{"id":23182,"date":"2010-03-02T15:02:52","date_gmt":"2010-03-02T20:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=23182"},"modified":"2010-03-03T09:09:17","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:09:17","slug":"ancient-astrology-20-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/daily-astrology\/ancient-astrology-20-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Astrology: Rumor of Writing on the Wall"},"content":{"rendered":"

What information about ancient astrology was available 20 years ago? It’s a hot topic these days, particularly among young astrologers. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Rob Hand at the 2008 United Astrology Conference. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was just beginning to happen twenty years ago,” said Robert Hand<\/strong><\/a>, in an interview today. “In 1990, people were beginning to study ancient astrology, but it wasn\u2019t 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<\/strong><\/a>, which was created to address the lack of available ancient astrology texts.<\/p>\n

“There were a limited number of texts and nobody teaching at conferences. That I can tell you with authority,” he said.<\/p>\n

Among the few texts that existed were Pingree\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere 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\u2019t think of any other texts that were available before Project Hindsight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst person to do this publicly was Robert Zoller, in the 1970s. He was regarded as slightly nuts because he wasn\u2019t humanistic. I would not say he was a headliner, but people heard him from time to time.\u201d Zoller, an astrologer, translator and historian, became one of the founders of Project Hindsight, along with Hand and Robert Schmidt.<\/p>\n

Olivia Barclay was teaching students from Christian Astrology<\/em> by William Lilly in the 1980s, but this is a mid-17th century text, and is not considered ancient astrology.<\/p>\n

Project Hindsight begins in 1993 with Robert Schmidt\u2019s 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.”<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}