go away for a day, and a conversation actually breaks out.. woowho

Kirk wrote:
The trouble is - - - which Aquarius?

how many choices do we have? hopefully not just 2, lol.. the way i see it, there is personal observation, or there is taking another persons word and everything else somewhere in the middle.. signs are divisions of space.. one can think of them as part of a cycle too. i have never made that big a deal of signs. i tend to see the sign as colouring a planetary body a certain way, but not having a life of it's own.. maybe others see signs differently.. i think of aquarius as a half way point here in the northern hemisphere between 0 cap and 0 aries, or the beginning of winter and spring. i like idea of the zodiac cycle as a journey from the personal to the social and back again with each sign bringing forth something missing in the previous sign and creating greater wholeness as represented by a full circle/cycle.. aquarius isn't aries, but it is a step in that direction.. i see uranus driven by socially progressive ideals which may or may not apply to sun in aquarius types.. aries on the other hand doesn't seem to care so much about any of that. i think mars is a better fit for the sign aries. for the record, all these connections astrologers like to make with signs and planets are just that - connections.. one can say this planet rules this sign, but i think of all this as more to do with seeing connections between planets and signs.. i haven't swallowed the rulership approach to astrology..

Kirk wrote: The Aquarius we all read about in popular astrology is largely a creation of 20th century sun sign astrology. Aquarius has been repeatedly discussed and written about by those who accepted Uranus as it ruler. Aquarius was changed to make a better fit with Uranus.

i am not convinced of your first sentence here.. but i don't spend any time reading sun sign astrology, and perhaps you are a better authority.. pop culture, or pop astrology for that matter is easy to negate as trivial. i like your idea of aquarius morphing into something different to fit better with uranus.. i suppose it could just as easily morph back into something that could be made to fit better with saturn too, lol.. that would hopefully bring us into a conversation about the distinctions between saturn and uranus and just how they differ.. equally interesting to me would be how these signs might describe something deeper then the symbol they represent and change depending on whether a planet was located within it or not..

Kirk wrote:
But back to Uranus and Aquarius ? Aquarius does appear to resemble Uranus very much after having been refitted to make a better match. But monkeying around with the rulerships and then changing the nature of a sign to match the new planet is ? for me ? extremely questionable.

i think presence of uranus forces astrologers to come to terms with what the planet means astrologically.. one can't reference an old astrological text book for this to happen. they need to make a direct connection or not.. as i mentioned earlier, i am not sold on the rulership idea and really don't care what planet rules aquarius. whether a sign is ruled by this or that planet is not something that i have relied upon heavily.. i am into making observations on the planets a number of different ways.. the creation of the zodiac is very interesting, but not as interesting to me as watching a planet make a connection to another planet or point in a chart via transit or thru other predictive methods - midpoints and what have you..

Well, I don't want to go overboard here, as the Psychological Astrology brought me into the fold, so to speak. Authors like Liz Greene and Rob Hand made sense of all this, and placed it in a context I could understand.

So, while I think they may have dropped the ball on some things, I am still convinced there is some validity to the psychological side of Astrology.

Nixx wrote: What I find odd about this, although I am well aware by now Psychological Astrology is not something you have looked into, is that this model, which emerged in the 70's and is arguably the manstream Western schema nowadays, does not associate the 'Individual' with either Aquarius or Uranus. So one wonders who does in this 'contemporary' arena you are commenting on.

No but modern astrology does associate Aquarius and Uranus with individuality which is I think the point that was being made. As Kirk points out it's noteworthy that he's not used the term Psychological Astrology either, in fact, the capitalisation is actually misleading as I've said several times before, we can assume you mean the psychological model of astrology as made popular by the likes of Liz Greene, Howard Sasportas and the CPA generally, but, to make the point again, it's telling that this organisation and its member do not refer to themselves with this capitalisation.
http://www.cpalondon.com/index.html
"Here you can learn psychological astrology"

I find it odd that you capitalise it when nobody else does as though it were a brand. It's a bit off topic but I'd still be curious by why you do this.

a bit ot, but i would be curious if someone would like to define 'modern astrology' while we are discussing different terminology in use here.

for me personally the idea of 'traditional astrology' didn't really rear it's head until very recently. if i am not mistaken lillys christian astrology was one of the first books from the past to come onstream in the mid 80's, while much of the work that 'traditional astrology' uses to help define itself wasn't available until into the 90's..this is all very recent! it is also my recollection that until the hippie movement of the 60's not a lot of astrology was being done on any scale to any extent to the point that the term 'pop astrology' didn't exist prior to this time either..

so maybe folks are trying to describe 'modern astrology' as from the time of alan leo and anyone who didn't bother studying up enough to be able to do the math to do primary directions.. or maybe some would like to put it on an even more narrow wedge of time from the 60's until the 90's with people like liz greene and robert hand being a few of the better known proponents of this descriptive brand of astrology known as 'modern astrology' although hand has reached out and beyond to defy these simple breakdowns of modern or traditional... it seems to me in another 30 or 40 years all these little distinctions are going to fall by the wayside and trying to either understand or negate an approach taken in a particular time frame are going to be replaced with some real astrology that has relevance in the present moment.. fwiw, that is what i think people are doing here on some level, but it is fun to talk about the terms being used, trying to leave aside the feeling one gets over the hostility some display if someone else doesn't appear to be practising the 'right kind of astrology'...

Kirk wrote:
I wasn't saying that Psychological Astrology associates "the Individual" with Aquarius or Uranus. I was saying that that astrological sign and planet have been given qualities of strongly individualistic behavior and aims. That's not the same as saying that if one is searching for individuals one is to look to Aquarius or Uranus.

About "Psychological Astrology": I remember some confusion a couple months back as to just what you are referring to. If I remember correctly, another forum member posted something to the effect that you have your own specific idea of what that is - hence the big P and big A. To me it's usually just 'psycholocal astrology'. But perhaps I've got it all wrong.

In the absence of any references I'll give you one, page one of the 'Art of Stealing Fire'.

??Uranus is an Outer Planet. Because the outer planets reflect movements in the Collective Psyche, in which we all share, Uranus is not concerned with individual development. It may even prove inimical to individual human values and individual emotional needs. We should realise the collective nature of this planet by the simple fact that the planet is the co-ruler of the sign opposite the one in which the Sun rules. This alone informs us that it symbolises the antithesis of individual expression (which is solar) because the individual is submerged in the group??.

You can deduce from this that if a Psychological Astrologer was faced with someone who had a strong Aquarian focus or a pivotal Uranus one task might be to help the person find some 'individuality'!!

To explain again, and this is getting ad nauseum, if you don't seek to define your terms then you end up with a situation we had here before when I think it was challenging Tommy who thought Tyl was a Psychological Astrologer. Not an author I have heard a Psychological Astrologer talk about before, for reason which became apparent when I had a look at some of his output. Not a theorist who fits, this Plato, Ficino, Jung, Hillman et al lineage. What might be a little confusing these days is how Psychological Astrologers are now sometimes called Archetypal Astrologers, this seems to be a post 1990's development from what I can see. For example: http://www.archaijournal.org/

james_m wrote: for me personally the idea of 'traditional astrology' didn't really rear it's head until very recently. if i am not mistaken lillys christian astrology was one of the first books from the past to come onstream in the mid 80's, while much of the work that 'traditional astrology' uses to help define itself wasn't available until into the 90's..this is all very recent!...

Would it be better to say that the term "traditional astrology" didn't come into use before the mid 80's?. Lilly did not define his approach as traditional as there was no modern astrology to distinguish it from.

He clearly based his work on previous authorities and they too based their work on previous practice so he did traditional astrology by any definition. As written you seem to imply that the tradition was made up in modern times like Wicca or folk dancing.

Yes there is little point in making 70's astrology a different category from Alan Leo say. In any case modern living teachers say today things that are straight out of early C20th works, no doubt taught by the astrological schools.

Maybe you are right that in future all differences will be laid aside but there seems to be a genuine ideological divide between tradition and modernism in our subject, from what I have seen and heard.

Matthew

matthew,

the term 'traditional astrology' is indeed a very recent term that wasn't being used when i started astro in the 70's. neither was 'modern'.. this is all a more recent development based on the release of a number of astrological texts that were only made available at the end of the 20th century to a much wider audience.. for those who haven't been around longer, they might not know this. as for defining the term 'modern astrology' i think it has to be with making a distinction between what was being done prior to the availability of these historical texts, and represents only a small part of the history of astrology.. on the other hand, many more people have been introduced to astrology then would have been the case thanks to the same generation represented by the Beatles, or what i referred to as the hippie generation in my previous post.. well, maybe sydney omarr was around before that doing sun sign columns and some others too, but i think a real surge of interest happened with the hippie generation which was also interested in different religious orientations especially those from the east..

when i see these terms used, that is mostly how i see them as being defined, but i am also aware that this recent history with the use of these terms isn't discussed that much, or only as a means of wanting to strand 'modern astrology' on some isolated island with no connection to any roots, which i think is an unfair characterization.. i hope these terms fall by the wayside at some point and people get on with articulating their views based on their observations, as opposed to anything else. now hopefully i have said something that someone will want to hang me up on, lol..

nixx - thanks for your last post as it articulates some of my thinking on the nature of uranus.

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I suppose you could be on the ''wind up'' (again?) Kirk.

If you scroll back I was giving you Greene's take on this planet and for some reason you now think this is mine, and are ignoring her and Perry's Plain English. As to why ?

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