Fixed Stars

Dharmaruci has written on a very interesting topic this morning: The accuracy of the zodiac. There’s more there too, like how the fixed stars work so well in astrological charts and a look at Hitler’s Mercury, but this is most relevant to me at the moment:

I’ve lately been feeling more dissatisfied than usual with the imaginary nature of the zodiac in modern astrology. The planets are in real places, and their relationships with each other are real, but the constellations that are supposed to be behind them and influencing them are not there. This is partly due to precession, but actually the neat 30 degree segments they were divided into several thousand years ago are also a fiction, because nature is never like that. 

In a way western astrology is more straightforward than Vedic astrology in this respect. A western astrologer will tell you that the zodiac we use bears no relationship to the stars. I don’t want to put words in the mouth of a Vedic astrologer, but their astrology takes precession into account, so there seems to be more of a relationship with the stars, but actually the neat 30 degree fiction still remains.

This is not to say that western astrology doesn’t work, because it does, and it does so very well. But as an astrologer, what turns me on is my symbolic relationship to the sky, that is the foundation, that is what moves me, and that is what in large measure is not there. It’s like modern western astrology for me is part relationship to the sky and part tea-leaves.

I think this is really undeniably true which is what makes the skeptics so crazy. The sky isn’t cut up into nice little 30 degree segments which we call the zodiac, astrology is a symbolic system […]