1957 September. Your Powwow Corner. "Pluvius Restored!"
To put it in historical perspective, this was published in September 1957. It was only in the May through July issues that Bradley had published his findings on the actual boundaries of the Sidereal zodiac and the power of solar and lunar ingresses. Only one issue of American Astrology intervened between that report and the present article.
Most interesting, and perhaps most important in the long run, from this September column was Bradley's discussion of aspect orbs, which we have long had present on this site, and referenced frequently. The next topic in his column, though, was the first new information on the ingress topic post "Unveiling a New Tool," and was the setup for the largest and (in some senses) most important project of his life, the NYU weather study a very few years later.
I do summarize the results from this article in the "Weather Studies" chapter of SMA, but here is a bit more of it.
The article opens with a breezy reference to the then-popular movie Fantasia, nd especially the scene that shows the god Jupiter causing torrential rain.
He remarks that, though Jupiter is historically closely connected with rain, it is to the credit of more modern astrologers that the attribution had fallen out of vogue, since there was nothing in 19th-20th century Tropical astrology to suggest there was more to it than ideas of fruitfulness and the abundance of growing conditions. Jupiter's traditional "warm and moist" attributions had begun to be treated as more symbolic than actual. He praised serious astrologers for not simply parroting their predecessors in the absence of any evidence to support the idea.
However, "the dawn of Mundane Astrology's new era" changed all that. "One of the many revolutionary contributions which our new mathematical tool has made to the science of astrology," he wrote, "has been the full-panoplies restoration of Jupiter to his cumulonimbus throne!"
By the time this was written, Bradley had already begun talking to one of the eminent meteorologists with whom he later worked closely and (without naming him) quoted him as saying, "This can change everything!" (It was probably Max Woodbury, but possibly Glenn Brier.")
It all began when he found reference to a 14.21 inch rainfall flooding Galveston June 3, 1950. He checked the most recent lunar ingress (in this case a Liblunar) and found Jupiter on MC closely square Sun. Since he had previously concluded that Neptune was the planet of floods, this bothered him, so he started calculating charts for other gigantic downpours.
He then went on to document that Jupiter didn't need Sun to perform this way - it could stand on its own. He forshadowed later work by saying that, "one of the big projects underway at present is the statistical treatment of Jupiter's mundane placement in the 'Caplunar' ingress charts covering the dates and places of the greatest amounts of downfall in 24-hour periods according to the records of the U.S. Weather Bureau." (He outlined the basic parameters, which are essentially what was stated later in the full report of results.)GA wrote:The statistics as to the action of Sun-Jupiter formations, by virtue of proximity to the angles of closeness to exact aspect, have turned out to be one of the most astonishing arrays of facts and figures yet realized in the course of astrological research.
He mentioned the "heaviest single downpour in 214 hours ever recorded in Washington, DC," being 7.31 inches on August 11, 1928. Jupiter was on the Washington Caplunar MC. He cited other individual, spot-checking examples.
The illustration accompanying shows the mundoscope positions of Jupiter for the Caplunars of the 12 largest rainfall dates in NYC history. Six of the 12 have Jupiter within 4° of Caplunar angles (all but one of those is within 3°, and that one is 3°18'). Odds are millions-to-one against this kind of distribution (the excess was almost 6 standard deviations from what was expected if it were random). The three instances (of these 12) where Jupiter was on MC (rather than one of the other angles) were the three occasions of heaviest downpour in NYC history.
This, published just two months after "Unveiling a New Tool" finished, is as astounding a confirmation of the accuracy of the SVP as one could want.
The concluding sentences reflect Bradley's normal way of expressing his frustration at the myopia and rigidity of the astrological establishment:
GA wrote:Only a few, a very few within and some outside the field of astrology, will fail to see the significance of this discovery. The myopics within cannot see because they will not see. To try to enlighten them give the same feeling one has when pointing something out to an animal and having the animal fix his stare on your finger instead.