What information about ancient astrology was available 20 years ago? It’s a hot topic these days, particularly among young astrologers.
What I said in my coverage of NCGR was that you could not get information about ancient astrology at conferences 20 years ago; obviously some translated texts existed, but there were not many, and they were not easy to acquire.
Now, you can walk into many discussions of astrological history, ancient techniques and ancient texts. Books are available in the conference bookstore, for purchase online, and many are available free online. This is providing astrology with classical grounding and a solid foundation in its history, the lack thereof was one of its great flaws since the revival of the 19th and 20th centuries.
“It was just beginning to happen twenty years ago,” said Robert Hand, in an interview today. “In 1990, people were beginning to study ancient astrology, but it wasn’t available at conferences.” Hand is considered a leading authority on the history of astrology. He was one of the early leaders of NCGR, and the co-founder of Project Hindsight, which was created to address the lack of available ancient astrology texts.
“There were a limited number of texts and nobody teaching at conferences. That I can tell you with authority,” he said.
Among the few texts that existed were Pingree’s translation of Dorotheus, the Jean Rhys Bram translation of Fermicus, and two translations of Ptolemy. Milius was available in two translations. There was a partial Xerox copy of something called Pseudo Manetho, Hand said. Ptolemy never created or codified a full astrology method; he gives rules and pointers.
“There was one guy, Jim Holden, who was studying [ancient astrology] but not teaching it. George, a guy at AFA, was talking about ancient astrology. He wrote articles, and made some public comment. I can’t think of any other texts that were available before Project Hindsight.”
“First person to do this publicly was Robert Zoller, in the 1970s. He was regarded as slightly nuts because he wasn’t humanistic. I would not say he was a headliner, but people heard him from time to time.” Zoller, an astrologer, translator and historian, became one of the founders of Project Hindsight, along with Hand and Robert Schmidt.
Olivia Barclay was teaching students from Christian Astrology by William Lilly in the 1980s, but this is a mid-17th century text, and is not considered ancient astrology.
Project Hindsight begins in 1993 with Robert Schmidt’s translation of Paulus into English; there was also an earlier translation by James Holden. “Due to the overwhelming lack of interest, he never published it.”
The first Project Hindsight conclave, called PHASE 1, was in 1994. “The weekend before the first PHASE conclave was an NCGR conference on the history of astrology. We went from the NCGR conference to the first PHASE conclave. That was when things really got moving.”
Since then, Project Hindsight has resurrected and translated dozens of ancient texts from Latin, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, in addition to creating and publishing a number of monographs (short books). Though Hand has split from Hindsight, he has translations available from his own publishing operation, which you can find at RobHand.com.
I think it’s essential that there be plenty of astrologers with roots in the tradition, who understand the basics — and some who understand the advanced ancient techniques, so that there are always teachers around who are grounded in the classics. I think every profession (or in this case art form) benefits from knowing its own history and suffers from ignorance of the past. It’s not merely an intellectual exercise because of the complexity of doing astrology well, and the grounding necessary: to learn astrology you have to study diligently for a decade or so, and you need a framework and intellectual rigor. The ancient techniques provide a platform, if we are cautious to recognize that they come from a different world with a different world view.
I am still looking for examples of practical application of ancient techniques, though this may be a matter of creativity. The newspaper horoscope is a good example of applying an ancient technique, in particular, whole sign houses, the first house system and the innovation that gave us aspects and other features of astrology that we take for granted today. The newspaper horoscope (a 20th century thing) revived an ancient technique; then the classical movement unearthed much more about the history of that technique (check a monograph called Whole Sign Houses by Rob Hand, one of my favorite astrology books).
Out of the traditional astrology research, something called the Thema Mundi emerged, a hypothetical chart of the world, which informs us that the 1st house is associated with the sign Cancer rather than the sign Aries. I call this the 90-degree shift issue. In the 20th century astrology was reduced to a “12-letter alphabet” that simplistically associated Mars, Aries and the 1st house, Taurus Venus and the 2nd house, and so on. As it turns out, the 1st house was associated by the ancients (in the Hermetic tradition) with the sign Cancer and the Moon; the 2nd house with Leo and the Sun; and so on. This has the ability to change the way that all astrologers work — and to improve the sensitivity of their readings.
The shift is not just theoretical. The ascendant or 1st house is a key to one’s sense of identity. Do we associate the identify of humanity or the world with the nature of Mars/Aries (war, sex drive, conquering, initiative) or do we associate it with the nature of the Moon/Cancer (nurturing, feelings, the home, mothers, children and another kind of initiative)? Big difference, right?
Those just are two examples.
I think it’s meaningful to understand worldviews of the past, and to recognize how they apply and do not apply to the present. We need to raise awareness of what astrology needs to do TODAY, where we live, and what astrologers need to do, to address the present turning point of humanity. We need to be able to handle the sudden incursion of so many new planets and classes of planets orbiting our Sun. There is comfort in the past, and we are facing a kind of chaotic abyss in the present, symbolized by all these new planets: there is no system except for maybe Chaos Theory that can handle the 230,000 planets discovered, most of them since the very late 20th century. These discoveries are a commentary on our lives, taken as a lot, and as individual processes.
This expansion presents special challenges of theory, practical technique, and understanding human nature. It’s going to take a lot more than astrology to help us get there, though astrology is a lot better off in a grounded, informed state about its past than it is floating on the bubble of pop psychology, magical thinking or occultism that has fed it for so long.
I haven’t read any of the translations you mentioned here Eric. You said that Project Hindsight has made traditional astrology more popular, especially with young people. Do you think this is a good thing? I have not seen much practical application o,f for example Hellenistic astrology so I’m wondering if it is all more of an academic exercise.
Jamie.
Sorry, sometimes I type too fast – as I was saying, I’ve studied astrolgoy for over 40 years and can say I have a vast amount of reading material, some books are so tattered, I don’t even touch them anymore, but to date, I don’t know if I have ever come across any scientific proof of why astrology works, as applied to either a personal natal chart or a broader world chart. Everything has a chart when you think about it. I “know” it works, because after reading the material and, also, with a blind faith in the very beginning, the more I read, the more was proven to me.
It really was a simple question of application of the material. Along those lines, and not claiming to have read every piece of paper ever written on the matter, I agree with Eric’s claim regarding no true availability of ancient astrological text.
Good for you Eric, you have them running down the aisles, and also thanks for the openess of the dialogue between you and the other gentlemen. Sometimes you just have to push a closed door open.
Peace Be
In truth the personalization of the planets and stars was made by early man. Constellations, planets, the actual sign names, etc. were given attributes by the human evaluation of these “aspects”. Each generation made the study of the logic of the stars larger.
From an organic point of view, the aspects really represent the circumferance of the circle and the physical distance of each planet to another. Almost like, “you can stand there, but don’t stand over here”.
Then of course was the telescope. Then maybe some astronomers became astrolgers as well, for they were the ones really looking closer at the actual planets, and I don’t know how, but the two finally met on an even playing field.
I
This is awesome!! I love that astrology is moving forward into consciousness this way, and I love the way we all have a place to engage one another creatively about what it means for the people who are on the planet right now, empowered with a desire to better understand themselves and each other…astrology helps to make the world a better place…like everything…it’s only as good as our understanding and ability to work with it. It makes me happy inside to know that we are able now to look at the works of those who saw what they saw and courageously tried to make sense of it. Now, it’s our turn! Very exciting, indeed.
Thanks Moses, good to hear from you, in any event. As you have now figured out I am not a fan of facebook but as one great astrologer said of that service today, “this too shall pass.”
It’s good we got this out into the open – the history of how astrology honors its own history. That’s why I don’t mind making the minor, harmless kind of error – it can result in a good clarification.
You are fortunate to be arriving in astrology when the past is honored. I was introduced to the subject by Geoff Cornelius in his book The Moment of Astrology, who noted the utter lack of awareness of how to do horary, according to modestly old rules (Lilly, ca mid-1600s). Much of the astrology we have coming from the 20th century is full of occultism, early New Age and magical stuff — which is fun, if you know what you’re dealing with.
If I haven’t been clear, cheers to Roberts Hand, Schmidt and Zoller for having the foresight to put together Hindsight. Yes I bought a big stack of those books off the table at the conference book store…but heck I have a lot of Capricorn in my chart. And everything old is new again.
But then there is what is new.
Moses — I am ready to present at the next Blast on how to use the newly discovered planets in counseling practice. They are amazing.
Thanks for clarifying everything, Eric. That original audio quote from you is still on your site at the end of the Chris Brennan talk–I missed it when I looked for it earlier today.
It is a minor quibble, in any case, but I’m glad we’ve clarified the issue and hopefully learned something from it. My only intention was to bring this to your attention so that you could clarify your point, if you wished to. I made sure to let you know about my Facebook update right away so that you could join the discussion and clarify your point there, if you were interested in doing that. I think you stated things less strongly than I suggested you did initially, though, and I apologize for that.
Keep up the good work!
A few notes on this.
Texts were rare and hard to acquire – as clarified in Rob Hand interview. You cannot prove “what might not have happened” but obviously Hindsight led the way and created the popular availability of the texts, and the desire to understand them. They “created the market” if you could call it that.
Other translators went to work after Hindsight.
The comment about 10 years ago – I would clarify – outside Project Hindsight, the discussions at conferences were not nonexistent but rare. By the mid-90s the discussion is still going on inside Hindsight exclusively, unless someone from Hindsight got on the bill at a bigger event. We would need to study conference schedules to see how rare, 10 years ago.
Moses seems to have come up with a similar bibliography as Rob Hand. However, you could not just google up a copy of Valens and have it delivered to your door. If you were a classics student you could get it through Interlibrary at a university. I thought Rob’s comment about the “overwhelming lack of interest” in the topic was telling.
Perhaps I overstated the point a bit – but I would give this the True Enough rating. Not what I was planning to do today, but I have learned a lot, and that makes it a great day.
Rush transcript – commentary on Chris Brennan talk at Research Symposium.
We can see that we’ve come a long way in our understanding of astrology since these days when we were told that our lives were mapped out, that we were following choreography. Though many of the same debates still exist between then and now. We are still having this fate versus free will debate without realizing the whole thing was blamed on astrology a long time ago, and that this has its roots in a very old discussion around the time of Ptolemy; we’re talking before the birth of Jesus. Alright so that is another brief visit to the Research Symposium. Just so you know, 20 years ago, even 15 years ago or in fact even 10 years ago, these kinds of conversations were not happening at astrology conferences. A project called Project Hindsight in the early 1990s began the conversation when they began translating ancient texts out of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, and gradually the Project Hindsight material has found its way into mainstream astrology — a very useful thing for astrologers to have grounding in the history of their own profession. So this is to say that up until recently, astrologers, not only did they not have a grounding in history, they had exceedingly little access to the information. I don’t want to use an absolute here but for the most part 20 years ago there was no access to these ancient documents that are now widely available today and are discussed at almost every astrology conference today. For Planet Waves this is Eric Francis.
Hi there, feel free to delete one of my two comments. They’re identical. I sent it twice because Eric said that the first one hadn’t come through yet. You don’t have to approve this message, of course. I’m just asking if you can delete one of my two comments.
Hi Eric, this was a surprise, but it’s always good to see things discussed so that we can all learn something from it.
I’m sorry you couldn’t find the discussion on my Facebook wall. We’re friends on Facebook, and the post is a recent one on my wall. The misunderstanding seems to be that you were probably looking on my public “fan” page, which is actually for my fiction writing (not astrology), rather than my personal page, where I talk about astrology and lots of other things.
Here is what I wrote to begin with on my Facebook wall:
“Eric has said that twenty years ago, we didn’t have ancient astrology texts, but now we do thanks to Project Hindsight. That’s not exactly true, though I’ll let others more knowledgeable on the matter of the old texts mention which works we have had translations for. We obviously had translations of Ptolemy and lots of old Indian texts.”
I just went back again to your recordings to find your original quote, but it’s not available now (it was on one of the Chris Brennan recordings). I was very careful to listen to your words the first time, though as I hate misquoting people (as I hate being misquoted myself), and originally I rewound the recording to make sure I heard you correctly. I think at the time maybe you just overstated your point a bit in the heat of the moment, but no big deal and you’re really doing right to try to clarify this issue for everyone after I’ve written to you to bring it to your attention.
I won’t post the full quotes and names from others who wrote on my facebook wall, because it was written in a somewhat private context (only my facebook friends could see it), but here are some of the points that were made by others (not me). I will write to the people who made these quotes and invite them to comment on this thread, if they wish to …
“As an example, “Christian Astrology” was published and readily available by Regulus Press in 1985 because of the interest in “traditional” astrology. This happened because of the demand for known texts and was primarily a move by Olivia Barclay who was teaching traditional astrology in the late 70’s and 80’s. There were lots of texts available before project hindsight. We didn’t have the internet access that we do now, but old bookshops and libraries were sources. Another example. Rob Zoller published his Arabic Parts in 1980 … We who are in the ranks of 45 years in the business can remember that far back. I have … Paracelsus, Ptomemy’s Tetrabiblios and many more all of which were both available and reprints published before Hindsight. ”
Another one was:
“We already had translations into English of Dorotheus (Pingree, 1976) and Firmicus Maternus (Bram, 1975?) and of course Manilius (1697 onwards) as well as Ptolemy (late 18th century onwards) more than 20 years ago. However, the last 20 years have brought the first English translations of Vettius Valens, Paulus Alexandrinus, Antiochus, Heliodorus, Hephaistio and Censorinus. So the corpus of translated ancient texts has certainly expanded, but I would agree that 20 years is not an ideal cut-off point for an assessment of the modern English translation movement. If instead we take 35 years, it covers pretty much everyone ancient except Ptolemy and Manilius.”
One more:
“… before 1994 there were some translations of the Hellenistic material but it’s quality was okay (Dorotheus) to terrible (Firmicus).”
I really appreciate you making the recordings online, and as I mentioned to you, I wrote my own newsletter list of about 15,000 emails right away to let them know that your broadcasts from NCGR were freely available. I think you’re doing great work, Eric, and you have great integrity to do this. Thanks again.
I have moved this comment to the audio comments area.
Hi Eric, this was a surprise, but it’s always good to see things discussed so that we can all learn something from it.
I’m sorry you couldn’t find the discussion on my Facebook wall. We’re friends on Facebook, and the post is a recent one on my wall. The misunderstanding seems to be that you were probably looking on my public “fan” page, which is actually for my fiction writing (not astrology), rather than my personal page, where I talk about astrology and lots of other things.
Here is what I wrote to begin with on my Facebook wall:
“Eric has said that twenty years ago, we didn’t have ancient astrology texts, but now we do thanks to Project Hindsight. That’s not exactly true, though I’ll let others more knowledgeable on the matter of the old texts mention which works we have had translations for. We obviously had translations of Ptolemy and lots of old Indian texts.”
I just went back again to your recordings to find your original quote, but it’s not available now (it was on one of the Chris Brennan recordings). I was very careful to listen to your words the first time, though as I hate misquoting people (as I hate being misquoted myself), and originally I rewound the recording to make sure I heard you correctly. I think at the time maybe you just overstated your point a bit in the heat of the moment, but no big deal and you’re really doing right to try to clarify this issue for everyone after I’ve written to you to bring it to your attention.
I won’t post the full quotes and names from others who wrote on my facebook wall, because it was written in a somewhat private context (only my facebook friends could see it), but here are some of the points that were made by others (not me). I will write to the people who made these quotes and invite them to comment on this thread, if they wish to …
“As an example, “Christian Astrology” was published and readily available by Regulus Press in 1985 because of the interest in “traditional” astrology. This happened because of the demand for known texts and was primarily a move by Olivia Barclay who was teaching traditional astrology in the late 70’s and 80’s. There were lots of texts available before project hindsight. We didn’t have the internet access that we do now, but old bookshops and libraries were sources. Another example. Rob Zoller published his Arabic Parts in 1980 … We who are in the ranks of 45 years in the business can remember that far back. I have … Paracelsus, Ptomemy’s Tetrabiblios and many more all of which were both available and reprints published before Hindsight. ”
Another one was:
“We already had translations into English of Dorotheus (Pingree, 1976) and Firmicus Maternus (Bram, 1975?) and of course Manilius (1697 onwards) as well as Ptolemy (late 18th century onwards) more than 20 years ago. However, the last 20 years have brought the first English translations of Vettius Valens, Paulus Alexandrinus, Antiochus, Heliodorus, Hephaistio and Censorinus. So the corpus of translated ancient texts has certainly expanded, but I would agree that 20 years is not an ideal cut-off point for an assessment of the modern English translation movement. If instead we take 35 years, it covers pretty much everyone ancient except Ptolemy and Manilius.”
One more:
“… before 1994 there were some translations of the Hellenistic material but it’s quality was okay (Dorotheus) to terrible (Firmicus).”
I really appreciate you making the recordings online, and as I mentioned to you, I wrote my own newsletter list of about 15,000 emails right away to let them know that your broadcasts from NCGR were freely available. I think you’re doing great work, Eric, and you have great integrity to do this. Thanks again.
Thank you so very much, Eric. Unless i am very wrong, history will recognize your own personal example of integrity as intergral to the restoration of astrology to the respect and acceptance it deserves. It is an honor to be of service with you.