I am pleased to announce that my long-awaited book on ancient astrology has finally been released, and it is titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune. The book was actually published in February, but the past couple of months of getting it out and promoting it have been kind of hectic, and so […]
Yesterday the History Channel aired an hour-long episode of its series The Universe: Ancient Mysteries Solved that focused entirely on astrology. The episode was not so much about the history of astrology as it was on debates about the validity of the subject in modern times. I had a lot of trepidation going into it […]
Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers by James Herschel Holden, American Federation of Astrologers, Tempe, AZ, 2013. Hardcover – 792 pp. – $79.95 (ISBN 0-86690-641-X). Available through Amazon.com. James Holden spent the vast majority of his life studying the history of astrology, and his Biographical Dictionary of Western Astrologers represents the culmination of more than 70 […]
I posted a video on the origins of horary astrology today on YouTube, as a response to a video that Kevin Burk recently posted on the subject. The specific point of the video was to counter an assertion made by Burk that horary is one the oldest branches of astrology, when in fact I would […]
The National Council of Geocosmic Research (NCGR) is hosting a large astrological conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts next week. The conference is titled ‘Planetary Revolution: Geocosmic Alchemy II’, as a followup to their previous successful conference in Baltimore in 2007. The main conference is scheduled to take place from February 25th to February 28th, 2010, with […]
I made a video today which outlines the history of western astrology in 10 minutes. It is ten minutes long because that is the restriction for all YouTube videos, although I covered quite a bit of ground in such a short clip. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, although I was surprised […]
In 1901 a group of sponge divers discovered a complex mechanical device lying at the bottom of the ocean, just off the coast of a Greek island named Antikythera. The device subsequently became known as the Antikythera mechanism. It was found amongst the remains of a shipwreck that took place sometime around the early 1st […]
Over the course of the past century researchers have discovered that Hellenistic astrology was transmitted to India sometime around the 2nd century CE. Inklings of this transmission were noted in the late 19th century, for example by the historian August Bouché-Leclercq in his 1899 work L’astrologie grec, although it was not until the middle part […]
My article on the origins of horary astrology titled The Katarche of Horary just came out in the latest issue of the NCGR Journal. Most NCGR members should be receiving their copy of the journal right about now, and for those who aren’t a member of the NCGR the journal should be available for purchase […]
I came across a clip today from Richard Dawkin’s new documentary titled Enemies of Reason in which he attacks a number of paranormal fields, including astrology. Dawkins brings out the usual modern arguments against the subject that have been recycled over and over again over the past couple of decades, mainly focusing on Sun-sign columns […]
This is the first 10 minutes of a video that was made in August of 2006 by Robert Schmidt of Project Hindsight for a conference in St. Petersburg Russia that he was not able to attend. In it he touches on some basic points concerning the history and origins of Hellenistic astrology. He is talking […]
Elsa just posted this really interesting quote from Benjamin Franklin on her blog which nicely illustrates his endorsement of horoscopic astrology. I was always aware that Franklin wrote the Poor Richard’s Almanac, but this really displays his stance on astrology in a bit more dramatic of a manner than I had seen previously. The quote […]
I just returned from a three week trip to Paris where I had the good fortune of visiting the Louvre and seeing the Zodiac of Dendera. I went last Saturday night during the Moon-Venus conjunction that could be seen clearly in the night sky in the tropical sign of Cancer. The Zodiac of Dendera (or […]