Skyscript Astrology Forum

I agree, which is why I don't think the physical/mechanical explanations like electromagnetism or gravity work.

BTW, if anyone is interested, a version of this topic on the "other astrology" board on the Astrodient forum www.astro.com is now running through 80 pages. However, after about page 20 it morphed into a discussion of "does astrology work?" vs. how it works.

waybread wrote: But nobody so far has explained to me how the Big Stuff Out There That Permeates Everything explains how the astrologer locates the missing cat, why the native's ex BF just un-friended her on social media, or why she doesn't have a BF. Is quantum physics ever going to explain why somebody's sister cannot manage her money? Should he take the job as a shopping mall security guard?

hello waybread,

I have no explanation, but perhaps a little thought experiment could be interesting. To me, a central problem is the perception of time, since astrological synchronicities clearly exist 'before' the physical bodies associated with them are discovered and named.

Example: in his book De Divinatione Cicero wrote "Did all the Romans who fell at Cannae have the same horoscope? Yet all had one and the same end." The very bloody Battle at Cannae (Hannibal vs. Rome, 70.000 Romans killed in a matter of hours) was used by Cicero as an example to disprove astrology, but what Cicero didn't know was that Pholus (associated with the Centaur massacre) was exactly conjunct the Sun around the time that the Cannae-massacre started. Because Pholus had 'not yet' been discovered.

The crucial thing is the 'not yet'. The way i see it, we can perhaps accept this by imagining a dualist (or perhaps even pluralist) concept of time, where time is both sequential (a chain of events starting with the Big Bang) and simultaneous (everything happens at the same time). To me, that would be a beginning of an explanation for things like the Sun-Pholus conjunction at the time of the Cannae massacre. Not in the sense of a time-dichotomy but complementary sides of the same coin.

Interesting point. Some scholars think that Ptolemy wrote his Tetrabiblos introduction to counter Cicero's arguments. Mr. Pt. said that a national chart would take precedence over an individual chart in cases like the one you describe.

In western thought, we have the concept of Time's Arrow, in which time moves in a linear direction from past to the present to the future. Hinduism teaches that time is fundamentally simultaneous, and then there is quantum physics' theories of spacetime, and my favourite Star Trek NTG episodes with space-time discontinuities that moved people back or forth into alternative realities.

I've also looked at neuroscience and cognitive psychological concepts of time. I recently read an article about how people automatically predict the immediate future through vision. http://www.newsweek.com/neuroscience-op ... nce-735274

The ability to predict something of the future with reasonable accuracy is what allows us to get up in the morning, put on our shoes, go to work, and anticipate a busy appointment schedule-- with some semblance of accuracy.

Without getting woo-woo about it, some cultures (like traditional Scotland, Ireland and the Roma) have a tradition of people who are gifted with "second sight" involving accurate premonitions. That this "runs in families" suggests that, if the phenomenon is real, it may have a genetic explanation.

I think there is a lot about time we don't understand, including why astrological prediction at a distance and into the future should work, if it does.

If i could travel in time or predict the future, i would be interested to find out if we ever get asteroids named after famous Nazis. This would be a very bad sign of course, and i'm guessing this will never happen, but then again, Pyrrhus, Caesar, Hannibal and Attila already got lucky.

The synchronicities surrounding the naming of asteroids underline the strangely flexible nature of astrological semiotics/semantics which, in my opinion, indicates that common 'explanations' of astrology based primarily on mythology/archetypes are merely scratching the surface.

The relation between the ancient Pholus myth and the Cannae-massacre is one thing. To me, the asteroid 1896 Beer which was named after an Austrian astronomer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Beer is quite another thing. This asteroid happens to show up in, for example, the chart of the famous alcoholic Alan Watts, tightly squaring his Sun conjunct Mercury. There's no classical mythology at work here. Only a very loose language-based symbolic association which nevertheless seems fully integrated in what you called "the Big Stuff Out There That Permeates Everything". Finally, in the chart of the Battle at Cannae asteroid Hannibal would seem to be conjunct asteroid Karma although that calculation is an approximation.

To me this kind of stuff would suggest that we're living in a meaning-based universe. I'd guess that in physics, we see this kind of reasoning in theories that take information (not energy, matter etc.) as a starting point: John Wheelers famous "it from bit" slogan https://plus.maths.org/content/it-bit

I sometimes play around with asteroids. Sometimes the "hits" are uncanny, as when two people have namesake asteroids that hit one another's planets in synastry.

Although I think you can use namesake asteroids in other languages, I'd be a little careful, as sometimes a name in German, French, &c that seems English actually is not, and has a very different meaning in the original language.

BUT-- I do take your bigger point in your last paragraph. Despite all of its definitions and rules, I see astrology as a very subjective process. It takes place in the mind of the astrologer. So much of what we practice does not exist objectively up there in the sky. There are no signs, houses, lots, nodes, or even constellations up there. They were invented, not discovered.

Wheeler's idea of the participatory universe seems important. However, at this point in time, it is premature to assume that quantum physics supports astrology.

https://futurism.com/john-wheelers-part ... -universe/

Really great link. Thank you!

I see astrology a little bit different. The mind of the astrologer probably does play a very big part, and i do agree that signs, houses, lots and constellations are in some sense invented but i don't think aspects are pure inventions, because that would suggest to me that the whole of mathematics and astrophysics is an invention as well. Aspects do have physical consequences, for example for the barycentric motion of the sun. For sure, physics and mathematics also deal in purely human inventions, some of them quite fanciful like for example supersymmetry (i'd call that the fallacy of aesthetically pleasing quantification) but of course that doesn't mean we dismiss physics or mathematics.

I personally think that generally speaking, astrologers are not yet aware of the actual scientific potential that's hidden in certain astrological hypotheses/theories. I'm very new to astrology myself, and i'm amazed to notice how many astrologers prefer to create their own private astro-universe with its own rules. This makes communication relatively difficult. It reminds me of the situation of the Protestant church in the Netherlands (where i live). Over here we have 500 different flavors of Protestantism and even agnostic/atheist priests. How did that happen?

The 'scientific' astrologers i've communicated with tend to like the philosophically mature work of Richard Tarnas, and i fully agree. In fact, he's the one who got me interested in astrology in the first place, so nothing but praise for Tarnas. On the other hand, he's at the psychological/Jungian side of things. I believe that right now the physical side of astrological research is seriously under-represented. I think we need a couple of new Keplers and Landscheidts to draw a new line between scientific fact and nonsense/bunk. The demarcation problem, but this time for real so to speak.

I actually think the immediate future of scientific astrological research looks very bright, because we have now entered the age of Big Data and AI. I remember Bernadette Brady saying somewhere that to do scientific work in astrology, we need a bigger data set. It's my impression that this situation has already arrived. We can't just go hunting for small p-values in a couple of thematically related charts downloaded at astro.com if we want to make real progress. The potential for big data research is very broad. It encompasses the physical and the psychological, but the causality problem will of course remain a tough nut to crack.

Some examples of AI/Bigdata based research i particularly like are by Renay Oshop

Earthquakes and Moon phases
https://www.ayurastro.com/articles/eart ... -correlate

Twitter Followers Biased to Astrological Charts of Celebrities (Published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/cpm5359n308wm ... hop.pdf?dl

Mercury retrograde, Amazon review misspellings and AI
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hgc9doopjkh58 ... .pptx?dl=0

Thanks, dubbhism. Lots of good stuff in your latest post.

I think it's important to distinguish between cultural astronomy (ethnoastronomy,) solar system physics, and horoscopic astrology. Nobody doubts that the moon affects tides, for example, but this doesn't explain why a moon in Leo is different from a moon in Capricorn. There is also a lot of star lore held by different societies around the globe, but most of them are not even close to horoscopic astrology.

Even if we postulate some sort of physical, mechanistic causal mechanism whereby planets influence human behaviour, we are still left with all of the non-natal forms of astrology like horary and mundane. Even predictive astrology based on nativities is problematical, because your planetary positions at Time 1 no longer exist at Time N. Most of the currency of horoscopic astrology-- signs, houses, degrees, constellations-- do not exist up in the sky. They are what the astrologer-- through agreement with like-minded astrologers-- maps onto the heavens. Signs were invented by the Babylonians, for example, not discovered as having any real existence. They exist in a theoretical cultural domain.

Then we run into all kinds of problems of definition in running a big statistical study. For example, David Cochrane is one astrologer doing some fun stuff with big data sets, but I think he assumes a modern astrology platform. Some of his work deals with conjunctions to the sun as defining human personality traits; whereas in a traditional interpretation such a planet would probably be combust (unless it were cazimi) and thereby weakened.

I'm not saying that the many, many required definitions and parameters couldn't be addressed; it's just that they should be, prior to crunching all those numbers. Otherwise the researchers leave themselves open to all kinds of potential bias.

I think we'd need large-format multi-variate statistical tests, not just the old planet=trait binaries.

We cannot forget that astrology deals with people: their hopes, fears, talents, mistakes, and all the rest of it. Many things that influence human lives wouldn't even show up in a natal horoscope without supplementary data, such as gender, family religion or atheism, and skin colour.

To use your Dutch example, it matters if a native of Amsterdam is Muslim or ancestral Reform church, but you cannot read this off a horoscope.

Then statistics deals with probabilities, so if your planet=trait correlation holds 75% of the time, that might be highly significant, but it doesn't explain the other 25% of your sample.

Most quantitative research these days is done by teams. I think a team comprised of successful professional astrologers, quantitative social scientists (who do get a background in stats,) and an astronomer might get somewhere, but I don't see any one person having the required expertise.

A mundane chart for the Battle of Cannae consisting of a progressed Canlunar (Moon's entry into Sidereal Cancer, the MC progressed by the travel of the Moon from that time to the time of an event) with an eclipse chart previous to the event and located there around it. Charts are shown in the Tropical zodic. Locations of points are shown in right ascension. I do not use signs nor houses but am forced to show them by software. These charts are read by what planets or points are being swept by or are in tight aspect to the angles.

The progressed Mars/Uranus midpoint rose at 2:15 pm, LMT.

Tens of thousands lost their lives there then, thousands more were wounded, tens of thousands more were captured by their enemies. Tens of thousands more experienced victory over an enemy.

Thanks a lot for that unique astrology, i'm not sure that your analysis would change Cicero's mind, but the plot certainly thickens.

It is my impression that there are quite a few extraordinary things happening during the big battles between Rome and Hannibal. Personally i focus on asteroids like Hannibal (conjunct Uranus during the first big victory against Rome at the Trebia) and Roma, but also Chaos, Eris, Sedna and Pholus. The role of Neptune in the Battle at Lake Trasimene might also be interesting to you: the largest ambush in military history (record still standing) under the cover of fog.

For a short characterization of 4 battles between Hannibal and Rome based mainly on asteroids see http://www.dubbhism.org/2017/01/star-wa ... -rome.html

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@waybread, thanks for your thoughts, i think all your concerns are valid.

Just one last thing about what i like in Big Data: techniques like Deep Learning are (or can be used) relatively theory agnostic. So when you say that we have to be careful about letting bias creep in before we even start, my suggestion would be that with Big Data, you don't have to start per se with very specific assumptions about possible correlations. Instead you might get a big, high quality dataset and let unassuming algorithms hunt blindly for all kinds of patterns. Fully automated research (or data-based preparation for more serious work) so to speak. You could in principle search fairly exhaustively for certain simple correlations this way. All you need is a little bit of a focus and some general assumptions like perhaps the canonical mythological meanings as they seem related to certain heavenly bodies, the qualities of certain aspects and maybe one or two other parameters.

For example, i looked at 13 years worth of crime data (calls for service) as provided by the Police Department of the City of Chicago https://data.cityofchicago.org/Public-S ... /ijzp-q8t2, focusing on the theme of 'violent crime' meaning crime categories as diverse as public peace, robbery, homicide, assault and sexual crimes.

Unfortunately this particular data set is not high quality (calls for service are not the same thing as actual crimes so there's a lot of noise) but by focusing on hard aspects between the most common physical objects (planets, dwarfs, some centaurs and asteroids) the algorithm was still able to single out Mars-Pluto conjunctions and conjunctions of Sun + Pholus, Nessus, Eris and Sedna as indicators for a range of violent crimes, and confirm these results in similar datasets published by the Police Departments of San Francisco and other major cities in the USA (these datasets are even less quality than the Chicago set, but still).

A professional data scientist (which i am not) could take such a procedure a few steps further and automate the research in such a way that - in theory - every possible angle between every included object (or any other quantifiable parameter for that matter) can be checked against a given high quality data set. That's a somewhat different approach. I think it has potential. But you do need lots of good data, a big computer and serious programming and statistics skills to get it right. A potential problem with Deep Learning is a certain black box element, which is bad for transparency, but i think this can be solved good enough.

Although the patterns i noticed in the open source American Police Department data are worthless for science because of bad confidence intervals, the correlations that did pop up would seem archetypically correct so this particular project still had value for me because it suggests new directions for research that may some day even be scientifically bona fide.

By the way, i actually found two separate ways to track the influence of these bodies i mentioned in the Police data: either by looking at hard aspects or using Golden Aspects. For this last method i calculated the total number of Golden Aspects or Phi angles between the Sun, Pluto, Mars, Chiron, Pholus, Nessus, Eris and Sedna in 24 hour intervals for those 13 years of data (1.5 degree orb) and fed the algorithm a 'phi angle count' and a 'phi angle index' (as in Barbault-index, everything both geocentrically and heliocentrically) producing similar/better results.

dubbhism, I just prepared a carefully crafted response to your post, only to accidentally delete it. Right now I don't have the patience to recreate it, except to say that, no.

You're familiar with the "garbage in, garbage out" problem in research?

Obviously a statistical study has a minimum legitimate sample size, but bigger is better only if the data and methods still meet the basic research design criteria designed to minimize bias.

A correlation below 50%, even if statistically significant, is still a poor predictor.

I shudder at the thought of using "canonical" mythological meanings, because a study of mythology reveals just how syncretistic and contradictory the myths are.

Surely you're familiar with how much real estate around the zodiac a 10-degree orb for the sun in relation to another planet using only the major aspects would occupy: 160 degrees out of 360, by my calculation.

Plus, how does Big Data address the OP, which is how or why astrology should work, if it does?

Surely you're familiar with how much real estate around the zodiac a 10-degree orb for the sun in relation to another planet using only the major aspects would occupy: 160 degrees out of 360, by my calculation.

Orbs are subjective, quantitative calibrations of the results. In the 'automated' approach i was suggesting, variation in orb size can be automated.

I shudder at the thought of using "canonical" mythological meanings, because a study of mythology reveals just how syncretistic and contradictory the myths are.

All i'm saying is that in general, Mars-Pluto conjunctions would not seem to be related to themes like love, peace and harmony. That's what i mean with "canonical". Same thing for the dwarfs. If you want to research whether astrology works or not, assumptions about classic Graeco-Roman mythology or any other body of mythology are not needed per se in my opinion, but allowing for a modicum of *meaning* (even if based on nothing else but a broad consensus/working hypothesis in the astrological community) would seem fairly essential to me.

Plus, how does Big Data address the OP, which is how or why astrology should work, if it does?

In my opinion Deep Learning and a few related techniques can be used in a relatively theory agnostic way. That's good for transparancy (just like using data produced by 'objective' parties like Police Departments). Therefore, it's not impossible (merely speculating here) that relevant new kinds of data may be collected using this technique, potentially leading to solid new insights. If that's too indirect for this thread i'm sorry.

Anyway Deep Learning is not magic, it's just fancy statistics. Here's an example of one of the discussions going on in this field https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-theo ... -20170921/

Thanks, unique_astrology and dubbhism, for your thoughtful posts.

On that now 82-page thread at Astrodienst on this topic, I argued mid-way through the discussion, that I don't think statistics are going to help us very much, but if others think they will, I will be interested to see the results of their studies. I'm not opposed to attempts to quantify astrological outcomes on principle, rather, I think that to do it correctly, astrologers (or whoever does the analysis) are going to have to start thinking in terms of specific definitions, outlining their assumptions, and explaining how they mitigate at least the most obvious potential biases.

This is how academics set up their research. If they don't, they get clobbered by their critics.

Then whose astrology would you use? I have a lot of admiration for astrologer David Cochrane, a really original thinker, but I don't think he'd get to square one with traditional astrologers, because his assumptions seem to be thoroughly modern. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pOkwi63qOw

My course background in statistics was a long-ago and far away required course, but during my career I worked a lot around social scientists and scientists who used stats routinely. I read their papers and attended their conference and seminar presentations. My poor knowledge of stats was a work-around, and I did learn how to get my head around the introductions and conclusions of papers in a lot of different fields.

Let's take well-known actors as an example.

There are a lot of different multivariate statistical tests out there. Some of which don't require mythological assumptions. For example, the Astro-DataBank is full of the horoscopes of American film actors. It would be possible to select out the Rodden AA individuals, have all kinds of horoscope data bytes in digitized form by degree, and just see whether given "actor" signatures showed up significantly. Then you could compare them to a control group of the same size. (I. e., kind of a Gauquelin-type study for the 2010s.)

The problem that I see, having looked at the horoscopes of a lot of actors and other creative people, is that I'm not convinced that a horoscope discriminates between actor vs. non-actor. Rather, I think it shows the kind of actor someone will become once s/he's on that trajectory. But then I didn't get into minor aspects, fixed stars, asteroids, Arabian parts, and so on; in the way that a big data project could.

But if my surmise is correct, and a horoscope shows how someone will go about acting, painting, &c; rather than as a simple career choice, or perhaps a simple "fame factor," then we've got a real problem, if ithe problem in fact boils down to each artist's unique creativity.

The other problem is that succeeding in a field like acting depends on much besides raw acting talent. Getting discovered or getting the big break might depend upon a transit. Having good social connections in show business. Or conversely, a talented person living his life in West Overshoe, Iowa, so that all of that talent went into the high school play, or maybe becoming a gifted high school teacher, never to surface into the Rodden data base.

Maybe, just maybe, Big Data will show some blips and burps such that a given correlation is indeed statistically significant. But if it explains only at the level of 65%, then that still leaves 1/3 of the sample unaccounted for. Not helpful if an astrologer gets a read-my-chart question like, "Can I have a successful acting career?"

This starts to nudge us into more qualitative research. Which is the current direction that a lot of social scientists are taking.

And then what is the role of the astrologer? The minute the talk turns to statistics, suddenly the astrologer becomes invisible.