Rain season

I’ve been meaning to write something for a while now, I mean, I am past due on some maintenance I intended to do. Fill out the bibliography, clean up some links, incredibly boring things like that. My choleric-melancholic disposition isn’t very conducive to doing boring stuff and my life experience has taught me that 90% of everything is basically, boring stuff. Meals before you get to the dessert. The cherry on top of the cake. Eh. I love forms enough to want to create new ones so I’ll write something incoherent made up of bits and pieces of things I did want to write but I lack the energy to do so right now.

Moon and stars

I’ll start this off by saying that this will contain a little bit of politics, fears for the future and things like that. But not in the usual sense.

Lately, I’ve been watching Mars rise in the South every night and as I am a nocturnal creature mostly, I could watch his course as the night broke into day. I’ve never seen Mars be so prominent in the night sky before. The planet’s luminosity seems to rival Venus at this point. It seems so very strange. As if, we’re meant to look up and see that Mars is on the rise.

Shenannigans of traditional astrologers: a closer look at a critic, Saturn opposite Sun and other trivia

Sunday’s augury has gone reasonably well and bright faced Selene has chased away Mars who has had the bad tendency to rise in exact opposition to my window lately, so this is a beautiful night to write something light hearted. Or not, that’s up to the reader’s impression. I’m probably good at communicating thoughts in writing but my moods always end up seeming distorted.

Anyway, I’ve been reading this and that lately, in a heavily jumbled manner as usual, and one of the things that seemed writing-worthy was a small essay by John Frawley, or rather, a lecture turned essay. I’ve written about Frawley a few posts back, mostly in a supportive manner versus what I saw as laps of logic by traditional astrologers. This time it’s going to go in the contrary direction.

The essay is titled What is the Tradition in Astrology? He does answer the question eventually which I’ll discuss here and I have to say right away that I wasn’t exactly impressed with it, but it was something else that caught my eye first. The effect of a Saturn opposite Sun in natal charts.

The delusions of grandeur of Indian nationalism

I’ve been spending some time recently trying to acquaint myself a little better with Hindu sacred texts and metaphysics. Fascinating stuff really and I intend to write on some specific things in the near future. I always had a great deal of respect for the culture of India, even though to get better acquainted with it is a daunting task, unless you have some familiarity with the languages of the Indian subcontinent. The very fact that we’re talking about an area so large that gets classified as a subcontinent and a population that makes up almost one fifth of the global total gives a picture on how extensive and labyrinthine the culture can be.

I also had personal reasons to have an appreciation for India, even though I wasn’t extensively familiar with the culture. I appreciated their dedication to their traditions and culture and how they withstood christianization attempts for centuries. That’s not just admirable but downright heroic and a great accomplishment. I have to say in the interest of accuracy, that the period in the history of the British Empire that India was colonised didn’t correspond with a great drive to christianise their colonies but that doesn’t mean that attempts weren’t made. It is still a great feat to withstand them while being occupied by foreign invaders.

In this little endeavour of mine to get to know the holy texts and culture better though, there was something that started to bother me. It actually bothers me a great deal because the  Greek and the Indian culture have many similarities, both reaching similar heights and similar lows and having similar experiences of being under foreign control in recent history. And that was the various Indian nationalists who seemed hellbent on comparing our two cultures and insisting that one was greater than the other and somehow, the Greeks copied everything from Indian sources.

As I have no tolerance for Greek nationalists making similar claims, I don’t have any tolerance for nationalists of any other nationality that seek to distort history in a similar manner. Here, I’m going to write against both because they’re not being simply disrespectful and dishonorable but actually completely wrong.

Shenanigans in traditional astrology

I have been planning to adjunct my critical posts on modern astrology with a few equally critical of traditional astrology for a while now. Instead of a couple of very long posts, I’d imagined I’d do it piecemeal, with individual concepts examined, tested and then written about. Easier, but it would still be a monumental task to examine the entire heap of astrological tradition from Babylon to Alan Leo so I’ll take a rain check for now.

What’s far more doable though is to look at contemporary traditional astrologers, instead of traditional astrology and see just what they’re really up to. Again though, I’m not really aiming to go about it in detail right now. There’s too many things to pick apart and besides, you’re far less likely to get sued if you talk crap about Julius Firmicus Maternus than some of the traditionalist star astrologers of our era. And on that note, Julius was a ridiculous Roman suckup to Constantine and a loathsome turn-coat. Sue me Jules.

US media. Still damn scary

I don’t write political posts regularly because I consciously avoid this subject. Usually, people who avoid this subject avoid it completely, in every facet of their lives. That’s not really the case with me. I have become far more disinterested the last couple of years but I still have pretty solid convictions on what systems would be fair to try -under specific circumstances- and what systems have proven to be patently unfair and unstable -the current one. I just don’t want to touch upon that subject in this blog since I’ve devoted it to other pursuits and to mix religion, the occult and -lately- astrology with politics can sometimes become toxic. Avoiding the subject also means that I can avoid more trolls.

I’m not going to avoid it this time because US media and the propaganda machine there is just too fucking scary. But what happened?

Bad astrology of the week #3 Black Moon Lilith tells all about the Moon Landing Hoax

Yeah, apparently you can use the Black Moon Lilith to find out if others are lying to you. Or at least that’s what my guest article for today claims and in a case no less serious than the first Moon landing. Today we’ll look at what I consider to be one of the worst and most biased chart readings I’ve ever seen, located at astrologyweekly.com.

Bad astrology of the week #2 Millers, flour and warm bread

With Easter on the immediate horizon, I’ve found some spare time to devote to a few short pieces on astrological weirdness. Weirdness? Nonsense? Buffoonery? I’m not sure. My biggest beef in this game is that metaphysics has become completely devalued as an area of philosophy. To think that we went from Plato to Doreen Virtue makes me feel that to still believe in the myth of linear cultural progression is a tragedy of Aeschylian proportions. Anyway, my exhibit for today is a newsletter from Susan Miller of Astrologyzone.com.

The origins of the word “pseudo-science”

Many times, the history of how a word came to be or how it was first used can reveal interesting things. Some of those discoveries can be useful and some can be trite and useless. And then there are some that prove to be an embarrassment to the modern lovers of the word under examination. Very amusingly, one of the very first texts to make extensive use of the word pseudo-science was actually defending astrology and was more or less, trying to debunk the sceptics. It’s time to bring that text out of the darkness.

A brief note on the translation of ancient astrological texts

I was planning a more extensive post on bad translations of ancient Greek texts and particularly the recent Penguin edition of the fragments of Heraclitus but that will have to wait. For now, I’m going to focus on a rather minor translation error, which isn’t really important as far as translation errors go, but it becomes far more important if the reader is trying to decipher ancient Greek astrology.