Mark, an awful lot of the issues with astrology boil down to the "free will" vs. determinism/fatalism debate, and have done so for the past 2000 years. I am not a fan of the expression "free will" because it is always limited by various constraints of one sort or another. The terms I prefer are "moral choice" or "personal agency."

I don't see that leaning towards a free will/moral choice spectrum diminishes astrology. Rather, I would ask us to consider the areas of life in which personal autonomy is possible. Surely we can see from individual natal horoscopes what sort of person is likely to have a more fatalistic view of life, and who is likely to be more proactive.

All of us live within a legal and moral environment that is founded on the principles of choice. Otherwise, the next time one of us gets a speeding ticket, tell the police officer that you had no choice in the matter: your blasting along at high speeds was pre-destined.

Electional astrology (not meaning the mundane astrology of elections!) becomes meaningless if people are unable to alter inevitable fates.

Ptolemy (Tetrabiblos, 1:3, pp. 28-29 and 32-33 in Robbins transl.) addresses this very point. In strongly siding with fatalism, he notes that it is not absolute. The doctor can give a prognosis for an untreated disease. Yet by prescribing a cure, he can ward off the natural course of the illness.

According to Benjamin Dykes, Traditional Astrology for Today, pp. 101-3) "...traditional astrology is indeed compatible with meaningful choice...being accurate and specific is not the same thing as believing in universal fate or determinism.... Suppose I predict a more or less external event for a client, such as that she has enemies working against her. The client cannot control the existence of the enemies directly but she can choose to take actions that flush them out or avoid their full fury."

Lilly in Christian Astrology gives examples of advising clients on how to mitigate difficult circumstances. If astrology were truly fatalistic, what would be the point?

It would be fascinating to consider whether an opposition party could look at Brady's thesis and analyse, within a horoscope's constraints, how they could work with the system to tip the balance in their favour.

In terms of political mundane astrology there is also a Dark Side to a strongly fatalist perspective. It tends to reinforce the status quo, and that status quo will normally favour entrenched wealth and power, and disempower the ordinary person. Hegemony is the political art of getting ordinary people to support the rhetoric of their own lesser status.

We also have to assume that the astrologer himself has some sort of personal agency to interpret a horoscope. The exact same moment could be a chart for a nativity, a horary question, or a political election. As Liz Greene put it, in viewing a "blind" horoscope we don't know if it is for a person or a chicken. In viewing a blind chart we don't know whether Venus represents voting behaviour or chocolate. The astrologer brings some personal agency to the interpretation.

So let me ask the fatalists out there. When you read a horoscope, are you simply some sort of pre-programmed robot or mechanical wind-up doll (think Energizer Bunny), producing an analysis that was long ago predestined by the stars?

bradys approach seems simple enough.. planetary phase of venus essentially as i understand it and which i believe marhgerita the poster here focuses on and which deb the host is in the process of writing a book on.. as i recall just the other day from reading here someone mentioned it would have been wrong twice for the usa election results in the past century which is pretty good but not perfect.. nothing wrong with a simple system as i see it and i love the fact it was wrong twice out of however many times to leave open the idea that something else is also at work.. astrologers get no free lunch to 100% accurate predictions.. something else is always at work..

Lee Lehman put it quite nicely (somewhere in "Martial Art of Horary Astrology) when she said that the chart shows what will happen if you are too lazy to use your free will or abrogate your free will.

But I think it can be argued that astrology does reduce your free will. Consider: You are hiking in the mountains and you come to a fork in the path through the forest. The map does not show a fork and so you can assume that this is just an alternate route and the two tracks will join up sometime later. But, is there a second track because one of them is blocked? Is one of them shorter than the other? Is one of them safer than the other?

You have no information on which to base a decision on which path to take, so you have complete freedom of choice in the matter. There is nothing to stop you going down which ever route takes your fancy for whatever reason.

But now suppose you take out your mobile phone and call the park ranger to ask him about the fork in the path. He tells you the path on the left was cut because the path on the right has been victim to a land slide and there is now a section which is only six inches wide with a sheer drop of a thousand feet to the valley bottom. You can go that way if you want, but it is very dangerous.

Now you have some information about the two routes. A reasonable, sane and sensible person will take the path to the left. Your choice in the matter has been reduced and even removed by the knowledge you now have. No sane and sensible person would take the unnecessary risk of taking the right hand path.

So. We are now left with an aphorism: The more information you have about a given situation, the better your ability to make a sane and sensible decision on how to proceed. Acting in a sane and sensible manner always restricts your freedom of choice to that which is most sane and sensible. Only the totally insane have true free will or freedom of choice!

Since astrology acts to give us more information about a given situation, it always acts to limit the freedom of choice for a sane and sensible person.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey, I like your hiking analogy. I would definitely take the safer route (Saturn opposite Mars) but then I'm not an Aries-Capricorn sort of hiker.

I think in the "forewarned is forearmed" take on astrology, people have the choice to be proactive in more daring sorts of ways. Just to give a personal example: I took a very early retirement about 5 years ago, based upon (a) my desires to do additional things with my life, (b) serious personal finance number-crunching, and (c) the observation that my upcoming transits looked like some really rough sledding for the next few years.

My husband and I fixed up our house, sold it, I retired from my job, we moved across the country, bought a new house in a place where we didn't know anybody, and began a serious gardening project; all of which were in keeping with the transits of the time. Things worked out really well.

If I had a fatalistic view of astrology I would have thought, "Hunker down where you are, doing what you have been doing, and be stoic about feeling stressed. With any luck you'll survive this misery for the next few years. Then maybe your transits will get better."

I think astrological foreknowledge should help people to identify where and how they can be more courageous, more risk-taking, and have more freedom in their lives.

More on-topic, one of the difficulties I have with seemingly infallible yet simple astrological presidential predictions is how much they seem to divorce astrology from ordinary mundane events.

I mean, take horary astrology. I don't practice it, but if I ask _Paul_ the Astrologer what happened to my missing documents, he can analyse a chart for my question in terms of feasible locations and actions. If I analyse a birth chart, I can describe the individual's personality and life-issues in terms that make sense in terms of how one usually would describe another person and her anticipated behaviours. With electional astrology, I could analyse somebody's business decision or surgery options and then recommend a date and time based on everyday observable relevant events.

Voting behaviour and polling are now exact sciences. (They're wrong occasionally but so is any predictive social science.) We know that "the people" (as symbolized in mundane astrology by the moon) are not some kind of unified undifferentiated entity, but are typically highly segmented. We know what basic issues motivate people to vote, and so on.

If we look at mundane astrology of voting behaviour as reducable to a simple Venus cycle or moon above/below the horizon and that's that, there is a big disconnect between the heavens and some fairly complex human behaviours. The very simplicity of pinning election outcomes on one or two simple variables, indeed, disconnects mundane astrology from the other branches of the field.

Mind you, I'm not saying that Brady misinterpreted a century of election results. But then Paul the Octopus had a pretty solid record, also.

waybread

to the first part of your post -'know thyself' has to be central.. without this a person is bound to lead a more fated experience.

to the 2nd part, it is interesting and one of the many factors that astrologers pointed to an obama win - moon which connects to the general public - in obamas sun sign which always highlights the persons sun in a more favourable manner, unless the sun position is problematic in itself.. mundane astro 101 i think..

I hesitated to post this in a mundane thread but as some have ventured into a discussion of free will I think this information is pertinent.

The birth charts of Samantha Bissett and Robert Napper would have been virtually identical save for the angles and the Moon's position (and if one were born within 2 hours before or after the other even the Moon's would have had nearly the same position).

On November 3, 1993, Napper murdered Bissett in Plumstead, southeast London. Except for aspects to the angles and probably the Moon they would have had the same aspects between planets in their birth charts and from transits or progressions.

Who could determine astrologically which one was the perpetrator and which one the victim if not given gender identity? Were both, either, or neither expressing their free will?

u astro - i think the link muddled up the page width

it is a coincidence napper and samatha's birthdate is the same or that there is a mars/pluto opposition in the chart for this same date, or that there is a mars/pluto conjunction on the date of the murder or that those pesky modern astrologers make an association with hard aspects between mars/pluto and such horrible things as rape and murder.. all coincidence..

something about oppositions being expressed thru others via projection and etc. too i guess.

James, I am familiar with mundane astrology 101 at the level of this Skyscript article http://www.skyscript.co.uk/ingresses.html and at the CEO Carter level. He developed his system due to perceived failures in prior techniques of mundane astrology to predict the outbreak of WW II. (Ptolemy has some interesting mundane astrology in 2:1-8.)

The concern I expressed above is precisely how vastly different astrology's understandings of the state and the electorate are from social science studies of voting behaviour and polling. Equating the moon to "the general public" aka "the people" ignores all of the socio-economic complexity inherent in the American electorate.

I don't know if Tom is still with us, but I just acquired a Kindle e-book by a noted conservative journalist, David Frum, on why Romney lost the election. Among other things, he chastizes the Republicans for not doing their demographic homework and not recognizing how they need to re-purpose their message to reach sectors who were voting for the Democrats. A similar editorial was posted on the conservative blog redstate.com. This is what the Republicans are now saying, mind you.

And maybe analysing all of that complexity is a waste of time, if mundane astrology produces more accurate predictive results.

But I can't think of another branch of astrology that operates so differently from the accepted wisdom "out there" within the topic it purports to analyse. There is no unified homogenized set of "common people" in the US, such that it seems reasonable (to me, anyway) for the moon to represent all of them.

In fact, if you unpack each of the planets and signs in the Skyscript article's lists of significations, some of them bear little relation to one another; and in a real political system, might represent vastly different interests.

None of them apparently represents the Hispanic vote, the evangelical right, the Tea Party, libertarians, African Americans, single middle-aged women, or any of the other constituencies so critical to the outcome of this presidential election.

I want to request that members dont continue any further detailed discussion of nativities here unless they specifically relate to American politics.

I accept I let the discussion meander into fate vs freewill issues. Some people have really run with that topic here. I dont mind allowing that flow to continue as long as we can all stick with the fundamentally mundane focus of this thread and forum. However, exclusive discussion of nativities belongs elsewhere on Skyscript.

More generally though, if people want to get into a more philosophical discussion of mundane astrology perhaps we should consider opening a separate thread for that? This thread is already very long and with the US Presidential election over it has perhaps served its original purpose?

While we are on the that topic I just want to thank all the members that have contributed here and helped to make this an interesting and stimulating thread.

Thanks

Mark

zoidsoft wrote:

james_m wrote:aquastella

your post is a fine example of why relying on one astro factor to express a high degree of confidence on the outcome is a poor way to do astrology..

same goes for the undue obsession with mercury retro which seemed to cloud many astrologers viewpoint on this election..

now i guess all those who got it right can open the door up to hubris in thinking it was due there superior technical knowledge or particular approach, overlooking others who might have used similar techniques and came to the opposite position here.. at least a few folks stuck their neck out and made a prediction!

lucky or unlucky guesses, that's all..

Well, it was near unanimous that everyone expected Mercury Rx to cause more problems than this. Perhaps the fact that most voting occurred before the actual onset of Rx helped bail it out, but stations have been noted for causing problems too. One theory has it that stationing planets are actually more powerful because they concentrate their energy in one place, like holding your hand over a candle?

I?ve shown how the same symbolism can be interpreted both ways in my prediction. Every astrologer should be able to do this and if you can?t see a plausible scenario where either side can win, then either it will be a landslide or you haven?t been practicing astrology long enough.

curtis,

one can say what they want about however many astrologers relied on mercury retro as an important defining feature of this past election.. the fact remains none of it amounts to anything other then the need to examine more closely the deep attachment that many astrologers have to the relevance of mercury retro.. i see this as the main problem that astrologers are foolish not to want to examine more closely..

on the topic of stationary planets and giving them greater relevance, this is what i have been pushing for, for some time. i mentioned just this in my comments at november 5th thread here http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=6959

i think stationary planets are a big deal and as i was saying in the nov 5th post, i think the window for them has to be wider then most astrologers seem to consider - 4 or 5 days perhaps.. just how this might impact mundane astrology as opposed to natal astrology, i am not clear on, but in natal astrology i personally think it is a really big deal. thanks for your comments.

johannes susato wrote:

james_m wrote:[...] and i would be the first person to shoot down someone else for thinking they know all that much about astrology, lol...

? ? ?

hi johannes,

i seem to recall having a conversation with you on the philosophy channel but you disappeared and were not seen again only to turn up here! until you answer my questions over there, i have no answer for you over here!

cheers james

james_m wrote:
i think stationary planets are a big deal and as i was saying in the nov 5th post, i think the window for them has to be wider then most astrologers seem to consider - 4 or 5 days perhaps..

Maybe the 7 days mentioned by Paulus and Porphirius for the heliacal rising phase ?

Put jokes aside, 7 days are too much for me for a station, especially about Mercury, but 2-3 days it could be ok in my opinion

margherita

Maybe the 7 days mentioned by Paulus and Porphirius for the heliacal rising phase ?

Nice one Margherita. Your merciless.

Mark