Solunars by Aldebaran Sidereal Academy

Wed May 03, 2017 1:17 pm
Having recently added a dozen or so options to the choices of anyanamsas in their free charts, Astro.com has posted a new article on ayanamsas. In the past, some of us have found their explanations of the Sidereal Zodiac condescending. This isn't, although it still tries to tie most anyanamsas to one or another fixed stars. It's a translation of a new article by Dieter Koch, and explains not only the Fagan-Bradley SVP, but several others as well. Koch includes references for all of them.

The Fagan/Bradley zodiac is very close to the zodiac that was used by Babylonian astrologers in the Hellenistic period. Statistical examinations of astronomical cuneiform tablets by Peter Huber in 1958 have provided an ayanamsha that differs by less than an arc minute from the Fagan/Bradley ayanamsha. However, according to a more recent investigation by John P. Britton (2010), the difference could still amount to several arc minutes (see further below).

The Fagan/Bradley zodiac is the oldest sidereal zodiac.

While it has some information that's misconstrued, it's a pretty good article, and interesting.

SteveS wrote:

Good post JSAD. I have always been impressed with Dieter’s astronomical/mathematical mind. A few years ago, I contacted Dieter about the possibility for me contracting him to do a specialized Sidereal Astrology program, but he declined saying he was under contract with Astro.com which prevented him from discussing the this possibility.

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.

Jim Eshelman wrote:

Nature is utterly symmetrical - not necessarily in its outermost workings, but certainly at its most fundamental. The structure of an atom is utterly symmetrical in an exacting mathematical way. If the most primitive units from which everything is composed is this symmetrical, then symmetry is inherent (through and through) in everything.

What excites me about the seeming intransience of the Sidereal zodiac is stuff like this: We have a point that today we call 0°00'00" Capricorn, and when we calculate the Sun's crossing of that point 1,993 years ago, on December 20, 78 AD, Mars and Saturn were exactly (0°54' and 0°07', respectively) on angles over the city of Pompeii, Italy; and when we progressed that, by the same way we do today, its Ascendant fell within 1° of transiting Mars just as Mount Vesuvius erupted, eradicating Pompeii, and buried it under hardening lava for nearly two millennia.

When measured not against anything local to earth... not against anything local to our solar system... but against the background of the whole of the universe, this spot we call 0°00'00"Capricorn, of all the quarter million seconds of arc in the circle of the ecliptic, has remained invariable for 1,993 years.

...Or even longer... because in 202 BC (2,218 years ago) when the Sun reached that same spot, Saturn was 0°09' from an angle over the city of Zama (Carthage) when the Roman army waged the final battle there in a 17-year-war, slew 20,000 people, and effectively eradicated their land.

And so forth. There are other examples, documentable across thousands of years. If the point we call 0°00'00" Capricorn were not invariable against the whole of space, varying by even half a second a millennium, these contacts would not have been so close. If it moved as much as some fixed stars (say, Antares which has moved 0°03' in the same time), these results would evaporate altogether, the corresponding charts having angles displaced 20-30°.

Bogdan574 wrote:

Nature is utterly symmetrical - not necessarily in its outermost workings, but certainly at its most fundamental. The structure of an atom is utterly symmetrical in an exacting mathematical way. If the most primitive units from which everything is composed is this symmetrical, then symmetry is inherent )through and through) in everything.

Atoms are hardly symmetrical, as most atoms are isotopes or ions, and this doesn't even cover the strange behavior of quarks and neutrinos. You could say the universe strives for symmetry through entropy but if the universe was perfectly symmetrical then there would be no entropy in the first place. But this is all philosophy, not the practical uses of astrology. Everything else you said is on point, though it proves how sidereal astrology is an metric for measuring cosmic bodies and theory for predicting events, not how symmetrical the universe is.

Jim Eshelman wrote:

Bogdan574 wrote:But this is all philosophy, not the practical uses of astrology.

Indeed. And, while we need to wander there occasionally (it is impossible to contemplate the infinite without wandering into religious turf - whether it looks religious or not), we do try to spend most of our time pragmatically.

Everything else you said is on point, though it proves how sidereal astrology is an metric for measuring cosmic bodies and theory for predicting events, not how symmetrical the universe is.

What I was attempting to demonstrate with the latter part wasn't symmetry (I'd moved on) but - at vast enough distances, such as the infinity with which we naturally engage - the invariability. Everything in the universe is in motion and constantly changing, but (at least from any level we can perceive and measure during the time the human race has existed) the context has striking invariability.