Astrology Project: New Open Post

[ecosophia]

Regular readers here know that I post astrological predictions concerning politics and economics on SubscribeStar and Patreon, and every so often post something that can be read by anyone. The more experimental a post, the more likely it is to be open for the public, and the one I've just put up -- well, it's about as experimental as they come.

It used to be quite common to interpret comets as significant omens in mundane astrology. Unfortunately very little material seems to have survived on how this was done. I've gathered together what I could find, in Ramesey's 1653 classic Astrologia Restaurata and a few other sources, and given it a shot using the recent Comet Tsushinchan-Atlas as a test case.

Maybe it's just me, but I tend to think that the most important of the various purposes of astrology is accurate prediction, and the only way to see what works is to give it a try. You can find my tentative conclusions here on SubscribeStar and here on Patreon. Over the next two years, we should see just how accurate these conclusions turn out to be, and then put the results to work the next time a comet comes through.

Spoiler alert: comets, according to astrological tradition, are always bad news. This one isn't as bad as some, mostly because it was relatively small and wasn't visible for that long, but it has some unwelcome tidings.

Comments

Re: Public Health and the dark mirror of aristocracy.

[ecosophia]

There was never a "Greek empire," other than the very temporary empire of Alexander the Great. Astrology in the twilight of the Roman Empire lost a lot of ground in Europe because spherical trigonometry didn't survive too well in dark age conditions; it thrived in Persia and, a little later, in the Muslim world because their levels of literacy and education were much higher.

The collapse of astrology in the early modern West was entirely a function of ideology -- the promoters of the scientific revolution made a big point of insisting that it was nonsense, and made rejection of it one of the touchstones for loyalty to their ideology. (Interestingly, they never tried to disprove it -- they just insisted loudly that it couldn't be true.) Since the new ideology of scientific materialism was extremely convenient to the rising capitalist class, it got enshrined in the educational mainstream, leaving astrology to survive solely in the hands of a network of fringe intellectuals and mostly rural and small town occult entrepreneurs.