I would never 'predict' someone was gay based on them, but it's an interesting presence all the same.

Hi Paul,

Just wanted to point out how I met a gay man, never guessed he was gay until he told me, got his birthtime, drew up his chart, saw an exact configuration reflecting homosexuality described by Valens, in his chart.

Stellar, I've read the widely available Hellenistic astrologers in English translation. Obviously "traditional astrology" includes subsequent astrologers. Apart from some recently published primers in traditional astrology so far my traditional interests remain in Antiquity.

But let's use the Hellenistic astrologers to discuss the meaning of adultery in the Hellenistic world. Above, I gave several examples to explain why the term might have meant something different back then than it does today.

I am currently traveling and don't have access to my home library, but I recall Ptolemy in Tetrabiblos matter-of-factly delineating how to determine whether the native will prefer sex with boys. If we assume that the native was a married man and a slave-owner, then would this have constituted adultery or not? To his peers? To the Puritans? To us?

We can't read the answer transparently off of Tetrabiblos. Rather, we have to broaden our scope to think through the meanings of adultery, then and now.

If you read about social mores in ancient Greece, many respected men were what we today would term bisexual and polyamorous. Slavery put a very different cast upon norms of propriety. So far as I can recall from sources like Valens and Maternus (not currently to-hand,) the issue was not of adultery defined as a one-off fling, but what we today might term sexual addiction.

Even men who preferred sex with males-only might have married and fathered children as part of a societal expectation, not to mention the ways that marriage could solidify rank and property.

Paul, obviously I know astrology extends beyond the Hellenistic world! And obviously I think astrology "works" to the extent that I have devoted over 20 years to its practice and study.

Where I part company with many (not all) traditional astrologers is the degree to which I believe in astral determinism. I think a natal horoscope shows potentials and proclivities. These are always modified by things a chart doesn't show, such as whether the native lives in a strictly puritanical or permissive culture, such that those proclivities can be openly expressed or not.

Ptolemy, come to think of it, said something about a horoscope showing difficulties in the native's life, but that like a doctor prescribing a cure, some means of mitigating them. Lilly says as much in Christian Astrology, as well.

Good morning,

As we have discussed at some length in a prior thread, the applications of words used in the title of this thread in my humble opinion are, in the vast framework of astrology where planets have manifested similar patterns aeons before written human history, severely culturally restricted and negatively biased.

Anthropological research, comparative zoology etc. have underscored that humans are naturally neither monoandrous nor monogamous (even in the wider sequential understandings of these terms), but rather poly-androus and poly-gamous. Depending on the social order involved, Jovial concerns about inheritance and possession have at times attempted, with largely mitigated success, to impose restrictions upon the joyful unfolding of love-life inherent in Our Lady Aphrodit?. The loyalty of true friendship has little or less to do with sexual exclusivity, so it appears.

Long-term statistical research in Central Europe has recently confirmed that, of 10 children born in official wedlock, 2 to 3 on the average are not biological offspring of their legal fathers but rather "Kuckuckskinder".

May one suggest that, in astrological analyses, one might attempt to examine matters of the 'night sect' S?l?n?, Aphrodit? and Ar?s on their on terms and values, not muddled by Jovial moralistic imputations? In reading ancient Hellenistic interpretations, one often finds realistic descriptions of behaviours. Of course one should bear in mind that Hellenistic (and Brahman) civilisations were patriarchal.

Best regards,

lihin