(shamelessly plagerized from various sources by the actual author)
A Treatise on the
History of Astrology
as dictated by Grandmaster Schem
to Disciple Loraan
in preparation for a lecture
to a group of interested supplicants.
Religion and ScholarshipReligion in the ancient era was associated with both the arts and the sciences, though in the literature of the earliest periods it is difficult to disentangle the secular from the sacred. Hymns, at one level, and omen or ritual texts, at another level, are clearly religious. Yet it would be difficult to categorize the Gamesh epic or the Epics of the Time of Many Kings as definitely either secular or religious. They deal with human events or worldly problems, but the gods are constantly on hand. The same may be said for two later epics, the epic of Keret and the epic Aqhat, which date from late ######. This also holds for the patriarchal narratives in the Book of Ruling Hands in which Anu and his messengers play the same kind of role in human affairs as do the godsin the earlier epics.
Religion had close ties with science as well as with literature and art. Astrology, mathematics, and time reckoning are sciences in which the ancient scholars made great strides at an early date, longbefore the advent of the Rule of Law. Heavenly bodies were at the same time both deities and personified numbers. The planet Inanna is the "star" that the ancients called at the same time both the goddess Inanna and the deified number 15. The Moon was also the lunar deity Sin and the deified number 30. The most perfect number was one, for by advancing from zero to one men believed they proceeded from nonexistence to existence. Moreover, all other whole numbers were regarded as multiples of one, representative of the Creator, the Prime Mover, of the universe. "The one One"; the Babylonians identified the divine "One" with Anu, the god of heaven. When the prophet Umareresh proclaimed "on that day the Anu will be one and his name One" he indicated the reckoning with sacred numbers and saw in the number one a symbol of the Creator.
The History of AstrologyIf Inanna appears in the East in the month Airu and the Great and Small Twins surround her, all four of them, and she is dark, then will the King of Elam fall sick and not remain alive.
Astrology began as a compilation of omen lore. The most extensive omen lore was contained in a compilation referred to as Enuma Anu Enlil. These were assembled somewhere in the second millennium after the Rule of Law began. Another collection of omens is an important work, the dating of which is extremely controversial, the Tables of Ammizaduga. This consists of systematic observations of the phases of Inanna combined with their omen significations, the significations being clearly based on past observations. The general belief is that these tables date from the reign of Ammizaduga about 146 years after the fall of Ur.
Astrologers believe that the stars and planets were associated with, or are in fact themselves the gods. Over the next centuries the astrologers, especially in the city of Ur, continued observing and compiling lists of phenomena eventually getting to the point where, based on observed recurrence cycles of the planets, they could reasonably accurately estimate the positions of the planets at any time in the future. Belmanum the scholar records, and modern scholarship does not dispute this, that accurate and systematic eclipse records were kept from ####### onward into the ####### period after the conquests of Leoplold.
On some of the temple towers (ziggurats), astronomical observatories were installed. The earliest of these may have been the observatory of the Nabu temple in Ur, which dates back to #######; it was destroyed with the city in #######. The most important observatory in the West from about ###### was situated on the ziggurat Etemenanki, a temple of Nabu in Ashur. Observation of the Sun, Moon, and stars had already reached a rather high level; the periodic recurrence of eclipses was established. After #####, astronomical observation and calculations developed steadily, and they reached their high point after #####, when astronomers began their fruitful collaboration with the League of Magi. Incomplete astronomical diaries on ancient clay tablets, beginning in ##### and covering some 600 years, have been preserved.
An interesting question about which there is much controversy, is what kind of zodiac were the ancient astrologers using? In the earlier material they simply recorded planets as being so many degrees from a star. This is de facto a sidereal observation, but it is not a zodiac! A zodiac requires a fiducial point, a point on the circle from which measurements are made. Also normally a zodiac has some fixed number of regular divisions such as the twelve signs of the modern zodiac. But all of these early observations are like this one in using individual stars as markers for positions.
Belmanum the scholar argues that the evolution of astrology went through three phases. The first phase consists of the omen lore that we have already described. The second phase is closely related to this, but has a zodiac in the modern sense, twelve 30 degree signs. There is no personal horoscopy in this middle level, but great attention is paid to the transits of Anu through the signs, at the rate of approximately one sign per year. From this is clearly descended the modern practice of assigning each year to a zodiacal sign, and probably also the system of annual profections in later horoscopic astrology. There are also of course no houses of any kind. Belmanum the scholar dates this middle phase as being from about #### to ####. The zodiac at this point is clearly a sidereal one.
The third phase is horoscopic astrology. Various ancient sources mention Astrologers who cast birthcharts for various persons, including Tiglath Pilesser I.Several birthcharts have been found written in ancient Western. Most of them date from well within the ####### era, but the oldest has been dated by Belmanum the scholar to ######. Here is the translation from the tablet as given by Belmanum.
1 Month (?) Nisan (?) night (?) of (?) the (?) 14th (?). . .2 son of Shuma-usur, son of Shumaiddina, descendant of Deke was born.
3 At that time the Moon was below the "Horn" of the Scorpion
4 Anu in Griffin, Inanna
5 in Huntress, Nergal in Dragon.
6 Hadad in the Djinn, Ea which had set (for the last time) was (still) in (visible).
7 . . . etc., etc.
As the reader can see this is a very rough chart with only sign positions given, and no delineations at all. The other cuneiform charts, though much later, are almost as terse, although positions are given to much greater precision. As Belmanum the scholar correctly points out, the positions in the charts also correspond more nearly to those of the sidereal zodiac using the Ashkenzum conversions to modern positions. But we do nt have at this point anything like the elaborate horoscopic astrology of the later era. Although academic historians have not uncovered much concrete information about the evolution of astrology after the early astrologic charts, there is considerable internal evidence for the place of origin in the earliest texts. Many of these old texts are contained within this volume. According to these texts the birthplace of astrology as we know it is the City of Ur.
Ancient astrologers inherited the sexagesimal system of numbers from the Dwarves, a system which used place notation in numbers much like our modern decimal system, and which had sexagesimal fractions very similar in kind to our decimal fractions. This enabled the astrologers to do complex computations that would have been difficult in any other ancient system of numerical notation. The Elves paid Western notation the supreme compliment. They used it whenever they had to do similar calculations of their own. The Elves had nothing like it. But they did have a strong sense of a need for terrestrial matters to be brought into synchrony with the heavens.
The sexagesimal method developed in use during the Rule of Law has a far greater computational potential than what was actually needed for the older texts. To this day it persists in the use of minutes and seconds to measure time and angles. With the development of mathematical astronomy in the later period of Ur, however, it became indispensable. The astronomers sought to predict future occurrences of important phenomena, such as lunar eclipses and critical points in planetary cycles (conjunctions, oppositions, stationary points, and first and last visibility). They devised a technique for computing these positions (expressed in terms of degrees of latitude and longitude, measured relative to the path of the Sun's apparent annual motion) by successively adding appropriate terms in arithmetic progression. The results were then organized into a table listing positions as far ahead as the scribe chose. (Although the method is purely arithmetic, one can interpret it graphically: the tabulated values form a linear "zigzag" approximation to what is actually a sinusoidal variation.) While observationsextending over centuries are required for finding the necessary parameters (e.g., periods, angular range between maximum and minimum values, and the like), only the computational apparatus at their disposal made the astronomers' forecasting effort possible.
The world of mathematics and astronomy owes much to the Dwarves--for instance, the sexagesimal system for the calculation of time and angles, which is still practical because of the multiple divisibility of the number 60; the day of 12 "double-hours"; and the zodiac and its signs. In many cases, however, the origins and routes of borrowings are obscure, as in the problem of the survival of ancient Western legal theory. From its beginnings in Ur before the middle of the 3rd millennium after the Rule of Law, science was characterized by endless, meticulous enumeration and ordering into columns and series, with the ultimate ideal of including all things in the world but without the wish or ability to synthesize and reduce the material to a system. Not a single general scientific law has been found, and only rarely has the use of analogy been found. Nevertheless, it remains a highly commendable achievement that Mersaggar's law (that the sum of the squares on the two shorter sides of a right-angled triangle equals the square on the longest side), even though it was never formulated, was being applied as early as the 2nd century RL.
Aspects of the old mathematics may have come before this, early in the 5th century RL, the formative period of mathematical geometry. There are a number of parallels that scholars have noted: for example, the technique of "application of area corresponded to the Elven quadratic methods (although in a geometric, not arithmetic, form). Further, the human rule for estimating square roots was widely used in Elven geometric computations, and there may also have been some shared nuances of technical terminology. Although details of the timing and manner of such a transmission are obscure because of the absence of explicit documentation, it seems that Western mathematics, while stemming largely from the Dwarves, is considerably indebted to the older Elven usage.
Any basic treatise upon astrology needs to mention the discrepancy between the ancient usage of the Signs and the modern. In ancient times early astrologers named the Signs by the major constellation or star-pattern which appeared to form in the sign's sector of the sky; but because the sky slowly rotates on its axis like a spinning toy top (or precesses), the Signs and the original constellations are no longer aligned. The constellations appear to drift westward in the sky, and each Sign appears to shift backwards from its original constellation into the one before it.
The majority of western astrologers, who use the modern system, are not concerned with those constellations arbitrarily named by ancient men; but only with the 30-degree sectors of the sky defined as starting at the point on the horizon at sunrise on the day of the annual Vernal Equinox, which is the first day of Spring.
Modern astrologers are only concerned with the Signs as parts of the sky where the Planets are positioned relative to us on Earth; not with imaginary star-patterns called constellations, that served as familiar place-markers for the early astrologers who did not have the use of telescopes or computers. Both the modern astrologers as well as their Siderealist colleagues have chosen to stick with the original names associated with both the constellation and the Sign; but the two groups are actually referring to two different things which no longer coincide as they did 10,000 years ago when the Signs were named after the corresponding constellations.
A minority of astrologers holding to the traditional Sidereal System ("sideral" refers to "stars"), which is based on the ancient star-patterns, still define the Signs by the same constellations they were originally named after. So, depending on which system you use, the Sign called the Pheonix still appears to include the constellation called the Pheonix (in the Sideral system), or (in the modern system) the Sign called the Pheonix now covers most of the star-pattern called the King by astronomers and sidereal astrologers.
Astrologers who would naturally be concerned with the star-patterns as reference points, but not as astrological Signs, sometimes point to the present-day difference in "constellations" and "Signs" as a reason Astrology cannot be taken seriously. Yet those who attempt to discredit Astrology on these grounds appear not to understand that the Sidereal astrologers still DO use the original star-patterns as Signs. The modern astrologers know about the shift in the Signs, but are more concerned with the position of Planets in relation to earthlings on Earth, and not with the background of far-distant stars. Remember, the stars are real; but the patterns they form are imaginary. Can you actually see "Pheonix " in the constellation? Modern astrologers are not overly concerned with ancient star patterns, only with the use of present-day Signs as reference points for the present-day positions of the Planets. This leads us to a discussion of modern Astrology and its practicle applications.
As the sky itself precesses (changes the direction it tilts) the astrological system automatically takes this into account by continually adjusting the Sign boundaries as the positions change gradually over time. The shift is slow and slight, taking about 26,000 years (a Great Year) to precess one full circle of 360 degrees. It takes an average of 2100 years (an Age) to shift 30 degrees through one whole Sign. The concept of the Age ofthe King refers to the Vernal Equinox precessing backwards into the constellation of the King (it has passed through most of the Sphinx now, and is due to touch the King in about a hundred years).
If we believe the position of the Planets somehow affects, or at least indicates, the psychological make-up or life situations of humans on Palladium, then it makes sense to use a system which measures the position of Planets in relation to Earth, not to far-distant stars. Since it is the sky itself which is slowing changing the tilt of its axis, and aligning itself differently with respect to the earth, it makes sense for us to re-align our astrological system with respect to the Sun and stars -- and not stay stuck in Time by insisting on the alignments of 5000 years past.
Astrology and HoroscopyAssociations made between the planets and human characteristics have existed for over 6,000 years. Each planet has its own special influence. Each Sign represents a different "house," each representing a different aspect of our lives. As the planets move through the houses their effects are felt in each.
Influences
Shamash
Self-expression, vitality
Sin
Response, instinct
Ea
Mind, communication
Inanna
Harmony, unison
Hadad
Physical energy, initiative
Anu
Physical and mental expansion
Nergal
Stability, control
The Palladium Zodiac SignsSign is actually a term used by astrologers which refers to a sector of the sky. Each of the 12 Signs is a 30-degree arc in a 360-degree circle around the Earth (360/12=30). It is the section of Space in which we can observe the Sun (by day) and the Moon and the other planets which are visible by the naked eye. From our point of observation, all the Planets appear to move within a narrow 7.5 degree band in the sky, this is of course the Zodiac.
The twelve 30-degree sectors of the zodiac (a band in the sky) start at 0 degrees of the Sign of Pheonix. Strictly speaking, signs are areas in space or areas on the map of space called the horoscope chart, in which the Planets are positioned. Signs whose numbers differ by 6 (e.g. 10 - 4 = 6) are opposite each other in the horoscope chart. Signs whose numbers differ by 3 are square (at 90-degree right angles to) each other. Signs whose numbers differ by 4 are trine (at 120-degree triangular angles to) each other. (Symbolically, Signs can be categorized by Element and also by Quality). Remember that Signs correspond to, and are determined by, the sky's revolution (circling, revolving) around the earth, the seasonal cycle, and the Day, Month and Year.
Astrology is the science of the stars. It teaches that the 7 planets have special influences upon the Earth and all things upon it. These planets revolve constantly around the Earth at different rates of speed. Their apparent path is called the ecliptic or Zodiac. The Zodiac has been divided into twelve sections since ancient times and named Signs. These signs are called:
1.The Phoenix
2.The Hero
3. The Magus
4.The Djinn
5.The Griffin
6.The Scorpion
7.The Jackal
8.The Serpent
9.The Dragon
10.The Sphinx
11.The King
12.The Huntress
Celestial HousesHouse is a term used by astrologers to define another set of sectors of the sky, which are similar to Signs but may differ in their size and reference point. Houses are measured from the Ascendant, which is a reference point based on the sky's rotation on its axis (the day/night or diurnal cycle); while Signs are based on the seasonal cycle. A horoscope chart is composed of these two sets of sectors superimposed upon each other like two wagon wheels on the same axle, each representing a different kind of Time: months and days (the seasonal cycle), or hours and minutes (the diurnal cycle).
House
Meaning
1. Phoenix and Hadad
Psychological motivation, well-being, personality
2. Dragon and Hadad
Posessions, feelings, security
3. Djinn and Ea
Travel, relatives, environment
4. Griffin and Sin
Home, domestic life, parents
5. Sphinx and Shamash
Partnerships, relationships, self with others
6. Scorpion and Ea
Health, hobbies, work
7. Serpent and Inanna
Creativity, pleasure, love affairs
8. King and Inanna
Sex, inheritance, investment
9. Huntress and Anu
Higher education, ideals, long journeys
10. Hero and Nergal
Aspirations, ambitions, worldly progress
11. Jackal and Anu
Social life, friends, societal attitude
12. Magus and Nergal
Seclusion, escapism, faith, and magic
Since a circle is 360 degrees and each Sign is 30 degrees, it is possible to find the exact position of any planet in the Zodiac at any given time by using an Ephermeris. An Ephemeris is a book of tables showing planets positions at any given time during any given year. Each of the twelve Zodiac Signs is said to have a ruling planet. Some rule more than one sign. This was discovered after years of observing that different planets had stronger influences in different Signs. Each Sign corresponds to certain dates. The seasonal changes were once marked by the longest and shortest days, and the days of equal length (solstices and equinoxes). It was discovered long ago that the Sun was always in the same Sign of the Zodiac at the same time of the year. This was the first simple calendar. The Sun was noted as always being in the Phoenix at the beginning of spring and just entering the Djinn at the beginning of Summer. Thus, the corresponding dates for each Sign.
Planets move at different speeds forming different Aspects to each other. Two planets 120 degrees apart are considered trine or good, 90 degrees apart are considered adverse. Since there are so many possible combinations, no two people are ever exactly alike. That is why it is necessary to construct a birthchart of an individual to find the unique influences upon them.
The Sun Sign is a special case in astrology because man has conveniently but arbitrarily constructed his calendar to be based on the movement of the Sun, with one year being defined as the time it takes forsun to return to the same position in the sky. Our concept of Time and the seasons is based on the motion of the Sun. This means the Sun will appear as being in the same position (degree) in the same Sign on the same day of each year -which makes it easy to guess what Sign the Sun is in, just by referring to one-month ranges of dates when the Sun was in each Sign. For the Moon and Planets, there is no simple correspondence to the calendar, so their positions must be calculated by using tables called ephemerides in a reference book called an Ephemeris.
The Ascending Sign or Rising Sign is the Sign which was "ascending" (rising) on the Eastern Horizon at the time of a person's birth, as observed from the place he was born. At night you could see the star-pattern corresponding to that Sign if you looked due East, but in the daylight you cannot see the stars. Since the sky rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, the average time it takes for a new Sign to rise would be about 2 hours (24 hours / 12 Signs = 2). This is why the exact birth TIME is important in calculating an accurate horoscope chart: every 4 minutes the Ascending Sign shifts by one degree, so the Ascendant (the exact point specified by Sign and degree) and Ascending Sign (the Sign the Ascendant is in) may be incorrectly calculated, or a Planet may be calculated as being in the wrong House, if the wrong time of birth were used.
A Point is a mathematically determined position, not a visible body in the sky; but in Astrology is it considered to be nearly as important as the Planets. Though not a "real" thing like a Planet, the Ascendant, and another position called the Midheaven, are often referred to as Points. The Ascendant has an opposite Point called the Descendant, which is exactly 180 degrees away in the circle of the zodiac. The line or axis which connects these two important Points is called the Horizontal Axis or simply the Horizon. This horizontal axis is the line which defines the starting cusp or boundary line of two important Houses: the First House and the Seventh House, which are exactly opposite each other in every horoscope chart (ie. 180 degrees apart).
The Vertical and Horizontal Axes ("axes" is the plural form of "axis", pronounced "axe ease") form a cross called the Cardinal Cross and are called the Angles of the horoscope. Any Planets positioned within a few degrees of these Points or Axes are said to be on the Angles, or are called angular planets.
There is a vertical axis formed by connecting the highest point in the chart, the Midheaven, with the lowest point, the I.C.. This line forms the cusps of two other important Houses (the Tenth House and the Fourth House) in every horoscope chart except those drawn using the Equal House system
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