Graham F wrote: And I'm not quite happy about using one arrangement of correspondences between the elements and the 12 places for the signs, and another for the houses, and then expecting the two to correspond.
Graham

this is another interesting set up that i have been thinking about too and while it is completely speculative, perhaps this arrangement of the elements predates the one we have now? regardless it is especially interesting from the point of view that liz greene and the pyschology astrologers put fire opposite earth, with water opposite air just like chris's reconfiguration of the elements here..

Martin Gansten wrote:

Paul wrote:Some of the things I found most fascinating from this paper are better realisation that the diurnal half of the chart corresponds to the lot of spirit, with the nocturnal corresponding to fortune. This seems obvious but I never made that connection before.

Glad to see it wasn't just me.

well i gave that some thought too.. funny thing with symbolism is how the symbolism can sometimes be easily flipped around..

i recall wanting to have a conversation on a statement on curtis manwaring site written by a fellow named charles bueck in 1995.. let me quote the specific line that i found fascinating.
"According to the position of the Sun, the chart is divided into two FIELDS. The solar field relates to the LIMITED, and the lunar field corresponds to the LIMITLESS."
http://www.astrology-x-files.com/x-file ... nsect.html

i think it ties back to the focus that martin and paul have highlighted here, but i am not exactly sure if there is only one way to perceive these ideas.. i would be curious to hear some other folks thoughts on this and perhaps i ought to start a separate thread on this..

Graham F wrote: Also, we can't be sure, despite Ptolemy's rationale that you mention, that the domicile rulerships precede the triplicities, can we?

We can't really be sure of anything here. All we can do most of the time is make what seem like logical inferences based on the evidence available. So, no we can't be sure that the domicile rulerships precede the triplicity rulerships, although it is suggestive that the domicile rulerships do not seem to need the triplicity rulerships to exist, whereas part of the rationale for the triplicity rulerships may require domicile rulership to exist already.

Graham F wrote: Still not sure I can agree with you here: as Fagan points out, it's strange that the 12 house meanings seem to go through life, means of livelihood/family, siblings, parents, children+spirituality, illness, marriage and death, before starting up again with religion/travel, career/honours, earnings/friends and isolation/death again. I looks like they get to the end of the sequence, then start doubling up.

I'm not sure that I agree that either the Octatopos or the Dodekatopos follows some sort of strict progression of the native's life. If you did that then you could make the same argument that there is a problem with the Dodekatopos having death right in the middle at the 7th.

All it seems like to me is that the author of the Octatopos thought that there were some significations missing from the Dodekatopos, and so they introduced some additional significations for the first 8 houses. Schmidt pointed out that the main thing that distinguishes the Octatopos from the Dodekatopos is that the Octatopos includes a number of family members that are otherwise missing from the Dodekatopos: siblings, parents, children, spouse. Maybe it is as simple as that. Someone thought there should be some additional significations, primarily in order to place all of the members of the native's family within the first 8 houses. If this is what happened, then it looks like they focused on houses which largely fall under the horizon, and they only assigned the family members themselves to the houses that are configured to the ascendant.

varuna2 wrote:It might be better to remove the part about the 8 signs or houses, since it is intuitively wrong, and will not be accepted by many, therefore detracting from the rest of the essay.

Paul wrote: It's probably best to put aside the 8-fold division of the houses, as, clearly, that's not what this paper focuses upon.

I just wanted to point out really quickly that the main reason that I included that paragraph on the 8-place system in the paper is in order to acquit myself of the charge of someone who is arguing solely for a complete and singular sudden invention of Hellenistic astrology. While the paper presents some additional pieces of evidence in favor of the sudden invention hypothesis, it is also important to note that some of the core meanings of the houses in the later tradition represent the synthesis of two or more different systems of assigning significations, and so any sudden invention would not have been complete or singular in the earliest strata of the Hellenistic tradition.

Martin Gansten wrote:

Paul wrote:Some of the things I found most fascinating from this paper are better realisation that the diurnal half of the chart corresponds to the lot of spirit, with the nocturnal corresponding to fortune. This seems obvious but I never made that connection before.

Glad to see it wasn't just me.

Yeah, this was one of the realizations that I was the most excited about initially, after figuring out the elemental scheme, since it has a lot of interesting implications for many traditions. I think that it was also the discovery that came last, because it was only after I saw how everything in the joys worked together like an integrated system that I realized that it meant that any significations associated with those houses would have been derived from the joys, rather than the other way around. Ben's observation about the malefics having recently changed hemispheres really sealed the deal though, because it implied that there was something solar about the entire hemisphere above the earth, and something lunar about the hemisphere under the earth. After staring at the diagram for a while and the names of the places I realized that it was just an application of the usual Spirit/Fortune, mind/body distinction that comes up frequently throughout the tradition, especially with the Lots, except that it applies to all of the houses in each hemisphere.

This also kind of ties in nicely to the argument I made in my previous paper on the lots about how the the two concepts underlying the Lot of Spirit are light and the mind, whereas the concepts underlying the Lot of Fortune are darkness and the body. This becomes sort of a reoccurring theme throughout the Hellenistic tradition.

Unfortunately the houses argument towards the end is also one of the most difficult to justify textually, and so I'm not sure how much of it I will be able to retain for the shorter version of the paper in Culture and Cosmos. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Good morning,

May one question the validity of the almost exclusive use of deductive methods to the corresponding exclusion of inductive ones?

There seems to be an underlying assumption that, if one delves back far and deep enough into ancient historic documents, unearths the correct and representative ones, cleans them from possible interpolations, translates and understands them properly, that one will thus be able to deduce something like 'true original astrology'.

Aside from 'anecdotes', what evidence exists that, for example, there are statistically valid correlations between sets of events and elemental attributions of planets?

Best regards,

lihin

lihin wrote:Good morning,

May one question the validity of the almost exclusive use of deductive methods to the corresponding exclusion of inductive ones?

There seems to be an underlying assumption that, if one delves back far and deep enough into ancient historic documents, unearths the correct and representative ones, cleans them from possible interpolations, translates and understands them properly, that one will thus be able to deduce something like 'true original astrology'.

Aside from 'anecdotes', what evidence exists that, for example, there are statistically valid correlations between sets of events and elemental attributions of planets?

Best regards,

lihin

Mr. Lihin,

You might be interested in another way of thinking?

1. syadvada or saptabhangi.

2. nayavada

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

lihin wrote:There seems to be an underlying assumption that, if one delves back far and deep enough into ancient historic documents, unearths the correct and representative ones, cleans them from possible interpolations, translates and understands them properly, that one will thus be able to deduce something like 'true original astrology'.

With multiple agenda's in the world, I'm sure someone would think this as it is difficult to arrive at a truly original thought. What's really at stake here is the validity of astrology itself. Many people interested in Hellenistic techniques want to prove that there was a close connection between classical philosophy and astronomy / astrology and thereby have a more powerful argument against skeptics (because all science derives from the same). This is at least one of the reasons why I have pursued it. Many astrologers interested in modern techniques don't seem to care about this and seem rather short sighted in this area, but without addressing the philosophical foundation, astrology will probably have a rather dim future in the long run.