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Mercury in Capricorn has no sense of humour? Hah!
We're very dry, that's all...
Exactly!! We're very funny people. No, really. We're just more refined than the average low-grade humour. :lol:

One thing that worries me about this type of astrology is the potential to start categorising people unfairly. I don't believe that mundane charts were ever designed for this purpose. One of the issues I have been thinking about lately is the difference between cultural relativism and ethical relativism. This has been brought to the fore particularly since the invasion of Iraq. The most dangerous weapon that has been used so far, in my mind, is the idea that the Iraqi people are culturally different from us and so therefore they must all be ethically different from us. This, of course, is not true. Trying to use a mundane astrology chart to explain the individuals who live in this place can lead to all sorts of trouble.

There might be a potential to use mundane charts to determine a national ethos, perhaps, but this can't be said to apply to all individuals within this nation or even most of them. Formby is a small place that is surrounded by other small places. It was there prior to the redrawing of the boundaries and, no doubt, the boundaries will change again at some stage. A more appropriate chart, if you want to look at one, might be the founding of the city rather than when the borders changed.

If you think the churches are Puritan then there is a good chance they are. The Puritans did have a great deal of political power all over England at one time, even banning Christmas for several years (far too much like a pagan festival). It does not mean that this influence still predominates. These churches are magnificent structures that are hundreds of years old. It doesn't say much about the current beliefs any more than the Tower of London says anything about the punitive measures of today's British system. You say that the people of Formby are generous but only when there is a tsunami. Welcome to the attitude of the rest of the world, not just Formby. Formby may well have a conservative leaning but it seems to me that the whole world has gone this way recently. I believe that a good look at the current planetary configurations might explain why this is so.

I am not saying that these charts shouldn't be done but I would be careful about reading too much into them and then tying it to apply it in an individualistic manner. Sometimes it can be useful to compare national charts with those of national leaders to see how the leader?s chart resonates with that of the nation but you cannot look at the national chart in order to describe the leader. And national charts are useful in times of natural disasters. Sometimes the comparison will explain the transits that conspired to create this disaster. But, again, this does not necessarily tell us anything about the individuals in this disaster. One of the most common arguments against astrology, and one that Augustine used frequently(he got it from Cicero, who, I think, got it from Carneades) was that astrology cannot possibly be true because when a disaster happens the people involved do not all have the same birth charts.

I like mundane astrology and I wish I had the time to study it more closely. But it would be wonderful to use it in a more predictive manner and be able to forecast events rather than study them after the fact.

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I would also think that mudane astrology used to 'typify' the ethos of a country is more accurate than that for a town or village. We are now a very mobile society, so there is no guarantee that the residents of Formby or anywhere else have been lifelong residents, and therefore more attuned to the chart. I have lived in four different villages surrounding Cambridge in the last ten years; where would I fit?

I'm not sure about the architecture in Formby, but during the Reformation a lot of the older churches were stripped of their magnificent paint and plaster work; that's why even some of the most splendid cathedrals today look stark and plain inside, even though the 'bones' of the Norman and Gothic structures still exist. Ely Cathedral is a case in point; it used to contain stunning painted plasterwork, but this was all hacked to pieces and destroyed during those long 150-odd years between Henry VIII's schism and the end of the Puritan period. A great shame, in my opinion. There are now few examples left of the marvellous plasterwork.

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Death of new age ideals
And which new age would that be? The one that ended with the Restoration? Or the one that ended with the ascension of the Dear Leader in 1997? Or some other one?