Last week I noticed that the domain HellenisticAstrology.com was open so I decided to buy it before some other domain name headhunters did, and so one thing led to another and I ended up launching a website dedicated to Hellenistic astrology. The main purpose of this website is to help spur the revival of Hellenistic astrology by providing resources for those who would like to take part in the recovery effort, as well as for those who would simply like to learn more about this ancient tradition of astrology. There is information about the history and philosophy of Hellenistic astrology, as well as on the actual techniques that were used in the ancient world in order to produce astrological delineations and predictions.
One of the main goals of the site is to sponsor and support various translation projects in order to help contribute to the recovery of the tradition. This is part of a larger effort that we are undertaking with the site in order to form a cooperative translation project in order to translate the entire corpus of Hellenistic astrological texts. The idea is that we will be able to use our Hellenistic astrology wiki in order to allow multiple translators to work on the same texts, while at the same time cross referencing them and providing additional linguistic information for each of the words used in the texts. Ultimately it is a quasi-open source translation project since we will make all of the translated texts available to the public online for free, although we are still working out some of the details surrounding multiple author copyrights and eventually we may publish the texts in book form.
Even though I only launched the site a week ago it already has a life of its own, and we already have a decent group of contributors together in order to work on the project. There are two articles up in the articles section, one written by myself and the other by Demetra George. We have already had our first translation contribution to the site, which is a translation of a chapter from book 9 of Vettius Valens’ Anthology which has never been translated and published anywhere before. We also launched a Hellenistic astrology blog in order to post additional news, updates and articles. I will be teaching my online course on Hellenistic astrology through the website pretty soon, and there are also plans to teach Greek and Latin through the site in the near future in order to help with the translation project. Of course, there is also a forum for Hellenistic astrology on the site, and I’m sure that we will have many interesting discussions there.
We are still looking for additional contributors to the website, so if you are interested then please let me know. In particular we are looking for people with foreign language skills, although there are a number of other projects that we could use some help on as well.
For more information check out the website at www.hellenisticastrology.com
4 replies on “New Website for Hellenistic Astrology Launched at HellenisticAstrology.com”
Dear Chris
I am eager for hellenistic books and essays (like the one written by Crane). Do you have any plans for the christmas of 2009 on releasing new books?
And…
Pardon me, but is there an easiest and official way to purchase the Valens’ books?
Thank you and keep doing this good job.
Rodolfo (from Brazil)
Hi Rudolfo,
Thanks for your comment.
I am in the process of finishing my own book on Hellenistic astrology which should be out by later this year or early next year. It is titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune.
If you would like an early preview of it then you might be interested in signing up for the course that I teach on Hellenistic astrology through my website, since I have incorporated quite a bit of material from my book into that course: http://www.astrologicalconsultingservices.com/courses/hellenisticastrologycourse.html
Are you looking for translations of Valens, or are you looking for the original Greek text? Unfortunately there is no easy way to get a hold of translations of Valens at this point, since the translations that Robert Schmidt did in the 1990’s have been out of print for quite a while now. Hopefully Project Hindsight will be able to reprint those as final translations at some point, although I doubt that it will happen anytime soon.
I hope to have more translations of Valens up on HellenisticAstrology.com in the near future though.
Dear Chris,
Congratulations for the launch of your project «Hellenistic Astrology.com».
It is a beautiful and interesting project. Long life and much success for you.
I annnounced it today on my portuguese blog.
Tudo de bom.
António Rosa
«Escola de Astrologia Nova-Lis»
http://www.nova-lis.com
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