Mundane Astrology Project: An Experiment

[ecosophia]

I'm sure most of my readers know at this point that I also do mundane astrology -- the branch of astrology that predicts the fate of nations and political figures -- and post the results to my SubscribeStar and Patreon accounts. (No, those aren't free, but they're cheap, and I do have bills to pay, you know.) A lot of that consists of ingress and eclipse charts, the bread and butter of a traditional mundane astrologer's work, but every so often I like to try something experimental -- and those tolerably often end up being free posts that anyone can read.

I've just posted another of those.  It's a bit of a complicated story.

The Roman astrologer Julius Firmicius Maternus included in his writings, among many other things, what was then called the Thema Mundi -- quite literally the birth chart of the world. According to his sources, a pair of otherwise forgotten astrologers named Aesculapius and Anubius, the world began with the Sun at 15° Leo, the Moon and ascendant at 15° Cancer, Mercury at 15° Virgo, Venus at 15° Libra, Mars at 15° Scorpio, Jupiter at 15° Sagittarius, and Saturn at 15° Capricorn. That's an interesting chart with implications that probably need to be teased out in a later post, but it ties in oddly with another project of mine -- exploring the use of solar returns in mundane astrology.

Solar returns are much used in the predictive end of natal astrology. The idea is that you cast a chart for the moment at which the Sun returns to the position it was in when you were born, and read that as a guide to the year ahead. Solar returns work quite well in natal practice, so it occurred to me that it was worth checking out whether they could be used to make annual predictions for nations that have known dates and times of foundation -- for example, the United States.

But the Thema Mundi raises a dizzying proposition: it should be possible, using it, to cast solar returns for the entire world.

So that's what I did. I used standard mundane methods, and cast it for Washington DC, since (a) we don't happen to know the location at which the earth first started coming into being (if there was one), and (b) the mundane methods I know focus on the fate of individual nations, and seeing what the next year of world history has to offer for the United States is an intriguing prospect. Will it provide accurate predictions?  I have no idea; if anyone else has tried anything like this, I haven't seen an account of it.

My predictions are therefore experimental and tentative. If the Thema Mundi is an accurate basis for mundane solar returns, and if standard mundane technique interprets such returns accurately, here's what we can expect.  You can check it out on SubscribeStar here and on Patreon here. After that, we'll just have to see what happens...

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

a) How's your Koine Greek? The Thema Mundi has seen a lot of discussion in Hellenistic Astrological sources which. as far as I know, have never been translated; some of which concern Mundane Astrology. I confess to having ignored or skimmed at best most of those, as my interests lie elsewhere, but I know that it was put to use in mundane astrology.

b) According to the Ephemeris Search Engine on astro-seek, this arranagmeent has never occurred in a period lasting from

https://horoscopes.astro-seek.com/ephemeris-search-engine-astrology-planet-positions

[ecosophia]

1) My Latin's pretty good but I've never tried tackling Greek. Do you know of anyone in the Hellenistic scene these days who knows that material, and will talk to a non-Hellenistic astrologer?

2) I gather that it's been longer than that; I read some time ago in a Reddit community a post by someone who'd gone looking around 10,000 years in both directions, with zero hits. On the other hand, if that's the birth chart of life on earth, those positions were current at the beginning of the Proterozoic Aeon some two and a half billion years ago...

[booklover1973]

It would be difficult to find out, because due to the chaotic character of the orbits of the planets, it is not possible to calculate their positions more than a few million years into the past or into the future.

[(Anonymous)]

1) Unfortunately I don't. I've been picking this up on my own, without much interaction with the community beyond using reference books.

[(Anonymous)]

Hi JMG,
I'm a graduate of Chris Brennan's Hellenistic astrology course and primarily use that approach in my own work. I'm not technically proficient in Koine Greek (especially from that period), but I've studied all the major translated works from the ancient astrologers. If I can be help, let me know.
- Procrastes

[ecosophia]

Thank you! My question is quite simple: do you happen to know how the Thema Mundi was used in making mundane astrology predictions in Hellenistic times?

If it matters, my focus in astrology is pretty much entirely on accurate political and economic prediction using classic mundane methods, drawing on sources from Ramesey through Raphael and Green -- no post-Rudhyar psychobabble, thank you very much. ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

The Thema Mundi was used, as near as we can tell based on the remaining texts, as an exemplar for planetary domicile, exaltation and aspectual/relationship schemes. It appears to be so foundational that more specific, detailed, predictive methods are not really tied to it. For example, Olympiodorus, commenting on another astrologer's work, illustrates the concept of angularity in a chart with reference to the Thema because this chart would presumably have been easy for even a novice astrologer to visualize. It's also worth noting that Firmicus Maternus, in the same book/chapter in which he details the Thema Mundi, repeatedly states that the individual nativities of human beings are judged against the Chart of the World. I think this is a legacy of natal astrology's primacy once the core system of astrology came together from Babylonian, Egyptian and Hellenic elements in Hellenistic Egypt.

For an "actual" time that the chart might correspond to, Demetra George writes, "The thema mundi is timed to the Egyptian New Year, which begins in summer with the heliacal rising of the star Sirius that announces the flooding of the Nile River.... Egyptian astro-theology held that the heliacal rising of a star represented the birth/rebirth of stars and hence the rebirth of the souls who were encased in stars--a fitting moment for the birth of the world" (Ancient Astrology, Vol. 1, pg. 172).

Conceptually, the birth of cosmos is a "perfect" moment against which the charts of imperfect human beings are compared, whereas the movement of time and the unfolding of a life within it rests on differing symbolism and thus requires a separate toolkit. It was really the early medieval Perso-Arabic astrologers, especially Abu Ma'shar, that really refined and developed solar returns as a predictive tool. I would dig into the mundane astrology of this period because the later European astrologers--including William Ramesey--often draw from them.

All that being said, I don't think you couldn't use the Thema Mundi for mundane astrological predictions (after all, contemporary magicians are using it to time planetary consecrations, a la Kaitlin Coppock). It would also be interesting to also see how the birth charts of individual nations fit into the Nativity of the World.

[ecosophia]

Thank you for this! My source for the Thema Mundi is the partial translation of Firmicius Maternus by Thomas Taylor that got included in one of Manly P. Hall's odder books; I'll have to doublecheck and see if the material on judging natal charts against the Thema Mundi is included there, and have a look at Firmicius Maternus more generally. As for Abu Ma'shar and his peers, they're already on the get-to list, because the great conjunctions are a branch of mundane work the classic mundane tradition I mentioned doesn't really do much with, and I want to give it more attention than I've done so far.

[(Anonymous)]

My pleasure! If you haven't settled on one yet, may I recommend Benjamin Dykes' recent translation of Firmicus, or even James Holden's? Don't bother with the Jean Brams translation--many important passages were entirely left out of the work.

[sdi]

Oh, don't go looking for the chart—you won't find it! Mercury and Venus station at most at 28° and 48° from the Sun, respectively, while the Thema Mundi has them at 30° and 60°. (Though I'll grant that I have no idea if the orbits of the inner planets have been stable for billions of years...)

Chris Brennan has an excellent discussion of the Thema Mundi, it's origin, and it's rationale, in Hellenistic Astrology, pp. 228–232. JMG, to your question, Brennan believes it to be philosophical or didactic rather than practical.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the "Venus as comet" myths would have to be true, with her starting either in Earth's orbit or outside it.