Mark wrote:...
Although unlike Waybread I seriously doubt a book like this will ever 'prove' the validity of one school of astrology over another. All it really confirms is how well a small select group of astrologers responded to one particular test. To approach any kind of scientific validity this kind of experiment would surely need to be done on a massive scale in terms of natal examples.

Mark

Mark, your comment isn't unlike mine. I do not think the book "proved" the validity of any school of astrology over another.

I almost wish it had, though, even if it were a version I didn't practice. That would have been something to offer astrology's critics. As it stands, I think all of the astrologers came out with egg on their respective faces. Sadly.

I mean, Steven Forrest's older books are just super introductions to modern astrology, but he just lost me in this book when focused on archetypes rather than the facts of "Joyce's" life, and when he speculated that she was a Cherokee spiritual leader in a past life (p. 438.) Robert Hand's medieval interpretation scarcely went beyond a workmanlike accounting of Joyce's chart placements according to this tradition; and then some of his extrapolation from these info-bytes was wrong. Robert Hand is one of my astro-heros, but this was not the work that truly made me a member of his fan club back when I got beyond Linda Goodman 20 years ago.

I think a really major large-sample set of multi-variate statistical tests devised by a team of statisticians, social scientists, and astrologers would be really useful; but I don't dispute the premises of the book. Many astrologers feel that their work will always be subjective and intuitive, depending as much upon the insights and expertise of the astrologer as upon the probabilities and measures of significance used by quantitative social scientists. An analogy might be the skill of the individual medical doctor in diagnosing a patient.

Interestingly, the Vedic astrologer and the astrologer who worked extensively with asteroids (D. George) did the best. So much for the traditional vs. modern astrology debate.

Yiotish astrologers are usually on spot. If I could, I think I would study jyotish, but it is too late for me :-)

The reason of their success is not, in my opinion, that some zodiac is better than other, or if saturn does this aspect or that one, or if dashas are better than firdaria.

In my opinion the main reason is that most astrologers of jyotish learn with a teacher... and they are students and have to learn until they walk with their own two legs. This is different in both modern and traditional astrology. Every student is an "expert" as soon as they read a book or two. They make their mind before they do the hard work.

I often see discussions on the skyscript forum and I think "this person is so upset about this point, but I am sure he never tested his theory in practice". In fact we see a lot of experts with "strong opinions" about topics but never bothering to look at a chart to see if any of these opinions hold water.

Not to say that everything is at the same level. If someone gives me an X-Ray, I would read "the chart" completely wrong. So, there is a right and wrong reading. But probably there is more than one right way to make a diagnose based on a X-Ray.

And of course, not every theory can be proved "right", but there are a few that can be proved wrong only by pure reasoning and other by looking at a few random charts.

Jyotish astrologers are usually on spot. If I could, I think I would study jyotish, but it is too late for me :-)

Oh dear and you looked so young in your photo too. Your not one of those astrologers that puts out a picture from 20 years ago are you?

Mark wrote:

Jyotish astrologers are usually on spot. If I could, I think I would study jyotish, but it is too late for me :-)

Oh dear and you looked so young in your photo too. Your not one of those astrologers that puts out a picture from 20 years ago are you?

Yeah, Yuzuru, you're making it sound like you're 90! I hear great things about Hart de Fouw, though his classes tend to get packed and are not cheap and in California ...

Gabe

Curious as to some of the comments here being at variance with my own recollection of the tome I sought out the book and came across the scorings I made in the back of it.

The first number is ''hits'' and the second ??misses??:

D GEORGE - ASTEROID - 0-9
*E ROBERTS - ARCHETYPAL - 8-1
G CHRISTIAN - URANIAN - 1-3
*H FITZGERALD - PSYCHOLOGICAL - 0-1
J MARCHESELLA - MODERN WESTERN - 4-2
K BOWSER - WESTERN SIDEREAL - 5-4
K ROGERS 'LIGHT HEARTED' - 1-7
R HAND- MEDIEVAL - 4-2
**R SCHMIDT - HELLENISTIC - NO SCORE
R GALE DREYER - VEDIC - 5-6
S FORREST ? EVOLUTIONARY 2-1
***W ASHLEY- MYHTOLOGICAL - NO SCORE

* Roberts provided a more in depth psychological assessment than Fitzgerald.
** Schmidt didn?t provide an analysis of the subject instead opting to outline his Hellenistic paradigm.
*** Ashley provided 5 different myths suggesting one or more may be resonant.

Yuzuru, I think your point is well taken about the spotty training of many western "astrologers."

In the case of the book Under One Sky, the contributing astrologers were seasoned, published experts in their respective branches, with long consulting careers, so I can't fault them on their lack of practical experience. Some of the chapter authors listed professional astrological society credentials (like NCGR) in their own bio sketches, and some did not. The problem, to me, was that each was asked to give a blind chart reading based upon the techniques of their respective schools, and yet I didn't think any of the authors hit the markin terms of "Joyce's" autobiography. She seemed like quite the world traveler and free spirit, involved in a range of alternative therapies and knowledge systems, yet hardly any of the astrologers picked up on this. "Joyce" by the way is an older woman, so she has a life to look back upon, not merely future potential.

But the previous post makes me think that an astrologer's performance rating may also be subjective! A life and a chart reading are loaded with multiple elements, and it is difficult to weight them objectively. Each reader or client comes with our own set of preferences. And nothing wrong with this. To each his own.

Hello,

I bought the book recently simply because there are readings given by Robert Hand, Robert Schmidt, Demetra George and R Gle Dreyer representing medieval helenistic and vedic - the three streams of astrology that I am interested in. I later discovered that Demetra George focused more on asteroids rather than her more comtemporary hellenistic approach in reading charts.

I was dissapointed with Schmidt's reading or rather lack of reading because he didn't actually read the chart. Furthermore, I don't think that his approach in pre-delineating the chart resembles any of the ancient hellenistic astrologers approach in reading a chart. The ancients would have been more precise. By precision I mean giving precise predictions though the predictions might still be wrong (inaccurate predictions).

Robert Hand gives much better delineaton though he did miss a few things.

I agree with Yuzuru on the training of many of the western astrologers where they become experts after reading a book or attending a weekend course in astrology.

The reason for the below average performance of western astrologers and maybe above average performance of the vedic astrologer:
Western astrology is a body of so many disciplines and I don't think each discipline can be used exclusively. Many of these western disciplines are not really into prediction at the ouset, so you would expect them to fail when they try to do something that they are not. Vedic astrology is all about prediction (well may be some vedic astrologers would say that they are not ALL about prediction but this is the general understanding of Vedic astrology) and making predictions are their turf. When you embark into vedic astrology, you are taught to make predictions from the very beginning of your training. Many vedic astrologers are not shy in using yogas or tools that work even though they might not understand fully the concept behind these tools and yogas. Just look at some of the websites on vedic astrology - many of them use various techniques that can only be called ecclectic even though they still call their art vedic astrology e.g. they might use varshappal which is tajika (persian) togeher wih vismshottari dasha system and perhaps some techniques modified from Jaimini system for timing.
I think this is why Robert Hand didn't fare well. He was trying to interpret the chart using only one system that he calls medieval - to be more precise, Schoener's type of medieval astrology. I am pretty sure that he would be more ecclectic in his private readings but for the sake of the book, he was demonstrating the art of medieval astrology mainly from one book. That is probably the difference. He (and a few of the western astrologers) were trying to show how their brand of astrology work and NOT how they work as an astrologer reading a chart.

waybread wrote: But the previous post makes me think that an astrologer's performance rating may also be subjective! A life and a chart reading are loaded with multiple elements, and it is difficult to weight them objectively. Each reader or client comes with our own set of preferences. And nothing wrong with this. To each his own.

Perhaps not as subjective as you think unless we conclude the subjects account of her life was largely erroneous.

As an example George suggests Joyce had a lonely and isolated childhood, was raised by an aunt, married a rich husband, dabbled in venture capitalism, one parent or both died accidentally, etc and according to Joyce none of this happened.

At the end of the book Nasser seems to be of the view that each account was as accurate as each other which could be regarded as a dubious position to adopt

astrojin wrote:

The reason for the below average performance of western astrologers and maybe above average performance of the vedic astrologer:

Gale Dryer appeared to be completely wrong with her assessment of Joyces health/illnesses, work. money, mother and relationships but did identify her interest in travel, loss of a parent early, research abroad but on balance a bit of a shambles so on what basis her performance was above average is beyond me.

Hello,

To Howard,

I am sorry I did not make myself clearer. I was responding to the claims of a few astro-members here who seem to allude to the "better" performance of Vedic astrologers compared to Western in predictive work in general - not the performance of Dreyer in this particular book. In fact, I was quite happy to see that Dreyer got it wrong on many occasions (something that I happily showed to my Vedic friends)!

HOWARD B SAYER wrote:

waybread wrote: But the previous post makes me think that an astrologer's performance rating may also be subjective! A life and a chart reading are loaded with multiple elements, and it is difficult to weight them objectively. Each reader or client comes with our own set of preferences. And nothing wrong with this. To each his own.

Perhaps not as subjective as you think unless we conclude the subjects account of her life was largely erroneous.

As an example George suggests Joyce had a lonely and isolated childhood, was raised by an aunt, married a rich husband, dabbled in venture capitalism, one parent or both died accidentally, etc and according to Joyce none of this happened.

At the end of the book Nasser seems to be of the view that each account was as accurate as each other which could be regarded as a dubious position to adopt

I think we're in basic agreement, Howard.

My previous point was about how a reader might evaluate the performance of the different astrologers. Since none of them was truly on the money, we're into "glass half empty, glass half full" terrain. And then each reader can judge which elements of the native's life s/he finds most important for an astrologer to delineate. I didn't do a rating system for each astrologer, as you did, but my "votes" for best effort went to George and Dreyer. And this despite the fact that I am a big fan of Hand's and Forrest's older intros to modern western astrology; and find George's books on asteroids named for goddesses to be based much on her personal beliefs about femininity.

George made some goofs about Joyce's life events, but I thought she did a better job than the others in capturing some of Joyce's "calling to tend to the spiritual needs of others" (p.154) which most of the others missed.

Given the difficulties of doing a blind chart reading, I note that an astrologer could play it oh-so-safe safe, and base a reading on generalizations rather than definitive statements to minimize being wrong; so on another level, I give some credit to those astrologers who were willing to take risks.

As I noted above, I think one flaw with the book was that Joyce wrote her autobiography as a largely chronological sequence of events in her life; whereas some of the astrologers were much more interested in delineating her personality. I could infer her personality from her chronology, but that's different than having her actually describe herself. I think the editors could have synchronized this better.

waybread wrote: I think we're in basic agreement, Howard.

I don't think so. I have stressed how Roberts account might persuade a sceptic astrology may not be nonsense and how George's account was probably the most inaccurate if one adopted a more critical or rational analysis.

On page 54 George speculates that she may choose astrology as a vocation and keep personal relationships at an arms length neither claim is supported by Joyce?s account. As to did she tend to people's spiritual needs this is hard to evaluate, 'spiritual' is a hazy concept. Incidentally she struck me as unremarkable, arrogant and a somewhat objectionable character so not someone who I would have sought out to nurture my spiritual needs whatever these may be. Joyce did comment on how she felt others found her compassionate, generous and joyful when she was younger.

Roberts wondered if Joyce had a surreptitious involvement with psychology, which could be seen as an astute, or lucky, hunch in relation to Joyce?s interest in somatic therapies such as Polarity, Alexandra and Feldenkrais. According to my notes she was the only astrologer who came close to guessing what Joyce?s vocation, if it could be called this, turned out to be.