Talking about tones, it's almost amusing (but not quite) to note how, like
the Monty Python butcher, yours to me is alternately rude and fawning depending on whether you want something from me or not. I'll just correct you on a few factual points:
AJ wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 11:19 pm
Ah yes, the old "it's been around a long time, so it must be true."
No, I specifically didn't say that, so either you didn't understand what I said or you are wilfully misrepresenting me. I simply questioned the reverse, and equally silly, idea that because something isn't modern or in fashion, it must have been discovered to be false. Only those who take the trouble of learning a technique and testing it will be in a position to say whether it works.
Yes, the 20th century saw a marked shift toward psychological astrology—but many predictive techniques remained in robust use, including transits, solar returns, and secondary progressions.
It would be more correct to say that some predictive techniques were kept in name (although sometimes not even that, as the names were changed) but applied in very different ways. This includes transits (given hugely greater importance today than in the pre- or early modern periods, and used differently), solar returns (formerly annual revolutions, also used differently), and the early modern technique of secondary
directions, never intended by their inventor Placidus as a stand-alone technique.
Primary directions [...] fell into disuse because they were technically cumbersome, inconsistently applied, and lacked clear, replicable results when compared with more accessible methods.
They were increasingly poorly understood from c. 1800 to the early decades of the 20th century, so yes, in that sense there was inconsistency, and yes, you did and do need some mathematical ability to use them. The rest of what you say is not true.
Even the venerable Robert Hand
Oh dear. If we are having arguments from authority, does Rob Hand really outweigh every astrological author outside India, from Ptolemy to William Lilly (and before, and after)? But let's not go there. It's just silly.
Ah, the inevitable Alan Leo as scapegoat
No, that was just a marginal note indicating that Leo coined the phrase 'modern astrology' and made it his selling point. It was meant as a nod to James's use of quotation marks around 'traditional astrology'. Until the self-professed 'moderns' came along, traditional astrology was known simply as astrology. (Having said that, though, Leo really was an ignoramus.)
it takes a lot of audacity to characterize an entire century of astrologers, many of them highly intelligent, mathematically adept, and historically literate, as enthusiastic but generally less technically proficient.
Did you catch the word 'generally'? There will be exceptions to any generalization, but anyone who takes the trouble of reading through the astrological textbooks produced from the late 18th to the early 20th century, at least the English-language ones, will be unable to escape the same conclusion. As for being historically literate, let us not forget how very difficult it was, until the late 20th century, to locate a copy even of such comparatively recent works as those of Lilly or Partridge, even if you wanted to read them — which, if we're honest, very few of the Theosophist or, later, Jungian astrologers did.
Sometimes it's due to a growing awareness that the method itself is flawed, unwieldy, or doesn't live up to its promise.
So you keep saying, but there is no historical basis to your claim that this is why ('primary') directions fell out of use. The historical evidence (written sources) is there for anyone to see, if they bother enough to go through it. You keep (rather offensively) attributing sentimental reasons to my statements, but the fact is that they are based on having read much of what there is on astrology in English from the 18th and 19th centuries, and into the early decades of the 20th. Have you?
And yet, if you look closely, you can find astrologers in the post-war world who not only understood primary directions but also chose not to use them, precisely because their complexity and ambiguity made them impractical for predictive work in the real world.
Presumably you can give us some references to the works of those astrologers? As for complexity and ambiguity, directions rank about equal with house systems, and for several of the same reasons. Astrologers who are happy to use houses (especially quadrant houses) have no reason to baulk at directions. And as for the real world, that's where I do my predictive work, in which directions play a major part.
But let's be honest: knowledge doesn't guarantee a well-founded opinion either.
No, it's a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Still necessary, though.