Skyscript Astrology Forum

Hi
This is from David Roehl pdf at Vettius valesns group

Q: Why are some charts wrong? Is this because of the wrong calculations Valens made or some
charts are correct when you make them in siderial?
Dave: Because he had no ephemeris, nor a clockwork mechanism whereby to find planetary
positions. If you have book 1, go look. He says you start from Augustus Cesar and count this way
and that and when you get to your date, that's the result. What he means is that you start from the
day that Augustus died. Run a chart for that day (Wiki will give it to you) and look at Saturn's
position. Round it off and that's where Valens thought Saturn was on that day, because that's why
he picked that day as a starting point. Note the counts do not make allowance for retrogrades,
known to some (not Valens, alas) as epicycles.
So there are two problems. One, the final positions are mean, not actual, and if you miscount
you get a mess and won't know it. With a few exceptions, Valens only gives position by sign, and
when I constructed the charts, some of them had placements in the first or last degrees in the sign,
which is dicey. It was not unusual for one planet to be wrong. In a handful of charts, two planets
are wrong. It would be easier to give charts the way he gave them and not put actual dates and
times under them, but I wanted students to tear into these charts as actual charts. I was
disappointed that neither Neugebauer nor the Hindsight folks spotted Nero's birth and death
charts. (They were given to me, I did not find them.) If we can get the actual dates, there might be more historical characters among them. Book 2 (I think) ends with charts of people who died. I
suspect these are death, not birth charts. There is one that has an error in it. If I correct the error in
one direction, I get one date. If I correct it in the other, I get "Easter", 33 AD. The subject was
"thrown to the lions." Writing c.170 AD, is Valens trying to tell us something?
Q: Are the biggest part of the Neugebauer's charts with correct date? In your book, are you refering
to those dates given by him or you have calculated all the charts on your own investigation?
Dave: With the exception of Nero, and to the best of my knowledge, no one before me has
attempted to find actual dates for the charts in Valens. Certainly no one has produced actual
charts. I did not want to make a flabby book. I wanted to make a book that answered the obvious
questions, like, what date was this person born? Back in the 1950's Neugebauer used the same
methods to construct his charts that Valens did, believe it or not: Counts. There were no
ephemerides that went that far back, and there was no easy way to calculate. Sepharial did the
same with his old charts.
Valens is way, way more than releasings and minor periods. He has squares and rectangles and
all manner of things. He treats the parts as if they were actual planets, he counts from a part to
some other place, treating parts as if they were ascendants. The techniques are spectacular, the
reason for them is, I believe, because he has only approximate positions and so needed a lot of
horsepower to make forecasts. I am writing marginal notes, to the extent I understand

Making the assumption that Valens didn't have an ephemeris because some of the charts are wrong is about the same as thinking that Schmidt translated the original scraps of paper that Valens actually wrote on.

This was not the case. In between Valens time and Schmidt's, due to the lack of a printing press in the early days, there were copyists who introduced transcript errors, edited what they didn't understand, etc...

zoidsoft wrote:Making the assumption that Valens didn't have an ephemeris because some of the charts are wrong is about the same as thinking that Schmidt translated the original scraps of paper that Valens actually wrote on.

This was not the case. In between Valens time and Schmidt's, due to the lack of a printing press in the early days, there were copyists who introduced transcript errors, edited what they didn't understand, etc...

Regret to disagree. Please refer to Book 1. Valens did not have an ephemeris, he had counts. He gives them explicitly in Book 1. They are based on the death of some Emperor or other. At first I thought these counts would start on the actual day of death, but I was informed by James Herschel Holden a couple of years ago that one reign ended and another began on the 28th of August of the year. Which might not have been the official Roman new year, but was the official Egyptian new year, which was the calendar that Valens used. So far as the many ancient calendars, Al Biruni wrote a book on that, which the Universe Bookstore in Toronto used to sell. I have a copy.

Which means we can set a chart for the 28th of August, 14 AD, the official end of the reign of Augustus (who had, in fact, died on the 19th of August), to know what Valens' starting positions really were, as he uses the death of Augustus for several of them. We then know how much error is in play. We do not have to imagine scribes who could not copy.

We then use those counts to establish the "Valens horoscopes" for Emperor Nero, who was born on December, 37, and who died on June 9, 68. Valens gives BOTH charts in his book.

Here is a great secret to Valens. After trying for several years to use the charts in the book to establish where he lived, I finally realized his charts were not of his clients, but of the rich and famous of his day. Which means that most of them were set in Rome, even though it is clear that Valens himself did not live there. (Nor did he live in Antioch, but that's another story for another day.)

Which means that if we set up the charts, get actual birth data and then study the history of the period, we might find any number of famous births - and deaths - among them. Valens himself gives no names. Nero's birth and death charts were discovered among them by accident. Among the death charts, if one of them has, not one, but two mistakes, it's the Crucifixion itself. Thrown to the lions, so says Valens. The chart in fact has at least one mistake in it.

In reconstructing ancient charts, Valens gives six or seven different, contradictory ways of calculating the ascendant. To the best of my knowledge, none of them will produce what we think the rising sign should be, which means all this equal house or whole house stuff is premature. He has the start of Alcabitius houses, which is to say, a precursor to Placidius, which was used for primary directions. Also note that despite not being able to find the ascendant, his formula for calculating the MC from it is dead accurate.

What is not stated in Valens is that if you have a sundial and a simple table, you can read the ascendant directly from it, provided it is sunny and a day birth. Valens, it seems, does not bother with the obvious.

What is not so obvious is that he pulls the same trick at night when the moon is out. If you know the day of the month and from it, the sun's degree, and if you know how many days it's been since the new moon, you will know the moon's position within a couple of degrees and by using that and another set of tables, then when the moon is visible by night you will be able to tell the time at night, which in addition is also the approximate degree rising.

Just as most medieval European cities had a big clock at the main square, ancient cities had an obelisk that functioned as a sundial. When these ancient economies collapsed and the obelisks fell into disuse, the markings on the ground wore away and we no longer knew their real function. Valens presumes you know this, and much more.

Having established this, it seems clear that when Valens talks of the "lunar gnomon" (Riley translation) he is probably talking of LUNAR MANSIONS.

Now does this help any of you to get beyond the idea that Valens had a printed ephemeris open in front of him? I have not begun to talk about how Ionian, Attic and Roman numbers would be used in order to perform the complex spherical trig necessary to actually calculate planetary positions in that fashion, as such calculations are virtually impossible using those systems.

For that matter, go back to the Neugebauer and Van Hoesen Greek Horoscopes of 1959, which has all of the Valens charts worked out in it. All calculated by means of the same counts as Valens himself used, because until Neil Michelsen wrote the original routines for IBM back in the 1970's, there was no other way to calculate that far back.

Honestly, David, and I'm guessing it's you, this is just kookery and you nor anyone else is benefitted by it.

dragonqueen wrote:

zoidsoft wrote:Making the assumption that Valens didn't have an ephemeris because some of the charts are wrong is about the same as thinking that Schmidt translated the original scraps of paper that Valens actually wrote on.

This was not the case. In between Valens time and Schmidt's, due to the lack of a printing press in the early days, there were copyists who introduced transcript errors, edited what they didn't understand, etc...

Regret to disagree. Please refer to Book 1. Valens did not have an ephemeris, he had counts. He gives them explicitly in Book 1. They are based on the death of some Emperor or other. At first I thought these counts would start on the actual day of death, but I was informed by James Herschel Holden a couple of years ago that one reign ended and another began on the 28th of August of the year. Which might not have been the official Roman new year, but was the official Egyptian new year, which was the calendar that Valens used. So far as the many ancient calendars, Al Biruni wrote a book on that, which the Universe Bookstore in Toronto used to sell. I have a copy.

Which means we can set a chart for the 28th of August, 14 AD, the official end of the reign of Augustus (who had, in fact, died on the 19th of August), to know what Valens' starting positions really were, as he uses the death of Augustus for several of them. We then know how much error is in play. We do not have to imagine scribes who could not copy.

We then use those counts to establish the "Valens horoscopes" for Emperor Nero, who was born on December, 37, and who died on June 9, 68. Valens gives BOTH charts in his book.

Here is a great secret to Valens. After trying for several years to use the charts in the book to establish where he lived, I finally realized his charts were not of his clients, but of the rich and famous of his day. Which means that most of them were set in Rome, even though it is clear that Valens himself did not live there. (Nor did he live in Antioch, but that's another story for another day.)

Which means that if we set up the charts, get actual birth data and then study the history of the period, we might find any number of famous births - and deaths - among them. Valens himself gives no names. Nero's birth and death charts were discovered among them by accident. Among the death charts, if one of them has, not one, but two mistakes, it's the Crucifixion itself. Thrown to the lions, so says Valens. The chart in fact has at least one mistake in it.

In reconstructing ancient charts, Valens gives six or seven different, contradictory ways of calculating the ascendant. To the best of my knowledge, none of them will produce what we think the rising sign should be, which means all this equal house or whole house stuff is premature. He has the start of Alcabitius houses, which is to say, a precursor to Placidius, which was used for primary directions. Also note that despite not being able to find the ascendant, his formula for calculating the MC from it is dead accurate.

What is not stated in Valens is that if you have a sundial and a simple table, you can read the ascendant directly from it, provided it is sunny and a day birth. Valens, it seems, does not bother with the obvious.

What is not so obvious is that he pulls the same trick at night when the moon is out. If you know the day of the month and from it, the sun's degree, and if you know how many days it's been since the new moon, you will know the moon's position within a couple of degrees and by using that and another set of tables, then when the moon is visible by night you will be able to tell the time at night, which in addition is also the approximate degree rising.

Just as most medieval European cities had a big clock at the main square, ancient cities had an obelisk that functioned as a sundial. When these ancient economies collapsed and the obelisks fell into disuse, the markings on the ground wore away and we no longer knew their real function. Valens presumes you know this, and much more.

Having established this, it seems clear that when Valens talks of the "lunar gnomon" (Riley translation) he is probably talking of LUNAR MANSIONS.

Now does this help any of you to get beyond the idea that Valens had a printed ephemeris open in front of him? I have not begun to talk about how Ionian, Attic and Roman numbers would be used in order to perform the complex spherical trig necessary to actually calculate planetary positions in that fashion, as such calculations are virtually impossible using those systems.

For that matter, go back to the Neugebauer and Van Hoesen Greek Horoscopes of 1959, which has all of the Valens charts worked out in it. All calculated by means of the same counts as Valens himself used, because until Neil Michelsen wrote the original routines for IBM back in the 1970's, there was no other way to calculate that far back.

Kookery? Is that your sole argumente?

Either this gets on point, or it goes the way of the other Valens thread.

Sometimes it just isn't necessary to go into a long diatribe when a short statement can prove the case.

Chris Brennan points out that Valens refers to the "Eternal Tables", which was the mainstream ephemeris before Ptolemy's gained widespread circulation. While Schmidt refers to the "rough and ready" calculation methods of Valens, not all charts have the same level of inaccuracy. Some were too accurate which suggests that he did have access at times (maybe when he wasn't traveling to see the "amazing Abraham", etc.). Also most of the critical edition compilers such as Otto Neugebauer and David Pingree state that there were copyist errors and edits done. This was explained in Schmidt's prefaces to Valens and we at PH did try to date them (including myself) using Neugebauer's "Greek Horoscopes" back in the mid-90's using software.

As for the accuracy issue and the reason for the "counts", if there wasn't enough accuracy to place planets correctly then what good would ephemerides do? After all these ephemerides were calculated with the most advanced mathematics of the day so if they couldn't do it back then, then what?

Now ready for this thread to go "poof"...

Q: Why are some charts wrong? Is this because of the wrong calculations Valens made or some
charts are correct when you make them in siderial?
Dave: Because he had no ephemeris, nor a clockwork mechanism whereby to find planetary positions.

The idea Valens had no astronomical tables to work with seems to be refuted outright by scholarship on this issue.

For example, see this piece by Mark Riley:

Besides consulting the astronomers Hipparchus and Apollonius, and the Babylonians Soudines and Kidenas whose data for the Sun and Moon he claims to have used, Valens studied the ??ancient astrologers??, particularly King Nechepso and the sage Petosiris, legendary Egyptian astrologers and Critodemus, who lived in the first century CE. A Survey of Vettius Valens, by Mark Riley

http://www.csus.edu/indiv/r/rileymt/PDF ... Valens.pdf

Some of the planetary tables he relied on might have been crude by our modern standards but that is a totally different issue. I seem to recall Neugebauer and Van Hoesen stating somewhere in Greek Horoscopes that Valens lunar positions were often out due to his reliance on the Babylonian tables of Soudines and Kidenas. I have no time to dig out the relevant section just now but I refer anyone there for clarification on this issue.

Mark

BTW, an interesting aside to this dating of the charts in "Greek Horoscopes" is that it sort of contradicted the Anatoly Fomenko theory which was hot during the mid-90's in academic circles which stated that our history has been altered. Fomenko put forth the idea that there is really only 700 years of original western history and that it is all repeated under different labels and he "proved" it using advanced statistical analysis. However, Valens charts do indeed seem to come from about 2000 years ago.

Anatoly Fomenko theory which was hot during the mid-90's in academic circles which stated that our history has been altered.

I'm not familiar with Foemenko but Rob Hand made a similar statement in a lecture I attended claiming our dates were out of whack with the actual events and the guy most responsible was an astrologer/historian. Hand said that history may have been rectified.

Tom wrote:

Anatoly Fomenko theory which was hot during the mid-90's in academic circles which stated that our history has been altered.

I'm not familiar with Foemenko but Rob Hand made a similar statement in a lecture I attended claiming our dates were out of whack with the actual events and the guy most responsible was an astrologer/historian. Hand said that history may have been rectified.

Rob Hand is aware of the Fomenko study. It was presented at the 1995 PHASE conclave by Robert Schmidt and perhaps more recently Hand has discovered where the alteration began at Catholic Univ. Fomenko said that this retooling of history probably happened in the early renaissance.

Zoidsoft wrote:

Rob Hand is aware of the Fomenko study. It was presented at the 1995 PHASE conclave by Robert Schmidt and perhaps more recently Hand has discovered where the alteration began at Catholic Univ. Fomenko said that this retooling of history probably happened in the early renaissance.

I was under the impression Fomenko's radical historical revisionist theory belonged out there in the kookiness category referred to earlier.

I haven't heard of a single serious historian anywhere who gives these theories the time of day. I am therefore quite shocked to hear that Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt toyed with this theory.

From Wikipedia:

Fomenko is a supporter of drastically revising historical chronology. He has created his own revision called New Chronology, based on statistical correlations, dating of zodiacs, and by examining the mathematics and astronomy involved in chronology.

Fomenko claims that he has discovered that many historical events do not correspond mathematically with the dates they are supposed to have occurred on. He asserts from this that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits.

He also claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D. and was crucified on Joshua's Hill; that the Trojan war and the Crusades were the same historical event; and that Genghis Khan and the Mongols were actually Russians.

As well as disputing written chronologies, Fomenko also disputes more objective dating techniques such as dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating (see here for an examination of the latter criticism). His books include Empirico-statistical Analysis of Narrative Material and Its Applications and History: Fiction or Science?.

Most Russian scientists and worldwide historians considered Fomenko's historical works to be pseudoscientific.

I can only assume part of the appeal of this theory for astrologers was that it relied on the dating of zodiacs.

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_(Fomenko)

Mark