Tautologies Are Fun!

50
I think it was Jung who was listening to the conversation of two very educated patients at an insane asylum. When the one insane person stopped speaking in an in-depth way about a complicated subject, the other one would start speaking, and each one was speaking on a completely different subject.

Jung questioned one of them about the disconnect in their conversation since their conversational input was clearly unrelated, and they said this is the normal state of affairs for all human conversations, and it bothered him because he was never sure they were not correct about that...

51
Haha thank you Varuna. You hint at two important points that are relevant to but transcend our Valens discussion when you note that "I reject the premises of the questions, since I must in order to use a star-based frame of reference", and then add the excellent (and humorous) story about two of Jung's patients.

One, our first principles color how we see everything else. And two, that's ok - it's the human condition.

If more people realized this, there'd be a good deal less contention on these forums, IMHO.

Ok I'm way out of here...I can hear Paul and Martin typing that this thread is done even as I type this.

Until next topic, it has been fun, and I thank you again.

Phil

53
What was really funny was that when a sidereal presumption was made on sidereal forum all the siderealists jumped in to prove that it was a tropical issue :)

It proves that many of us are basically au contraire. LOL

54
Consider all sidereal stars with 2.11. and you will understand why all responses in this thread are short of historical accuracy. Regulus was not hot because of the summer. Some naturalistic astrologer thought that the days around Regulus were hot because of the fixed star. At some point in the Hellenistic tradition, a fully naturalistic conception of astrology developed that tried to explain everything through the weather, humors and winds (and thus rejected lots and numbers).

Ptolemy, who is usually thought a tropical astrologer, actually thinks fixed stars make ''day by day intensification of the weather''. See his book Phases of the Fixed stars or the relevant chapters in the Tetrabiblos if you doubt my claim.
Now the sign of Aries as a whole, because it marks the equinox, is characterized by thunder or hail, but, taken part by part, through the variation in degree that is due to the special quality of the fixed stars... - Ptolemy, translation by Robbins http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/R ... /home.html
Basically Ptolemy's cosmology or astrology is non-available today. Even his meteorology is unavailable, not because of climatic change due to some Milankovitch cycle, but simply because it is unscientific.

He says that the region of the Praesepe is stifling, that the Hyades (of the ''temperament'' of Mars) is ''fiery, producing thunder and lightning'', he thinks that the Pleaides and the Preasepe are of the nature of the Moon and thus they produce earthquakes. By the way, the third decan of Scorpio produces earthquakes as well, because he is aware of ''A Nebula behind the Sting of Scorpius'' elsewhere.

Thus the 2.11 chapter is neither applicable to the sidereal nor tropical zodiac, to the first because the non-wandering stars actually do not influence the weather, and to the latter, because Ptolemy actually thought that fixed stars influence the weather. There is some irony in the whole story, really.

Ptolemy also mentions from time to time the ''shapes'' of the images, alluding to Capricorn and Aquarius being moist. The stars are cold and moist there, so it fit well with the winter.

A lot of times you will hear a tropical astrologer say that the ancients lived in the Northern Hemisphere, so the other hemisphere problem is irrelevant. Rightly they say that we should not impose our thinking on the possible error of the ancients with the seasonal considerations. Oh, yes, but they thought that the constellations influenced the weather and following this logic we should continue to use the constellations for marking out the year and the seasons, that is by adopting a sidereal zodiac.