Bogdan574 wrote:
I appreciate him bothering to discuss different sidereal zodiacs but it still has the problems JSAD pointed out. My biggest issue is with this paragraph, which I will divide into two parts, my criticism deals more with an underlying attitudes I perceive in most astrologers.
Incidentally, this phenomenon not only challenges current definitions of ayanamsha, which anchor the zodiac at some fixed star, but also obviously proves that the zodiacal constellations either have no reality and are mere imagination or otherwise that they are a transient and perishable thing.
Without zodiacal constellations there would have been no astrology to begin with. The oldest astrologers gazed at those constellations with their own eyes when developing astrology and using it for their many purposes. It's easy to discount the constellations and the so-called fixed signs when you use your computer all the time with no opportunity to do any actual stargazing, but if we were forced to look directly at the stars and planets to do our astrology it would be much harder to deny them, empirical realities that they are. Astrology began with the stars, after all, let us not forget that.
Something being transient and perishable does not count against it, considering how everything is transient; even galaxies fade away and black holes vaporize. The stars existed in a certain pattern when we began studying them, they will eventually move, the constellations will change, we will evolve as a species. Perhaps at that point we may have a new way of studying the stars, perhaps we won't need them at all at that point. But right now the stars, out sun included, travel around the Milky Way, and we extrapolate meaning from their positions and movements. We change over time, as does the universe. Such is life and the cosmos.
In addition, it is obvious that the astrological zodiac of 12 equal signs with all its wonderful internal logic and symmetry, if it is real at all and an everlasting archetype of the cycles of life, cannot derive its effectiveness from a random distribution of unrelated fixed stars, but must be based on something more stable and more fundamental.
Balanced, equal systems with "wonderful internal logic and symmetry" representing "an everlasting archetype of the cycles of life" are only ideals. Koch almost seems to have a religious expectation for the universe to conform to what he sees as meaningful and eternal. Nature doesn't care about symmetry, archetypes, or granting wishes. Koch is like a man in Galileo's time who thought that, since there are seven metals, seven planets, seven days of the week etc., other heavenly bodies like Jupiter's moons could not exist.
By Koch's own logic, the "an everlasting archetype of the cycles of life", which I interpret him to mean the seasons, being far more transient and perishable than the fixed stars, are less reliable. Just 12,000 years ago we were still in the last ice age, with seasons wildly different from our own today, while the constellations were relatively close to what we see today. Our very era is dealing with global warming, which will throw disturb the "everlasting archetypal cycles" of the seasons. The stars, however, are unaffected by something as mundane as the burning of petroleum.
And don't even get me started on the hemispheres of the globe. Does the "everlasting archetype of the cycles of life" apply exactly the same in the southern hemisphere where the seasons are the opposite or it all flipped upside down. Even areas in the northern hemisphere have different seasons depending how close or far away from the equator you are. The "wonderful internal logic and symmetry" of the tropical zodiac only remotely works in temporal regions of the northern hemisphere.
