Harmonics & the Zodiac

[Jim Eshelman]

[The following was a letter of mine published in the "Many Things" section of the August 1978 issue of American Astrology. It led to a brief public civil debate between John Addey and me. I don't think I have the issue a couple of months later that had his response but, if I find it, I'll type that, too. I thought this might be of interest. (I also needed to dig this out for something I'm writing at the moment.)]

Your allusion ibn May "Many Things" to John Addey quickly caught my attention. Along with Cyril Fagan, Addey ranks as one of the two people whose writings have, at different times, caused me to question the very basis of everything I have called astrological, forcing critical adjustments in my thinking. However, a specific result of this intellectual challenge was that I sat down with pencil and ephemeris in hand and tested the harmonics thesis on objective data ranging from only handfuls of charts to the 2,492 eminent clergymen used in the Profession and Birth Date study. So far, when applied to the zodiac, harmonics theory seems to e either blind or seriously myopic.

The week I read the May commentary, I was unpacking old boxes of paper and came across an investigation I did several years ago involving the birthdata of a hundred convicted murderers incarcerated in one of our country's penitentiaries. Accompanying this letter is a visual tabulation of the Moon's placements in the zodiac at their births. Other planet placements were studied, and gave interesting results in their own ways - consistent in their indications that the zodiac is valid, but not divided in quite the way the popular press would have us believe - but the lunar positions caught my fancy and had the most energy expended in their behalf.

Addey Moon murderers.png

The illustration which is given here is a picturization of the Moon's occurrence at these five score births given in 30° moving sums. Notice that when the zodiac is folded four sign-zones over upon itself four times, to combine four sign zones of the same "quality," one major peak eme4rges of particular significance. Admittedly, this is a good example of Addey's "fourth-harmonic wave," a 90° wave cresting at four points along the ecliptic which is easily seen with quadrants superimposed. A simpler explanation, though, is that the diagram (like many before it) verifies a traditional astrological truism - namely, that there is a zodiac wherein every "sign" shares something in common with the third one preceding and following it.

Nonetheless, it is easy to understand how twenty years of viewing diagrams of this sort have inspired Mr. Addey to conclude that there is no zodiac. The peaks and troughs, notice, don't correspond to the central parts of the signs in the "standard" zodiac. To quote Addey in regard to a similar study, "...high-scoring and low-scoring areas run across the sign boundaries just as if the boundaries were not there." Indeed, the boundaries of which he speaks are not there, nor is the zodiac on which they are based.

However, that peak at 9° of the Tropical fixed signs n the illustration "just happens" to coincide with the precise center of the Sidereal cardinal constellations (gee, again!). The highs and lows of the curve align themselves almost perfectly with the exact parameters of the only zodiac used in the first few thousand years of astrology's history, and apparently the only one valid to this day.

I am reminded of Mr. Addey's 1969 re-examination of the 7,302 medical doctors originally collected by Brigadier Firebrace and Rupert Gleadow. Addey therein remarks that, "there is no difficulty in seeing the 60° wave - the sixth harmonic - with its peak in the vicinity of 8° of the negative signs, a trough at about 8° of the positive signs, and the nodes of the waves at about 23° of the signs" (emphasis mine). These are, of course, Tropical signs of which he is speaking, and when corrected for the 23° of precession separating his scheme from the Zodiac at the time these physicians were born, it again throughs the peaks and troughs at exactly 15° of each constellation, and says that the dividing lines between signs are at 0° - but only if the Zodiac has everything to do with the Universe that surrounds us.

-- James A. Eshelman, Los Angeles