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Showing posts from December, 2025

Papillon

From a high cliff, Papillon observes a cove where he realizes the waves are powerful enough to carry a man out to sea and to the nearby mainland. That's from the Wikipedia article for  Papillon , a 1973 film based on a true story. Papillon is French for butterfly and it's the nickname of the main character who has a large butterfly tattoo.  He's a safe cracker wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in a harsh prison system in French Guiana. At some point, he's transferred to a facility on an island.  Others have built rafts to try to escape and have all been washed back to the base of the cliffs by strong waves, breaking up their rafts and probably killing them. Papillon spends substantial time observing the waves and concludes there's a pattern. My recollection is he says there is a pattern of seven waves which repeats.  He believes if he leaves at the right time, he can get out. He does successfully escape. A reasonable use of astrology ...

The Music of the Spheres

The Planets by Holst is described by Wikipedia thusly: The Planets, Op. 32, is a seven-movement orchestral suite by the English composer Gustav Holst, written between 1914 and 1917. In the last movement the orchestra is joined by a wordless female chorus. Each movement of the suite is named after a planet of the Solar System and reflects its character according to astrology.  I would say it's seven "songs" from an album I had in my teens. So it's music that is supposed to capture the character of each of seven planets in our solar system. Historically, a drummer helped soldiers march in step and rowers row in sync. They used a fairly large drum with a deep tone. Sound is vibration and you not only hear a deep tone like that, you feel it. This means it serves as troop coordination even over the din of war. Deep tones can travel long distances and both whales and elephants use deep tones to communicate with others of their species very far away. Because sound is vibra...

How to start?

So you read my last post  and you're an astrologer and want to start doing this one day-at-time Sun Sign astrology. Where to start? How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.   Don't make any big dramatic announcements. If you have a website, Twitter account or other online channel for publishing stuff, start where you are and come up with a schedule that makes sense to you. If you Tweet DAILY, do "Today's birthday..." If you blog once a week, do "This week's birthday kids." Ideally, then ADD at least the date and approximate degree of X sign to a CHART for people to consult. In the future when you write about things like transits, make sure you give exact degrees rather than hand wavy generalizations.  Start saying over and over "IF you have your Natal Chart, any heavenly body at THIS degree of ANY sign will feel some sort of impact. If you don't have your custom chart, look up your birthday on this work-in-progress chart of Sun positi...

The Advice Business

So someone using a program to cast charts may not be qualified to help space agencies or space companies figure out how to use astrological charts as gravity maps to improve space navigation. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't worth paying for life advice, which is what most people want out of it. I have a lot of criticisms of popular or sun sign  astrology, such as: Canned astrology   A Foggy Memory of my Rulerships Hypotheses   The Secret Sauce   Earth, The Final Frontier   I LIKE astrology. I found   it useful to help me figure out me. I would like to see it return to being a respected source of good advice like it once was. Some areas I wish we would work on: 1. Update Rulerships and base it on something more substantive than whatever it's currently based on. 2. Rename or rebrand it because it never was the study of the stars. It was the study of the wandering stars -- planets visible to the naked eye without use of a telescope --  and othe...

How much does this matter?

The rising sign changes signs every TWO HOURS because there are 12 signs and 24 hours in the day. Being off by an hour means half the people will be told the wrong rising sign. And ALL people will be told the wrong degree which impacts aspects and transits. How much does it matter that we have a dozen house systems and fundamentally don't agree on house details if you are an engineer at NASA? I have absolutely no idea. I'm guessing the big information is stuff like "Planets that form a 90 degree angle to Earth at launch time or to the current path of travel of some space vehicle will create a high energy gulf stream, so to speak, which can potentially cause problems OR get used  to rapidly ride that wave to where you are going." Will NASA need to "correct" existing astrological lore about house systems to use this information? My two answers are No and Not Necessarily.  So I once had this  get rich quick scheme  where I was going to offer to do a quick and ...

Serious Astrologers

If you work for a space agency or company and want to take my hypothesis seriously that astrological charts are geocentric maps of the solar system which can be used as Gravity Maps for improving navigation, you should get a sailor experienced with sailed vessels and a serious astrologer who knows the math to help you figure this out. The punchline   is it was a lat-long (latitude longitude) calculation and I knew he was wrong because I'm an astrologer. Calculating lat-long for WHERE someone was born or the event in question took place is part of every chart. I was getting my Certificate in GIS from UC-Riverside which shares staff with ESRI because ESRI is in the same gepgraphic area. They are essentially co-located, or close enough for ESRI staff to moonlight as UC-Riverside professors for the occasional class here and there.  ESRI is the world leader in GIS software, so I have world class GIS education and I was better than my classmates at understanding things like lat-lon...

Old Math

If the movie Hidden Figures is at all historically accurate, they solved their unsolvable navigation issue with Euler's Method, which is called old math in the movie. Astrology is old math for mapping the gravitational ripples we need to understand for navigating between planets, like a sailing ship on the sea. An astrological chart is a geocentric map of the solar system full of notes about interactions between the gravitational wakes and eddies of other heavenly bodies as we experience those gravitational pressures on Earth. You just need to translate it to a space flight navigation tool.  It already has a rich history of observations of turbulence, dead zones, high pressure zones, harmonic confluence etc. Figuring out how to translate thousands of years of observations such as "When planets change direction, you are in for a bumpy few days." to space weather flight turbulence will give you access to a wealth of existing knowledge about gravitational sea waves, so to ...

Aspects and Transits

Aspects are the angles in an astrological chart. It's a map of a point in time of a solar system where everything is in motion. Transits are current and future motion and show how those bodies are currently interacting with each other or how they relate to points in someone's natal chart.