New Website for Hellenistic Astrology Launched at HellenisticAstrology.com

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