Do you believe in horoscopes?

[Dreamwoven]

Well put, YesNo. I've already posted abut one book that I have read among many others (Cosmic Clocks by Gauquelin) that used thousands of cases and ran correlations. I was impressed but I am still chary of taking a definite position on the matter.

[YesNo]

I haven't read Gauquelin's work, but what I found by searching after you mentioned him seems to show that he has found the existence of an influence. Here is something by him on the "Mars effect": http://www.theoryofastrology.com/gau...ars_effect.htm

[Pompey Bum]

I used to be a Libra on the Virgo cusp. Then the planet wobbled or something and I became a little more of a Virgo. Now I think I may be what we used to refer to in High School as a "technical Virgo." I didn't really expect to get that back.

[Dreamwoven]

Thanks for that article extract, YesNo. Good work.

What I found impressive in Gauquelin's work was the large number of cases he worked with, and that as the article shows, calculated likelihood parameters for them. Sadly I lost the book but could look up the author's name, and work from there.

There is an interesting side-effect of all this. One might think that Gauquelin's findings would make traditional scientists more receptive to this theory and test it many other cases. This seems not to have happened. The answer maybe lies in Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and the idea of a tipping point when an old paradigm is overthrown and a new one is developed to replace it.

[free]

I like this quote on astrology by Jung, who, certainly, was a man who knew human nature more than ordinary people.

We are born at a given moment in a given place and like vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything else. - C.G.Jung

http://www.wisdom-of-astrology.com/t...#39;sblueprint

[Dreamwoven]

Indeed!

[YesNo]

I like this quote on astrology by Jung, who, certainly, was a man who knew human nature more than ordinary people.

We are born at a given moment in a given place and like vintage years of wine we have the qualities of the year and of the season in which we are born. Astrology does not lay claim to anything else. - C.G.Jung

http://www.wisdom-of-astrology.com/t...#39;sblueprint

The quote from Jung that stood out for me from that link was this:

Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, i.e. meaningful coincidence.

I realized I did not know what synchronicity was although I've heard the term before. This link helped: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...ronicity03.htm

The correlations that Gauquelin found might be best viewed as synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. They cannot be explained by chance and yet there is no causal, deterministic explanation either.

[free]

The quote from Jung that stood out for me from that link was this:

Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, i.e. meaningful coincidence.

I realized I did not know what synchronicity was although I've heard the term before. This link helped: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...ronicity03.htm

The correlations that Gauquelin found might be best viewed as synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. They cannot be explained by chance and yet there is no causal, deterministic explanation either.

Synchronicity is sometimes amusing, sometimes meaningless, for me. But I am not an explorer of it. Jung was. Talking about I Ching, they say that Jung used to spend hours 'under a tree' throwing the I Ching coins.

[Danik 2016]

The quote from Jung that stood out for me from that link was this:

Astrology is one of the intuitive methods like the I Ching, geomantics, and other divinatory procedures. It is based upon the synchronicity principle, i.e. meaningful coincidence.

I realized I did not know what synchronicity was although I've heard the term before. This link helped: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci...ronicity03.htm

The correlations that Gauquelin found might be best viewed as synchronicity, or meaningful coincidences. They cannot be explained by chance and yet there is no causal, deterministic explanation either.

Found this old thread when I was looking for something else.
Meaningful coincidence seems to me a good synonym for synchronicity.
Astrology is a science and a very old one with it´s own parameters practiced already in old Egypt.
In India they used astrology (I don´t know if they still do) to predict if a certain marriage would be happy or not.
According to my experience it is more helful in exploring trends and charactheristics in a certain chart. It is not usual to make a very definite prediction as a certain aspect can mean several things. For example, a good astrologer won´t tell anyone he is going to win in next week´s lotery. He well tell the asker about his abilities to deal with money and if he can see a good astrological aspect in the chart that favours playing in the lotery next week.

[YesNo]

That's how I see astrology as well, Danik. The trends aren't as clear, but the basic question is whether there is any reality that the astrologer is observing that the astronomer misses? I would say, yes. The astronomer misses the subjectivity of the observer.

Astrology is a holistic theory, much like Elliott Wave's "social mood" which I think is even more accurate than astrology. The opposite of a holistic theory is a mechanistic one that assumes some reductionist approach to reality is true rather than just a convenient model.

For what it's worth, I also think Tarot cards are valuable. If one sees them as prompts for one's intuition most people can find them useful. I have an app on my phone that gives me a card of the day to think about. I occasionally use it and find it helpful in focusing my attention.

[Danik 2016]

Yes, I agree that the astrological approach is holistic. The astrological cards of people, places, countries and events follow very accurate patterns of calculation though. Today there are several internet programs to calculate an astrological chart.

An introduction to astrology I like very much, "Astrological signs/the pulse of life" by Dane Rudhyar though the book is from the 20 C- it is a dynamic at times poetic account of the zodiac, showing how each particular sign adds its contribuition to the whole process.

[YesNo]

I'll see what the library has on astrology when I walk there this morning. There is a Vedic astrology which takes into account the precision of the equinoxes. I can't remember much about it at the moment although I did my horoscope using some online tools and the description it gave of me seemed rather accurate.

[Danik 2016]

I haven't read anything about the Vedic horoscope. For the traditional horosope one has to know the exact date and hour of birth and the place of birth. There are several online sites that make your card for free, for example astrocenter.com. But the readings of the card are usually standard computer readings.

[YesNo]

I found a printout of a vedic horoscope I did many years ago. I can't believe I still have it. Unfortunately, I didn't record the site address. It looks like there are many places now to get this done online for free.

I picked up a book by Caroline Casey at the library, "Making the Gods Work for You". She seems to be approaching it more from a psychological perspective. I don't remember much about it anymore.

[Danik 2016]

I did a Vedic one yesterday, but I still prefer the traditional one, maybe because I am more used to it. I used to try interpreting charts but I´m no astrologer. You have to have experience as a chart is like a poem. You can read it indifferent ways.
I don´t know this author but the psychological perspective can be interesting too.