The clockwork of Astrology

waybread

Well-known member
This is from my post #4. I can elaborate at greater length, if you're actually interested.

As a stylized representation of the cosmos, the horoscope is a type of map. As a map, it is a form of graphic communication. The act of astrology takes place in the mind of the astrologer reading a form of graphic communication that has no necessary obligation to follow a linear model of time.

This is unlike my post, which you would read from left to right, and then top line to bottom line.

Did you see the movie Arrival? Highly recommended.

My explanation is built on a theory, debated by linguists, that learning a new language gives you a window into a new understanding of space and time. Notably but not exclusively through verb tenses, languages express their own understandings of time. English, for example, has all kinds of nuances about past and future times that many other languages lack. In German, future verb tenses are constructed out of past verb tenses, showing the future as unfolding out of the past.

Most languages are linear, following a "time's arrow" sequence of past, present, and future.

In a map, horoscope, or another form of graphic communication like a photograph, however, we can grasp the whole simultaneously. Or we can focus on different parts of a complex picture, without necessarily following a linear progression. Our eyes can move up, down, left, right, or in some other sequence.

By analogy, we have trouble reading or listening to a phrase structured like: " trouble like analogy phrase by structured a have like reading like listening or analogy," because our written and spoken language is linear and one-directional. We can't comprehend so well simultaneously of by randomizing the order of the text.

We don't have this linear straight-jacket with most forms of graphic communication. (For using the night sky in this fashion see Bernadette Brady's YouTube lectures on Visual Astrology.)

So studying horoscopes opens up the astrologer's mind to new ways of understanding time simultaneously or in a non-linear order, and new ways of communicating space.

For example, if I post my horoscope, even though we've never met and I live so far away that we probably never will meet, you can say something about me based upon glyphs and lines on a page. You can consider what happened to me 20 years ago or what will happen next week. You can look at my "money house" (#2) out of sequence after my 9th house. Or before my 1st house. There's no set linear order.

One trouble with causal models of astrology is that traditional western, modern, and Vedic astrology work very differently. Sidereal and tropical astrology don't put the planets in the same places: today we're about 24 or 27 degrees apart, depending upon the sidereal system used. House cusps can vary widely for one person depending upon the house system used. Yet skilled astrologers from vastly different schools of thought can nevertheless come up with valid readings.

This shouldn't be possible if astrology were causal to the point of being deterministic or fatalistic.

Much of what we interpret isn't even up in the sky: it's calculated data points.

Geoffrey Cornelius, in The Moment of Astrology, talked about the "wrong" chart nonetheless being radical.

Gravity, electromagnetism or what-have-you emanating from planets makes no sense in terms of explaining why a woman with an afflicted Venus in Scorpio is often jealous. It makes even less sense in terms of explaining how such forces could affect a moment in time like a horary question, because there's nothing tangible there to be acted upon.

In a horoscope reading, I synthesize symbols on a computer screen (formerly on a page.) Isn't this what you do?
 

petosiris

Banned
In a horoscope reading, I synthesize symbols on a computer screen (formerly on a page.) Isn't this what you do?

Do you synthesize symbols with causal influence (or say correlation due to a third variable) or are you synthesizing cold reading tricks?

For example, if I post my horoscope, even though we've never met and I live so far away that we probably never will meet, you can say something about me based upon glyphs and lines on a page. You can consider what happened to me 20 years ago or what will happen next week. You can look at my "money house" (#2) out of sequence after my 9th house. Or before my 1st house. There's no set linear order.

It is best to have a set linear order as the philosopher does - parents, siblings, multiple births, teratology, length of life, bodily form and temperament, bodily injuries and diseases, quality of mind, diseases of mind, material fortune, fortune of dignity, occupation, marriage, children, friends and enemies, foreign travel, and quality of death, which is placed at the end of all these subjects. This is so that each preceding section may guide the particulars of the later inquiry. For example, it is not needful for one to investigate the topic of children through the Midheaven for someone who does not have the necessary length of life, or has some impotence or infertility of some kind.

One trouble with causal models of astrology is that traditional western, modern, and Vedic astrology work very differently. Sidereal and tropical astrology don't put the planets in the same places: today we're about 24 or 27 degrees apart, depending upon the sidereal system used. House cusps can vary widely for one person depending upon the house system used. Yet skilled astrologers from vastly different schools of thought can nevertheless come up with valid readings.

This shouldn't be possible if astrology were causal to the point of being deterministic or fatalistic.

I doubt that all these systems of prediction pursue the natural way of inquiry, rather than, say, deriving authority from religion and tradition. There is no question that all these systems can't be valid at the same time, since despite their generalizations, they have some differences in the consideration of data.
 
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Flapjacks

Well-known member
Time is one of the more unreliable ways to set up the Ascendant. Ptolemy noted the inaccuracy of solar gnomons and water clocks of the more careful practitioners of his time, think about how clocks in hospitals can also just be off by a few minutes even with near immediate record (I am not saying they are as unreliable, though they can have the same flaws to some degree). Ptolemy recommended an astrolabe which can be set up to show Ascendant degree (emphasizing direct observation by astronomy than chronometry) and also a rectification method (emphasizing astrology rather than relying solely on the "4th hour of the day on the second day of Thoth" which many surviving horoscopes have).

Thank you, that clarifies the reason for JupiterASC comments quite a bit! The location of planets is not independent from time, but time isn't required to cast the horoscope when it comes to rectifications.

That sort of side-steps greybeard's meaning, though...
 

petosiris

Banned
Thank you, that clarifies the reason for JupiterASC comments quite a bit! The location of planets is not independent from time, but time isn't required to cast the horoscope when it comes to rectifications.

That sort of side-steps greybeard's meaning, though...

Yes, time in the everyday sense of the hour on the clock, not in the sense of the complex relationship between time and space in relativistic physics. Most people refer to the human conceptualization of time when it comes to it rather than physics.
 

petosiris

Banned
In a horoscope reading, I synthesize symbols on a computer screen (formerly on a page.) Isn't this what you do?

No, because I am not swindling people. I bet 99% of people going to astrologers also believe in its efficacy, barring enlightened skeptics like you and Geoffrey Cornelius.
 

waybread

Well-known member
Define what you mean by "cold reading" and "cold reading tricks." "Cold reading" isn't a term I use myself. I'm smelling a loaded question here, but I want to understand you correctly.

Do you mean what I would call a "blind reading," meaning a chart where nothing is known about the life of the native?

If you have any questions about how I read charts, I've left many examples to peruse. I'll try to read some fresh ones later today so you can see some recent examples.

I normally follow a more conservative form of modern astrology. Sometimes it's more modern (asteroids, harmonics) sometimes it's more traditional (horary.)I like to qualify my statements. I'm not God and it would be presumptive of me to assume any infallibility.

Further, every planet, sign, and house has multiple interpretations that are consistent with its core meanings. Is the moon one's experience of one's mother? One's home? Early childhood? Mature women? Liquids? A set of medicinal herbs? An indicator that a matter will not conclude successfully?

It depends upon the question you ask. For each of 7 questions, the moon might symbolize something entirely different. It just beggars the imagination that all of them (plus dozens of others) get tidily packed into one literal heavenly body explained by temperature and moisture.

Where all of this does get sorted out and synthesized is in the mind of the astrologer, interacting with a form of visual (graphic) communication that we call a horoscope.

During the course of its long history, astrology has not always been deterministic. The Stoics were, and prior to the Stoics the Greeks had a religious belief in the 3 Fates. But Christianity insisted upon free will.

Possibly you find it to be helpful, turning a two-dimension chart (actually, 3D if we include declination) into a linear uni-directional order. (You're paraphrasing Ptolemy, if not quoting him.) But many questions put to the astrology are mundane, horary, or electional: they do not involve a nativity. If someone is asking about a marriage, we don't go through your entire rubric, that's for sure.

Relatively few questions on this forum are requests for reading an infant's nativity. And then I think we have to be very, very careful about what we say. Most requests are by people who are minimally teenagers, and often decades older. With our life expectancies now so high (in the 70s in most developed countries) the old issues about high infant mortality are not so relevant, when a 40-year old asks why he's still single.

I don't know what you mean by a "natural way of inquiry." Oddly enough, Vedic, modern, and traditional western astrologers have demonstrated that they are capable of good results.

I'm not swindling people. Shame on you. I happen to disagree with you.

I don't know what you mean by an "enlightened skeptic." Geoffrey Cornelius thinks astrology is a form of divination. Shouldn't all of us keep our critical faculties active? Otherwise one is too easily misled. Astrology doesn't demand an oath of allegiance-- and then which version would be the correct one?

And will the real physics please stand up? Quantum or Newtonian? In quantum physics, the observer changes the nature of what s/he observes. At least in the lab. For now.
 
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petosiris

Banned
Define what you mean by "cold reading" and "cold reading tricks." "Cold reading" isn't a term I use myself. I'm smelling a loaded question here, but I want to understand you correctly.

No matter how much you sugarcoat it, you are clever enough to know what I mean.
 

petosiris

Banned
We live in a very tolerant time, each astrologer doing dozen different of the points mentioned on the first page side by side with the other, and both frequently failing with their objective, which does not bode well for the god theory helping each one of us in the usage of contradictory systems. But we need not become pessimistic of our field, or become subjectivists.

Its main attraction is the promise that it contains entirely new and extremely important knowledge that might be gained by systematic study of the phenomena in question, and this would be worth pursuing even if the subject happened to be partly or complete waste of time.

Skeptics don't pursue astrology because they think its waste of time, waybread you pursue astrology despite agreeing that its waste of time (by which I mean that it is an objective phenomenon). I however pursue it (like most others, practitioners or not) because I do think it is an objective phenomenon, so there lie our differences (of ''allegiance'').
 
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petosiris

Banned
Possibly you find it to be helpful, turning a two-dimension chart (actually, 3D if we include declination) into a linear uni-directional order. (You're paraphrasing Ptolemy, if not quoting him.) But many questions put to the astrology are mundane, horary, or electional: they do not involve a nativity. If someone is asking about a marriage, we don't go through your entire rubric, that's for sure.

I was paraphrasing him. Ptolemy mentions only the two great parts of astrology - universal and genethlialogical. He definitely recommends taking mundane astrology into account before nativities - ''So then, as, among all genethlialogical inquiries whatever, a more general destiny takes precedence of all particular considerations, namely, that of country of birth, to which the major details of a geniture are naturally subordinate, such as the topics of the form of the body, the character of the soul and the variations of manners and customs, it is also necessary that he who makes his inquiry naturally should always hold first to the primary and more authoritative cause, lest, misled by the similarity of the genitures... or, again, on the subject of marriage, lest he mistake the appropriate customs and manners by assigning, for example, marriage with a sister to one who is Italian by race, instead of to the Egyptian as he should, and a marriage with his mother to this latter, though it suits the Persian.'' - http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Ptolemy/Tetrabiblos/4C*.html#10

Nowadays, first-cousin marriages are generally frowned or illegal in some countries, but they constitute more than half of all marriages in some Middle-Eastern countries and their ethnic groups. Thankfully, I am not aware of the kind of detrimental incest for the offspring that was happening in Hellenistic Egypt. Some countries also have polygamy, others don't. Ptolemy would probably not claim that all those nativities have such indications in their nativities, but rather that particular temperaments react in different ways to the temperament of the ethnicity, culture and upbringing.

Most requests are by people who are minimally teenagers, and often decades older. With our life expectancies now so high (in the 70s in most developed countries) the old issues about high infant mortality are not so relevant, when a 40-year old asks why he's still single.

Most people are also from western countries except on one particular board, so you might see my previous paragraph as 100%? irrelevant too.
 
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david starling

Well-known member
Skeptics don't pursue astrology because they think its waste of time, waybread you pursue astrology despite agreeing that its waste of time (by which I mean that it is an objective phenomenon). I however pursue it (like most others, practitioners or not) because I do think it is an objective phenomenon, so there lie our differences (of ''allegiance'').

Magnetism both attracts and repels.
 

petosiris

Banned
No one says that one can't derive meaning or benefits from astrology with full subjectivity, though I question its utility for the inquirer, particularly if it so happened that the subject has some degree of objectivity. :thinking:
 

petosiris

Banned
Imagine trying to come up with fancy methods to get more queries correct with shotgunning. I don't see why astrology should not degenerate into that if there is no objectivity in it.
 

petosiris

Banned
There is something sinister in the way Cornelius sells full subjectivity under the guise of something magical/literature/divination. This leads to so much confusion because most people think he simply means replacement by another mechanism of synchronicity (see his podcast with Chris Brennan).

I will have it in mind that you understand him correct the next time you give me some advice though. I am keen on building a scientific system rather than a mentalist one.
 
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