Wow, this is a complicated post to respond to. I praise Clay for actually understanding the math and for original thought; but, at least from what you've quoted, I would need to ding him for theory without proof or substance, which is a bugaboo of mine.
Also - knowing that I'm limited by the subset of what you've posted, so that the issue might now actually be with Clay - I have a personal problem with the style. From what you've said before, he seems to have been trying to play to Tropical and Sidereal audiences simultaneously, having something to lure them both in. This might have been a tactic to try to save
American Astrology's sales in the '90s while still getting
some Sidereal information in its pages - not sure. But (again, just from the parts quoted), this rubs me the wrong way, because it's more about politics than astrology, trying to soften the magazine's reputation.
So let's sort through what he's really saying here. It isn't
exactly what he seems to be saying (which is, "Hey, guys, I can show you how to make both Siderealists and Tropicalists happy today").
Clay wrote:I come not to bury the Tropical zodiac, but to praise it! Not the phony and absurd “Tropical longitude zodiac,” however, but rather the true Tropical declination zodiac. After their Tropical-to- Sidereal conversions, Cyril Fagan and Donald Bradley (late great writers for American Astrology magazine) never failed to ridicule the notion of a Tropical zodiac. For all their scholarship and erudition, though, they completely missed the fact that the Tropical coordinate, declination, provides a meaningful interpretative function which has no Sidereal equivalent. This mistake, I believe, is attributable to the fact that Astro*Carto*Graphy and Cyclo*Carto*Graphy were not fully developed during Fagan’s or Bradley’s lifetime. Though Bradley drew up several proto A*C*G maps (none of which were for natal charts), he saw at most a handful of such charts, and certainly no C*C*G maps at all. Had Fagan and Bradley been thoroughly exposed to these maps, they would have certainly modified their dogmatic assertion that all Tropical zodiacs are, ipso facto, meaningless.
In this first long quote, the first thing clear is that by "Tropical zodiac" he doesn't really mean anything that a Tropical astrologer would recognize as the Tropical zodiac. He's creating a
new "tropical zodiac." That's important to understand as we go.
He is technically correct calling declination a tropical coordinate in this sense: If a point is fixed in space, so that its Sidereal longitude and latitude do not change, precession will cause right ascension and declination to change. That's tropical.
He is then saying that something has been missed about the value of declination. Fair enough: I've always been open to that possibility, I just haven't found any evidence of it. Parallels of declination simply fail miserably as aspects, but there might be other uses of declination, or even
consequences of declination, worth exploring. (I've experimented, for example, with turning and crossing points in declination cycles for weather prediction and possibly market prediction.) Anyway, it's a fair enough point that there might be something about declination that we have missed.
This far into the quotes, though, I see nothing to substantiate so flat a statement as, "declination provides a meaningful interpretative function." I accept that it
might, and I await the statement of exactly what that might be... but the statement that it
does is a strong, strong statement.
His last statement above is terribly irksome to me. He is still referring to a Tropical
zodiac, and there is nothing
zodiacal about what he's doing.
Clay wrote:So, my conclusion is that celestial longitude should be divided relative to Sidereal coordinates; and the Tropical zodiac signs should be based on declination, which, in essence, they are.
There it is! He doesn't mean a
zodiac. He's doing something else with it, and I can't tell from this what he's doing with it in a
practical sense. He would IMHO better have referred to a
tropical framework than a
Tropical zodiac. It is absolutely defensible that declination is a tropical coordinate and that,
at the ecliptic, the actual Tropical zodiac is distinguishable by declination distinctions (though this isn't true for a planet not exactly on the ecliptic). - In Clay's defense, I probably don't have in these two quotes some critical things he said, that might make me treat his thesis differently. (Also, I'm being critical of the thesis, based on facts presented to me, not of Clay personally.)
Finally, Fagan and Bradley were incorrect in two significant respects: 1) A Tropical zodiac does in fact make sense, because a Sidereal zodiac cannot measure the global “paran” function
I don't want to wrangle this one to death, but I have to say two things about this sentence.
First, I don't care at all if "a Tropical zodiac does in fact make sense" (I'm sure he meant
tropical, not
Tropical, in this case). I've been able to "make sense" of that possibility for almost half a century. In fact, the first letter from me that Bradley answered was one where I laid out a theory on how both zodiacs could be right and valid. (It was wrong - missed the point - but probably wasn't bad for a 16-year-old.) So, I don't want something that makes sense (theoretically), but something that can be
demonstrated to have distinctive value and specific application.
Second, I don't know what he means by "global paran function but, if he's just saying that parans exist and can be tracked, and the
procedure of calculating them requires using equatorial coordinates (that are inherently tropical), then he's pulling the wool over people's eyes with language, and I might get genuinely irate. It is true that "a Sidereal zodiac cannot measure" parans because parans are inherently non-zodiacal. The problem I see is that his sentence implies (and I'm sure is intended to get the listener to think he means) that the Tropical zodiac can do the job. But, he isn't talking about the
Tropical zodiac, but about a
tropical framework of equatorial coordinates. My ire comes from the fact that (based on the what was quoted here) he's evidently using "packaging language" for some palliative reason.
2) both a Sidereal and Tropical zodiac could be relevant and meaningful simultaneously.
Again... he isn't talking about a Tropical
zodiac. All the way to the end (based on the parts quoted), he's misrepresenting.
In the next post I'll make a simpler statement about the value I see in what I wrote.
