Skyscript Astrology Forum

dr. farr wrote:I suggest that McCann's results were disappointing because his experiment (probably) did not incorporate all of the considerations and elements required for accuracy in horary technique.

Hello Dr. Farr...

I doubt it. My opinion is that trying to quantify astrology is impossible due to the "leap of faith" aspect inherent to it, simply that. All of us here are familiar with that one horary chart in our experience that is impossible to be simply a coincidence. Still, trying to explain that through technique alone seems a dead end to me.

I do believe every chart is reliable as a simbolic reflection of reality. Still, not always will they be readable simply because assuming that they would, is like assuming something can be thoroughly understood, or that all the possibles in and outs of a given situation are imaginable. To assume that would be like assuming, that even if for a single moment, men could be omniscient. That's God territory.

Ironically, Mr McCann did do away with the considerations before judgement - he has an article up at CURA with his idea of why they were invented and why we needn't take them seriously. You can find it here.

Which is interesting.

I don't believe that God acts in the world, but I do believe that God gave us the stars - if we have the wit to understand them. Doesn't really fit into a modern scientific paradigm. It would, however, be perfectly acceptable in a discourse like pilpul - Talmudic reasoning. If a rule or an interpretation stands throughout generations (and Jews are a pragmatic lot at heart), we keep it. Well, we keep them all, actually, as nobody can bear to throw any of it away, but we learn how to reason things like laws and ethics with human beings at the centre, because this is where we live, and this is how we act in the world. The Talmud gets read, reviewed, argued over, and slightly amended every generation, but the core stands.

Is it rational? Well, not in the Greek sense maybe, but it is certainly reasonable - and it works. You don't have to believe in God to engage in it, either - something else it has in common with astrology. Doubt and questioning are highly encouraged.

I think astrology is pretty much in the same space. It's been with us for a very long time now, it has rules, there was an awful disruption of the transmission of those rules, but now that we're finding them again, we're testing them, re-codifying them, and making the tweaks here and there that anyone has to to adjust for the world around us. But there's still so much to be done. Or to quote the Talmud, Pirkei Avot: Ours is not to complete the work; but we must take part.

Is it reasonable? Yes. Does it work? As PFN said, we've all had those charts. I've looked back on some of them and while I can see why they worked and would get them right again as far as that goes, I'm at an utter loss to explain how I was able to pull so much detail out of some of them.

Do we make mistakes? Of course we do - and we get to see that, too, and to learn from them. Building a community that is passionate about keeping the tradition alive will hopefully help to keep us from rolling completely off the tracks.

Once upon a time, astrology was a science - but then the world went and changed, as it is wont to do, and it became not a science. I'd like to think that the world still has room for serious non-scientific discourse.

It was astrologers, after all, who urged Galileo to publish his findings.

I?m going to get back on my hobby horse.

Statistical tests study the meaning of undetermined universal significators and usually find that universal significators are meaningless. Those studies tend to confirm Morin?s theory of determination. This theory of Morin's is a very fine one that can be seen and demonstrated to work wonderfully in practice.

If Morin is right then the existing approach to statistical tests of astrology is wrong. The questions tested aren?t the right ones and so don?t test astrology.

It?s unnecessary for statistics to confirm astrology. On the other hand, if statistical tests are done in an effort to test astrology, they should test astrology. Astrology is the cosmic arbiter; not statistics. But statistics may be able to serve the great art if statistics are able to comprehend it.


I think we need to take back our words, and our world, from the modern delusion. 'Mathematic' comes from the Greek 'to learn.' Arithmetic, not mathematics, is about numbers. Astrologers are mathematicians.

'Science' is from scientia, 'to know with the mind.' We share mind with cosmos--the great Intelligence, the One Mind.

'Measure' is related to the Sanskrit manas, 'mind.' The kind of mind or aspect of mind to which manas refers is the mind that knows earthly life and, therefore, cosmos. It can be described as:

mind, intellect, intelligence, understanding, perception, sense, conscience, will, (in philosophy) the internal organ of perception and cognition, the faculty or instrument through which thoughts enter or by which objects of the senses affect the soul.

This mind, or intelligence, can do a lot of things that instruments that measure the corpus of cosmos cannot do, and can understand a lot of things that those instruments can't do much to help us understand.

As we rediscover, reconstruct and revivify astrology in the West, we need to rediscover, reconstruct and revivify the world and words in which it thrived.

I'm unwilling to cede mathematics, science, measurement, mind, rationality or much else to a modern scientific view that limits its interest to the corpus of cosmos and measures only with the functional equivalents of yardstick, clock and scales.

The waking mind measures experience all the time. Some experience we can measure with clocks and yardsticks. Some astrology measures. Astrology categorizes, meaningfully interrelates and systematizes mind's measurements, and ties them to the stars.

Penny

Thanks - I like the way you put that Penny.

Deb

Thanks Deb, I wish you and all forum members too a good and healthy 2010.

I just saw I forgot to link to the Maurice McCann interview, here it is:
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/mccann.html

Deb wrote:I have never been to understand his objective perspective, expecting horary to perform like a science regardless of the querent?s need to know the question asked.

It seems that here the difference between objective and subjective perspective appears. (More explantation on this in the 'Dark matter' thread, 4 january) The objective approach would speak more for astrology from a technical point of view than the subjective approach, however that wouldn't make the last approach useless. As can be read in several articles the astrology-and-science website the subjective approach deals more with the meaning of astrology. Discussing a problem with someone/client, using the subjective side of astrology (whether it be horary or natal) is more focused on advice and helping the person to cope with some problem. In the chapters on astrology in Keith Thomas' 'Religion and the decline of magic' the 16th/17th century astrologer played a role in life not merely as a 'fortune teller' but also as an advisor like reverends/priests and nowadays psychologists and social workers.

Perhaps I may carefully say that reading Keith Thomas' could make me think that the difference between modern astrology and classical astrology would not be so big after all. However, I don't generally know about the practice of classical astrology so some may disagree with this and even be displeased for the comparison, especially much modern astrology is associated with vagueness and blaming asteroids for any kind of problems. Yet the application and results still might show some similarities.

The last time I spoke to Maurice, about a year ago, he wanted it to be publicly known that he had more or less dropped out of astrology. After years of studying horary statistically, and asking questions in order to study the results of his charts, he found it was unreliable.

To me statistical results also have their impact on me. The scientist in me hopes for some objective demonstrable proof and also explains that I have a silent hope that some physical effect of the planets might be revealed one day. Besides that, some of my dissatisfaction may have come from looking too much at my own chart as a study object and trying to find the meaning of transits by observing them. Looking too much at your own chart/and hard aspect transits leads to nothing I'm afraid and especially when you realize that according to probability we can have a difficult transit every year. If one includes the three modern planets and semisquares one could easily conclude that life is a continuous hell.

In reply to dr. Farr, I don't know about the technical details McCann used but reading the interview gives me the idea that he did his work thoroughly and taking everything into account. When I read about horary, I realize that studying it would be a full time job, a thing I couldn't get up to do I'm afraid.

Olivia wrote:Since we're still in the realm of subjective here (no scientific verification), in my experience, and probably in at least quite a few other astrologers' experiences, horaries about trivial questions simply do not work. I have no idea how you'd quantify that in a science experiment sense - how could one define what's trivial? And wouldn't trying to do that take you right out of the scientific territory you're trying to ground this in?

The question whether a horary question is trivial is up to the astrologer to decide. If for example one asks where the TV remote control is then I would tend to see it as trivial. The question where a passport is because of going to China the next day would be of much importance. So a research could focus on the serious questions and a list could be made afterwards if the object was found in the correct place or not.

I wonder if part of an answer in a horary might be given by the client rather than the chart. When I occasionally look in the horary section of this forum, I see that time is spent on formulating the question. In a session this might be the moment in which the client unconsciously reveals a lot of the question. This then could be unconsciously feedbacked by the astrologer. A research (perhaps with a tape-recorder) could reveal how much time the client speaks and how much time the astrologer is speaking. Although I realise that the idea of use of a tape-recorder could have a disturbing effect.

Perhaps as a lighthearted intermezzo in the serious discussion could be the Jewish humor of the following joke. A man couldn't find his walking stick and suspected one of his friends to have taken it. He went to a rabbi to talk about this. The rabbi advised the man to invite his friends for dinner on the friday night followed by reading the Thora. "After dinner", the rabbi told, "you have to read the Ten Commandments, and when you come to the 8th commandment (Thou shall not steal) then look your friends in the eyes. The one that casts down his eyes will be the one that took your walking stick." The next week the man met the rabbi again and the rabbi asked about the results. The man said: "Well, I was reading the Ten Commandments and when I came to the 7th (Thou shall not commit adultery) I suddenly remembered where I left my walking stick.".

So we may never know how horary and astrology in general works in their mysterious ways. After all there could be another objection to scientific proof of astrology. (Former astrologer) David Hamblin comments:

David Hamblin wrote:After all, what would happen to astrology if it was proved beyond doubt that there is a connection between planetary positions at a particular time and events on Earth occurring at the same time? It would be taken over, not only by science, but by politics and big business. It would become part of the "system" from which so many of us long to escape. It would do great harm, because of the way in which it would be used by unscrupulous people in search of profit and power. It would lose its magic and its capacity to inspire. How much better that it should remain one of those things (like life after death) that are never proved but remain tantalizingly possible, elusive, just out of reach, offering glimpses of a universe that lies beyond our ordinary experience.

source: http://www.rudolfhsmit.nl/p-reli2.htm

After reading McCann's Skycript interview (thanks Eddy for posting the link) and the McCann article link posted by Olivia (thank you Olivia), I must disagree with Eddy when he states that (McCann) "did his work thoroughly and took everything into account" (certainly McCann was completely unaware of Dragons Tail in the 1st, which, according to Martin Lewicki occurs an average of 12% of the time: at that rate of occurence this would have rendered unreliable 1 out of 8 of McCann's horaries-without McCann being aware of it-right from the "get go"!)

I find Penny Seator's viewpoint re: statistics to be very strong and I fully support her points and conclusions.

I thoroughly applaud the Hamblin quote! Thank you Eddy for posting this! I share Hamblin's point of view as expressed in that quotation and I really believe that it is wrong to try to convince or prove to the scientific establishment the reality of astrology or its various modes of application. I do believe that research is valuable, not for scientists but for US, in order to help better understand what we do, and to enable us to do it with greater success.

Proving Astrology will likely never be done by a subjective, delineation-oriented approach. Events can be spelled in too many different ways, astrologically.

That being said, I feel that the way to prove Astrology on grounds that can't be denied would be to take hidden, but well-documented birthtimes and use many events to rectify the chart and find that "hidden" birthtime.

When we have proven that you can take the Events in a person's life and derive the birthtime, it will not be such a large step to (and is an obvious implication that we can) perform the converse. And either way, it will have ALREADY ESTABLISHED a link between Events happening in a person's life and THEIR BIRTHTIME, which is the bottom line.

If we use a fine piece of software like Isaac Starkman's Polaris, then ALL human subjectivity is removed and scientific types are likely to appreciate that pure code and mathematics lead to the answer, rather than a series of clumsily stated "hunches".

Peace

Atlantean

dr. farr wrote:..., I must disagree with Eddy when he states that (McCann) "did his work thoroughly and took everything into account" (certainly McCann was completely unaware of Dragons Tail in the 1st, which, according to Martin Lewicki occurs an average of 12% of the time: at that rate of occurence this would have rendered unreliable 1 out of 8 of McCann's horaries-without McCann being aware of it-right from the "get go"!)

Thanks dr. Farr, as I pointed out I know too little about horary to know if someone is using everything thoroughly, perhaps McCann used only the systems that don't use Caput and Cauda.

About the other part of the post I have some remarks, quoting Martin Lewicki:

Moon is VOC about 10% of the time. Node would be in H1 about 12% of the time rendering about 22% horarys unreadable. That's still 78% readable. Even with added lots/parts restrictions surely there would enought % charts that are readble - or are there too many restrictions that render horary essentaily useless? Maybe Carr has a point

I see that he adds the chance of VOC to the chance of having Node in H1. I think this is wrong because there can also be situations where both occur at the same time. If for example there is an island with a climate with chance of 50% (6 months) cold winds and a chance of 50% (6 months) rainfall then simply adding both to 100% (the whole year) will exclude any chance of a nice sunny day on the island. However the rainy days and the cold windy days could have an overlap of 2 months and thus covering the year with 5 months rainy days, 5 months cloudy days and a combination of both in those 2 months. That leaves another 2 months for other type of weather. Hopefully some sunshine for that island.

The 12% chance of Node (whether Martin meant the north or the south Node I don't know but not really important for the mathematical example) in H1 is a number I don't understand. If there are 12 houses then there's a chance of 1 in 12 or 8.33%. Houses are of different sizes (if you use unequal systems) but during the whole diurnal cycle the average size of every house will be 30?. Another issue will be the sign where the Node is. If the node is in the two fastest rising signs, for the northern hemisphere this will be Pisces and Aries (for the southern hemisphere the opposite signs), on the average the chance is smaller than 1 in 12. Here it may be important which house system is used, for with these signs rising the houses can vary a lot, Campanus' house I size with Ascendant in Pisces or Aries varies between 50? and 65?. This will increase the decreased average chance. However with Whole (Ascendant) Signs the chance is smaller than 1 in 12. And other house systems might even have a smaller chance than this one. (Campanus' house tables are here on Achernar's site http://www.achernar.btinternet.co.uk/#mainmenu )

On the other side if the Node is in the slow rising signs Virgo or Libra then the chance of Node in house I is much bigger. In London the times that Virgo and Libra rise are from 3h09m - 8h51 Sidereal Time, almost 6 hours. A bit more north (Newcastle) it is 6 hours. So the chance of having these signs rising in the UK is on the average 1 in 4. Campanus' house I sizes vary between 30? and 36?, little affecting the chance.

If we for ease of the example use Whole Signs houses then each period when the node is in Virgo and Aries the chance of getting an according to the horary rules unreadable chart thus is 1 in 4. (If I say something incorrect about the horary techniques please correct me if I'm wrong.)
From December 2004 till December 2007 the Dragon's Tail was in Libra and Virgo. February 2014 till May 2017 the Dragon's Head will be in those signs. This is during 3 years. If both North and South Nodes would give an impossible horary then the periods chances of unreadability would even be doubled.

This leads to another interesting issue. If the Ascendant indicates the querent and the chance of either Virgo or Libra rising is 1 in 4 then slow planets in these signs might affect the horary during a long time. Saturn, momently hanging around in 0? Libra is now in the middle of an about 5 year period of the high chance of these signs rising. I wonder if horary astrologers have noticed an increased 'Saturnine effect' in the horary readings or in the querents.

Atlantean wrote:If we use a fine piece of software like Isaac Starkman's Polaris, then ALL human subjectivity is removed and scientific types are likely to appreciate that pure code and mathematics lead to the answer, rather than a series of clumsily stated "hunches".

I remember a discussion on the Skyscript forum in which Isaac Starkman displayed his methods and emphasized the accurateness of this method. It's not my intention to discredit Isaac but in that discussion he gave an example of a prediction. I kept that prediction in mind and now I can say that he was completely wrong.

Here's the thread with the prediction, http://www.skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewt ... 39c441d1fd
The post at the top of page 2, 21 may 2009 9h48m

Here is example of prediction for Benjamin Netanyahu: (...)

Around 1st Oct 2009 he will have the following primary directions (...)

What will happen to him?
The first possibility is the death of his father (age 100!), because there are aspects with Saturn/MC, Sun/Saturn, 5 aspects with Neptune (mourning), 3 aspects with 8th house, 2 aspects with NN (separation).
The other possibility is trouble as PM, defeat, etc

The facts anno 2010:
- Netanyahu's father is still alive.
- In October Netanyahu didn't have more troubles as usual in for politicians. Moreover the prediction is too vague, as a politician always will have to deal with troubles in parliament. Especially Netanyahu who is seen as controversial by his opponents.
- To make matters even worse, Netanyahu became a first time grandfather
on the 1st October 2009 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1118202.html . So all the applied symbolism in the prediction to show death, mourning, separation, trouble, defeat is absolutely wrong. I'm afraid that any interpretation to change the symbolism would be seen as artifice and 'hindsight astrology', not only by opponents but also by astrologers.

It's interesting to check ones own astrology, and I think it is also necessary. Especially in case of concrete prediction. Before one would apply this in practice (with clients etc.) one should assure oneself to be correct. Imagine what a devastating impact the prediction of a father's death would have had if this was told to a client. Again, I don't mean to use this as an example to degrade a certain method. I would put my own work under a similar scrutiny.

dr. farr wrote:
I do believe that research is valuable, not for scientists but for US, in order to help better understand what we do, and to enable us to do it with greater success.

Well put!! I have found with my experiences the more charts I analysis/research with birth times backed-upped with birth certificates or hospital records, the more I learn about my chosen branch of astrology. This would apply to any field of astrology regardless of one?s chosen branches of astrology. How could we expect any scientist to accept any statistical research pertaining to astrology, when that scientist is without the personal experience that is so important in studying astrology? True personal experience only comes with a lifetime of studying any field of endeavor that eventually reaches our heart level.

Regards, Steve

(certainly McCann was completely unaware of Dragons Tail in the 1st, which, according to Martin Lewicki occurs an average of 12% of the time: at that rate of occurence this would have rendered unreliable 1 out of 8 of McCann's horaries-without McCann being aware of it-right from the "get go"!)

The idea that horaries can be given a ?reliability percentage? doesn?t match with my experience at all. I?m not sure its fair to speculate on McCann?s work, so I?ll leave that aside, but even if it were the case that he totally ignored this, there?s no reason to conclude that all horaries become unreliable when they contain the South node in the 1st house. This would be a 'consideration', requiring only that the astrologer take it into consideration as part of the judgement.
(Also, I don?t understand the calculation that this occurs 12% of the time ? perhaps this should have said ratio of 1/12, which is closer to 8%?) Then we would have to introduce weighting for the fact that this only becomes a prominent feature when close to the ascendant ? but why waste such time? These are elements that astrologers consider whilst compiling an integrated judgement. Every part of every horary takes its meaning from the chart as a whole and a chart that is based upon a focused question will allow the omission or addition of some astronomical technicalities, whilst remaining reliable overall. (I?m talking about ?reliability? as subjectively assessed by the individual who expresses the concern ? the opinion of everyone else is irrelevant because they have no soul connection to the query). As far as I?m concerned *all* horaries are reliable if the question is appropriate, sincerely asked, and directly expressed, so I have never been able to relate to discussions about percentages of charts that work, or percentages of information that we can get from charts.

Deb

PS - Just catching up with the thread, I see Eddy raised the matter of the calculation too.

In her interview on this site, Bernadette Brady claims to have got 72-75% accuracy on her Australian football predictions, using her particular method.
http://www.skyscript.co.uk/brady.html
This statistic sounds pretty impressive. I wonder what the scientists would make of it.

Of course there are two ways of measuring the success (or otherwise) of sporting predictions - 1) accuracy and 2) profit from betting. Betting profit/loss is fairly easy to monitor but as far as accuracy is concerned I haven't a clue what my percentage rate is. It would be interesting to know whether others who make sporting predictions on a regular basis keep a record of their success rate.

These discussions always remind me of the idea of prediction. Practicing Astrology and making Predictions are two very different things, I have found the charts of "professional" astrologers and "diviners" can be extremely different.

How is a material "scientist" going to "prove" Astrology?
How is a "practicing" Astrologer going to use "science" to prove Astrology?

-make a prediction-

nothing shuts a materialist-atheist up like telling them something thats going to happen to them before it does