Skyscript Astrology Forum

Graham F wrote:Hello all

I'm really sorry, but I have clearly not been able to make myself understood.

I appreciate Waybread's reminder that arbitrary is not the same as wrong, I would say that choosing to put the VP, for all time, between the Jupieter-ruled section Mars-ruled sectiongoing "up" to the summer solstice, and the autumn equinox point between the Mercury-rules section and the Venus-ruled section going down is arbitrary, but not symbolically appropriate. Therefore, I'm wondering if it isn't wrong.

I of course agree that we could put the start of the year where we want, and call it what we want, but astrology (and most calendars) want a symbolically appropriate point. I Know that in Judaism it's around the autumn equinox ? that's entirely appropriate ; I was talking about how all this matches up to the symmetry of the rulership scheme, that's what bothers me. I quite agree that the spring equinox is a good candidate to start the year.

It would be symbolically appropriate to put the VP so that the symmetry of the rulership scheme corresponds to that of the antiscia/contra-antiscia arrangement (which Michael has clearly exposed), by placing the VP between the Mars-ruled sign and the Venus-ruled one on the way up, and between Venus's and Mars's on the way down. A planet at a given point would thus be reflected, by antiscia, to a point with the same ruler. It would be reflected across the contra-antiscia axis onto a sign with a complimentary ruler, i.e. of somewhat opposite qualities (Venus-Mars, Mercury-Jupiter, Sun or Moon - Saturn). I don't see how anyone can read Michael's explanation of antiscia without wondering why the symmetrical rulership scheme doesn't line up with the antiscial axis. (In horary astrology, the antiscial reflection of a planet is often considered to function as if it had the same ruler as that planet. - John Frawley. To me this reinforces the case for going the whole hog and making the rulership scheme reflect around that axis.)

Paul writes

I don't think it's a central tenet of the tropical zodiac that we refer to Aries as the first sign of the zodiac for all eternity but rather in recognising the importance of the sun's declination and the points on the ecliptic at 90? intervals along its axis.

Yes, that's what I mean ? I don't mind referring to it as Aries, its the symmetry of the rulership scheme, in relation to that axis.

If this doesn't seem more symbolically appropriate to you, try the little test I suggested:

try explaining the rulership arrangement to any non-astrology-savvy person (without mentioning sign names, as they'll have heard of those) ; then separately explain the equinoxes and solstices ; then ask them where they would put the latter in the rulership pattern ? It won't be be between Pisces and Aries, I'll bet, more likely between Aries and Taurus.

Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri) and Antares (Alpha Scorpii) were indeed used to mark the the spring and autumn equinoxes by the Sumerians around 3200 BC. Together with Regulus and Fomalhaut they constituted what later came to be known as the Four Pillars of Heaven in Egyptian and Hebrew texts.

I found this article quite comprehensive:

http://mathisencorollary.blogspot.ch/20 ... m-and.html

Of course, the trouble for us modern astrologers is that the VP is nowhere near Aldebaran today. Neither is it in Aries, nevertheless, the tropical zodiac works incredibly well in my experience.

To answer Paul: Yes, I did mean that the alignments, over time, seem to work in tropical, but not in sidereal (i.e. not with precession expunged).

Yes, I do use the classical rulerships in sidereal, and I find that it works. Its a dogma, if you like. I think I can justify it symbolically with relation to the galactic and super-galactic equators, when the right ayanamsha (very close to Krishnamurti) is used, which generate an arrangement resembling antiscia and contra-antiscia, with the cross passing between Cancer/Leo + Capricorn/Aquarius, and Aries/Taurus + Libra/Scorpio,but that's another story and I know this is controversial as people say you can't "see" those equators, they are subjected to very slight wobble etc. (You can't see the ecliptic, or the celestial equator either, and the VP also wobbles...).

In fact, I do find that Taurus should start zodiac, even in sidereal. Parlty because of Fagan's reasoning, and partly because I studide, with a teacher, the ashtakavarga system of the contemporary Indian astrolgoer Krushna. Krushna proposes the most effective system of "natural signifiers" for the houses, whihc he says are "the ruler of the sign in the 'natural' (Aries based) zodiac minus 6". What this boils down to, those of course he doens't suggest this, is that the natural signifiers of the houses are the rulerships of the signs starting from Scorpio - which is the first sign rising at sunset when the sun is in Taurus.

The rulership debate is not the same thing as in tropical, because in sidereal, the antiscial axis (which is unfortunately not often used) is fully disconnected from the zodiac, it moves around it. You don't have to choose one place to put it, as you do in tropical.

To be clear, and to "come clean", this is what I suspect happened (I know I can't justify this with sources, but it gives me a working model in my head): the zodiac developed sidereally, the rulerships were assigned/developed/revealed, who knows, around the time that the VP was near the beginning of the 30? sidereal segment marked by the constellation Taurus, around or before 2000BC, at any rate somewhere approximately between 4000 and 2000BC. In parallel, and perhaps more or less simultaniously, a tropical earth based division of the horizon (but Suns' rising point) and by extension of the sky was developing (megaliths, Machu Pichu etc). The two may gradually have become extended, the horizon measurement to include the ecliptic rising at given points, and the the sidereal to include (probably from the beginning, in fact) correspondences whihc were in reality tropical, and would no longer hold 4000 years later. Then Ptolemy principally, and others, codified what they could scrape together of a very old tradition, and wrote it down. This served as the basis for classical and medieval Western astrology, which may or may not have been consciously tropical. When it came to be conscious, in any case, the VP between Pisces and Aries was already so established that it was never questioned, and today, when reading of the basics of astrology, we are told that "Aries starts at the VP, so Aries is the first sign", or "Aries is the first sign, so the VP is at 0? Aries."

I find this to be an intriguing theory. My own take is that the analogous symmetry of the domicile scheme and the "antiscia scheme" which I demonstrated previously, with their emphasis on Leo and Aries respectively, might need to be supplemented by yet another scheme which departs from the third sign of the Fire Trigon, Sagittarius. This view emphasizes the significance of the Fire element as the Creative Force per say, in keeping with the position it holds in the Kabbalah. It would however contradict the idea that the numbering of the signs is arbitrary.

At present, I can't demonstrate the symmetry of such a scheme based on Sagittarius and the mutual cross, the way I can with the two others. At least, it might be noteworthy that Kleostratos of Tenedos (around 520 BCE) considered Aries and Sagittarius to be "the first", as Pliny reports, alas without any elaboration. On another note, there is a rare system of sidereal astrology that determines its ayanamsa by setting 0? Sagittarius at the Galactic Centre (I am not sure if you have heard of that or have any further info, Graham).

I can't believe that astrology was "invented" in Ptolemy's time, and in the few hundred years before, which would justify saying that the whole corpus was designed to have Aries at the VP. The old texts look too much like the traces of a much more complete and sophisticated system, and I also can't believe that the peoples who built Stonehenge and Carnac, and other early civilisations around the world, didn't have a fairly sophisticated "celestial science" (in the broadest sense of the term, not excluding what we call gnosis).

I agree. A lot of esoteric lore could be the extant bits and pieces of an ancient science that existed, in time immemorial, lost and reassembled to the best of people's ability later.

But as Paul says (re the claim that rulerships were probably around before the 0? Aries general epoch):
"The problem is a lack of evidence. We simply don't have any evidence of it."
This is quite true, but I still haven't seen any convincing evidence that it's right to take "freeze" them where they were sidereally (more or less) in Ptolemy's time.

The thing to appreciate is that the tropical zodiac is based on the relationship between the Earth and the Sun, which (for all intents and purposes) ever remains the same. The twelve equal sectors into which the ecliptic was divided were conveniently marked by the constellations that roughly occupied their space at the time. Following the astrological literature over the course of the centuries, there seem to be slight changes in the meanings of the signs which we may attribute to the precessional shift of the fixed stars whose influence was originally quite undistinguishable from the influence of the sign proper.

But anyway (Paul again) :

we simply do not know - and not knowing is okay. It is infinitely better than finding a comfortable solution and pretending this is the truth. If we don't know, there's no shame or problem with this but it also encourages us to keep an open mind and to continue to search for solutions.

Indeed.

Graham

Amen.

A few remarks on this, Waybread...

waybread wrote:Sorry for not getting your point, Graham.

Possibly because you are looking for logic in a system that emerged from religion?

So, obviously, you are you suggesting that astrology as we know it is not based on a logical system.

For starters, what is the VP? (vernal, vertex, Vemus..... point ?)

Also, so far as planetary rulers of signs go, I take it that you are familiar with Ptolemy's explanation, based upon planets' spatial distance from the sun and moon, and temporal from the summer solstice. Ptolemy was a relative late-comer and a great systematiser, who showed little sympathy for astrology's religious roots. He pruned a lot of these out of the Tetrabiblos, while reinforcing his favoured Aristotelian concepts.

By connecting astrology to Aristotelian physics and cosmology, Ptolemy actually went a long way in devising the completely logical and scientific system as which I see astrology.

Vettius Valens, Ptolemy's Alexandrian contemporary, criticizes his predecessors for their impractical mysticism.

You are probably also familiar with the works of the pre-astrology Greek authors like Hesiod (Works and Days 2:383-404) And Aratus (Phaenomena) who placed a lot of calendric significance on the Pleiades, located within the constellation Taurus. However, this wasn't based on the vernal equinox, but the phenology of agricultural cycles and the Mediterranean shipping season. http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NymphaiPleiades.html

So far as I can tell, the tropical zodiac is comparatively recent. The Babylonian zodiac was sidereal. (Francesca Rochberg, The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 128.) The Babylonians did not seem to recognize precession. although other ancient cultures did.

You are probably also aware that Babylonian astrologers didn't use houses, and their astrology was primarily what we would call mundane astrology, or omen literature. Initially it was based on constellations, not signs and degrees, which came in around the 5th century BCE as an improved means of predicting eclipses. We know from historical and archaeological evidence that there was no horoscopic astrology of the sort recognized by classical astrologers until the late 3rd century BCE. At that time, we see an amalgam of Babylonian, Greek, Egyptian, and possibly additional cultural astronomies.

By the beginning of the new millennium there is indirect evidence that precession was becoming a big religious problem. The Gospels and early Christian symbolism show all kinds of evidence that faith communities were trying to come to terms with the vernal equinox moving into Pisces. Revelation, however, definitively established the spring equinox in Aries.

According to Nicholas Campion, The Dawn of Astrology, p.216, Hellenistic astronomers tried to determine the location of the spring equinox, and 8 degrees Aries was favoured by Eudoxus (ca. 400 BCE) and Pliny. Ptolemy calculated it at 0 degrees Aries. Trouble was, others who adopted the "Aries point" didn't get the issue with precession, and thought the equinox had always occurred at 0 degrees Aries.

According to Campion, knowledge that the signs were being displaced from the constellations for which they were named due to precession was a major issue with astrology's late ancient critics.

Simply because they didn't understand the true nature of the signs (which I briefly talked about in my previous post).

So, hey-- it's all arbitrary. But so is connecting stars, calling them constellations, and applying pictorial images or myths to them. It is arbitrary to convert constellations into 30-degree signs. Our calendars are arbitrary.

Au contraire, Madame. Both the signs and the months are reflecting the relationship between the Sun and the Moon.

In this regard, sidereal astrology is also arbitrary because no constellation is precisely 30 degrees wide on the ecliptic.

I think it's fair to say that the zodiac at the time of Ptolemy was tropically based. Sidereal astrology is an attempt to move that zodiac along with the precessing stars, which presupposes pinning it to something other than the equinoxes and solstices - perhaps to certain fixed stars.

Which perhaps partly explains why science is not the right comparable for astrology.

Ah, here we get to the gist of the matter again as far as the topic of this thread is concerned. I don't consider any of what you mentioned above arbitrary.

Graham F wrote: I appreciate Waybread's reminder that arbitrary is not the same as wrong, I would say that choosing to put the VP, for all time, between the Jupieter-ruled section Mars-ruled sectiongoing "up" to the summer solstice, and the autumn equinox point between the Mercury-rules section and the Venus-ruled section going down is arbitrary, but not symbolically appropriate. Therefore, I'm wondering if it isn't wrong.

I'm not sure why we would need to see it in terms of the rulerships though. We know that the signs predate the domicile rulership - or to be more accurate, we have no evidence of domicile rulership at the time that the zodiac was understood as 12 equal divisions of the ecliptic. As a result, we could turn this on its head and say that what's not symbolically appropriate is the assignation of planetary rulership, rather than the first sign of the zodiac. Indeed we could bypass both and say that both are symbolically appropriate but we may not be conceptualising it in the way it was envisioned, and merely making guesses post factum. What would seem much more symbolically inappropriate to me is to take a system which is millennia old, and we know to have existed both across sidereal and tropical astrology, and then to suggest that there's something wrong with it because we can't figure out why it was in place that way. As I was trying to imply in my past post, if the tropical assignation makes little sense, the sidereal one makes little also, in truth we could argue that the assignation of planets to the zodiac may be agnostic about tropical/sidereal or any distinction made between them, even if we have later apologists on both sides of that fence who make claims for its logic later on.

I of course agree that we could put the start of the year where we want, and call it what we want, but astrology (and most calendars) want a symbolically appropriate point.

Right, but notice that it doesn't really matter much anyway. It's not like it's a central tenet of tropical astrology that one begin the count at Aries. It's not like tropical astrology would implode if we started from another cardinal sign.
Spring made sense to the people who conceptualised the zodiac in the division we more or less understood it today and at that time it came in close alignment with their new year and with the vernal equinox. Therefore to them it made sense, symbolically and astronomically, to link them. Now we could make the same arguments for anything. Why not make Aquarius a water sign or updated Pisces in the sidereal zodiac to be cardinal - but when we do, we make assumptions about the underlying logic which whilst they may make sense to us, may not have made sense to the people who originated the zodiac, and whether or not that matters. Would there be any interpretational difference if we said that, say, Cancer is the beginning of the tropical zodiac? I don't think it would make much difference at all, but Aries still make sense to me.

I was talking about how all this matches up to the symmetry of the rulership scheme, that's what bothers me. I quite agree that the spring equinox is a good candidate to start the year.

Right, but why not see the problem, as it predates the conceptualisation of the zodiac in equal sections (at least that we can tell), as being the problem area, rather than where to start to zodiac? Or else we can postulate a problem not with the tropical logic, as I'm trying to demonstrate in these posts, but just in general that no great solution, tropical or sidereal, has been cleanly established - we work with the best we have.

A planet at a given point would thus be reflected, by antiscia, to a point with the same ruler

Yup, the only question really is whether antiscia is the foundation of the rulership scheme. If not, then this would be a disaster.

f this doesn't seem more symbolically appropriate to you, try the little test I suggested

But I don't know about others, but isn't it a bit leading to talk about equinoxes and solstices and then introduce the rulership scheme? Aren't we leading them to a conclusion? After all, maybe the rulership has nothing to do with the equinox and solstice. Maybe it's to do with the apogee and perigee of the planet? Or something else entirely!

The rulership debate is not the same thing as in tropical, because in sidereal, the antiscial axis (which is unfortunately not often used) is fully disconnected from the zodiac, it moves around it. You don't have to choose one place to put it, as you do in tropical.

This seems an odd way to look at it to me. Surely tropical doesn't "choose one place to put it" either. In fact the tropical zodiac's divisions are such that the antiscia points are inherent within it. Nobody puts them anywhere. Instead because both the tropical zodiac, and the antiscia points, are based on the sun's declination, the two are intimately linked, and the divisions of one becomes a division of the other - in other words, if we divide up signs based on declination, and antiscia is inherently based on declination, when we divide by signs we'll of course be describing a pattern of antisica too.

It seems weird to suggest that tropical astrologers 'put' the antiscia points anywhere. Both tropical and antiscia are a division of declination of the sun.

To be clear, and to "come clean", this is what I suspect happened (I know I can't justify this with sources, but it gives me a working model in my head): the zodiac developed sidereally, the rulerships were assigned/developed/revealed, who knows, around the time that the VP was near the beginning of the 30? sidereal segment marked by the constellation Taurus, around or before 2000BC, at any rate somewhere approximately between 4000 and 2000BC.

I'm okay with ideas that we can't necessarily find sources for, but in fact this idea isn't so much about not finding sources to support it, but we'd have to ignore a host of other sources with contradict it first. We already have pretty good evidence that the equal signed zodiac took off in the 5th or 6th century. Let's even give your idea some leeway and make it the 7th century - we're still a good 1300 years off your date. In addition, we have no evidence whatsoever of the domicile rulership scheme being in place in Babylon. What's more is that we have older evidence of exaltation than domicile dignity.

Whilst it's true that at this time the measurements were made sidereally, we know that measurement was often of things produced or associated with tropical concerns - and there wasn't always a clear understanding of this. As we have no evidence that they understood precession, we are left agnostic as to whether what they wanted to measure was actually a sidereal thing or a tropical thing.

Then Ptolemy principally, and others, codified what they could scrape together of a very old tradition, and wrote it down. This served as the basis for classical and medieval Western astrology, which may or may not have been consciously tropical

But we know this isn't necessarily the case. We know that there were astrologers 'borrowing' the zodiac and measurements from Babylon far before Ptolemy, and doing so chiefly using sidereal measurements, but placing the vernal point at varying points in Aries with little real understanding of its implications, and using rising formulae which required that vernal point to be precise, which contradicted each other. For example in Babylon there were chiefly two rising formulae and each one utilised a different position of the vernal point, but we see astrologers predating Ptolemy, and also those who are contemporaneous with him using one system with the other vernal position etc. Ptolemy was quite consciously putting the vernal point at the beginning of Aries with recognition of the astronomy behind this and the implications for astrology.

More likely the zodiac, whether equal or not, was conceptualised around the time when the solstice and equinox points were in the centre of the respective signs.

Waybread referenced Francesca Rochberg, if you can get hold of any of her papers or her books it would be a great place to dive further into stuff like this.

I can't believe that astrology was "invented" in Ptolemy's time, and in the few hundred years before, which would justify saying that the whole corpus was designed to have Aries at the VP.

But I don't think anyone is suggesting that.

This is quite true, but I still haven't seen any convincing evidence that it's right to take "freeze" them where they were sidereally (more or less) in Ptolemy's time.

The problem, from a tropical astrologer's point of view, is that you're considering them in relation to fixed stars, as though their position is against this or that constellation or fixed star. For example, you could "switch off" all the stars in the sky, have no constellations visible at all, and you will still have the tropical zodiac. All the tropical zodiac really is is the declination of the sun and the division thereof. If we take the ecliptic we'll see that at points 90? from one another, the Sun will have a declination of 0 (on the equator at the equinoxes) or its maximum declination north or south (at the solstices). These positions on the ecliptic are 90? from one another. Each 90? quadrant can be trisected into signs and these signs more or less are an imperfect alignment with a solunar cycle. In fact Francesca Rochberg has argued/demonstrated that chiefly the zodiac was envisioned as a lunar region which was divided according to its phases.

waybread wrote: Possibly because you are looking for logic in a system that emerged from religion?

Can you clarify which system you mean which emerged from religion? I think Graham is focusing chiefly on the rulership scheme but expecting this scheme to match or be reflected along the antiscia between signs.

But so is connecting stars, calling them constellations, and applying pictorial images or myths to them

Or indeed that mars rules aggression etc. In fact we can make the point that any real symbolic associations whether based on myth, appearance, astronomical property etc. is arbitrary if we apply it as a sign of anything of astrological importance/value.

Michael Sternbach wrote: I think it's fair to say that the zodiac at the time of Ptolemy was tropically based. Sidereal astrology is an attempt to move that zodiac along with the precessing stars, which presupposes pinning it to something other than the equinoxes and solstices - perhaps to certain fixed stars.

I'm sure a lot of sidereal astrologers would really disagree with this Michael. In fact we know that at the same time as Ptolemy, Valens was measuring things with respect to a vernal point which was not such that Aries was set to being 0 at this point. But rather that the vernal point was considered somewhere inside Aries, 8 or 10?.

These are all interesting discussion points though we seem to be straying from the OP.

Graham, it occurs to me that some of your examples, like Carnac and Machu Pichu, have little to do with the development of horoscopic astrology. There is a way that horoscopic astrology developed historically, and for that we have to start with Sumer, move through subsequent Mesopotamian cultures, and comparatively recently, add in some astronomical beliefs of the Greeks, Egyptians, and possibly Persians and Jews. Other societies had intriguing cultural astronomies but it is doubtful that the early astrologers knew anything about European Bronze Age monoliths, let alone what developed on American continents.

Maybe I'm the one who's confused (it's been known to happen) about rulerships. I'm assuming you refer to domiciles (Mars for Aries, Venus for Taurus, and so on.) Historically these were comparatively recent.

More anciently, Mesopotamian and perhaps Egyptian star-gazers developed the system of planetary exaltations, as comprising particular locations in the sky where planets were supposed to be particularly effective. Joanne Conman dated exaltations to a couple of millennia prior to the development of horoscopic astrology in ancient Egypt, but they also seem to have great antiquity in Babylon.

The rulerships fall not only into Ptolemy's system of distance from the sun-moon/summer solstice dyad, but also into particular relationships with the exaltations. These usually are a trine or sextile relationship.

Mars is exalted in Capricorn and domiciled in Scorpio (*)
Venus is exalted in Pisces and domiciled in Taurus (*)
Jupiter is exalted in Cancer and domiciled in Pisces (trine)
Saturn is exalted in Libra and domiciled in Aquarius (trine)
Moon is exalted in Taurus and domiciled in Cancer (*)
Sun is exalted in Aries and domiciled in Leo (trine)

Leaving Mercury as the odd planet out (domiciled in Gemini and exalted in Virgo, square relationship.)

Regarding the "logic" of religion, it might be helpful to consider the concept of situated knowledge. A concept entirely illogical to me in 21st century Canada might be very logical to an ancient person within a different mental framework.

The planet Mars rules aggression today because the Babylonian god Nergal ruled warfare. Nergal was initially a Sumerian god, then a Babylonian one; and during his evolution he was a god then a deified planet then both a planet and a god, ultimately becoming Ares > Mars.

If we question the objective existence of a Near Eastern god of warfare, the logic collapses. But if we see the evolution of this god/planet through the ancient system of thought, there is a logic to it. Not my logic, but their logic.

I haven't had time to follow this discussion in detail, however:

Michael Sternbach wrote:

I think it's fair to say that the zodiac at the time of Ptolemy was tropically based. Sidereal astrology is an attempt to move that zodiac along with the precessing stars, which presupposes pinning it to something other than the equinoxes and solstices - perhaps to certain fixed stars.

Recent research shows that this is wishful thinking at best:

http://www.astrozero.co.uk/astroscience ... iquity.pdf
"The Star Zodiac of Antiquity" by Nick Kollerstrom

http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=7423
Very recent zodiac research by Alexander Jones

Thanks for the links, Therese.

While I might quibble just slightly with Kollerstrom's history of the constellations, he makes a really valid point that the constellations didn't get completely codified as to (a) what they depicted and (b) whether a given star was in or out of a zodiacal constellation until Hellenistic horoscopic astrology was already underway.

I think it's fair to say that sidereally, the spring equinox was at somewhere approximately around 0 degrees Aries in the 2nd century CE when Ptolemy wrote Tetrabiblos. Effectively, a tropical and sidereal zodiac would have matched up reasonably well, allowing for some margin of error. Subsequently their vernal equinox points diverged.

Since Manilius, Astronomica, 1st century CE, is one of our earliest textual sources, I thought it would be interesting to see if he said anything about precession or the vernal equinox. Manilius describes both Hellenistic horoscopic astrology as well as the old tradition of linking rising fixed stars to people's fates, which seems more sidereal.

Translator Goold in the Loeb Classical Library edition, discusses precession pp. lxxxii-iii, and gives the known degrees of the vernal equinox in the sign of Aries listed by classical authors. Different ancient Greek and Latin authors used 15, 8, or 0 degrees Aries-- but the years elapsed between the authors' biographical dates are insufficient to explain the discrepancies with precession. Otto Neugebauer suggested that 8 degrees Aries may refer to the vernal degree in one of the older Babylonian lunar systems, which could have given it more cultural authority.

Then Goold makes the startling suggestion that Hipparchus (ca. 190-120 BCE,) who favoured the 0 degree of Aries point, actually redrafted the older outlines of the constellations, in order to fix the spring equinox at 0 Aries and the solstices at 0 Cancer and Capricorn! The prior zodiacal constellations had to be stretched or cramped to fit the cardinal signs system. And this would make some sense only in a sidereal system linked, however loosely, to the constellations.

Goold wrote (lxxxiii):

"Awkward as precession is for the astronomer, for the astrologer it is fatal. Or so one would have supposed. If in the time of Hipparchus the vernal equinox occurred at the first point of Aries... then in the time of Ptolemy it must have occurred at about [Pisces] 26 [degrees].... Oddly enough, it is Ptolemy who has saved the day for the astrologer: in Tetrabiblos 1:22 [Ptolemy] says that for astronomical purposes he will define the first point of Aries as the vernal equinox: if that moves, then the whole zodiac will just have to move with it: for astrological purposes men had better look to this movable, artificial zodiac. And so it has come to pass."

A suggested timeline:

190-120 BCE. Hipparchus transmits Babylonian astronomical information to the Hellenistic world, and re-jigs the constellations to fit a 0-degree cardinal sign paradigm for equinoxes and solstices.

150 CE. Early Aries/late Pisces would be crudely the vernal equinox in both systems. Aware of precession as a big problem, Ptolemy fixes the spring equinox at 0 Aries, the start of the "first" cardinal sign.

After ca. 50 CE, Christianity emerges as a new religion, partaking of both the Platonic and Judaic love of a fixed and unchanging cosmos. (More on this later.)

Late 1st century CE. Book of Revelation fixes the tropical zodiac with the vernal equinox in Aries. (More on this later.)

ca. 230 CE. Origen (church father) notes precession has decoupled constellations and signs thus furthering the ongoing debate in the ancient world about astrology's validity.

380 CE. Christianity becomes the state religion of the entire Roman empire

On Christianity as a solar (vs. sidereal) religion, an interesting book is:

David Fideler, Sun of God: Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism, Theosophical Publishing House, 1993. (And that's "Sun", not "Son." on-line as a Google book)

This thread is going way off track, and anyone who is writing at length about something that is not connected to the issue that the thread was opened to discuss ought to start a new thread to explore the unrelated issues.

Hi Deb,

I think, what we are trying to explore here is in fact whether astrology has scientific foundations or not. The OP is actively involved in this, and it is an interesting and good thread.

Just my opinion.

Michael Sternbach wrote:

Hi Deb,

I think, what we are trying to explore here is in fact whether astrology has scientific foundations or not. The OP is actively involved in this, and it is an interesting and good thread.

Just my opinion

I disagree I'm afraid. In any case Deb has spoken! And like the Queen of Hearts her word is final here!

I accept some partial responsibility for this thread going off in a tangent in deciding to pick up Graham's issue about the order of the zodiac earlier in the thread. But I hadn't anticipated this topic would swamp the whole thread the way it has.

I would like to get back directly to Waybread's original point. I think Graham has an interesting question but I think it really requires its own thread. I would happy to contribute further in that way.

Mark

PS I hadn't noticed the discussion here had got even deeper into the zodiac issue since I last looked! Deb's intervention makes even more sense having looked at the recent posts here.

Mark wrote:Michael Sternbach wrote:

Hi Deb,

I think, what we are trying to explore here is in fact whether astrology has scientific foundations or not. The OP is actively involved in this, and it is an interesting and good thread.

Just my opinion

I disagree I'm afraid. In any case Deb has spoken! And like the Queen of Hearts her word is final here!

The approach seems to work. I'm speechless...

I accept some partial responsibility for this thread going off in a tangent in deciding to pick up Graham's issue about the order of the zodiac earlier in the thread. But I hadn't anticipated this topic would swamp the whole thread the way it has.

I would like to get back directly to Waybread's original point. I think Graham has an interesting question but I think it really requires its own thread. I would happy to contribute further in that way.

Mark

Nobody's stopping you.

I'd be happy to get this thread back on track.

With just the note that in a discussion about whether astrology is a science, pseudoscience, or something else, there is an "argument from history" or "appeal to tradition."

I don't think anyone would dispute the parts of ancient astrologies that were mathematical or scientific, but clearly much of ancient astrology was based upon other considerations-- such as religion and philosophy-- that equally give astrology a berth in the humanities today. Through this thread's considerable digressions, I hope we've demonstrated that.