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On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:58:33 CST, Kjell Pettersson
<***@kjellpettersson.com> wrote in part:
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Post by Kjell PetterssonRaymond has shared with us a lot of his thoughts about what he finds
worthwhile to pursue astrologically. I thought it could be of interest
to hear from the rest of the gang if you have any areas of astrology
you cherish above others.
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[...]
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Post by Kjell PetterssonWhat parts of astrology are closest to your heart?
/Kjell
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Hmmm, as I have always viewed astrology as being universal, i.e.
that it applies to everything, it would be difficult for me to
separate any of its parts, as I now view astrology as a whole.
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But to come to the original question: what is closest to ny heart
about astrology.
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My answer has to be a bit biographical, as I began 'doing'
astrology like most people I knew, i.e., what used to be called
genethliac [sp?] astrology, natal or birth astrology. My early
collection of natal charts can attest to this.
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As I was trained in the ways Europeans did astrology (my main
mentors having been French and Belgians) I was very careful with
birth data, something which did not appear to be very important
then to many American authors. I viewed them as sloppy. (That was
before Rodden and her classification of data.)
*
Gradually, my interest in genethliac astrology led me to mundane
astrology. After all, logic was telling me that, if someone's
chart could show events in their life, then these events had to
have a chart of their own and, if they did, then the World must
have contained these charts of events as well. So I began, very
timidly at first, to start casting charts for no event in
particular, but for certain heavenly configurations. Equinoxes,
Solstices, certain conjunctions, etc. The list is endless,
especially when one starts studying Moon phases.
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As I was a maniac (and still am :-) ) I would not do this using
'normal' ephemeris, as they were much too imprecise. So, I began
using more precise ones, the ones employed by astronomers with
the appropriate conversions. So, I added a little trigonometry to
my astrological studies. Of course this very time-consuming
undertaking could only have been performed after I had left my
so-called day job. With no computer at the time, I was using
various forms of early calculating machines, some being huge and
without much output. Programmable ones came a bit later, thus
enabling me to do faster work. But if a maniac can do faster
work, he does *more* work in the time available. So it did not
help, it just allowed me to do more.
*
Back to mundane astrology. I had realized that authors who were
into this, were in vain attempting to predict the future and were
publishing mostly garbage, with some notable exceptions. It
became obvious to me that (please don't laugh) that the future
was much easier to predict *after the fact* than before.
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Although this might sound very stupid, it allowed me to accept
the notion that every event happens only once, and that any
attempt to predict it was, at best, a fluke. Maybe I would get it
right, from time to time, but this was - in my view - only the
product of knowing already more about my clients, and therefore
being able to 'tailor' the prediction to that situation. But this
was not astrology; it was an attempt to 'fit' astrology into what
I already knew about them.
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The same situation prevailed with mundane astrology. True, I
might have been lucky a few times, but I realized that this was
just a fluke. The best mundane astrology I ever did was astrology
after the fact. It enables one to see that events do not happen
at random, but follow astrological patterns. Therefore, astrology
was in my view perfectly useless, if one wanted to use it to
predict before the fact. But astrology remained to me a precious
source of knowledge about the World.
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Which led me to... Nostradamus!
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How come? He too was giving us predictions, but NOT astrology-
based predictions. To us, his predictions became understandable
only after the fact. No author to my knowledge had ever predicted
before the fact using Nostradamus' quatrains, despite what many
contended. There was a parallel between what one was getting from
Nostradamus and what one was getting from astrology: they both
gave us the information after the fact. And as I did not view
this as silly about astrology, I could not view it as more silly
about Nostradamus. It was just a fact.
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The difference, of course, being that he was a Seer/Prophet. A
visionary. He writes: "Propheta dicitur hodie, olim vocabatur
videns". Today we would say exactly the opposite. But he was
saying that today is called a prophet he who henceforth was
called a seer.
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Where does this leave me? To the realization that astrology is
valid only to allow us to better understand the World we live in.
It has to be an after-the-fact form of knowledge, and we, as
astrologers, ought not be embarrassed by this. Those who
criticise astrology precisely because of this have an unconscious
desire to turn astrology into a form of magic. It is far from
being magic: it is the best form of knowledge mankind has ever
devised to understand itself, the world we live in, in particular
the timing of events.
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But you knew all that, so I shall resist preaching further to the
converts. And the so-called skeptics (they are nothing but a
bunch of rabid defenders of their own views and have no skeptic
bone in their body) can just go to hell.
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Oops!
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Claude Latrémouille
February 18, 2012
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=== ***@torfree.net ===
=== CLAUDE LATRÉMOUILLE ===
===========================