alter the fact that the period from Pluto in Sagittarius to Pluto in Capricorn was a time of religious fervent and change. It’s just that the ground rules were different.

So what do we make of these two previous passes? The idea that Pluto’s transit of a sign highlights a sign’s qualities has been seen repeatedly. For example, Sputnik was launched October 4, 1957, with Pluto at 1 Virgo. The first moon landing on July 20, 1969 had Pluto at 23 Virgo. But before you wonder about the 23 degrees, consider that the last landing on the moon was by Apollo 17 in 1972 – the year that Pluto’s retrograde cycle took it back into Virgo for the last time.

It’s very easy to see the “can-do” engineering attitude as Virgo. For this brief moment in our history, nerds were cool. But let’s be honest: this was the space race – the USSR and the USA were in a contest over national pride. In other words, what we saw being played out through Virgo was the overbearing mutually assured destruction contest of superpowers, which also resulted in an insane arms race that continues to have severe environmental danger 40 years later.

So, thinking about these past passes, I propose the following adjustment to our understanding of Pluto’s transit through a sign: Pride goeth before a fall.¹² We can accordingly note that, while the Pluto in Virgo engineers succeeded spectacularly in getting us to the Moon – we didn’t stay there! We didn’t develop a colony, we didn’t follow up with an observatory. The moon launch became a dead end instead of becoming the gateway to the exploration of our solar system. President Kennedy perfectly embodied the Pluto in Leo call to put a man on the moon – but he said it while Pluto was in Virgo. The vision that got us there couldn’t encompass the concept of knowledge and engineering for its own sake – once the deed was accomplished, the funding was cut. We went for the wrong reason, and having gotten there, couldn’t sustain it. Pluto in Leo was gone, Pluto in Virgo spent, and the needs of Pluto in Libra would direct our attention elsewhere. In the words of President Lyndon Johnson: “It's unfortunate, but the way Americans are, now that they have developed all of this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they'll probably just piss it all away.”¹³

Our usual concept of Pluto in a sign is that it totally disrupts and reforms matters relating to the affairs of that sign. So it was pretty obvious with Pluto going into Sagittarius that the most likely institution for the phoenix in the ashes scenario was organized religion. And certainly we can make a great case for the period of Pluto in Sagittarius as being the triumph of the Religious Right – and then its rejection. Pluto went into Sagittarius in 1995 – during Clinton’s presidency. Now one might at first wonder what Clinton had to do with this Pluto in Sagittarius trend. From the day after Clinton was elected, “Impeach Clinton” bumper-stickers sprouted out of nowhere in the South – that land where Republicans could still sometimes win elections in 2008. There was a visceral reaction of a religious Right minority who loathed Clinton – and we saw this manifest with his second term in the form of the Impeachment, where the issues had absolutely nothing to do with his Presidency, and everything to do with his morality. This outrage, fanned by paid hate-mongers like Rush Limbaugh, resulted in the election of George W. Bush, who, along with his followers, saw no Christian conflict with lying about weapons of mass destruction, and torturing individuals savagely and repeatedly – but who, as far as we know, was absolutely faithful to his wife.

Last year, just after the Religious Right celebrated the nomination of Sarah Palin, the economy fell apart, sealing the deal against the Republicans, and leaving the Religious Right looking even more tarnished as one Palin family melodrama after another hit the national stage.

So one can legitimately ask: what about financial matters? Is the Pluto sign Ingress a contributing factor to the economic collapse?

About ten years ago, I had a master class of private students in Atlanta intensely interested in financial matters. They did a lot of study of financial cycles, and one thing that did emerge was that the transit of outer planets through the signs was not a useful indicator of financial success or failure. In other words, the 2008 financial debacle should not be attributed solely or primarily to Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn. There are other factors to consider. Penny Shelton did find some correlation between market bottoms and the 21^st degree of the cardinals – but we’re not there yet - a possibly depressing thought.

One that comes to mind immediately has been the Saturn-Uranus. There is some evidence that this is a combination which produces volatility. Interestingly, the peak of the dot-com crisis came in February 2000, just as the Triple Conjunction of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was forming, along with Uranus square to the whole group. I am illustrating that period – and this shows what a tight aspect pattern really looks like: here you see the tightness of the formation in the period from February to March 2000: much more impressive than the one in 2009-2011, especially as I have expanded up the time scale.

But perhaps a better recent pattern for consideration in interpreting the immediate future is 1989. 1989, you might recall, was when Saturn, Neptune and Uranus were all circling around each other in late Sagittarius, and then early Capricorn. So that should be a good signature for the time anticipated over the next few years.

Now firstly – we made it through. Ok, well, we elected a Bush… And there is the expression, the Revolutions of 1989, which represents the fall of Communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union. It was the Savings and Loan Crisis. It was Tiananmen Square. And then of course there was the Exxon Valdez. So there is no question that this was living in interesting times.

Clearly, that year highlighted crises in all the areas we can expect to continue to be hotspots: political instability, religious instability, and environmental instability.

But what is the difference between a crisis and a meltdown? Because this is the essence of understanding the context of these celestial events. And it's worth asking whether this is a question that can be always or even usually answered astrologically at all, or whether it is also a function of the stability of the political, religious, or other structures in question. For example, the pass of Pluto into Capricorn before the 16^th c. did not result in the breakdown of the Catholic Church. It was the time of Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon. The Catholic Church didn't self-destruct in this era: if anything, it produced some of its greatest glories. However, in Asia, this was the time of the Mongols, and their expansion had considerable impact on the expansion of Buddhism. Strong institutions don't automatically fall apart, even if they are ruled by the sign Pluto is in. Pluto's passage is more like a stress test! And it's worth always remembering that astrological events are not the only events happening in a particular time period. The existence of celestial influence does not preclude other kinds of influences!

There is a huge tendency in the astrological community to anticipate massive effects of Outer Planet aspects – and then quietly move on when the anticipated earth-shaking events generally don’t occur. Let me make a natal analogy: when you work with a client on yearly updates, do you ever discuss the fact that, ten or twenty years from now, they’re likely to remember only one year out of a decade? Do you tell your client that this is not that year?

The fact is, aspects happen. Even for those nine other years of a decade, there’s plenty to say to the client. But it is clear that it has proven difficult for astrologers to not focus on the next great aspect pattern as something akin to Armageddon, instead of just the naming theme for the next astrological conference.

So am I saying there’s nothing to fear from Pluto in Capricorn, and that further, there’s nothing new under the Sun? Not at all! What I am saying is that the Outer planet aspects by themselves are not the point.

We expect three major themes with Pluto in Capricorn:

Religious reform
Political reform
Environmental issues

The first two – religious and political – are essentially clean-up from Pluto in Sagittarius. In fact, they are already clearly in process. Wall Street fell apart in the closing phase of Pluto in Sagittarius. There's little question that the kind of speculative instruments that had been invented look like Sagittarius exuberance of the worst kind. And in the dawning days of Pluto in Capricorn, we learned that the only category of religious affiliation growing in the USA is “none of the above.”¹⁴^{And doesn't the expansion of government regulation sound a lot like Pluto in Capricorn?}

But is that it? It should be so easy!

Because now, we're set up to discuss what we didn't do in our study of the last two historical passes: carrying the story forward into Pluto in Aquarius. Because this is where the ideas of classical astrologers veer off from modern astrologers, because modern astrologers have created this myth of Aquarius as the sign of universal brotherhood, based on an ideal of Uranus as being a much sexier sign ruler than Saturn.

Ok, I’m not pulling any punches this morning, and I’m about to talk about how this worked historically. Living in revolutionary times is only wonderful and romantic when you are in your teens and twenties. When you are over fifty, it messes with your retirement! Because, like it or not, when you are older than forty-something, you are established, even if you’re not part of the Establishment.

What happens to religion after Sagittarius and Capricorn is ugly. In the 16^th c., it was called the Counter-Reformation or the Council of Trent – and it led to barbaric religious warfare for over a century. In the 18^th c., it was the French Revolution – with the motto of “Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!” sounds absolutely fantastic on paper, but in fact gave way to the excesses and savagery of the period rightly named the Terror, when the rule of law turned into the horror of the guillotine.

A moment alone with the quality of the signs gives you a hint – at least in mutable and cardinal signs, change is possible. Fixed signs resist change – a political quality we call “reactionary.” A number of us used to joke that the essence of Aquarius was given by that memorable phrase from Charles Schulz in Peanuts: “I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand.” Now – take that idea, and throw in overpopulation, and I suggest you defer your worries until Pluto makes it to Aquarius.

Pluto in Aquarius has shown a pattern of the re-assertion of hierarchies. In the 16^th c., the Catholic Church reacted to Protestantism, and then in the early 19^th c., the world-conquering ambitions of the Emperor Bonaparte emerged from the French Revolution.! In the fixed signs, the Old Order strikes back – or at least tries to.

But with that cheery thought, we're now ready to tackle the sleeping issue of Pluto in Capricorn and Aquarius in our time: the environment.

Environmental degradation is not a new thing, and not even an exclusively human thing. Many species are capable of wrecking a perfectly good ecosystem. The cause of ecosystem destruction by a species is most frequently by overpopulation: an overpopulation of deer takes out too much shrub and tree growth, which anchors the stream banks, which causes erosion – Eventually, more wolves eat the deer, thereby depressing their population. Then the hungry wolf population decimates the rodent population, then the wolves die back by starvation. The decrease in the rodent population affects the distribution of still more plants, the shift caused by stream erosion has a permanent, or at least a long-term effect on the area.

Humans have had difficulty fully understanding the consequences of the fact that the same rules apply to them. Besides the biblical injunctions of “be fruitful and multiply” and “subdue the earth,” the simple fact is that humans have generally regarded their ability to change an environment as a positive quality.

Let’s consider an example from one of our time periods – Frederick the Great of Prussia (ruled 1740-1786). This man is as much of an exemplar for the Enlightenment as Voltaire. His long reign meant that he was in power from when Pluto was in late Scorpio until when Pluto was in late Aquarius. In 1765, when Pluto was in Capricorn, Frederick commissioned a land reclamation project for draining the Prussian fens along the Rhine. Few people today realize that the original land around the Rhine River was mainly marsh. For centuries, small scale marsh reclamation schemes were tried, but Frederick’s engineers attacked the fen on a massive scale, eventually resculpting that entire region of Germany.¹⁵ The development of civil engineering in the Enlightenment completely changed the attitude of humans toward the environment. Before, humans could change the course of a river, terrace a hillside, develop irrigation systems – but these were understood as difficult, expensive undertakings that could only be done sporadically. The “success” of civil engineering changed the equation to one of actually looking for ways to “tame” Mother Nature – and, as Carolyn Merchant has pointed out, the juxtaposition of feminine names for nature and the image of rape is completely interconnected.¹⁶

As you saw in my example of the deer, the problem of ecosystem change is that one change produces a cascade of results. Civil engineering took the position that they were improving the land for human use, primarily through land reclamation, flood control, and similar benefits. And because the measure was human benefit, these improvements could be completely catastrophic for every other species impacted, but they would nonetheless be rated successful if humans benefited.

There is absolutely no question that the results of the efforts of 18^th and 19^th c. civil engineers were increased agricultural and pastoral productivity. Fens and marshes are remarkably productive ecosystems: but not for humans. This change to field and pasture increased the wealth of Prussia, allowed for a greater population, whose productivity also increased the country's wealth. So the economists and aristocracy were happy. But these extra people? Many only lived hard lives at a subsistence level, not enjoying the wealth that flowed to the top. And with the reclamation of the lands, these same lands became more accessible and useful for industry, leading to pollution, which had also markedly increased from the increased pasture land, leading to Samuel Coleridge’s famous poem about the Rhine entitled “Cologne:”

The river Rhine, it is well known,

Doth wash your city of Cologne;

But tell me, nymphs! what power divine

Shall henceforth wash the river Rhine?¹⁷

But beyond the memorable lines of the Romantic poets, there were rumblings of other viewpoints besides engineering progress. Because in the closing days of Pluto in Aquarius in 1798 Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population was published, the first philosophical work to address the issue of overpopulation.

In the past, human activity which degraded an ecosystem too catastrophically resulted in human migration away from the scene of the crime. Eventually, the land would recover – or not. The Old Testament describes a Palestine much wetter and more diverse than it is today. While humans may not have entirely created the Sahara Desert, there is no question that human activity has massively expanded it. In the 16^th and 18^th c., when deforestation destroyed the fertility of a river valley, or weather produced a potato famine, the people affected could move on to the New World. Now, there is no New World to move on to.

In the 20^th c., the US Army Corps of Engineers went from being heroes to being reviled by environmentalists. What happened? First, a lot of the things that civil engineers did, like straightening rivers, came under question, both for environmental reasons, and for economic reason that it was discovered that meandering rivers were less susceptible to flooding than straight ones. In other words, the engineering was making the problem worse, not better.

For all the current politically correct talk about sustainability, who is talking about overpopulation? Because, that’s the fact that will sink in while Pluto is in Capricorn: we are already overpopulated. How do we know it?

Studies of animals have shown that under overcrowded circumstances, sociopathic activity increases. Statistics show this is currently happening among Americans – and I cite Americans only because we have the statistics.
Reproductive difficulties arise. Here we are, in a society with the highest standard of living ever, and we need fertility clinics? Historically, fertility was a measure that the potential mother's physiology was strong enough to produce viable offspring. When nutrition is adequate, but fertility is still a problem, it's a sign of overpopulation.
Overpopulation produces stress symptoms. Anybody notice this is on the rise?
Have you all noticed how no major corporation knows how to treat customers anymore? That’s because there are simply too many. A company may be able to make a billion widgets – but a company like Citicorp cannot service one billion customers. We won't even discuss the airlines!
And while the Religious Right may not be happy about this, there is some evidence that overcrowding can result in an uptick in homosexual behavior – or any other behavior that decreases opportunities for reproduction.

I could go on citing examples, but this is the bottom line. If Pluto in Capricorn is about limitation (Capricorn) in reproduction (Pluto), then the message is about to be writ large. All the energy savings the individuals can try, whether different light bulbs, electric cars, or carbon-neutral conference centers doesn’t mean anything if the population of humans on earth continues to grow.

How did this all happen before our very eyes, so to speak? For the answer to that question we have to go back to Pluto in Scorpio. Re member how I mentioned how anomalous it seems at first to contemplate that the New World opened up with Pluto in Scorpio? Well – Pluto in Scorpio can be very sneaky – but then I shouldn't have to tell you!

One of the trends which happened during that period that we didn't connect the dots about was the revolution in computer accounting. Now – this sounds really mundane and boring. But remember when everybody started noticing that Walmart had begun to track individual customer preferences? This was when computer programs were being developed to do what was being called point of sale analysis. Computer storage and memory had become cheap enough to process and store massive numbers of sales transactions, which allowed companies to create sophisticated inventory systems based on customer preferences. Walmart began to drive the book business? The publishing business was driven toward mass sellers – and mass sellers only. This same kind of study of aggregate buyers' preferences is eroding the number of products in stores, because it has become truly “economic” to stock a lot of a few things. At the time this was happening, we were merely nervous about personal privacy. But what was really happening was that computers were allowing large companies to treat customers as aggregates instead of as individuals. Large companies? Sound a bit like Pluto?

We all figured that overpopulation would look like starvation – well it may, in Somalia. But in the “developed” world, overpopulation means constantly being a number – a soulless quantity – a piece of meat.

But just as the developed world was achieving stealth overpopulation, the Chinese actually started to come to grips with the problem. The current passage of Saturn in Virgo has marked the Saturn Return of China’s One Child Policy, which was implemented in 1979. Most Americans don’t even know about the existence of this, much less the reasoning behind it. So let me explain.

After the death of MaoTse Tung and his inner circle, the Chinese wanted to develop. They wanted, within slightly outdated parlance, to go from being a Third World Country to a First World one. But they had a problem: they realized that their population was too vast for this to be possible. They realized that the resources simply didn’t exist to allow them to develop economically. So they created a social contract with their people: if the people would adopt the One Child Policy, in turn, the government would create the infrastructure for economic development. And both sides kept their end of the bargain. The One Child Policy has been estimated to have reduced the Chinese population by 250 million – that’s the equivalent of the entire US population twenty years ago! China has gone from being the world’s most populous state to the second most populous – India is now the largest. More Chinese have access to education and consumer goods than ever before.

But there’s still a problem – because, even with this massive shift, China still cannot find the resources on the planet to develop fully. It’s been estimated that it would take the equivalent of 2 to 3 entire earth-sized planets to provide the resources for the entire world to develop to the level of the First World – and that’s at today’s level of population, which is still increasing. The Chinese were supposed to end the One Child Policy in about a decade. I don’t need astrology to tell me that that won’t happen.

What this means is: there is no solution to poverty except population reduction. There is no solution to development except population reduction. And sustainability is a complete joke unless it is coupled to population reduction. Reduction. Limitation. Sound like Pluto in Capricorn?

Have you heard President Obama talk about overpopulation when he mentions sustainability? He's danced around this topic one or twice. Have you heard any talk about changing our tax system to stop rewarding large families?

Do you think Larry Summers, Director of the White House's National Economic Council, and former savage critic of Kepler College, (or any of his economic group) can even begin to consider a world with a decreasing population, when every western economic theory has been dependent upon growth – in population, goods, and services? Sustainability is anathema to all existing economic theories, which are embedded in the familiar injunction of “be fruitful and multiply.”

So far, all the proposed solutions are band-aid stuff. Fuel efficiency. Carbon offsets. Solar power. All nice things – and necessary. But the debate on energy policy is distracting us from the fact that, while the burning of fossil fuels certainly can increase the probability that we will produce enough greenhouse gases to massively screw up our climate, “solving” the energy crisis will not change the fact that other resources are at least as critically limiting.

The Chinese have almost completed the deforestation of Southeast Asia. The ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere is now permanent. Clean energy won’t stop that. All fusion, wind, solar or other solutions do is stop the flow of money to Middle Eastern governments that we mostly don’t like. It doesn't change the fact that there are simply too many people – and the more we allow the population to continue to grow, the more environmental devastation will occur, decreasing the ultimate sustainable human population, and increasing the likelihood that the decline in population will occur by hideously devastating means.

Can we develop the will to face the limitations that Pluto in Capricorn will demonstrate for us? I don’t know – but I can guarantee that it won’t happen until we provoke the societal discussion beyond the baby steps of sustainability we have managed to achieve by now. We must bring population to the heart of the discussion – or everything else, as we say, is academic.

But if the problems are dire, that doesn't mean there's no hope. It's just that we must create a vision of a different future than I'm describing.

As astrologers, perhaps we need to re-vision the cycle. Linear thinking assumes that growth can be infinite. Cyclic thinking knows that what comes up, later comes down. Linear thinking is at the core of the Enlightenment – the kind of “rationality” that destroys wetlands because waterfowl habitat has no economic value. Linear thinking believes that economies can grow indefinitely – except, perhaps for occasional hiccups. Cyclic thinking allows us to envision waxing and waning – and right now, as a species, we need to wane quite a bit!

The normal – meaning, the typical – human tendency is for the waning portion of a cycle to be experienced as a catastrophe, whether through disease or war. The Chinese have managed to pull off the first voluntary population reduction in history. However, their blindness to their current economic policies which are wrecking environmental devastation show the limits to their consciousness of the totality.

Can the so-called Developed World join the Chinese in their demographic policy, but adding environmental awareness? That's not as far-fetched as it sounds. Most of Europe is inching toward an average of 1 child per family voluntarily. It's the United States that's the big question at this point. While our average number of children per family has decreased, it hasn't decreased enough.

So yes, there’s Hope when Pluto is in Capricorn – because, if we can start owning up to the problems, the solutions proposed can still be voluntary. If we wait for Pluto in Aquarius, those problems will be solved – ruthlessly, arbitrarily, and painfully.

1 If the idea of genocide sounds new to you, I suggest you consult Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me : Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York; London: New Press ; Turnaround [distributor], 2008. This work systematically critiques the complete misrepresentation of American history in high school textbooks.

2 Rosenberg, Diana K. Secrets of the Ancient Skies. Reston, VA: ARHAT, in press.

3 Menocal, Maria Rosa. The Ornament of the World : How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. 1st Back Bay paperback ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.

4 For an account of this period, see Niccoli, Ottavia. Prophesy and People in Renaissance Italy. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, 1990.

5 Lilly, William. Annus Tenebrosis, or the Dark Year and an Easy and Familiar Method Whereby to Judge the Effects Depending on Eclipses, Either of the Sun or Moon. London: Company of Stationers, 1652.

6 Edlyn, Richard. Prae-Nuncius Sydereus an Astrological Treatise of the Effects of the Great Conjunction of the Two Superiour Planets, Saturn & Jupiter, October the Xth, 1663, and Other Configurations Concomitant : Wherein the Fate of Europe for These Next Twenty Years Is (from the Most Rational Grounds of Art) More Than Probably Conjectured, and the Success of the Present Design of the Turk against Christendome Occasionally Hinted At. London: Printed by, 1664.

7 Goad, J. Johannis Goad Angli Astro-Meteorologica Sana: Sive Principia Physico-Mathematica, Quibus Mutationum Aeris, Morborum Epidemicorum, Cometarum, Terr*-Motuum, Aliorumque, Insigniorum Natur* Effectuum Ratio Reddi Possit. Opus Multorum Annorum Experienti^a Comprobatum. microform. prostant venales apud Samuelem Tidmarsh juxta Bursam regalem in vico vulg`o dicto Cornhill, Londini, 1690.

8 Smoller, Laura Ackerman. History, Prophecy, and the Stars : The Christian Astrology of Pierre D'ailly, 1350-1420. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994.

9 Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Pub., 2009.

11 See Wilson, A. N. God's Funeral. 1st American ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999.

12 Proverbs 16:18.

13 http://historicspacecraft.com/quotes.html

14 See, for example, http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/

15 Henderson, W.O. Studies in the Economic Policy of Frederick the Great. Oxford: Taylor & Francis, 2006, p 82.

16 Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature : Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.

17 http://www.online-literature.com/quotes/quotation_search.php?author=Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the Inauguration

2009-01-22T07:56:00.009-05:00

Since Kepler College hosted an inaugural party, I thought I would expand on a few of the remarks I made there that might be useful to astrologers examining the inauguration chart.

The U.S. Constitution spells out clearly that the term of the president begins at noon on 20 January now; 4 March for presidents inaugurated before 1937. However, the Constitution also specifies that the President and Vice President shall take an oath of office. How do we interpret this? The presumed answer is that the oath must be taken, but the term starts at noon. We have just seen a delightful bit of Mercury retrograde as Chief Justice Roberts came over to the White House on January 21st to re-administer the oath, as he had flubbed its administration during the inaugural ceremony. There was precedent for this: when Coolidge became president, his father, a notary public, administered the oath of office at 2:47 am 3 August 1923, Plymouth, Vermont. The oath was re-administered when he arrived in Washington by a district judge - because nobody had any idea whether a state notary had the right to administer the oath. Notice that the concern was over the legality of the oath - not over whether he was president. In the same fashion, President Obama had formally submitted the nominations for his cabinet and other senior officials, and signed several other papers - there seemed to be no concern that he reissue these, or that his cabinet members who had been sworn in themselves be re-sworn. With Justice Roberts clearly being involved in these procedures, one has to believe that if he thought that President Obama had not really been president for a day and a half, he would have suggested that all these bits of business be repeated. The oath must be performed - but the oath does not start the presidency.

So this is our first hint. Astrologers for decades have gathered around to get the precise moment of the oath: but it doesn't matter. Coolidge was president upon the death of Harding. Johnson was president when Kennedy was declared dead. There is no time when there is no president. So either noon is the time, or the death time of a sitting president.

But what do these charts show? The theory is that they show something about the presidency. Let's go back a couple and see how they work - and some of the things that you can and cannot do with them.

There are some things about inauguration charts that can and cannot be used. Consider -

By definition, the chart is at noon. So the fact that the Sun is at the MC, more or less, cannot be interpreted. It's there by definition. The only time this would be of note is in a chart for the death of a president, which is hopefully not planned.
The Sun is in Aquarius. That's January 20th now. For the earlier March 4th charts, the Sun was in Pisces.
The house cusps and what their rulers are. Given that the chart is January 20th at noon, the house cusps from inauguration to inauguration won't change much.

What this leaves to interpret is actually a very great deal. Since the inauguration is about the president, the ruler of the 10th house - Saturn - is of paramount importance.

For Bush's first inauguration, the most notable feature is Mars in Scorpio so close to the 7th house of open enemies. I had interpreted this chart as it was unfolding at a Kepler College symposium - and what had struck me at the time was how this made it so obviously a war chart - which made no sense at that time, because we weren't at war with anybody! Well - that is a lesson in calling it like you see it!

Saturn actually was dignified by Term and Face - minor dignities perhaps (although in Medieval style delineation term is not considered minor) - but it was also rendered imbecilic by being retrograde. What can I say? But that Saturn was rendered: the sextile from disposing Venus in exaltation meant that Bush was really quite strong - but because of the influence of others, since it was the rendering that saved him. Saturn was pretty close to the fixed Star Algol, a definite malefic. Besides the tendency to lose one's head, it represents someone who is headstrong, and incapable of listening to others, or caring what others thought. He was going to do what he was going to do - and at first, with Saturn in the 1st, he received public support. But the conjunction to Algol really throws in a question about the tendency toward "the ends justify the means."

For some time, I've had some questions about the extent to which second inaugural charts work - but the 2005 one convinced me.

Here, Saturn ruling the MC, the president, at the Nadir and at the Bendings in its detriment and retrograde - with nothing this time to render the imbecility. Now, a word about the placement of Saturn at the IC. While the concept of "Bush at the Nadir" has a certain poetic expression to it, there's an idea in classical mundane that you can read when during the time that a mundane chart rules by examining where the principle placement is by quadrant in this chart. Since it's Saturn we're concerned about here, that placement puts the full force of its wretchedness in the last year of his term, because this counting system starts with the quadrant from the Ascendant to the MC and runs diurnally.

So what of the Inauguration 2009? The first problem with this chart is that the Moon is at 29 degrees of Scorpio, void of course. A lot of modern astrologers take void to mean "nothing will come of the matter," but that's not entirely accurate. It's perhaps more accurate to say that the trains has left the station and it is now going to follow the tracks where they lead.

The emphasis in this chart is: Obama has been dealt a set of cards, and now what he can accomplish is already determined by the hand he has. He can play well or play poorly, but he is much more restricted than Bush was.

There is a lot of dignity in this chart - so all is not lost. The most dignified planets are Mars and Venus. Venus rules the people (the 1st House), while Mars rules open enemies (the 7th). With the Moon in the 7th, one has to conclude that his stated intention of getting out of Iraq and coming to a new entente with the Islamic world is of primary importance - and there, the late degree of the Moon makes a lot of sense relating to his intentions.

The economy is going to be very problematic: with Mercury and Jupiter, both dignified by Triplicity in Aquarius, but both combust and Mercury retrograde - there are definitely going to be some fits and starts. What is most interesting is that combust denotes secrecy in the old texts: so it looks like President Obama's goal of openness is going to be seriuosly resisted in that respect. But with this amount of Triplicity, there just may well be some dumb luck that helps out.

There is physical danger to the President - Saturn is in the 5th, and the 5th is the 8th from the 10th. But Saturn does have some dignity by Term, and Sahl, along with other Medieval sources would state that since Saturn is cold and dry and in a cold and dry sign, that there is some strength there.

Is there a political dimension to being an astrologer?

2008-12-07T22:01:00.003-05:00

Now that my Kepler College Commencement address has been published on YouTube, I thought some of you might enjoy the text.

Since this graduation is being held in the shadow of a US election, it seemed to me that this would be an excellent time to discuss politics – or not!

Back in 1989, the United Astrology Congress was held in New Orleans. Just before the Congress started, there was a press conference, attended in part by the New Orleans Times Picayune. Carol Tebbs and Rob Hand were there, and I'm sure said great things about I don't remember what. However, in the midst of all the wonderful things said by the astrological representatives, one of the reporters asked a question along the lines of: if what you say is true, then why is astrology ridiculed by so many people, including scientists. It was at that moment that my Mars-Pluto rising stood up, and I made a statement to the effect that, one of the major problems with astrology is that astrologers themselves do not recognize that the status of astrology is a political issue, and that the position of astrologers in our society is completely analogous to the position of gay people before Stonewall.

My statement drew some rather pained looks from some of my esteemed elders. But I, unlike they, knew just how gay New Orleans Mardi Gras could be, so I actually appreciated the irony that the reporters probably understood my statement a little more clearly than some of the astrologers present.

So now, a nodal cycle later, I would like to examine the question: is the astrological community like the gay community before Stonewall, and, if so, what does this mean for the future of astrology?

So I'm not going to hold you in suspense my answer is yes, there are some interesting parallels:

Like gays, you generally cannot spot an astrologer on the street – thus, astrologers have the protective coloration so that talking about being “out” about your interest in astrology is a completely comprehensible concept.
There is a substantial conservative religious community the reviles both homosexuals and astrologers. Within this context, the practice of either can be considered a sin, although it may be easier to cure one from performing astrological acts.
An astrologer may find it difficult to tell his or her family. What will they think? Will they be able to admit this to their friends? Will relatives stop talking to the person?
An astrologer could lose face in social circles for admitting this.
An astrologer could be harassed or even arrested.
An astrologer could observe parents stopping their children from Trick-or-Treating at the astrologer's house
An astrologer could experience job discrimination or delays in promotion because of her or his interests, and this is legal, because belief in astrology is not something for which there are anti-discrimination statutes.
Kepler College has had an accreditation application turned down summarily because we use the “A” word.

Ladies and Gentlemen, this is discrimination, and it's ugly. If free speech and free inquiry are precious to academia – and on paper, they are – then this kind of behavior is an abomination. So why does it continue?

This is the second part of my thesis: one of the reasons it continues is precisely because the astrological community acts like gays before Stonewall. Gays before Stonewall mostly rejected the idea that discrimination against homosexuals was a political issue that could be dealt with through political channels. So gays socialized with gays, created gay ghettos, developed signs and passwords, and styles of dressing to advertise to other gays – while those signals were mostly ignored by the straight community. And gays learned how to pass – by cover dates, and other means – all to allow of a level of social acceptance – even if that acceptance was only a lie.

The second year of Kepler's existence, we had one student who could not even last out one term because her family was so appalled that she wanted to study astrology. This is real.

What do we hear over and over when we come to Kepler symposia, or astrological conferences? People saying – wow! It's so wonderful to be with other people who think like I do. This is a mark of discrimination.

Are you afraid to admit to someone that your favorite color is blue? That you like weaving? Who you favorite band is? Whenever you are afraid to admit to who you are, one possible cause is discrimination. It's not always the cause – there can be other reasons to be afraid. But when you see your colleagues and friends with the same interests going through the same process, this is a sign that this issue has a political dimension.

But granting that it does, why should we care? After all, this is grossly more trivial than discrimination against blacks or women, as we have seen all too clearly in this presidential season.

The reason that we need to care is that damage to the psyche by hatred and self-hatred is a fundamental form of abuse – and it affects both abuser and abused.

How can you expect to develop a true profession in an environment where a substantial number of practitioners are afraid to admit what they do to a stranger? How can we move forward when we feel compelled to accept every crumb of coverage from the new media, no matter how biased or sniggering? How can you expect to be able to be proud of your degree from Kepler College when people can mock the very idea that astrology can be studied academically, except by non-believers? How can we have the kind of voice that demands that accreditation agencies take us seriously? These gains can only occur through the political process. In fact, our work through Kepler College, and Nick Campion's through Bath Spa and Lampeter have opened that dialog within academic circles: but those ripples have not gone far enough.

My friends Frank Kamminy of the Mattachine Society and the late Barbara Gittings of Daughters of Bilitis were among those who stood up in the late Fifties and early Sixties to protest a status of homosexuals – at a time when most gays told them to sit down and shut up. And notice there yet another tell-tale sign of political discrimination: the naming of societies like Mattachine or Bilitis were euphemisms – like the use of “geocosmic” or “the study of cycles” by astrologers to tone down the reaction to the “A” word. But who, really, is being kidded? A couple of years ago, Zero Population Growth renamed itself the Population Connection, because they thought that doing so would “open doors.” This is surely no harbinger of success!

In reality, it took about a Saturn Cycle from 1969 for gays to achieve a level of critical mass, so that, for example, when Kepler College opened in 2000, gender preference was largely irrelevant. But it wasn't too many years before that where you could hear whispering by some members of the audience at astrological talks by gay or lebian astrologers. Or when certain gay men in astrology felt the need to talk about marriages long departed, or girlfriends as real as Harvey, the Six foot invisible rabbit. And of course, in larger society, the issue of gay marriage continues to divide, even as “The L Word” has become a popular TV show.

When will astrology begin its march toward political acceptance, and how will it happen? I don't know. But long term, if Kepler College is to succeed, then happen it must. The absence of freedom is tyranny, and as a liberal arts institution, we are devoted to the arts of free men and women. How can we teach and manifest those arts when we ourselves are not free, or at least attempting to free ourselves?

Predicting Death

2008-11-25T07:01:00.002-05:00

Recently, an Australian newspaper ran an a question asked to their regular "Cosmic girl" Yasmin Boland about whether death could be predicted. She answered:

Why do you want to know? Some astrologers do claim there are ancient methods but i've never tested them. If you're really curious, contact Lee Lehman at www.leelehman.com - she's an expert in early astrological techniques - you could test out the theories on some people you know who've already passed away and then ( if you dare) on yourself.

Now, as a result of this, I have received some inquiries! But not, I might add, from crazies, but from people who are earnestly asking questions. Twenty five years ago, I might have blown these questions off. But twenty five years ago, neither of my parents had died. And of course, I was twenty five years closer to immortality than I am now!

So what do these "ancient" methods say about death? There are several Hellenistic and Medieval calculations that collectively said several things relating to death:

That there is a way of measuring vitality in the chart, and that this measure can be turned into an approximation of the length of life
That the birth chart does speak to the manner of death, at least in general terms
That methods for looking at "accidents" (i.e., events) to the persons life have to show a trigger at a critical time in order for death to occur.

Then, there are the stories. The Renaissance astrologer Jerome Cardan is alleged to have predicted the day of his death - and then died on that day. His critics claimed he committed suicide in order not to be wrong. But then I think of the story of the Chinese sage who, upon seeing influences in his Chinese-style chart that indicated death, took it upon himself to retire to a secluded place in the country and meditate for the year. He emerged more popular than he had been before.

Any time one discusses the subject of death, it's reasonable to point out that the demographics of people's life expectancy have shifted dramatically since these techniques developed. As there is not some radical discontinuity in the components of a birth chart then vs. now (presuming that we choose to examine the chart without the outer planets that have been discovered since), then the conclusion is that either the techniques were bogus all along, or that they were showing something other than necessary death - something like possible or probable death. This idea even applies to my specialty, horary astrology, where it is possible to ask a question like, "Will I die in my 52nd year?" or "Is this diagnosis of cancer fatal?" When I see a chart laden with the classical arguments of death, I am really seeing a probability statement - and my answer at that point is generally that, had you been living in the 17th century before modern medicine, then yes, you would have died.

When I have conducted classes where I taught people this death method, and then everybody examined her or his own chart, a large portion of the class had inevitably lived past the point where they "should" have died. However, most of these students recalled events in that year that were circumstances such that, in that hypothetical 17th c. case, they would have died. Instead, that moment became a turning point, or at least a component of who that person became after the event.

My conclusion from this is that all of us are confronted with "opportunities" to die far more frequently than we think. In infancy and childhood, those windows are passed by for reasons outside one's immediate "control" - one's socio-economic class gives better nutirition, a fatal scenario is averted because of a medical intervention. Later in life, other factors come into play, including one's own will to live. And will to live is a variable thing, based among other things on one's psychological state of mind.

I believe that both of my parents died when they encountered circumstances such that their will to live was broken. Watching them, watching their pain and their process, certainly brought home to me that if, as astrologers, we spend out lives focused on the moment of birth, then we have to conder the endpoint of life just as surely as the beginning.

Years in advance, I would have been hard-put to predict an actual year of death for them. But then, one of the things which is a basic requirement is an accurate birth time, and I didn't have this on either one. However, when time telescopes and you know you're coming down to the wire, whether this year or next, this month or next, or this day or next, the techniques telescope as well. My partner's mother was diagnosed with cancer about five months before she died - and I was able to predict the death to within one day of exactitude at that point. But had I been asked a couple of years earlier, I would not have been able to be so precise. And as it turned out, Dad visited us two months before he died - and my partner asked a horary about death, and that chart was accurate to within a week - and Dad hadn't been diagnosed with anything at that point.

The first time I was called upon by a client to predict death, it was just after AIDS had achieved public recognition - and I had already lost an acquaintance to it. A guy I had never met contacted me and said he had been diagnosed - and asked me what his prospects were. I had never seen so many indications of death as I did in that chart. But being much younger then - in life, and in my profession - I didn't know how to say this. So what I did say was, if you want to live, this is the level of change you will have to make in your life - and the amount was massive. What's more, what I said was actually completely true, given the chart. I didn't believe he could do it, and he didn't - and he died.

On the other hand, I've been wrong. A woman several years ago asked about when her mother would die, because her mother had become a significant burden on the entire family. I didn't have an accurate time for the mother, so I attempted to read it off her daughter's chart. It didn't work. But the daughter became involved in helping a former partner go through terminal cancer and death. Sometimes the chart shows the topic, not the subject.

Just what is it in a chart that shows death? Like with most of astrology, there's always more than one possible configuration. I can absolutely see the value in calculating and examining these "windows," especially if by that means one knows when to be especially vigilant.

But we also have to acknowledge that death is inevitable. None of us will cheat death in the end. As a life lesson, however, I keep thinking of that Chinese guy. Planning and acting before reaching the terminal stage may open the space for a change in consciousness - this time.

Obama Re-constructionist?

2008-11-05T09:40:00.000-05:00

For years, I have been urging people to read a very interesting book about the American presidency by Rutgers University professor Stephen Skowronek:

The Politics Presidents Make : Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997.

Skowronek's thesis is that there are four types of presidencies: re-constructionist, articulating, pre-emptive and disjunctive.

The idea is this: there are presidencies that lay out an agenda for the country that lasts for years after that president is out of office: this is the re-constructionist type. What is important in Skowronek's model is that this applies to the political party as much as the person. The last re-constructionist president was Reagan, who set the agenda since 1980 with his vision of what the presidency and the country should be. The party represented by a re-constructionist president sets the agenda for that period.

An articulating presidency is one where the president comes from the same party as the re-constructionist one. This president doesn't so much set a radically new agenda, as find ways to extend the mandate already delivered. George H.W. Bush was an example of this.

A pre-emptive presidency - Bill Clinton - is where the party out of party wins an election, reacts to the prevailing agenda, but does not succeed in overthrowing it.

A disjunctive presidency - we can now hopefully say George W. Bush - carries the mandate way past its logical conclusion. This is the president most likely to be reviled by historians and contemporaries alike as a "bad" president.

Now: it seems more likely to me that Obama is a re-constructionist than a pre-emptive type: I certainly hope so. Everything which he has said about his vision for America suggests this.

When I first read Skowronek's book in its first edition, I immediately graphed out his classification of presidents and tried to ascertain an astrological cycle. I failed. I suspected that was likely the case from the start, because each one of these cycles is of different length. The last re-constructionist before Reagan was F.D. Roosevelt, and so that one ran from 1932-1980. The latest one, I hope runs from 1980-2008. But in thinking about this, there's no doubt in my mind that the Saturn-Uranus opposition coupled with Pluto's sign change certainly provide enough planetary energy to represent a serious disjunction!

I do think it is incumbant on astrologers to begin to explore more serious models for predicting and understanding the presidency than simplistics impressions of natal charts - often, without even having good birth data, because there is such a temptation to do something. As I have said in my own work, I'm delighted to be wrong this year - but then, I have quantified from the beginning that my method has an error rate - in this case, it was 18%. We must learn to only consider ourselves right when we are right for the right reasons.

I raised in my post yesterday that question of how we should view this fascinating interface between the personal and the mundane. Coming to this understanding is going to require adding more components in than just another astrological technique. I would nominate Skowronek's work as a potentially fruitful addition to our thought process.

New President - Same Astrological Questions

2008-11-04T11:20:00.000-05:00

It's USA Election Day, and like millions of my fellow citizens, I voted early. So now, I have nothing to do but wait. I am in the odd position of having predicted one, while voting for the other - so I have guaranteed myself an interesting time this evening.

So now, it's time for the next phase: predicting whether this will be a one-term or a two-term presidency. I first began this exercise after the 2000 election, when I attempted to find a way to cope with the results. So I decided the examine the inauguration chart as predicitive of this difference between length of presidencies. And further, I started the exercise, not with the first inauguration, but with the establishment of the "modern" party system by Andrew Jackson - the system of spoils, as it has been called. So the earliest inauguration in my database was 1824.

Working with the inauguration chart has certain challenges from a mundane perspective, but these are precisely the challenges that should whet our appetites as astrologers. First, they always take place at a date and time mandated by the Constitution. Starting in 1949, Inauguration day is January 20th of the year following the election. Prior to that, it was March 4th. In either case, the time was noon. This, by the way, sets up one little tempest in a teapot right there. Most astrologers treat the time of the oath for the presidency as the actual time of office. It's doubtful that that would stand up in court, so to speak. Go back and read the Constitution and the amendments - then see what you think. The oath is just the public ritual.

However, the date and time do put a number of restrictions on the interpretation of the chart. The Sun sign, Ascendant and Midheaven are essentially fixed. So any predictive work from these charts has to be based on something other than, say, the Sun being in the 10th house.

So to begin my study, I decided to compare the inauguration charts of one-term vs. two-term presidents: and see what spilled out. The first fact that we need to know is that, in this system, there were 22 one-term presidents and 11 two-term presidents through George W. Bush. I began by studying the phase angle between all ptolemaic planets in the 8th harmonic. Where there was a difference, I am showing it here, plus commenting on the placement in the 2009 chart.

1. Moon-Mercury

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

I also examined a number of these combinations for presidents who either died in office, or resigned (i.e., Nixon). It's a small sample, but perhaps worth considering.

Comparing these two graphs, none of the two-term presidencies had a Moon-Mercury phase of 90 or 180 degrees. The most comment phase for the two-term was 270: the closing square. Remember that these are phases, not aspects: the phases correspond to the phases of the lunation cycle in modern astrology. The phase angle for 2009 is 270. While this would be the top choice among the two-term presidencies, 270 is not an uncommon phase in the one-term presidencies. So score this one either not predictive or slight nod to two-term. The died/left office had a high correlation with the 0 phase.

2. Sun-Mercury

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for died/left office:

The Sun and Mercury by definition can only be in one of two phases, because the geocentric angular separation can never exceed 45 degrees. What was suggestive here was that, among the two-term presidents, there seemed to be no difference between the two phases. With the one term presidents, the 270 phase was half as common as the 0 phase. The 2009 phase is 0, so either we consider this no prediction, or a slight nod to one-term.

3. Sun-Jupiter

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

The shape of these two distributions is quite strking. In the one-term presidencies, there are no cases with the Sun-Jupiter in the 90 degree phase - while that is the most common phase for two-term. None of the two-term show the 0 or the 270 phase. 2009 has the 315 phase. This is a call to one-term, as 315 is more common than average (the horizontal line) in the one-term, and less than average in the two-term.

4. Sun-Saturn

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

Like the Sun-Jupiter, the phase angles here show a different distribution. The 90 phase is the most common for the two-term: the one-term group have that less than average. For the one term group, the 0 phase is the most common, while the two-term show that one less than average. The 2009 chart has Sun-Saturn in the 90 phase, so this is a prediction of two terms.

5. Mercury-Mars

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

Here, the main differences are that two-term presidencies show greater than average distribution in the 90 and 180 phase, while the on-term group show greater than average distribution in the 0 phase. 2009 comes out 0 phase: this predicts one term.

6. Mercury-Jupiter

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

The two-term group has 90 as the most common phase, with no examples of 0 and 315. 90 is uncommon in the one-term group, whereas 0 and 315 are average. 2009 is a 315 angle; this predicts one term.

7. Venus-Saturn

Here's the graph for one-term presidencies:

Here's the graph for two-term presidencies:

The one-term distribution shows the most frequent phase as 90, with 135 less than average; the two-term group has 135 as the most common, with 90 less than average, and 225 non-existent. 2009 has the phase angle of 135, predicting two terms.

So much for the phase angles. There are other distributions as well. Here are a few that I have already worked with.

8. Syzygy prior to Inauguration

Those of you who have followed my presidential party prediction model will recall that which syzygy: i.e., whether the prior lunation is a full or new moon, may be a predictive factor. So it made sense to examine it here as well.

In the one-term group, there's no difference in which syzygy preceeds the inauguration, whereas the two-term presidencies have a preponderance of full moons. 2009 is a full moon, which means it's not predictive.

9. Retrograde Planets

It made sense to examine whether there was a difference in the distribution of retrograde planets between the two groups.

You will observe on the last two graphs that I have also inserted a category for "died in/left office." And it will be readily apparent on this graph that retrograde placements seem overly abundant in the "died in/left office" category: at least for Jupiter and Mercury. There do seem to be some differences in the distributions between one-term and two-term, but not regarding this year's retrograde planets: Mercury and Saturn. However, as we have just observed, Mercury retrograde is pretty common in the inaugurations of those who died or left office: Mercury retrograde appears 44% of the time in these charts.

10. The Quadruplicity of the Moon

It is extremely common in horary to read relative timing off the quadruplicity of significant points in the chart. And what can be more significant than the Moon? Here are the results.

In the one-term presidencies, a cardinal Moon is most common; in a two-term one, a mutable Moon is. It's interesting that this is the pairing: cardinal for short-term makes sense, but mutable (or common as it used to be called) implied that two-terms is "common" or average - which it is not. Oh well. In 2009, the inauguration Moon is at 29 Scorpio. As fixed works out to be about the average point for one-term, whereas it is less than average in two-terms, I rate this an argument of a one-term presidency. And fixed is uncommon in died/left office, so this is another argument against that scenario.

So I got this far, with one-term leading two terms by 4-2. But I wasn't happy. One major factor is that 33 elections is not really that many, and unlike my party prediction model, I don't really have a track record for using the sum of these factors to correctly predict and outcome. So I decided to examine more factors.

11. The Quadruplicity of the Ascendant Ruler

Because the the noon charts erected for either March 4th or January 20th, there have only been two Ascendant rulers: Moon or Venus.

This one has a really distinct distribution: and one so extreme, that it's really compelling. Clearly, when the ruler of the Ascendant is mutable, there's a high likelihood of two terms, whereas cardinal and fixed look like one-term. The fact that this is so extreme is very important, because, most likely, some of these factors are not really that predictive. But this one looks like it could stand up. In 2009, the Ruler of the Ascendant is Venus in Pisces: so this calls a two-term presidency. As I said, this made me sit up and take notice!

11. The Quadruplicity of the Midheaven Ruler

If the Ruler of the Ascendant is significant, then why not the MC, as the MC is the king in the old mundane systems?

Frankly, the distributions here don't suggest much of anything, because, in all cases, cardinal leads the pack. In 2009, the MC ruler is Saturn in Virgo: mutable. By the way, the two MC rulers that have happened historically are Jupiter and Saturn.

12. The Quadruplicity of the Part of Fortune

Again, this is not a particularly compelling distribution. One term presidencies are more likely to have the Part of Fortune in a fixed sign. In 2009, the Part of Fortune is in Pisces, so this one doesn't matter anyway this year.

13. The Quadruplicity of the Part of Fortune Ruler

To understand what to do with this graph, remember that there have been twice as many one-term presidencies as two. So when I tell you that in 2009, Jupiter is Aquarius, what we do to compare the graphs is to take the frequency of fixed in the tw-term presidencies and double it - this produces 8. This is taking the 11 two-terms and normalizing them to the 22 one-terms. Now we compare 10 to 8: and the difference is not that big. No call here.

14. The Quadruplicity of the Ruler of the Moon

What is immediately obvious with this graph is that one-term presidencies generally don't have the dispositor of the Moon in a mutable sign. As for the other quadruplicities, the effect is not that great. In comparing 22 one-term presidencies to 11 two-term, the number of two-term occurrences needs to be doubled to be of comparable size. In 2009, the Moon is in a cardinal sign. So: the cardinal number for this comparison is 6 (3 times 2), compared to 9 for the one-term: so a cardinal dispositor favors a one-term presidency.

15. Which Planet is the dispositor of the Moon

In doing the quadruplicity of the Moon's ruler, I noticed that among the two-term presidencies, Jupiter seemed to be the most common dispositor. So I decided to break this out by planet. Here your see the three distributions top to bottom: one-term, two-term, died/left office, with the planets in the Chaldean order, starting with the Moon itself.

The one-term presidencies favor Saturn as the Moon's dispositor more, while the two-term ones favor Jupiter. As the dispositor of the Moon in Scorpio in 2009 is Mars, there is no prediction from this factor this time.

So here we have it: ten factors which show a different distribution between these different presidential groupings. Of those which are predictive in the case of 2009, there are five arguments in favor of a one-term presidency, and three in favor of a two-term presidency. So my prediction based on these factors is for a one-term presidency. But I am really struck by the opposite prediction using the quadruplicity of the Ruler of the Ascendant.

What I have presented is the beginning of a model. Frankly, I would like to have a lot more factors.

One final note. Both my prediction here, and my prediction of the election itself, are based on mundane factors only. In other words, both these models imply that there is a current at work at the time of each election, and that the people who step into these roles of candidate or president do not contribute to the outcome: the die is already cast. Now, I have to say that I don't entirely believe that. If Barack Obama wins (and it would certainly be my personal preference), then one way of expressing this would be that his personal chart contains one or more configurations which allow him to rise above the mundane stream. Perhaps that's the next interesting study: what marks an individual to beat the odds? Both these mundane models very much imply that there is a script - and that oftentimes, the candidate simply reads the scripted lines, and the play moves effortlessly to Act IV. But not always. So what is this spark? At the moment, we don't know - but it certainly is an interesting question.

Sarah Palin and Pluto in Late Sagittarius

2008-09-07T09:57:00.000-04:00

Many of you may know that I predicted that John McCain would win this election (you can see a "summary" of the prediction on YouTube (http://uk.youtube.com/user/leephd53). While my model is quantitative, I thought that there would likely be some last religious fundamentalist as Pluto retrograded back into Sag. I guess we have found it in Sarah Palin's nomination. While I have to admit that there is a certain entertainment value to conservative Republicans learning how to say "sexism" in a complete sentence, there is also the challenge - is a Pro-Life feminist really a feminist? My gut is to say "free speech," but what about her whole package of beliefs? For a somewhat different historical approach, you might like to read Sommer's article at http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.28410/pub_detail.asp. Is Palin then just a repackaging of conservative feminism?

The rest of my thought about Pluto in late Sag for the election, followed by the ingress into Cap just afterwards, is that whoever is elected will be elected under one premise, and have to govern under another.

Two Books on the Culture of Medieval Islam

2008-01-20T23:07:00.000-05:00

Griffith, Sidney H. The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient to the Modern World). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Gutas, Dimitri. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture : The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early Abbasid Society (2nd-4th/8th-10th Centuries). London ; New York: Routledge, 1998.

I believe that, if the astrological community is to be viewed seriously on the outside, it has to collectively learn how to behave critically. This means thinking about thinking, among other things. And this means that we have to learn how to critically examine our own authors. Which is a short-hand way of saying that what we should not be doing is praising those works which “agree” with our personal viewpoints, while dismissing or trashing those that don't.

Until we can achieve this level of understanding, we look like a cluster of Christian heresies from the 4^th or 5^th century CE, each lovingly transmitting its own opinion of the nature of Christ and God, while condemning all other beliefs to Hell and damnation.

As an exercise in presenting this idea of the critical approach, I'd like to contrast two books that cover roughly the same historical period: one of interest to astrologers, as you will shortly see.

The period of the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1258) marked the consolidation of Islamic power after the first political dynasty, the Umayyads, who had ruled since the Prophet's death. The first century and one half of the Abbasid period included the great period of translation of Hellenistic material into Arabic from Syriac, and then Greek. This material included virtually the entire corpus of Hellenistic astrology, as well as massive quantities of other Greek natural philosophy and medicine. This translation movement then sparked a highly creative and productive period of commentary, as Arabic-speaking philosophers (Muslim, Christian and Jewish, as well as some remnant Zoroastrians) digested the material, commented upon it, and then developed new ideas of their own. This period also significantly opened up transmission of Indian ideas to the West, as Muslims increasingly became involved in the wars and politics of the Indian subcontinent. From an astrological standpoint, the Abbasid period marks the transition from The Hellenistic and Sassanian forms of astrology into what is first called Arabic astrology, then Medieval astrology, the latter especially as the Arabic works in turn are translated into Latin primarily in Spain and Italy, especially from the time of the 12^th century.

Gutas' work has taken barely ten years to become a classic. I am not saying this because I “like” it, but because it has become an extremely influential work to historians of this period. This means that any subsequent work about this period would be considered suspect if it did not refer to Gutas' work. I should add that Gutas covers the translation of astrological works quite overtly. As is typical of the period (of historians of science) , Gutas does not attempt to minimize the role of astrology in the society and natural philosophy of the time, although neither does he discuss the content of the works in the way that a practitioner would.

One of the things which is so intriguing about this particular time and place is that Muslims, Christians and Jews were able to work together so cooperatively. While politically, there was no question the Muslims were at the top of the heap, their fellow Monotheists were able to contribute substantially to the intellectual life of their shared culture.

Having said this, what is also intriguing is that the Muslim political policies made conversion to Islam desirable – but not compulsory. This was way more of a carrot approach than the stick employed by the Christian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella and their successors in Spain. The net result is that, from the time of the Umayyad conquests through the next five centuries, the Muslims went from being a tiny minority in their conquered lands to a huge majority – and largely through the voluntary conversions of individual Christians.

Gutas did not cover that issue within his work: it simply wasn't the subject of his study. It was to address this political dimension that I wanted to read Griffith's book.

The contrast of writing styles could not be more extreme. Gutas has a clear, factual writing style that is easy to follow. By contrast, Griffith' writing is filled with run-on sentences and hyperactive footnotes that seriously mar the readability of the text.

Further, I cannot say I really know that much more about the transition of the Islamic Empire from a numerically Christian-dominated zone to a Muslim one. Griffith's major development is to emphasize the development of apologetic writing – an odd name to someone outside the field, but a technical term for the “defense of the faith” writing of the Christian hierarchy to defend the spiritual superiority of Christianity. These writings were meant to discourage conversions to Islam – which we know statistically they failed to do. He does present some evidence that the different Christian sects managed to cobble together an entente of mutual interest – and that is something worth noting. However, I came away from his work still wondering how significant these apologetic writings really were to the intellectual life of the time.

Will Griffith's work become a classic like Gutas'? I seriously doubt it. I think its major flaw – apart from stylistic – is that it actually represents a rather narrow study masquerading as a larger topic. Had the work been clearly labeled as a study of Arabic-language Christian apologies, it would have had the benefit of matching its title. But the implication of a broader river instead of a deeper, but smaller stream, leaves the reader unsatisfied.

The Alethiometer and Horary Astrology

2008-01-18T22:54:00.000-05:00

So I admit it – I was quite intrigued by Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials – the books, not the movie. Frankly, I fail to see how any movie version of these books – especially book three – can even begin to do the book justice, because the anti-clerical, anti-Christian tone is simply too dicey for a Hollywood production: unless they grasp the essentially gnostic tone of the story, and understand that the Authority is a stand-in for the Demiurge, and not necessarily any statement on higher reality.

But apart from religious scruples, I was fascinated by the alethiometer. The alethiometer stands in as the perfect form of divination: divination that is the truth, if only one knows how to read it. Further, we note the fascinating change – Lyra can read it perfectly as a child, but at the change to adolescent - which is such a huge factor in this series – strips her native ability. After the change, she must rely on books and a painfully long learning curve to achieve the result that came naturally such a short time before.

What is the lesson here? I think it may actually be the same lesson as why each individual's daemon assumes one single form upon entering adolescence: the truth that the alethiometer reads is parallel to the truth one sees about oneself.

To children, adults are arbitrary beings doing arbitrary things. Adults are, so to speak, forces of nature. Meanwhile, children are beings in the process of becoming. Adolescence and early adulthood is the time that a child becomes “fixed” into an adult. And it is in the period of early through middle adulthood that the personality is the most fixed. And here in lies the key to the alethiometer.

Lyra's questions to the alethiometer either ask about what has already happened – or what will happen. In this sense, the questions she asks (and the others ask other alethiometers) are exactly analogous to those horary questions I encounter daily. Divination is about what you don't know – and you may not know about it even though it has already occurred – or because it hasn't occurred yet. The past you don't know is exactly like the future that you cannot know.

But there's the machine – and then there's the diviner, or reader. As a child, Lyra is free to associate symbols, and intuit the meaning. And she obviously has a talent for this: that's what makes her so special. With maturation come passions – passions unlike anything she experienced before. Emotions become complex. And in that complexity, she loses this native ability, just as Pantalaimon loses his ability to change shapes. And I believe this happens to the daemons not because they cannot change, but because their humans cannot bear the fluidity of change.

It is into this universe of fixed personalities that adults learn to read the alethiometer using books and fixed methods. It is described as a lifelong process. In teaching many students horary astrology, I am struck by how hard it is for many to creatively break the rules. It's an odd universe, the process of divination – one is constantly confronted by the curious juxtaposition of needing to have a really good rule book – but the also the ability to know when to transcend those rules. It was this conundrum that I attempted to address when I titled my book The Martial Art of Horary Astrology – because, like the good horary astrologer, the good martial artist has to practice the rules until they are absolutely instinctive, because only then will one be able to know when to ignore them. Slavish following of the rules produces a fighter who is completely predictable, or a pedestrian interpretation.

Curiously, this flat-footedness seems to most be a part of early to middle adulthood. One is too caught in trying to look good, and so one over-asserts oneself and one's ego into everything. It is only as one gets older that one truly begins to see the commonalities within the fierce assertion of individuality – and then one's interpretation becomes more fluid.

So if it takes a lifetime to “learn” the alethiometer, is it because it takes a lifetime to break down the mask that one so carefully builds up? What does that say for the mask that fractured that “childish” native talent in the first place? And what does this say for prediction in general? It has been my contention that horary operates in the reality that, while we always have free will, it's simply easier to not exercise it. It's always easier to do what comes "naturally" than to have to consciously think about alternatives. I would suggest that therefore horary - or the alethiometer - works best for young to middle-aged adults. Because that represents the life-phase where the armor is hardest - and I don't mean armored bear here! As to older adults, the question is really whether that person is clinging tenaciously to the armor, or accepting its inevitable dissolution.

Harry Potter from a Feminist Perspective

2007-07-24T05:59:00.000-04:00

Yes, I admit it. My partner and I took turns reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows aloud to each other the weekend of its release. It seemed both fairer, not to mention more fun, to savor that last piece of the story together.

I do not propose to justify my particular interests from a feminist perspective: frankly, I’m long past that dubious exercise. What I would like to address is the Harry Potter phenomenon, and what it can tell us about the status of women in the 90’s and ‘00’s, when these Books were written, and in which they are also set.

J.K. Rowling – Jo to her fans – is said to be the wealthiest novelist ever from this series, having grossed over $1 billion in royalties. Almost as much as the Books themselves, part of this story is also the story of Jo and her fans – and how she has set the agenda for the discussion and review
of these Books in a post-Internet world, a highly instructive process by itself.

So let’s lay the groundwork. The Harry heptology is the blockbuster fantasy series of our time, supplanting the Lord of the Rings (LotR ) series for this crown, despite the stunning Peter Jackson movie renditions of the Ring Trilogy. Thus, it is worthwhile to compare elements of both. Both series drew upon rich sources of Western mythology to create vivid and varied worlds. Magic is a hallmark of these fantasy worlds, like so much of the fantasy genre which LotR could be said to have seeded. Within different fantasy universes, magic works differently. In LotR, magic is a specific province of particular races, like the Elves (Elder). Magical objects – most notably the rings – can achieve a kind of sentience: a plot mover in LotR is the desire of the One Ring to return to its master, and its ability to actually make events happen that will move toward this goal.

Magic in the Potter (HP) series is congenital: one is born either magical or muggle, with magical ability usually manifested by the age of seven, and with non-magical offspring (squibs) possible within magical families, and magical offspring possible within muggle families. In this, Rowling’s universe more closely resembles psi ability in the sci-fi television series Babylon 5, although it could also be said that both of the latter series are reflecting the post 1950’s scientific outlook of DNA and genetics.

Two of the great religious-philosophical issues are shared by the two fantasy series: Fate, and the problem of Evil. In LotR, evil is incarnate in Sauron, the current Dark Lord, who was lieutenant to the previous Dark Lord of an earlier age. Sauron crafts a ring of power – the One Ring which will rule over all the magical rings of Middle Earth. In the Potter series, the Dark Arts can be studied by any magician, and in the modern period in which the Potter series takes place, a dark-magical expert named Lord Voldemort emerges. HP is the story of the entwined fates of Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. When Harry was one year old, Voldemort murdered his parents, and then attempted to murder Harry. Instead, when he tried, the killing curse rebounded on Voldemort, disembodying him, while Harry was left with a lightning-shaped scar. Harry was henceforth called, The Boy Who Lived, because nobody previously had ever survived a killing curse. Evil is a bit more relativistic in Harry Potter: one becomes evil by doing evil deeds.

As for Fate, the Fate of LotR is multi-layered and inter-generational. It is clearest in the character of Aragorn: the descendant of King Isuldur, who defeated Sauron and then failed to destroy Sauron’s ring, thereby allowing Sauron to eventually return to power. It is Aragorn’s job to fix the mess, if the new age of men is ever to dawn.

In HP, Fate is personal: the whole series of events leading to Harry’s parents’ murders and Harry’s survival sets him up as the Chosen One – the one who ultimately must go toe-to-toe with Lord Voldemort for the hearts and minds, bodies and souls of the wizarding community.

Before we proceed to an actual examination of the works, it’s worth mentioning one biographical note: J.R.R. Tolkien originally invented Middle Earth and the stories to engage and amuse his children: the effort of an extremely bright academic philologist to engage his sons in his own academic passions. J.R. Rowling wrote her Books to support her child: she completed the first volume as an unemployed divorced mother, a few years after the death of her own mother.

At first, it’s easy to critique the HP series from a feminist perspective (and it has been done) – the current Top Dogs are all male: Voldemort, Harry, Professor Dumbledore, and the various Ministers of Magic. There is the slightly disturbing piece that all female magicians are called witches, while all male magicians are called wizards. To most ears, “wizard” sounds better (perhaps because of Gandalf in LotR) – had Rowling chosen the word “warlock” for the men, the footing would, perhaps, have felt a little more equal, although still raising the question of why the genders need to have different words ascribed to them at all. It is, by the way, completely appropriate to critique Jo on word usage: she has shown great care in her choice of language over the years, and especially in choosing titles for foreign language editions. Further superficial feminist critiques include the level of giggling among the girls, and the housewife roles like Molly Weasley. On the other hand, having taught girls of this age: I'm sorry - but they giggle. This may not be a convenient feminist idea, but it is true!

But I think these issues are better considered comparatively. LotR was written roughly fifty years before HP. In LotR, the female roles are ancillary and cardboard, for the most part. Of course! Tolkien invented this world for his sons, and so males occupy better than 95% of the roles, except for extras, of course. They mostly move the plot passively, if they move it at all. Some, like Goldberry, are female Earth or Water deities. Galadriel is the one female Elf ring-bearer (there are no female ringbearers among either the dwarves or men): and she uses her ring to maintain the forest Lothlorien, and to prophesy. Arwen is Aragorn’s love interest, an Elf, who gives up immortality to be with the (mortal) man she loves – a part so sketchy in the book that Peter Jackson considerably juiced up the role in the movie. The only active part is Eowyn, of the royal house of Rohan. She sneaks along with the army that rides to fight in Gondor, and acts as the agent to kill the leader of the ringwraiths – a man for whom it had been prophesied that no man could kill him. She thus acts the part of demonstrating, as was so typical of the Celtic concept of prophesy, that the exact wording of the prophesy is critical.

Things are much different in HP. Here, the first notable point is that the Trio as they have been dubbed – Harry, Hermione and Ron – is two boys and a girl. Stop and think about this – this is actually exceptional. How many trios do any of us remember growing up that were mixed gender, unless they consisted of brothers and sisters? Jo has said that Hermione was a composite of herself and her sister – Hermione played the role of the smart kid who kept Harry and Ron in passing grades in many of their classes – and was always there to do the library work to figure those things out that they needed, but hadn’t been taught yet. Because she read so much, she found amazingly useful spells that the boys couldn’t even begin to consider. She learned how to make complex potions and sophisticated spells by reading about them and then trying them out.

Women are all over Hogwarts, even if they aren’t in charge. Professor McGonagall is the Deputy headmistress throughout six of the Books, briefly becoming Acting Headmistress at the end of Book 6. Other regular female professors are Professors Sprout, Trelawney, Hooch, Vector and Sinistra. This works out to a staff gender ratio of 1:1. As far as we can see, the gender ratio of students is around 1:1. The school was founded by two witches and two wizards. The four houses that they produced are still headed by faculty members in a gender ratio of 1:1.

The issue of career pathways and choices for women seems to be open. It appears that Molly Weasley chose to be a housewife: but she also chose to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix, a resistance group set up by Dumbledore the first time Voldemort attempted to come to power. There are many witches employed at the Ministry of Magic. Witches are textbook authors, judges and examination supervisors. The professors at Hogwarts seem to follow the Medieval model of being in Church orders, which meant celibate. But whether this was compulsory is never stated. And here is one of the areas where the magical community does seem to differ from the muggle community: it appears that there may be a lower incidence of marriage. And what does seem to be completely absent from the books is any hint of homosexuality.

The story takes place in the United Kingdom in the 1990’s. The magical community is a parallel community to the muggle one: as such, it is going to look a lot like the world as a whole. Would a sub-community with no sexism and racism even be believable to kids (much less adults) reading what to them is contemporary fiction? I think not. In fact, it is precisely Jo’s brilliance at portraying Harry as the totally realistic obnoxious self-centered adolescent in Book 5 that sets up so much of the plot development in Books 6 and 7. Voldemort’s vicious sexism in Book 2 causes him to completely discount Ginny’s emerging strength – which becomes an increasingly important plot element as the series proceeds. Hermione’s bookish personality may not look like heroism in Book 1, but she does show an innate ability to think on her feet, and she finds her courage totally by Book 7, when she is in the thick of the hunt for and destruction of the horcruxes.

As it is, Jo’s magical community is less sexist – and racism becomes a major issue in the books: often, but not always, intertwined with evil. Racism in the magical community is shown in two ways: the ancient preference of some of the wizarding families for pure blood (i.e., no muggle ancestry, or at least none closer than great grandparents), and the treatment of the other sentient magical species: goblins, centaurs, and house elves. In Books 5 and 7, the racist oppression of others by the evil side is a primary theme. In Book 7, the benign neglect type of racism of a character counted among the “good guys” in Book 5 is shown to have been partially responsible for his death, and Harry himself gets involved with “fixing” things with the aggrieved party.

In comparing HP to LotR, we see not only a massive increase in both the number and complexity of female roles, but we see a greater articulation of the concept of evil. Tolkien did the written version of LotR in the shadow of World War II: when the whole Nazi regime could be seen as a personification of evil. Tolkien wrote of the ring of power: that the power over others was the gateway to evil deeds. Compare the evil of Sauron to the good of the Elves: the three elven rings were used to protect the people and lands. But in Sauron’s obsession to amass all power to himself, he insured that the other rings could not defeat him – but this also insured that when his ring was destroyed, that destruction in turn destroyed the power of the elven rings.

In HP, the track which turns Tom Riddle from a somewhat sadistic boy into a true bastion of evil as Lord Voldemort was his obsession with conquering death: and then surrounding himself with a cadre of Death-Eaters for whom the purity of (magical) blood was a paramount issue – this, despite the irony that Riddle/Voldemort himself was a half-blood (i.e., half muggle). In Book 7, it is also revealed that the last great evil wizard was also obsessed with the need for power over the muggle community. Riddle is gradually revealed through Book 6 to have been a loner – a boy/man who felt no familial connection, and no true friendship. As Dumbledore prepares Harry for the Final Showdown, he emphasizes to Harry how Voldemort cannot begin to understand the love and sacrifice of Harry’s mother when she allowed Voldemort to kill her, but as her last act, wove a spell around Harry which deflected Voldemort’s killing curse back upon himself. The theme of power vs. love resonates to an old mythos in the human psyche.

It should further be emphasized that Rowling does not merely populate the Good side with women: they are among the most evil characters as well. Voldemort has followed Hitler in designing the "chain of command" as a diffuse structure, not a tight hierarchy. That way, nobody but him knows everything going on. But within the competition thereby created for his attention, one of Voldemort’s top lieutenants is Bellatrix Lestrange, who of all the Death-Eaters, appears to be the most bloodthirsty by far. But witness her duel with Molly Weasley in Book 7 for two sides of the coin. Molly fights not out of malice, but for her family and friends: her two brothers had been killed in the earlier confrontation with the Death Eaters in Voldemort's first rise to power, and she has been suffering from the losses to the Order of the Phoenix in this more recent war as well.

The other seriously evil female character is Dolores Umbridge, who is a Ministry of Magic plant brought in as a professor in Book 5 to keep an eye on Dumbledore, when the Ministry of Magic suspects Dumbledore of lying about the return of Voldemort at the end of Book 4. Although not a Death-Eater (i.e., follower of Voldemort), she has a completely sympathetic vision of the future of the magical community (pure-bred), and some sadistic ways of enforcing her will, whether on students (Book 5), or on the magical community itself (Book 7).

I would be as seriously suspicious of a tale this complex with no evil women as one where all the evil characters were women. Thus, neither good nor evil is presented as having a gender affiliation.

In judging the whole of the work, it needs to be remembered that this was, from the beginning, a commercial enterprise on Rowling’s part. There is no shame in an author who wants to support herself on her writings! Part of what has made this such a successful work is that there is close to a perfect mix of creative imagination with realistic character development. Pretty much everybody can find at least one character to identify with – apart from the sexual preference omission. Rowling leads a bit on gender equality and certainly more than a bit on racism. And one has to acknowledge that the question of just how far one’s fiction should lead ahead of contemporary mores is as much a tactical one as anything else.

Note: I wrote the above before Rowling "outed" Dumbledore, which raises a whole series of other questions. Was Jo right to exclude any mention of homosexuality from the actual text, and then bring in the topic later? I have heard two sides to this question. On the one hand, and this seems to be the larger faction among feminists I have spoken to, is can be viewed as cheating. While there was nothing in Dumbledore's background to suggest that he wasn't gay, it was a bit of a stretch - but not impossible - to piece together the story of Grindelwald and the impact of Dumbledore's personal/sexual feelings on his subsequent behavior. However, this level of reading into the plot hearkens back to a much earlier period in gay history: the "Before Stonewall" Era, when only a hint of deviance was kosher. In that time, legions of lesbian and gay readers followed Jeannette Foster's example in Sex Deviant Women in Literature in teasing out the slightest nuance which could suggest this possibility. The fact is: in roughly forty years time, most of us have lost this knack - if we ever had it.

The other point of view is that Jo did the right thing: these works are, after all, technically children's literature, and perhaps it's best to just leave the whole thing out. I have to say I would disagree with that viewpoint: I am reminded of Philip Pullman's comment en passant about a minor character in The Golden Compass that he was unusual in having a daemon of the same gender that he was - a comment alive with possibilities, and yet hardly explicit in any way.

Of course, in Rowling's case, we may find that she has her cake and eats it too. By "outing" Dumbledore during the filming of Book 6 - where we first glimpse the younger Dumbledore - and before Book 7, one would ask how these scenes will be handled now.

An Open Letter to Maria K. Simms

2006-11-30T09:32:00.000-05:00

Congratulations on the release of The New American Atlas for the 21st Century – Michelsen Memorial Edition (http://www.starcraftseast.com/). It’s hard for me to believe it’s sixteen years since Neil’s death. Our own paths diverged only a couple of years after Neil’s death, as first you, and then I left the NCGR Board, the place where we had briefly walked together.

Neils’ early death so easily could have been much more of a tragedy, but for you, who chose to assume the mantle of keeper of the flame. This new edition shows that you have done so with grace and discernment. This could have just been a slavish reproduction with a new cover. But no: you and Rique Pottenger chose to update it, making the best current calculations available based on equations that Neil didn’t have. Then, in what was the first choice of an astrological ephemeris publisher since the astronomical flak last Summer about the planetary status of Pluto, instead of demoting Pluto to a monthly position, you took the bold stroke of adding Ceres to the main pages while retaining Pluto. What more fitting tribute could there have been to Rique’s mother, Zip Dobyns, who also makes a cameo appearance in the section remembering Neil.

So kudos on the publication!

2006 Elections

2006-10-28T16:50:00.000-04:00

The reason that I don't often make predictions about post-season baseball is that I'm too passionate about it. Strong emotions interfere with good predictions. Which is why most astrologers find themselves to be somewhat flummoxed with their own charts. The other area where strong emotion frequently gets in the way is politics: where almost everybody seems to have an opinion as strong or stronger than the most rabid sports fan pulling for his/her favorite team.

And so again: it's election season.

Well over a decade ago, I worked with Bernadette Brady to build a quantitative model for doing sports prediction based on the Medieval astrologer Guido Bonatti's rules of warfare. With this model, we were able to beat bookmaker's odds for both the cricket matches known as the Ashes (in Bernadette's case) and US football Superbowls in mine.

Shortly thereafter, I asked whether these models could be similarly applied to presidential elections. I did a study not only to determine if the warfare model in general worked (it did), but also which chart to use for the presidential election, as so many mundane possibilities existed. The three charts which historically produced the best results were:

Midnight election day
The prior lunation
The prior Libra Ingress (a contrarian model: i.e., it predicts in reverse)

Note: this article can be found at my web site under http://www.leelehman.com/downloads___references.html

Although this model was developed specifically for presidential elections, I have experimented in the past with applying it to presidential off-year elections. In this case, my hypothesis is that the same model that predicts the presidential result by party could predict whether the congressional elections show a net gain or loss for the party in power.

Therefore, in the spirit of this hypothesis, I present the predictions for 2006.

Here are the tabulations according to this model for the three different charts. Please click on any of the graphics to see a larger view.

The only chart here which may be unclear is the Libra Ingress, since the score is tied. The rule for tie-breaking is that the superior planet “wins;” thus all three models favor the Democrats. The conclusion is that the Democrats will gain seats: how much is not a function of the model.

Can Accountants be Astrologers?+

2006-08-01T23:29:00.000-04:00

In the wake of Enron and other such messes, I want to ask this philosophical question. Granted, greed is endemic to the human race. Kenneth Lay’s excesses along with those of his cronies are merely one chapter in a long history of corporate-government corruption that includes such earlier chapters as Tammany Hall, Exxon Valdez, countless scandals and bubbles, and schemes.

So why get upset about Enron, apart from its environmental consequences, and its obvious tie-ins to the Bush Administration, and the Clinton one as well? The reason, I think, relates to the legacy of the Reagan Administration in the USA, and Thatcher in the UK. There was a fundamental paradigm shift then that still relates to life today. To follow the very interesting presidential study of historian Stephen Skowronek, particular administrations set up a paradigm of government that holds until the next paradigm.* Subsequent administrations either follow the lead of the paradigm-setting administration, or unsuccessfully react to it, until the whole thing collapses with the new paradigm. In Skowronek’s model, the Reagan Administration was the last paradigm, with F.D. Roosevelt before that.

Curiously, one of the accomplishments of the Reagan Era was to further complete the secularization of society which was a hallmark of the Enlightenment – the furtherance of the very point of view that banned astrology from serious intellectual consideration. And even more curiously, that secularization is currently being driven in part by a group of Christian Fundamentalist businesspeople – whose own beliefs are also ultimately compromised by the same position they are advocating.

Whether one chooses to blame Reagan’s economic team, or the simultaneous influx of data processing into business, the fact is that the way that business is conducted on the inside changed radically in the 1980’s. The advent of relatively easy access to reams of data not merely allowed, but virtually mandated that all larger businesses run everything “by the numbers.” The Walmart model of breaking down every sale into components of line item and customer zip code preferences heralded the era of “ship on demand” and frequent buyer clubs: where the clubs were “sold” to the public as benefiting them, but where the real beneficiaries were the companies.

The dark side of this force is that everything and everyone became a number, or merely an aggregate of numbers. And this is where everything changed. Customers became numbers. In the airline industry, this resulted in smaller seats, less legroom, horrible and eventually either non-existent meals or purchased meals as airlines raced each other to find every last way to shave a little bit off the cost,or raise the price a little bit. Flying became uncomfortable as customers were forced to the realization that these literally are cattle cars, and the airlines blamed 9-11. Flight attendants have told me that once their payroll was automated, they routinely found errors in their paychecks – and these errors were always in the airline’s favor.

This disconnection between money and humanity – the severance of any sense of humanity in a business transaction – means that customers can be constantly hit with questionable charges, support centers can be outsourced in ways that significantly impact customer relations, and employees are reduced to productivity machines. The irony is that in the immediate decades leading up to this sea change, there was substantial research suggesting the models such as Abraham Maslow’s where employees are treated well, and allowed to make a significant contribution to self-autonomy, do in fact increase productivity. Whereas treating people as numbers and reducing choice results in lower productivity in employees, and loss of brand loyalty in consumers.

Yet, these newer quantitative models persist, presumably because the short term numerical analysis looks good on paper, and because numbers often provide a comfort blanket, regardless of whether they are correct or meaningful. What these models lack is any accounting for the uniqueness of individuals, or any incentive for service beyond the mediocre. Ironically, the enforcement of these quantitative systems has encouraged workers to act exactly like workers under the Communist system that supposedly was debunked: work is rewarded equally whether one does a good job, or a poor job, so why excel? These methods demean the individual person, declaring the only good to be “value,” which is strictly quantitative.

Whether one is interested in examining life astrologically or spiritually, this approach is both disastrous and demeaning. These systems declare the value of the individual so strongly that they are meaningless without it. You cannot run your life astrologically based on my chart – or vice versa. You cannot rely on me to do your spiritual work – or vice versa. We know that the whole is not the sum of the parts. Whenever we ignore this, we encourage those who seek to tear down our beliefs. Never forget this!

For a really interesting website related to this logical issue of the whole not being the sum of the parts, see http://www.abelard.org/category/category.htm.

+ With thanks to Nick Campion, who asked a question which provoked this essay.
* Skowronek, Stephen. 1997. The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton. Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA.

The Thirteenth Sign? What to do with Ophiucus

2006-07-23T21:41:00.000-04:00

When I was first coming up in astrology oh so many years ago, there was a book called Arachne Rising, proposing a 13th sign. Now, the discussion is about Ophiuchus. Now, Ophiuchus is technically on the ecliptic. But I think what we may need to realize is that this is not a new phenomenon.

What is different now is that some very slick anti-astrology skepticism is picking up on this as an argument against astrology, as you can see through sites like: http://www.griffithobs.org/SkyOphiuchus.html. On the one hand, this website is completely correct. But that same page actually mentions part of why this issue is being raised now, and it has nothing to do with astrology. In the 20th century, it was the astronomers who redrew all the constellational boundaries so that all of the sky is defined. In other words, you have a fundamental re-definition of what a constellation is. The traditional idea was that a constellation like Cancer or Virgo was a recognizable group of stars that looked like something, and therefore meant something. Constellations were seen as being discrete: in other words, there was "space" around them. When astronomy seriously separated from astrology in the late 17th century, it maintained the old definition of constellation, while stripping it of astrological meaning.

Then, astronomy, in going its separate way, engaged in massive study of the sky with vastly superior telescopes. The more they looked, the more objects they found: more stars, and ultimately, galaxies, nebulae, clusters, etc. Under the telescope, the sky ceased to look like a series of discrete pictures, and by the 20th c., astronomers had realized that the constellations themselves were not "connected" in any way: the pictures only look that way from Earth, because the stars of a constellation aren't necessarily "near" each other in three dimensional space.

Thus, astronomy needed a system for ascribing location, and that meant that they needed to cover the entire celestial sphere, not just the ecliptic. Within this quest for locational accuracy, they redefined the constellations as zones of the sky: yet further divorced from the original pictures of our ancestors.

Then, in the ultimate irony, they come back and chide astrologers for not adapting their changed coordinate system, a system that might as well call a location in Leo as A-150X16 as anything else!

So: back to Ophiuchus. Is there any meaning to having the Sun in Ophiuchus? Maybe. The astrologer who I think knows the most about fixed stars right now is Diana K. Rosenberg. Diana for years has talked about the overlays of the tropical, sidereal and fixed stars. She's also talked about the fact that, using the traditional system, any ecliptic degree actually represents an overlap of several constellations. The fixed stars have always been seen as factors that should be considered in the delineation.

As to whether one should change the zodiac, I would be very reluctant to muck with this when the driving force is coming from a group profoundly hostile to astrology. But apart from that, if the ancients knew there were other constellations which intersected the zodiac, why didn't they incorporate them? Largely, we don't know. There's no historical evidence on this. We've got no one to ask. Whether it's because Ophiucus-Serpentarius (it's really a dual constellation) is simply so large, and that only a small portion intersects the ecliptic, who knows? We can certainly can and should modify our delineations for planets in that region based on the constellational overlap. But junk the old system because 20th century astronomers re-invented the wheel? I don’t think so!

Encyclopedia Entry on Horary Astrology

2006-07-12T14:23:00.000-04:00

Horary Astrology

This was submitted to and published in Lewis, James R. 2003. The Astrology Book. Visible Ink: Detroit.

Horary astrology is one of three branches of the general category of interrogatory astrology, literally, the astrology of questions. The other two branches are electional and event interpretation.

Horary astrology requires a Question to be posed by a Querent: and the simpler and clearer the Question, the better. The purpose of horary method is then to provide a means to answer the Question.

As a technology for answering a specific question using astrological methods, horary can also be considered a type of divination. As such, it is akin to I-Ching, Tarot, geomancy, and a host of other divinatory practices.^¹

The horary process can, for simplicity’s sake, be divided into three components:^²

Defining and asking the Question

Describing the circumstances surrounding the Question – which is to say, proving the Question

Providing an answer to the Question.

Defining and asking the Question:

A good horary question is clear, answerable, and can only be asked once. In order to avoid the consequences of asking the same question twice, it is possible to limit a question to a particular time interval. Thus, it is well to encourage your Querent to prefer the wording, “Will I get married within two years (or another time interval)?” to “Will I ever get married?”

Taking the Time

The moment of a horary question is the clock time taken for when the Querent finds it almost impossible to not know the answer any longer.

Noting the Place

Deciding which location to use if the Querent and the astrologer are separated by distance varies depending on the educational lineage of the astrologer. Schools deriving primarily from classical methods favor using the astrologer’s location, while schools deriving from Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson prefer the Querent’s location.

Describing the circumstances surrounding the Question:

By the medieval period, astrologers had begun to notice certain general chart configurations which portended specific answers. These came to be called the considerations against judgment. While it seems that every astrologer had a somewhat different list, the concept is simple: if one of the considerations is present, there is some problem relating to the asking of the question. This is where the astrologer really decides whether the question can and should be answered.

In the 20^th Century, it became common to use the considerations as a reason not to answer the Question, but there is no evidence that this was ever done consistently before the modern era. In most cases, the considerations themselves become part of the delineation of the answer.

The main considerations are:

The placement of Saturn. If in the 1^st House, the Querent may be lying, although misleading may be a better match. In the 7^th, the astrologer may not be properly placed to answer this Question unless the Question is itself of a 7^th House nature, in which case Saturn simply becomes part of that delineation.^³ In the 10^th House, the Querent may damage the reputation of the horary astrologer.

Ascendant or Moon in the Via Combusta (the zone from 15° Libra to 15° Scorpio. This is considered to be a malefic section of the zodiac. As there have been other degree spans mentioned by the ancient astrologers, it is unclear exactly what the Via is really. It is also not known whether the reference is tropical or sidereal

Ascendant too early or too late. An early Ascendant of 3° or less may mean either that it’s too early to ask the Question, or that there is still too much free-will in place to presume to give an answer. A late Ascendant generally 27° or later means that there is nothing that the Querent can do to change the outcome: other plans and events have happened rendering the question moot.

Moon Void-of-course. As the Moon traverses a sign it (usually) makes aspects to the sun and other planets. It is as if the Moon still has work to do. After the Moon has completed the last aspect to a planet, its condition is said to be Void-of-Course, vacua cursus. The aspects in use were the five ptolemaic aspects and the bodies, the Sun through Saturn. In classical times, the Moon was not Void-of-Course if occupying four signs: Cancer, Taurus, Sagittarius and Pisces^⁴(i.e., the Moon’s own sign and exaltation sign, and Jupiter’s two signs). There are multiple interpretations to what this one actually means in practice. The simplest starting point is to be aware that most timing in a horary comes from the Moon: when Void-of-course, there are no events being recorded by the Moon.

The Planetary Hour matches the Ascendant Ruler by Triplicity (i.e., their signs are in the same element). The use of planetary hours in modern times has dwindled, but traditionally, these were supposed to match, sharing an affinity between the Question and the Moment.

The traditional purpose of the considerations was to look for red flags that would make judgment difficult.

Providing an answer to the Question:

Generally, the astrologer needs to be able to do the following things to delineate the Question:

Describe the Querent.
Describe the Quesited (that which as asked about)
See if there is any relationship between the two
Provide some detail on how the Querent does or does not attain the desired end

The Querent is always given by the 1^st House. The possible Significators for the Querent are:

the Ascendant itself

the Ascendant Ruler

planets in the 1st House, or occasionally

the Moon – but this is problematic, because what the Moon really shows in the chart is the sequence of events

A similar list can be drawn up for the Quesited, except that first, we have to decide which (if any) house rules the Quesited.

The Quesited is shown by:

the House represented by the nature of the Question

the Ruler of that House

planets in that house

Table One is a brief listing of house rulerships for various types of questions, done in the classical style.

Table One. Types of Questions by House^⁵

1^st House

Longevity, health (disease is 6^th), happiness, moving vehicles (planes, trains and automobiles), best period in life, the visiting team in most sporting events.

2^nd House

Money, financial instruments directly convertible into cash (bank accounts, CD’s, guaranteed bonds), salary, moveable objects (things you can pick up and carry by yourself), lawyer acting in your behalf in a lawsuit (i.e., barrister).

3^rd House

Neighbors, siblings, cousins of the same generation in age, primary education (see below), short trips (see below), religious matters (see below), whether the rumor is true, writing.

4^th House

Your father (usually), property (whether land or buildings), hidden or buried treasure, your home, inheritance of land, the home team in many sporting events, gardeners or other workers who do landscaping or other outside work.

5^th House

Entertainment, sex (see below), pleasure, gambling, ambassadors (see below), bribery, gifts, the stock market and other riskier investments, alcohol and recreational drugs, children, procreation.

6^th House

Pets, disease, accidents (as in: car accidents), employees or day laborers, small animals (i.e., smaller than a sheep, but also includes large but domesticated dogs like St. Bernards), birds, labor unions (the unions themselves, not labor actions).

7^th House

Marriage and marriage partners, partnerships of all sorts (business as well as intimate), open enemies, thieves, the other party in a buying and selling transaction, a contract labor or subcontractor situation, the default other person (see below), the other side in a lawsuit or negotiation, the other possibility for the home team in a sporting event, removals (or moving house).

8^th House

Death, taxes, wills, insurance, your partner’s money, inheritances other than of property, lawyer representing the other side in a lawsuit.

9^th House

Travel, long trips (see below), philosophy, religion (see below), prophetic dreams, lawyers (see below), higher education (see below).

10^th House

Your mother (usually), honors and awards, promotions, high managerial jobs, judge in a lawsuit, arbiter in a negotiation, bosses higher up in the corporate ladder, perks given out at the whim of someone higher up.

11^th House

Friends, associations, organizations, funding bodies of government agencies, hopes and wishes.

12^th House

Witchcraft (see below), hidden enemies, imprisonment, all institutions of confinement, hospitals, self-undoing, large animals (horses, elephants, whales).

Having defined Querent and Quesited, the astrologer has three steps left. First, there may be specific rules that apply to the particular type of question. For example, there are specific rules for determining whether an object is lost or stolen that are considerably more complex than simply determining the house rulership of the object. For more information on this matter, the reader is encouraged to study a specific horary text in detail.

Second, the astrologer needs to decide whether the Question is resolved through perfection or emplacement. A perfection horary requires that some sort of action(s) or event(s) happen in order for the result to be brought about. An emplacement horary relies purely on where the planets are positioned at the time of the horary, not where they will be sometime later. Lost items, missing people or animal horaries, are the emplacement type horaries. Most other horary questions require the significators’ perfection.

The most common perfection is an approaching aspect of the Querent's planet to the planet symbolising the Quesited. Usually, only the ptolemaic aspects (conjunction, sextile, square, trine, and opposition) are allowed, but differing horary systems may include the parallel or quincunx. In a perfection, the faster moving body must catch up to the slower, generally, without the planets changing sign.

Many authors also allow for perfection by mutual reception between the Significators of the Querent and Quesited.

The next most common means of perfection is translation. In translation, a fast-moving body (generally the Moon, but occasionally Venus or Mercury) separates from one of the Significators, and applies to the other one.

There is one very rare means of translation, which is very powerful: collection. Collection occurs when the faster moving body is separating from the slower moving one, but both are applying to yet a slower body. The slowest one then “collects” the other two.

In addition to these means of achieving perfection, there are also other ways to thwart a perfection. These include:

Refranation: in this case, the two bodies are moving toward perfection, but before the aspect becomes exact, the faster moving body turns retrograde, and the aspect never happens until after that body goes direct again, if at all in the same sign. This is one of the most frustrating scenarios, because everything appears to be moving in the right direction until things suddenly veer off.

Frustration: in this case, again the Significators appear to be moving to perfection, but this time the slower moving planet achieves a partile aspect with a different body before the faster moving body catches up. Again, this scenario shows hope until the person represented by the slower moving Significator goes off in a different direction.

Prohibition: the Significators are moving to perfection, but a swifter body intervenes and completes aspects with both bodies first.

Besiegement: if a Significator is between two malefics, it is besieged. It is not at all clear how large an orb should be allowed for this. The concept for besieged is: between a rock and a hard place. A besieged planet is not free to act as it is hemmed in on all sides.

If the outcome of the Question is negative, the horary astrologer is finished at this point, If the outcome is positive, then there is one more job: attempting to determine the timing of the events leading to the result, or determining the spatial relationship to the object in question in the case of a lost object.

Timing comes from looking for a degree separation between any of the following:

the Significators of the two parties in a simple perfection

between the Moon and one of the Significators

between a Significator and a nearby house cusp

the number of degrees until the Moon changes sign, especially if the Moon is in the late degrees of a sign.

There are actually two scales of time: symbolic, and ephemeris. Symbolic time (a difference of degrees between the two Significators applied to produce time units through the following table) is used most of the time, unless some significant ephemeris event itself may impact the outcome. If, for example, a significant planet is about to go retrograde or direct, it’s common to refer to the actual station date as the critical timing date.

The unit of time to go with this number is given in Table 2.

Table Two. Units of time based on the qualities of the Significators.^⁶

Angular	Succedent	Cadent
Cardinal = days	Cardinal = weeks	Cardinal = months
Mutable = weeks	Mutable = months	Mutable = years
Fixed = months	Fixed = years	Fixed = unknown

Of course, much of the time you get mixed indicators: for example, one Significator will be Cardinal Cadent, while the other is Fixed Succedent. In these cases, you may want to adjust the units of time. The units of time also vary according to the nature of the Question itself.

Direction is not always so obvious, in part because of the frequency of having mixed indicators. The general idea is this: take the major Significators in the chart. Examine their location by sign and by house. If the bulk of the planets are either in one house or one sign, then you can translate this into compass location using the cardinal points of the chart,: the Ascendant as East, etc.

----

Horary was already well developed by the 1^st Century C.E. as demonstrated by the work of Dorotheus of Sidon.^⁷ In this remarkable work, Dorotheus presents interrogatory methods for such questions as building or demolishing a building, buying and selling, requesting a gift, marriage, whether a pregnancy will come to term, debt, travel, buying or building a ship, imprisonment, lawsuits, theft, fugitives, illness and bewitchment. While a modern horary astrologer would not likely follow all of his methods, his presentation is quite readable and logical to modern eyes.

The viewpoint that infused Dorotheus was that all forms of interrogations are interpreted with the same methods, except where the type of interrogation forces a change in usage. Furthermore, there is a hierarchy among the three branches, which applies to deciding upon the appropriate time to use for a question. For example, when it comes to theft, if the time of the theft is known, then a chart for the event is drawn. A horary is used only if that time isn’t known. While the differences between reading an event chart and a horary are often not explicitly mentioned, the most important is that in a horary, the Ascendant gives the Querent, while in either event interpretation or electional, the Ascendant gives the event itself.^⁸ Event interpretation is generally for a past event, horary for the present, and electional for the future.

Most likely, horary is much older than the 1^st or 2^nd Century in which Dorotheus lived. We can conclude this for two reasons: (1) because Dorotheus’ work looks too sophisticated to be a first generation codification, and (2) because Vedic astrology has an absolutely equivalent branch called prashna which is probably equally ancient. At this time, it is impossible -- based on manuscripts and artifacts alone -- to decisively nail down the exact nature of the cross-fertilization of Western and Hindu methods. It is clear that there was extensive sharing of knowledge between the two cultures. We know, for example, that the words used by Vedic astrologers for the planets are transliterations of the Greek planet words. It was easy to postulate that the major source of “sharing” occurred when Alexander the Great invaded Western India in 327-327 bce. However, it now appears that sharing between cultures was far more extensive and over a far greater time period than had been previously thought possible.^⁹

There are several extant katarche (the Greek word for interrogation) from the 5^th Century astrologer Palchus.^¹⁰ Mixed in with questions about taming lions and ships at sea, we see charts drawn for the times of political events: a disastrous crowning of a king, and the time when a Prefect entered Alexandria.

Horary was passed on as one of many techniques when large numbers of Greek manuscripts were translated into Arabic in the period around the 8^th Century ce. Because the Islamic expansion extended into India, this was another period of technique sharing between East and West. Dorotheus was one of the authors translated into Arabic, so his methodology became generally known – and influential on subsequent generations of astrologers. Later authors expanded on the Hellenistic authors. William Lilly, the great 17^th Century horary astrologer, cited Zael, one of the 9^th Century Jewish horary astrologers.^¹¹ The 10^th Century astrologer al-Biruni (973-1048?) also included horary as part of his work.^¹²

Just as the 8^th Century represented a bonanza for Arabic-speaking intellectuals, the 12^th Century was the same for Latin-speaking ones, as that marked the watershed for the translation of Arabic materials into Latin. To fully understand the significance of this transmission, we have to be clear about what actually happened to astrology in the Arabic period:

Hellenistic (and Persian, which is to say Babylonian) methods were translated into Arabic and studied.
Vedic methods were also translated in Arabic.
Hellenistic (Western) and Vedic methods could be combined and synthesized.
The Arabic-speaking practitioners themselves then added and modified the inheritance that they received.

The influx of material into the Latin West was even more extensive than that experienced by the Arabic scholars four centuries before. Thus, when Guido Bonatti wrote on horary in the 13^th Century, the tradition he built upon was already rich.

The Medieval horary astrologer practicing in the West navigated turbulent waters since the very essence of horary astrology – divination – was at best an uncomfortable topic for the Christian Church, and at worst, a mortal sin. Church philosophers postulated that if one can really predict human behavior, then the individual is not “free” to choose Christ and Salvation. While other branches of astrology can adopt the position that the stars incline, but don’t compel, doing so for horary would destroy its very substance, which is the prediction of human behavior. The Church had effectively restricted prophesy as its own perquisite, banning and anathematicizing it in other quarters.^¹³ So despite brilliant individual horary astrologers like Bonatti, most portions of horary apart from medical usage were outside the pale of acceptable astrological behavior for much of the Middle Ages. Yet somehow, its rules continued to be transmitted to future generations, and no doubt individual astrologers continued to answer their own questions.

The survival of horary astrology is due in no small part to the fact that people continued to ask the kind of questions that are the grist for horary astrology: Will I marry B? Is she a virgin? Where is my brother’s ship? Will my son die in the war? The people wanted the answers, while the Church said it either wasn’t possible to have them, or if you got them, it was from a demonic source. This hardly represented a stable situation.

Ultimately, every town had its own cunning man or woman.^¹⁴ He or she would either “fix” your problem, or at least tell you what was going to happen. These people were often the targets of the Inquisition in Catholic countries, but they flourished in Protestant ones – at least, as long as they kept a low profile. How they did their job might vary, with prayer a frequent accompaniment, but there were herbalists, palmists, readers of bird lore, physiognomists, scryers, talisman-makers, psychics (in our terminology), and some astrologers. The astrology practiced might have been primitive by the usual standards, but as literacy increased and books became more available, astrological technique became increasingly available.

The Renaissance had opened the door on classical learning – and it was never completely closed again after that. Part of what this opening represented was an alternate source of knowledge – one not controlled by the Church. Distracted by the rise of Protestantism, the Catholic Church was never able to regain the keys to knowledge. It was in this heady mix of the 16^th and 17^th Centuries that horary once again flourished. The foremost practitioner of this period, who still influences horary, was William Lilly (1602-1681). His eight hundred fifty-four page masterwork, Christian Astrology, is one of the most significant works on the subject.^¹⁵ What made Lilly’s work both great and enduring was that he not only covered the theory, but he also provided sufficient examples so that the reader could really work through his method.

By the time of Lilly’s death, unfortunately, horary astrology had gone increasingly out of fashion. Lilly had been involved in producing political propaganda in the form of almanacs and broadsides for the Parliamentary faction in the English Civil War. While that side “won” the war in the sense that they ousted (and beheaded) the king, after a relatively short period, the monarchy was restored. In this new social climate, prophesy that could have religious and political implications was frowned upon. In addition, the “new” scientific (which is to say secular) paradigm had asserted itself, and all forms of the occult became suspect. Astrology went into decline.^¹⁶

Fortunately, astrology was revived in the 18^th Century. Ebinezer Sibly’s large work on astrology, which went to many editions both before and after his death, included a substantial section on horary technique with his own chart examples.^¹⁷ Sibly’s technique was on a par with late 17^th Century astrologers, an observation which unfortunately does not hold true for the next generations. The 19^th Century environment in which astrology again flourished was one in which matters of the occult generally had become increasingly popular, in part as a reaction to excessive reason in the century prior.

Zadkiel (Richard James Morrison, 1795-1874) is today the best known of the 19^th Century horary cohort. Zadkiel thought highly enough of Lilly to produce an abridged version with his own material tacked on – a work that still confuses modern horary astrologers, who often mistake it for the original Christian Astrology.^¹⁸ Zadkiel and his contemporary Rafael (Robert Cross Smith, 1795-1832) both substantially simplified the astrology of their ancestors, with Zadkiel going in a “scientific” direction that would have been frankly unrecognizable to Lilly.

Many, if not most, astrologers dabbled with horary, even if it wasn’t the bulk of their practice. For example, The Astrologer’s Magazine (Volume 3, 1893) featured a regular horary column by “E. Casael.” This magazine was published by Alan and Bessie Leo.

In the early part of the 20^th Century, Leo substantially changed his astrological method to emphasize character analysis over predictive technique.^¹⁹ It was from these changes that both psychological astrology and esoteric astrology were ultimately based.

In the wake of these new forms of astrology, it isn’t surprising that one of the major trends of 20^th Century horary has been to add natal methods to horary delineation, and to combine horary with natal method.

Among the significant 20^th Century horary astrologers are:^²⁰

Marc Edmund Jones (1888-1980): While Jones’ method is often opaque, in great part because of a lack of examples, his philosophical discussion of "Phrasing the Question" and "Locating the Question" are useful reading even to classicists.^²¹
Ivy Goldstein-Jacobson (1893-1990) practiced in California, writing a number of books. She adapted some classical methods, adding the use of the word “cautions” for the considerations against judgment, and was adamant that the horary had to be calculated for the location of the Querent, not the horary astrologer. She was inadvertently the originator of the idea that planets in mutual reception “swap” or “exchange” places. She also popularized the use of the parallel, and added decanates to horary delineation.^²²
Barbara Watters (1907-1984) allowed the quincunx as an aspect, brought back the use of eclipses in horary delineation, use the word “strictures” for the considerations against judgment (thereby allowing later horary astrologers to refer to the “cautions and strictures” and to attempt to distinguish between them).^²³
Olivia Barclay (1919-2001) was largely responsible for the current popularity of William Lilly and the revival of classical methods in horary astrology. Originally trained in Goldstein-Jacobson’s methods, Barclay switched when she accidentally found a partial original copy of Lilly in a used bookshop.^²⁴

1 For a fuller discussion of this connection, please see Cornelius, Geoffrey, 1994. The Moment of Astrology. Penguin: New York.

2 For a full discussion of this system of classification and most of this article, please see my book, Lehman, J. Lee. 2002. The Martial Art of Horary Astrology. Whitford Press: West Chester, PA.

3 For example, if the Question concerns marriage, and Saturn is in the 7^th House, then it may become a Significator of the Quesited, or at least tell something about the potential marriage partner. Since 7^th House Questions include marriage, buying and selling, and theft, it is very common for this consideration to not apply. It is not then considered to be a warning concerning the astrologer. Also, if Saturn is dignified, these house placements may not qualify as true considerations, because then Saturn is not considered so malefic.

4 Lilly, William. 1647. Christian Astrology. Reprinted in 1985 by Regulus: London. Also available: Just Us & Associates, pages 122 and 299.

5 Lehman, pages 33-34.

6 Stella Rupertus. 1832. An Astrologian's Guide in Horary Astrology. London: Simpkin and Marshall. In text format, the idea is much earlier, but Stella was evidently the first to use a table.

7 Sidonius, Dorotheus. 1976. Carmen Astrologicum, translated by David Pingree. B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft: Leipzig. Also available: Ascella: Nottsh.

8 For a fuller discussion of this point, see Lehman, J. Lee. 2002. The Martial Art of Horary Astrology. Whitford Press: West Chester, PA, page 13.

9 For one account of how extensive this cross-cultural sharing could have been, see McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. Allworth Press: New York.

10 See Neugebuaer, Otto and Van Hoesen. 1959. Greek Horoscopes. The American Philosophical Society: Philadelphia., pages 142–150.

11 Lilly, William. 1647. See the “To the Reader” section for some of his sources.

12 al Biruni, Abu'l Rayhan Muhammed ibn Ahmad. 1029. The Book of Instruction in the Elements of Astrology, translated by R. Ramsay Wright, Luzac & Co.: London, 1934. Available from Ballantrae.

13 A fascinating picture of how this worked is found Chevalier, Jasques M. 1997. A Postmodern Revelation. Signs of Astrology and the Apocalypse. University of Toronto Press: Toronto.

14 For an account of this whole sociological period, see Thomas, Keith. 1971. Religion and the Decline of Magic. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

15 Lilly, William. 1647. Christian Astrology. Reprinted in 1985 by Regulus: London. Also available: Just Us & Associates.

16 The following gives a full account of this period: Curry, Patrick. 1989. Prophesy and Power. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ. Curry also discusses popular astrology in the 18^th Century, which was probably quite similar to what was being practiced in the 15^th, 16^th and 17^th Centuries by the less urban classes.

17 Sibly, Ebinezer. 1817. A New and Complete Illustration of the Celestial Science of Astrology; or the Art of fortelling future Events and Contingencies by the Aspects, Positions and Influences of the Heavenly Bodies. The Propietor, at #17, Ave-Maria Lane, St. Pauls: London. (12th, or Posthumous Edition).

18 The Zadkiel versions are generally published under the name: An Introduction to Astrology by William Lilly with Numerous Emendations, adapted to the Improved State of the Science. Also a Grammar of Astrology and Tables for Calculating Nativities. Many editions.

19 Curry, Patrick. 1992. A Confusion of Prophets. Victorian and Edwardian Astrology. Collins & Brown: London, pages 149-150.

20 I have engaged in the common hedge of picking our deceased colleagues, so that my contemporaries cannot complain were I to unconscionably omit their names.

21 Jones, Marc Edmund. 1993. Horary Astrology. Aurora Press: Santa Fe, NM.

22 Goldstein-Jacobson, Ivy M. 1960. Simplified Horary Astrology. Frank Severy Publishing: Alhambra, CA.

23 Watters, Barbara. 1973. Horary Astrology and the Judgment of Events. Valhalla: Washington, DC.

24 Barclay, Olivia. 1990. Horary Astrology Rediscovered. Whitford Press: West Chester, PA.

Astro Fundamentalism

2006-07-12T14:10:00.000-04:00

Cleaning out my e-mail (a good Mercury retrograde activity), I ran across a posting that I had done almost three years ago to an astrological e-zine. I wanted to share it here, with the names omitted to protect the innocent (or guilty). A contributor to that e-zine had said, "[T]here is a tendency among at least some exponents of ancient astrology to assume that (1) astrology originated with omniscient, divinely inspired ancient gurus; and (2) that one's character and fate are fixed at the moment of birth. At the very least this viewpoint is implicit in much of ancient astrology."

Let me address (2) first, before I return to (1). If there wasn't something "fixed" at birth, then we wouldn't bother with nativities! So the question is really: how much of the birth moment represents inexorable fate? I would certainly agree with the gentleman's characterization that classical and Vedic astrology both on average assumed a greater quantity of fixed than modern astrology, but let's remember that individual astrologers always varied in the extent of their adherence to this idea. William Lilly, in his rather (in)famous horary on his stolen fish, started with a not promising outcome, and then showed how he applied electional astrology to maximize his recovery. Had Lilly believed in the immutability of his horary, he would not have tried. Other horaries he presented also have subtexts of this same idea: I don't like the predicted outcome, so what do I do to get one that appeals to me more?

What is sometimes not recognized by modern astrologers, however, is the extent to which Western astrology, and especially modern Western astrology, has been affected by going through 1700 years of a Christian lens. It is precisely this Christian viewpoint - the need for free will so that we can "freely" choose salvation or damnation - which has made this whole discussion such a hot spot for much of that time. "Free will" can be seen as a tenet of Christianity.

I think much of what the poster may be objecting to crosses a major cultural and religious divide - and that's where we return to point (1). In the Indian culture, Vedic astrology is a part of the sacred teachings! Astrology, although certainly not the full system, pervades the Vedas, especially the Atharva Veda. In parallel to Christian beliefs about the Bible, these teaching were laid down by - dare we say it? - divinely inspired teachers, also known by the name gurus.
Because astrology is within the sacred sphere, its teachings are divinely inspired.

Now, at Kepler College we may (and do!) study the transmission of astrological ideas back and forth between Mesopotamia, the Hellenistic regions, and India, so that we would not tend to look at any past pronouncements on astrology as being any more divinely inspired than, say, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. However, the mind-set of a culture where astrology is sacred is very different. And I think this cultural divide also explains why so many of the American and European Vedic astrologers do not approach their astrology in quite the same way as the direct biological inheritors of the practice do: Westerners do not come to Eastern material through an Eastern lens, but a Western one. Which then raises the point: if a Vedic astrologer is coming to
this position from a deep religious belief in the sacred nature of his or her astrological findings, who are we to criticize that belief? It is one thing to point out differences resulting from cultural divides, it's another thing to attempt to apply names, such as Fundamentalism, when those names may not successfully cross the cultural divide either - or at least have the pejorative connotation on the other side.

The Mars-Saturn Conjunction

2006-06-19T15:11:00.000-04:00

Until the end of the 17th century, the Mars-Saturn conjunction was regularly examined for its mundane potential by just about all serious astrologers. Unfortunately, all the references are badly out of print. Among the primary works is:

Edlin, Richard. 1668. Observations Astrologicae, or an Astrological Discourse of the Effects of a Notable Conjunction of Saturn and Mars. Billingsly & Blagrave: London. I have made this available in an annotated edition through my Learning with Lee cd series.

Prior to the 20th century, the custom was to interpret the conjunction for its house location and rulerships in a particular place (especially a nation's capital), and using the Medieval convention of deciding which of the planets was stronger by essential dignity. In this case, being in Leo, Mars is stronger, but Saturn is nastier, being in its detriment. With the conjunction being in a fire sign, one expects hot and dry weather, and one expects the martian group of calamities: wars, fevers, violence. It is this very classification of troubles - whether those of Saturn or those of Mars - which was precisely why the conjunction was considered to be of importance.

In this case, for Washington DC, this conjunction occurred at 8 Leo 45 in the 5th house, with Mars, ruling the conjunction ruling the 1st house (Aries rising). This shows the United States as a principal instigator of war during the next couple of years. The Mars also rules the 8th hose of death, and this combination is not great news. With Saturn ruling the 10th house and in detriment, one expects that Bush's overall popularity will decline.

An underused Technique: Diurnals

2006-03-31T11:52:00.000-05:00

In December, my father died. As a daughter, my reactions have been varied and at times, surprising even to me. Perhaps in a few months, I will be able to write about that more fully. For now, I can only address externals, like: which financial companies really gave us hassle, and which were easy to deal with? More on that soon!

However, as an astrologer, what do I have to say about this? We all are such ambulance chasers, what can I say about the prediction of death?

First, did I predict it? Yes, and no. In my solar return for 2005, I had the Moon in Scorpio in the 8th house. As a classicist, the 8th house is certainly a primary indicator of death, and probably not that of the Native. The previous year, I had also had the Moon in the 8th house, this time, in Cancer, and sharing the house with Saturn in Venus. What happened? Our beloved head cat died. So death was a high probability item for 2005-2006, but whose death?

The following month, my partner had actually asked a horary question about who would died first, my father, or my stepmother? The chart had some uncertainty about who was which (another topic I hope to return to), but one thing was clear: whoever it was, was likely to die soon.

So the table was definitely set when I got the call that Dad had possibly had a stroke, but certainly was in a bad way health-wise. My brother and I dropped everything and high-tailed it to Arizona, and Dad died a little more than a week later. As soon as we arrived, it was terribly obvious that Dad was in very bad shape, and not likely to recover. His Christian science beliefs were only part of the complex of issues that added up to too little too late.

In that very odd world of hospice, when the mind gets endlessly caught up in trivial details like urine output, the astro-brain engages the “when” question, because there’s really not much else that makes any sense. The macro view of the solar return had performed, but what is the difference between Sunday and Monday?

Let’s be frank. Most astrological techniques are not really developed to work in total real time. When my partner Maggie’s Mom died, transiting Saturn was a day from conjunct Maggie’s natal Moon. Not bad! But still an orb. My solar return showed the year. My lunar return for the month in which he died (a technique I almost never use) had a fixed grand cross straddling my natal angles, with Uranus right on the 8th house cusp and the 8th house ruler Jupiter right on the 4th house cusp opposed by Mars; and the forming Saturn-Neptune opposition on my 1st-7th axis. It is the worst looking lunar return for this year, although upcoming July doesn’t look so great. So this focused November to December as the peak point. But do we always get the juicy transits on the “right” day?

I have found over time that when I am searching for the hit within a week’s time, more often than not, I get the real precision out of diurnals. Diurnals are a modern technique that is calculated by taking the time, time zone, and location of the Native’s birth, and inserting today’s (or whatever desired) date. What you then look for is angle hits: exact to the degree, transiting or natal, because the angles move by about a degree per day.

The hint that it’s time to consider diurnals is something big, with no logical transit to set it off. By logical transit, I mean something bigger than the Moon sextile a totally unrelated planet, i.e., a planet that is neither in a relevant house, nor ruling one.

Since I ended up sing diurnals to rectify my own chart, have also applied them to this kind of quotidial effect, to very interesting results.

Astrology is not Inherently Esoteric

2006-03-25T17:30:00.000-05:00

One of the ideas floating around the astrological community is not merely the idea that astrology is intrinsically esoteric, but that this is a good thing. Part of my problem with this idea no doubt revolves around definitions, but I think this idea also masks a couple of other underlying assumptions which are not terribly benign.

Esoteric knowledge is hidden knowledge. Ok, easy enough. But that raises the questions: hidden by whom? Hidden from whom? And what is knowledge, anyway? If your cosmology is that astrology was created by and maintained by the Divine, whoever and whatever that is, and that primary knowledge does not and cannot reside in human beings, then, yes – astrology must have and does have an esoteric component, if only because Divine knowledge and Divine will is rarely if ever transparent to mere mortals. However, if this is true of astrology, wouldn’t it be equally true of every other form of knowledge which relates to the divine? Why should astrology be unique?

Most of what we call astrology in either the West or India either originated with or was strongly influenced by the Babylonians. Francesca Rochberg, in her 2004 book which is listed in my bibliography post, addressed this issue of what divination meant to the Babylonians in great detail. Simplifying somewhat, in the Babylonian cosmology, all people were slaves of the gods. The king might be way up the ladder from everybody else, but even he was at best an overseer. But ho do you know what your masters want? The Babylonians believed that the gods spoke to humans through omens. Anything that happened that was out of the ordinary was potentially an omen, hence a message from the gods. At first, these omens might be seen as applying primarily or exclusively to the king, as it was his job to relay these commands. But eventually, omens that happened to you and to you alone could be seen as your personal message. Among the possible omens were the celestial omens. And eventually, the birth itself could be seen as a personal omen.

If interpreting the omens is at heart what astrology is, then why would those gods not want us to be able to decipher the message???

I believe that a lot (I won’t say all) of what gets touted as esoteric has a lot more to do with human power games than with anything divine. There’s good communication and teaching, and bad communication and teaching. If I acquire a skill and then I either cannot or won’t teach it to others, what good did it do for the human race for me to have gotten it in the first place? Where’s the divine logic in that? Now, it’s one thing to say that the acquisition of knowledge requires sequencing. That’s like saying that in order to understand radioactive decay, I first have to understand atomic theory. Fine. But if I understand decay, and you have only gotten as far as atomic theory, I am not “better” or “more evolved” than you are. I’m simply further along the learning curve, which is not a value judgment at all.

Get a grip. Learn what you can. Teach others. Have fun. Move on.

Books I've read recently of interest to Astrologers

2006-03-24T22:29:00.000-05:00

Burnett, Charles, Jan P. Hogendijk, Kim Plofker and Michio Yano, Ed. 2004. Studies in the History of the Exact Sciences in Honour of David Pingree. Brill: Leiden.

Connor, James A. 2004. Kepler's Witch. An Astronomer's Discovery of Cosmic Order amid Religious War, Political Intrigue, and the Heresy Trial of his Mother. HarperSanFrancisco: San Francisco.

French, Roger. 2003. Medicine before Science. Cambridge University Press: New York.

Gutas, Dimitri. 1998. Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. Routledge: London.

Ho Peng Yoke. 2000. Li, Qi and Shu : An Introduction to Science and Civilization in China. Dover: New York.

Ho Peng Yoke. 2003. Chinese Mathematical Astrology. RoutledgeCurzon: New York.

Hogendijk, Jan P. and Abdelhamid I. Sabra, Ed. 2003. The Enterprise of Sciences in Islam. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Lucas, John Scott. 2003. Astrology and Numerology in Medieval and Early Catalonia. Brill: New York.

McEvilley, Thomas. 2002. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. Allworth Press: New York.

Newman, William R. and Anthony Grafton. 2001. Secrets of Nature. Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Noegel, Scott, Joel Walker and Brannon Wheeler, Ed. 2003. Prayer, Magic and the Stars in the Ancient and Late Antique World. Univ. of PA Press: University Park.

Pingree, D. and C. Burnett, Ed. 2004. Studies in the history of the exact sciences in honour of David Pingree. Brill: Leiden ; Boston.

Possanza, D. Mark. 2004. Translating the Heavens. Aratus, Germanicus and the Poetics of Latin Translation. Peter Lang: New York.

Rochberg, Francesca. 1998. Babylonian Horoscopes. American Philosophical Society: Philadelphia.

Rochberg, Francesca. 2004. The Heavenly Writing. Divination, Horoscopy and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture. Cambridge Univ. Press: New York.

Rubenstein, Richard E. 2003. Aristotle's Children. How Christians, Muslims and Jews rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and illuminated the Dark Ages. Harcourt: New York.

Tinniswood, Adrian. 2004. By Permission of Heaven. The True Story of the Great Fire of London. Riverhead Books: New York.

Turner, Gerard L'E. 2003. Renaissance Astrolabes and their Makers. Ashgate: Burlington, VT.

Twicken, David. 2000. Classical Five Element: Chinese Astrology Made Easy. Writers Club Press: Lincoln, NE.

vanden Broecke, Steven. 2003. The Limits of Influence. Pico, Louvain and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrology. Brill: Boston.

Walters, Derek. 2005. The Complete Guide to Chinese Astrology : The Most Comprehensive Study of the Subject Ever Published in the English Language. Watkins/Duncan Baird: London.