RE: VMs: Astronomical Notes, Comments, and Replies

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

At 18:32 10/02/03 -0500, Larry Roux wrote:
> Are you saying that in the first case the person's horoscope would be
> determined by the degree of the zodiac that was rising at the time of
> their birth?  So, say at 10:00pm it may be determined by "20 degrees in
> Aquarius", but if I were born at midnight I might be 13 degrees in
> "Pisces"?  (Unlike the month rules we are accustomed to these days with
> the phony newspaper stuff?)

No, more likely the degree that the moon was in at the time of your birth 
(or conception, depending who you asked). :-)

Modern esoteric astrologers have a whole bunch of associations for each 
degree of the 360, but that's completely another kettle of <insert your own 
adjective here> fish.

> I know that the zodiac covers 360 degrees of sky (one full circle), but
> why would each constellation contain 30 degrees? Were they (or are they)
> all equal in size?  Certainly does not seem so on the outset.  Pisces
> looks much larger on the ecliptic than, say, Aquarius

Blame the Greeks, that's who (in antiquity) a number of historians of 
astrology say it probably all came from. I've also seen it (quite 
convincingly argued) that the Egyptians too had some form of horoscope, but 
that was something quite apart from this kind of thing.

> Lastly, why would the Voy show 30 degrees in each zodiac?  are the other
> 29 degrees in the constellation plus the 330 others of some importance?

Many other medieval sources (Pietro d'Abano most notably) thought in this 
way, so why should we be at all surprised to see it here?

> See? I scoffed at horoscopes and it woulda been handy if I had studied
> them after all!

In fact, I would contend that you cannot properly understand history 
(especially pre-1600) without understanding how astrology fits into it. For 
all the Church's efforts, astrology remained (for many) the primary extant 
mental model linking between Man and the cosmos, Man and the seasons, 
between Man and disease, between conception and infertility, in fact 
between Man and fate, etc.

In fact, you could also possibly draw an interesting parallel (I'm making 
this up as I go along, so don't be *too* hard on me for trying) between the 
Church's attempts to undermine astrology 1200-1500 and Microsoft's attempts 
to undermine browsers and open standards 1993-2003. Both were major 
entrenched (and largely monopolistic) interests, whose relation with their 
userbases were threatened by a different way of thinking, which they 
perceived to have the capacity to alter how their users interacted with the 
world.

Worryingly (for those of the slashdot persuasion, anyway), fatalistic 
medieval astrology lost its final battles (before being revived by Bob 
Zoller and others, though some 500 years later): but Ficino's psychological 
astrology (which replaced it) was effectively a defanged version of the 
old, and proved easy to assimilate.

Then again, things weren't so great for the Catholic Church 1550 onwards, 
so maybe history can still get it right yet. :-)

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....

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