I just received an email from a former student of mine a couple of days ago who recorded a video endorsing my introduction to Hellenistic astrology course. Since I am starting a new group of students in the course this week I thought that I would take this opportunity to promote the class a bit for anyone that is interested in signing up. The new group of students is just getting started this week, but since the course is designed so that people can work at their own pace there is still time for new students to sign up for the course this month.
Here is a link to the video endorsement I received from Bill Frazier today: click for video
Hellenistic astrology was the original tradition of ‘horoscopic astrology’ that was developed sometime around the 1st century BCE. In the course I take people on a detailed trip through the history, philosophy and techniques of this ancient tradition of astrology. Unlike modern astrology, most traditional forms of astrology are more explicitly directed towards timing and prediction, rather than say, psychology or character analysis.
I include a number of more obscure and remarkable timing techniques in the course, many of which have only recently been recovered due to various translation efforts. Upon completing the course students acquire a better understanding of the fundamental concepts and theories underlying astrology, and they find themselves in a better position to approach chart synthesis in a much more concrete and systematic manner. This naturally leads to an improved ability to carry out the fundamental purpose of astrology - to make predictions.
I’m taking on new students for private study all the time, so if you are interested in learning more then please send me an email or register for the course here.
I wrote this paper on the use of mythology as a device in astrological delineations a few years ago while I was still attending Kepler College . I think that I initially wrote the paper because I was kind of annoyed by the subject matter and I wanted to focus on more precise techniques, having just had my first introduction to Hellenistic and Indian astrology a few months earlier. At the time I was also rather excited by some of the arguments that Robert Schmidt was making about the conceptual origins of the Hellenistic tradition and the possible the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on the original cosmological model of the astrologers, as you can tell in the paper. The paper is pretty amateurish, and I would probably write it a bit differently now, but I’ll present it in the original form with only a few slight modifications since gist of the argument towards the end is still essentially the same as what I would make at this point in time.
This isn’t a technical paper on how to delineate charts using mythology, but it is actually more of a theoretical argument against using mythology as a core tool in delineations. I should point out that I’m not trying to denigrate anyone who is a proponent of such an approach, and I have a number of good friends who regularly employ mythology in chart delineations, but this article is more of a rationalization of my own reasons for not doing the same as the basis for my own practice.
The Place of Myth in Astrology
Horoscopic astrology appeared in the Mediterranean area sometime around the 1st or 2nd century BCE and it was heavily influenced by the philosophy of the earlier Athenian and Hellenistic philosophical schools, particularly that of Plato (437-347 BCE). Robert Schmidt has recently proposed that the entire apparatus of horoscopic astrology was a theoretical construct devised by one person, or one group of people, over the course of one or two generations based off of the Platonic notion that the cosmos is a living, sentient animal, with a body and a soul.[1] Furthermore, Schmidt argues that this cosmic animal possesses a rational consciousness that is capable of knowing the events that befall individual human beings, and the observable astronomical phenomena that are studied by astrologers are actually believed to be expressions of thoughts that take place in the cosmic consciousness of this animal.
I’ve been of the opinion for a while now that astrology is fundamentally deterministic, and that the majority of astrologers approach the subject with a more or less deterministic mindset, whether they consciously acknowledge it or not. In fact, the vast majority of astrologers seldom even realize just how deterministic their unspoken assumptions about astrology actually are, and these assumptions are in conflict with their consciously stated views about the subject.
A member of the Horoscopic Astrology group on Myspace posed a question along these lines on the forum today:
When we feel and understand the potential of a planetary (whole sign) ingress, maybe its possible to harness the energy to put us in the driving seat. If we don’t harness it, it will harness us. Can awareness make us the master rather than the slave?
I decided to approach my answer to this question from more of an explicitly Stoic perspective. Here is a modified version of my response:
The early founders of Stoicism, Zeno and Chrysippus, used an interesting example to illustrate a point along these lines, according to a later author named Hippolytus:
They too affirmed that everything is fated, with the following model. When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity, but if it does not want to follow it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they do not want to, they will be compelled in any case to follow what is destined. (Long & Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 62 A.)
The important point for here for the Stoics seems to be the degree to which a person can realize and accept their own fate, and how they subsequently choose to work with it. Within this context the Stoics also introduce additional ideas about the notion of co-fated events the doctrine of assent, since the choice to accept and ‘trot alongside the cart’, so to speak, or to not accept and be dragged, is a choice in it of itself. Theoretically, if we understand our fate then the more appealing option is obvious.
My friend Nick Dagan Best has a new video up on Youtube from his interview in the forthcoming documentary Return of the Magi. It is a rather insightful look into the the views and the practices of a contemporary astrologer. If you are not very familiar with astrology, or you don’t know much about how astrologers view the subject, then I would highly recommend that you watch this video, as it gives a pretty thorough introduction.
My favorite line from the clip is Nick’s statement in response to a question about skepticism of astrology:
I wake up every morning with the express intent of disproving astrology, and I go to bed every night having failed miserably.
Here is the clip:
More information about the movie that this interview will be incorporated into can be found at returnofthemagi.com. The Association for Young Astrologers is hosting the movie premiere of Return of the Magi on May 18th in Denver, Colorado at the United Astrological Conference. Tickets for the event can be purchased on the AYA website. For more information about Nick Dagan Best and his work see his website ExotericAstrology.com
Lately astrologers have been talking a lot about the lunar eclipse that just occurred tonight in Virgo. Eclipses of any sort of often tend to be rather unpleasant, depending of course on how they are hitting a certain person’s birth chart. Sometimes it is kind of interesting to observe how they effect certain people when they land in pivotal areas of their chart. Even though the eclipse just went exact a couple of hours ago, we already have an example of how this correlated with an event in one prominent individual’s life.
The New York Times Article
So, I was watching CNN just a bit ago and they had a few political commentators on talking about this article that the New York Times just decided to publish tonight at 7:00 PM EST on their website. Apparently the article is about John McCain allegedly having an affair with a female lobbyist during the 2000 campaign. This apparently compromised his political integrity because he also supposedly wrote
…letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s client…”
This is potentially damaging for McCain because, if its true, then it brings his integrity into doubt with regard to doing favors for lobbyist, even though he has been a staunch opponent of politicians doing favors for special interest groups like this for much of his career. Even if the New York Times article isn’t true, it is just bad publicity for McCain.
McCain’s campaign was quick to issue a statement tonight in order to dispute the New York Times article
It is a shame that the New York Times has lowered its standards to engage in a hit and run smear campaign.
What is interesting about this from an astrological perspective is that, according to Dana Bash of CNN, there may have been some arguments within the New York Times over whether or not to run the story in the first place, and according to McCain’s campaign
…The New York Times started working on this story several months ago, back in the fall.
If this is true, that the Times started working on this story sometime back in the fall, then I wonder if the story really first started to be formulated during the last set of eclipses back in August and September. Often eclipses act as these sort of bookends which link together events in a six month period, and it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if this was the case here.
Kepler College recently started a YouTube account and they posted a few clips from a recent graduation ceremony that took place in October of 2007. I found Rob Hand and Nick Campion’s speeches to be particularly interesting, as usual.
I just finished reading an astonishingly misinformed article by Glenn Perry in the latest issue of the NCGR Journal titled From Ancient to Postmodern Astrology, Toward a New Synthesis. Normally I would just let the uninformed ravings of some random astrologer pass by without taking much notice and then continue on about my day, but I was honestly caught off guard by the rather caustic nature of the article, as well as the string of inaccurate and uninformed statements that it was riddled with. So, I thought that I would take the time to address some of the issues with his article here. Such a misinformed and misleading tirade published by anyone deserves to be rebuked and admonished, but especially when it is coming from a guy with a Ph.D who should know better than to publish such a shoddy paper in an international journal.
Diatribe Par Excellence
While the title of the article implies that Perry intends to introduce or propose some sort of synthesis of modern and traditional astrology, the vast majority of the rather lengthy 18 page article actually turns out to be just one long diatribe directed against traditional forms of astrology in general. Actually, the emphasis of the article is directed towards disputing and ridiculing the author’s own rather skewed and minimal understanding of traditional astrology, which is not the same as saying that it is a legitimate critique of traditional astrology per se. I say this because the author is clearly addressing the tradition without much background or knowledge of it, which even Perry himself later admitted.
Perry actually reminds me of many of the modern day ’skeptics’ or ‘debunkers’ of astrology who attack the subject without really knowing much about it, and subsequently tend to make some pretty obvious mistakes in the process. Perry even invokes the Barnum effect at one point on page 31, much like many modern debunkers of astrology such as James Randi and Richard Dawkins are fond of doing. In general Perry also follows the same framework that many modern ‘debunkers’ do, in relying mainly on his rhetorical abilities in order to get his point across, rather than say, something more than a superficial understanding of the subject matter. This is an interesting case though because Perry is actually an astrologer that simply has some sort of axe to grind with the earlier traditions of astrology, for whatever reason. In the process of doing so Perry shows himself to be quite an aspiring rhetorician, but rather incompetent when it comes to actual research and scholarship.
I will focus mainly on some of the more blatant mistakes in the article, many of which showcase Perry’s lack of background or understanding of traditional astrology, as well as the history of astrology in general. (Update: for another perspective see Ben Dykes’ article) The point of this little overview will be to highlight the fact that Perry’s academic shortcomings far exceed his rhetoric, and thus undercut pretty much any point that he was attempting to make.
As I said in my previous post on Hillary Clinton’s birth chart earlier this year, one of the biggest issues that astrologers are going to run into when trying to make predictions about the upcoming election is that birth data for the majority of the candidates is pretty scarce. Basically, we just don’t have reliable birth times for a number of the candidates, and this information is quite important when casting charts and making predictions using horoscopic astrology.
That was the state of things earlier this year, and I had hoped that matters would have improved since then, but unfortunately the status of the birth data for the majority of the candidates is still a pretty dismal state of affairs. Recent events have led me to be a bit more skeptical about three of the candidates proposed times in particular, so I would like to address that issue briefly here.
Hillary Clinton’s Birth Time
Earlier this year I attended the NCGR astrological conference in Baltimore where I sat in on a lecture about the 2008 election. Naturally during the course of the lecture the point came up that the birth data for many of the candidates is either nonexistent or highly ambiguous. At one point the subject of Hillary Clinton’s natal chart came up, for which there are several different proposed birth times with different sources, and there was a discussion about which chart was the correct one.
Towards the end of the discussion about the different proposed birth times an older woman who was sitting off to the left hand side of the room stood up and stated quite calmly and sort of mysteriously that Hillary was born at 8:02 am, and that the Scorpio rising chart was the correct one. The unusual air of calmness and conviction about the woman kind of struck me as interesting, and I quickly jotted down the time. When I had done some cursory investigations into Hillary’s birth chart the previous fall I had come to the conclusion that the Scorpio rising chart was likely the correct one, although I was still perplexed to hear this woman state a precise time with such assurance, almost as if she had some sort of inside information.
It is not the purpose of this article to give a full review of Roger Beck’s new book on Hellenistic astrology titled A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. The major shortcomings of the book, as well as most of the issues that I have with it, have already been addressed in detail by Deborah Houlding in her review. Other reviews besides Houlding’s from Beck’s colleagues give him a bit more credit than he deserves. The purpose of this article is to point out one of the major flaws in the book that is due to a mixture of lack of knowledge of other scholarship or developments in the field, and lack of real familiarity or depth of understanding with the technical side of the subject matter, which probably stems from the sense of distaste that Beck exhibits for astrology in general throughout the course of his book.
While we might excuse Beck’s historical mistakes due to the fact that some of the recent work in the field that would have helped Beck to avert his errors were made by astrologers - and perhaps there is some justification in this excuse - I think that there is a deeper issue in the approach to scholarship that academics like Beck take that I want to address. First, we have to take a little detour.
House Division
In 1982 the astrologer, linguist and historian of astrology James Holden published a paper in the American Federation of Astrologers Journal of Research titled ‘Ancient House Division’. In this paper Holden, who reads Greek and Latin, pointed out that the original method of house division in the Hellenistic tradition was actually whole sign houses, or the “sign-house” system as he called it. According to Holden:
This was the origin of the houses of the horoscope. They began with the rising sign and were numbered successively in the order of signs. … Starting from the rising sign, the houses were numbered off in succession. … Note that the reckoning was by whole signs. This means that if the first house was Leo, the entire sign of Leo constituted the first house, the entire sign of Virgo the second house, and so on. This is the primitive form of Equal House division. It is found in the papyri (GH, pp. 16-75) from the earliest to the latest, and it is still in widespread use in India. (Holden, 1982)
Holden reiterated the same point in his 1996 book A History of Horoscopic Astrology. In the mid 90’s this argument was further confirmed and developed by Robert Schmidt and Robert Hand of Project Hindsight during the course of their translation project of Hellenistic astrological texts. Hand published a monograph which summarized their findings in 2000 titled Whole Sign Houses: The Oldest House System. Hand pointed out that not only were whole sign houses the original and primary method of house division in the Hellenistic tradition, but that early generations of Arab era astrologers in the 8th and 9th centuries were still using whole sign houses as well. (Hand, pg. 17) In the preface to his translation of book 3 of Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos Schmidt pointed out that there was a distinction in the Hellenistic tradition between whole sign houses which provided significations for certain topics, and the quadrant or ‘dynamic’ divisions which were used to gauge planetary strength. (Ptolemy, pg. viii)
With these developments in mind as a backdrop, we turn to Roger Beck’s treatment of the houses or ‘places’ in the Hellenistic astrological tradition that was published just this year, in 2007.
Hellenistic House Division According to Roger Beck
To put it simply, Roger Beck appears to be pretty much unaware of the existence of whole sign houses in the Hellenistic tradition of astrology. Continue Reading »
An astrologer named Kelly Lee Phipps has been filming a documentary over the past year on astrology called The Return of the Magi. It is sort of a What The Bleep Do We Know-esq documentary with a number of interviews from various astrologers in the field, as well as a running storyline with a narrative which incorporates some of the concepts that are mentioned in the interviews. This is a much needed project since, to the best of my knowledge, nothing like this has been done before on the subject of astrology. Certainly nothing with such a broad scope and a decent production budget.
Kelly has been going around to astrological conferences all year and interviewing various astrologers from different walks of life. The NCGR conference in Baltimore in March, the Blast in Sedona in April, NORWAC in May- Kelly made it to just about every major conference this year with his equipment, and it seemed like he did hundreds of interviews. We kept running into each other at conferences and trying to set up a time to do our interview, but we kept missing each other or running out of time before the conference was over. Eventually he caught me in Seattle right before I gave a lecture at NORWAC in May, and we did a quick little 20 minute interview.
I was pleased to hear that Kelly uploaded a bunch of short clips from all of the interviews that he did this year to his YouTube account today, including one that he took from the interview that he did with me:
It is kind of short, and I was feeling a bit nervous and rushed since the interview took place just minutes before I was about to give my lecture at NORWAC, but it gives you some idea of the types of clips that he plans to incorporate into the full movie. There are other segments of interviews that Kelly did on YouTube with other famous astrologers such as Demetra George, Steven Forrest, Rob Hand, Nick Dagan Best, Moses Siregar, Richard Tarnas, Michael Lutin, and many others.
Apotelesma is an important Greek astrological term that literally means ‘outcomes’. While the term katarchē was used to refer to the ‘inception’, ‘commencement’ or ‘beginning’ of any event, enterprise, or entity, such as the moment of the beginning of a journey, the term apotelesma was used as the semantic counterpart to indicate the outcome of that endeavor. Apotelesmatics is the study of outcomes, and thus the study of astrology.
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I just received an email from a former student of mine a couple of days ago who recorded a video endorsing my introduction to Hellenistic astrology course. Since I am starting a new group of students in the course this week I thought that I would take this opportunity to promote the class a bit for anyone that is interested in signing up. The new group of students is just getting started this week, but since the course is designed so that people can work at their own pace there is still time for new students to sign up for the course this month.
I wrote this paper on the use of mythology as a device in astrological delineations a few years ago while I was still attending Kepler College . I think that I initially wrote the paper because I was kind of annoyed by the subject matter and I wanted to focus on more precise techniques, having just had my first introduction to Hellenistic and Indian astrology a few months earlier. At the time I was also rather excited by some of the arguments that Robert Schmidt was making about the conceptual origins of the Hellenistic tradition and the possible the influence of Plato’s Timaeus on the original cosmological model of the astrologers, as you can tell in the paper. The paper is pretty amateurish, and I would probably write it a bit differently now, but I’ll present it in the original form with only a few slight modifications since gist of the argument towards the end is still essentially the same as what I would make at this point in time.
I’ve been of the opinion for a while now that 
My friend Nick Dagan Best has a new video up on Youtube from his interview in the forthcoming documentary Return of the Magi. It is a rather insightful look into the the views and the practices of a contemporary astrologer. If you are not very familiar with astrology, or you don’t know much about how astrologers view the subject, then I would highly recommend that you watch this video, as it gives a pretty thorough introduction.
Lately astrologers have been talking a lot about the lunar eclipse that just occurred tonight in Virgo. Eclipses of any sort of often tend to be rather unpleasant, depending of course on how they are hitting a certain person’s birth chart. Sometimes it is kind of interesting to observe how they effect certain people when they land in pivotal areas of their chart. Even though the eclipse just went exact a couple of hours ago, we already have an example of how this correlated with an event in one prominent individual’s life.
I just finished reading an astonishingly misinformed article by Glenn Perry in the 
As I said in my previous post on 
It is not the purpose of this article to give a full review of Roger Beck’s new book on Hellenistic astrology titled A Brief History of Ancient Astrology. The major shortcomings of the book, as well as most of the issues that I have with it, have already been addressed in detail by 
