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Hello Deb,

Thanks for clarifying your position. I think I am just beginning to appreciate what an enormous topic this is!

Perhaps my pressing publc speaking deadline has made me rather impatient to find black and white answers where they don't necessarily exist. I guess I am going to have to learn to accept a degree of ambiguity and humility.

Incidentally, going back to my original post I think I have clarified where my confusion arose about Kepler and heliocentric astrology. I have been reading Fred Gettings Dictionary of Astrology. He has a section entitled 'Keplerian Harmonics' where he states Kepler directly linked the heliocentric distances between the planets with musical scales. This is a different point from what David Plant and Nick Kollerstrom were stating when they mentioned Kepler's use of musical scale to explain his new aspects in geocentric astrology.

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I haven?t read Maurice McCann?s book on the Sun and the aspects but I can imagine that it raises some good points. Now I understand why you brought up the suggestion that the origin of aspects could be linked to their relationship with the Sun and why there is some association between that and the sign rulership scheme. I don?t know what McCann says but I also feel that planetary cycles from and to the Sun are crucially important to traditional astrological theory, and generally underestimated in modern astrology. I think there?s room for a lot more research and commentary to be done on that.

It looks like my memory made quite an exaggeration of the comment Kepler wrote about the book possibly having to wait a long time for a suitable reader. It was probably this comment I was thinking of, his Introduction to Book V.
See, I cast the die and write the book. Whether it is to be read by the people of the present or of the future makes no difference: let it wait its reader for a hundred years, if God himself has stood ready for six thousand years for one to study him.
This is just after where he talks about being stimulated by a manuscript of the Harmony of Ptolemy, having discovered that the ?great man? basically set out the same conclusions as he did, and that they both independently came to the same views, even though there was an interval of fifteen centuries between them. I really like the fact that Kepler was more concerned about his book being a worthy contribution than a popular one. He talks about himself and Ptolemy as two men who gave themselves "wholly to the study of nature".