Octoscope and the Masculine / Feminine Polarity

1
Hello Therese, Martin and all my other sidereal friends,

you may have noted on the Philosophy and Science section that I've (carefully, tentatively, keeping a low profile) come back to astrology or more exactly to astro-statistical studies. I made a study about Octoscope, the discussion can be found here http://skyscript.co.uk/forums/viewtopic ... sc&start=0 .

But then it so happened that in another study the sidereal zodiac proved to be the more correct one. I quote my own text from this morning:
I would like to make an update and that is that before finishing my paper on the results of the study at hand I decided to settle the zodiac question for myself for good. I wanted to be sure that the tropical zodiac is the one that pays off in further studies. I thought that the tropical zodiac will be the winner, but I just wanted to be sure of it.

So I went through the same 180+ groups (with Jigsaw and Excel it?s not as slow or tedious as it sounds) and looked for the most frequent Ascendant ruler in each group. Because the traditional rulers overlap (people ruled sidereally by Mars are most often ruled tropically by Venus and Jupiter and so on), only one of the zodiacs should give clear and logical, unconfused results.

And to my surprise it was the sidereal zodiac after all. Even the planetary polarities were visible with the sidereal Ascendant rulers. Mars: passion and confrontation <--> Venus: sensibility, intelligence and conciliation; Mercury: physical and mental action, practicality and worldliness <--> Jupiter: quietness, spirituality and otherworldliness (I know that this doesn?t align with modern Jupiter as the planet of excess and extraversion, but I think this modern interpretation stems mainly from tropical Sagittarius = sidereal Scorpio ruled by Mars); the Sun and the Moon: the queen and the king, uniqueness, leadership, centre of attention <--> Saturn: mass mentality, working class, repetition, perseverance.

The most curious and provocative polarity emerged with the Sun and the Moon: the Hellenistic notion of the Sun as Spirit and the Moon as Matter becomes really apprehensible on the sidereal zodiac, but so that the Sun (Leo rising) emerges as the fragile, sensitive, feminine Princess and the Moon (Cancer rising) as the strong, physical, protective, masculine King. That would change the masculine / feminine polarities of all the signs on the sidereal zodiac.

So I?ll write a paper of this study first. I?ll put the link here on the Skyscript forum for free download as a new topic, when the paper is ready.

I have already looked at the sidereal Ascendant rulers in Octoscope houses, and confusingly now it seems that the faganesque ?Ascendant as the center of the 1st house? type Octoscope works better after all. It needs further studies.
So actually here are two topics: do any of you use the Fagan Octoscope (eight, ?Sripati? style houses where the cusp is the center of the house, clockwise direction)? How do you interpret the houses?

It might be that the planets could be associated with the houses in the Chaldean order: 1st house ? (body) Saturn; 2nd house (money, possibly also religion) ? Jupiter; 3rd house ? (movement, goals) Mars; 4th house ? (soul, depth psychology, ?the inner child?) the Sun; 5th house ? (writing, audience) Venus; 6th house (illness, service) Mercury, 7th house ? (politics, society, marriage) the Moon; 8th house ? (death but also visual arts) Saturn again OR the Nodal Axis. The topics in parenthesis are tentative results from the study I?ve done.

Do you have any further views on the houses, other than those brought by Fagan and Patrice Guinard in their articles?

Another topic, maybe worth a new, independent topic is the result of the Sun as a feminine as the Moon as a masculine symbol. I know that Therese reverses the extravert / introvert qualities on the sidereal zodiac, but should we reverse the whole gender paradigm? Don?t you see sidereal Water and Earth, not only or even more extroverted but actually more masculine (physical, hard, non-sensitive)? And sidereal Fire and Air as more feminine (sensitive, romantic, light, non-physical)? Is this too radical a shift?

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Papretis wrote:
Another topic, maybe worth a new, independent topic is the result of the Sun as a feminine as the Moon as a masculine symbol. I know that Therese reverses the extravert / introvert qualities on the sidereal zodiac, but should we reverse the whole gender paradigm? Don?t you see sidereal Water and Earth, not only or even more extroverted but actually more masculine (physical, hard, non-sensitive)? And sidereal Fire and Air as more feminine (sensitive, romantic, light, non-physical)? Is this too radical a shift?
Papretis, I've recently adjusted my thoughts on gender somewhat based on translations of traditional western texts. If you have time, please read the introductory posts on the sidereal forum here on the topic "Traditional Ideas in the Sidereal: Trigons and Temperament."

We must first define exactly what we mean by masculine and feminine traits in relation to zodiac signs. I've tried to do that in my posts. Yes, a sidereal gender discussion would make an interesting new topic.
http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/LostZodiac.htm

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Papretis wrote:
So I went through the same 180+ groups (with Jigsaw and Excel. It's not as slow or tedious as it sounds) and looked for the most frequent Ascendant ruler in each group. Because the traditional rulers overlap (people ruled sidereally by Mars are most often ruled tropically by Venus and Jupiter and so on), only one of the zodiacs should give clear and logical, unconfused results.
Papretis, I am not sure of the method you used in this research. Were you counting totals only for the ascendant by zodiac sign or were you counting the signs where the ascendant lord was located? Or both? In my work I've found the location and aspects of the ascendant lord to be significant, but I haven't found that the ascendant sign alone is important except as a reference point for physical appearance.

I won't join the discussion on the Octoscope as I have never used it, and have no experience to offer. However, there seems to be a vibrant Octoscope discussion on the link you posted.
http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/LostZodiac.htm

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Hi Therese and others,

I'm on a holiday by my family, so this week and the next will not be so active regarding to astrology. I'm writing this on my mobile phone :) .

A new topic devoted to the masculine / feminine polarization might be worth starting.

But I can say that what I mean by masculinity is exactly the same thing as described in I Ching etc. As you quote I Ching translated by Richard Wilhelm (I've had the same book on my bookself for the last 20+ years): "In relation to the human sphere, this shows how the great man brings peace and security to the world through his activity in creating order...? (p. 3). This is exactly how people ruled (sidereally) by the Moon appeared in my study: firm, commanding, stable, protective, orderly, military-related, leadership-related... but not necessarily especially extrovert or showy.

Regarding the Octoscope: in my solitary moments I've had time to reflect the results of my several "sidereal Asc rulers in houses" studies. There are signals about some kind of twelve-fold Sripati or Vehlow houses to be the most fruitful direction after all. Therefore I just read the most interesting discussion about the original Indian house systems by you, Mark, Martin and pankajdubey, where it emerged that the Vehlow houses were used by B. V. Raman and possibly his family since who knows when. Can't wait I get back home for a couple of days for further studies until I start another holiday trip. But probably the Octoscope will be dropped for now.

Inconclusive?

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Good morning,

Not only have there been shifts of zodiacs, due to for example replacement of zodiacs with unequal constellations by equal-length zodiacs, to procession of the fixed stars compared to solstices and equinoxes (or, inversely, precession of latter compared to the former), but also in gender assignments to planets and, probably, to constellations. An excellent example might be Taurus the Bull who, according to widely accepted astrological symbolic systems, should rather be a Cow! :D In ancient Mesopotamia, the Moon was masculine, reflected even today in several languages like German (DER Mond, DIE Sonne).

Thus, the determination of the validity of a zodiac (unless all of the main current astrology computer programmes are mistaken in listing up to three dozen 'sidereal' ones) based on the sole criterion of Ascendant in equal-sign Leo or in equal-sign Cancer might be presumptuous, aside from the fact than in both cases the Ascendant may be at a border or in another unequal astronomical constellation than either of these. One might also bear in mind that assignments of constellation forms to star clusters have varied to some extent even from very ancient Mesopotamia until classical Greece, much more when including other ancient civilisations like China and Central America.

When one also recalls nutation and proper motion of the fixed stars, for example that Antares exhibits much less such motion than Aldebaran, one might be persuaded to consider tacking an equal-sign 'sidereal' zodiac to the former rather than, as often occurs, to the latter at about 15 degrees Taurus.

The human mind, however, generally craves 'fixity' of some kind and thrills. These human propensities apparently lead many if not most astrologers to understand and practice astrology more like a dogmatic belief system than an experimental science. With enough 'positives' through many astrological factors, techniques, etc., those so inclined will much more likely than not experience 'spiritual' (spiritus = air) thrills confirming their beliefs. If, for example, fixed stars including apparent magnitude 2 with an orb of 1 degree so not suffice to produce enough thrills, one can expand the set to include magnitudes 3 and 4 as well with orbs beginning with 7 degrees for 0 and below magnitudes. The inclusion of relationships based on ecliptic longitude, right ascension AND paranatellonta will with near certitude produce sufficient thrills for anyone. Thrills are enjoyable! :D

Best regards,

lihin
Non esse nihil non est.

Re: Inconclusive?

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lihin wrote:(...) The human mind, however, generally craves 'fixity' of some kind and thrills. These human propensities apparently lead many if not most astrologers to understand and practice astrology more like a dogmatic belief system than an experimental science.
Lihin, what pragmatic research do you plan to contribute to this dismal state of affairs? I have tried to show some differences between the Sun and Moon in actual horoscopes based on the Gauquelin collection of biographical data. http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/apolar1.htm

Perhaps you would like to comment on this article?

Therese
http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/LostZodiac.htm

research

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Good evening,

Thanks for the link. The article seems inaccurate to me in several ways, some of which i shall list here.

Even in India there is no 'the sidereal zodiac' but rather several of them. No so-called 'sidereal' zodiac is really sidereal because the constellations are not of equal length. A brief comparison of the 'sidereal' equal sign zodiacs listed in for example Janus and other astrology software programmes shows differences of up to 15 ecliptical degrees and more amongst them. In spite of the repeated query, no one here at this Forum has yet proposed coherent criteria, or any criteria at all for that matter, to systematically determine which of the numerous 'sidereal' zodiacs, if any, is the most correct.

As several Forum members have discussed in other threads, some are of the opinion that there is no 'the' tropical zodiac either but rather two of them, one for the northern, the other for the southern hemisphere with signs offset by 180 ecliptical degrees between them.

As mentioned in my last post in this thread, the symbolic assignments of positive, active, male to the Sun and the contraries to the Moon are far from traditionally universal. One can for example argue that Luna moves much quicker than Sol and rules a cardinal sign whilst Sol is much slower and rules a less ' dynamic' fixed sign.

As stated today in another thread in the horary section, my own feeble research efforts concentrate on horary astrology due for example to its frequent possibilities to limit the number of possible outcomes to only two and to its concentration on verifiable external events as well as to its comparatively fixed rule sets. Getting the assumptions clear and the zoo of variables small are no mean tasks. And scarcely two astrologers have the same set of assumptions!

Best regards,

lihin
Non esse nihil non est.

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Lihin, you are going off the track of the conversation. The significance of the article was to show the different personality types of those with the Sun or Moon in close aspect to the ascendant. Signs don't seem to be significant in that respect. They can be eliminated.

Only the prominence (in relation to the ascendant) of the Sun or Moon needs to be considered, and the personality traits collected from biographies by the Gauquelins. If you had read the article carefully, you would have seen that the planetary degrees for individuals were in the tropical zodiac.

This isn't a discussion of the zodiac. That is a different topic entirely. This is a discussion of solar and lunar symbolism as actually observed in individuals.

Therese
http://www.snowcrest.net/sunrise/LostZodiac.htm

Premises

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Good morning,

The Gauquelins, academically qualified statisticians, were well aware of the immense difficulties in defining and classifying "personality traits" and mentioned such problems in their writings. They relied chiefly on data gleaned from French periodicals of the 1st part of the 20th century.

If the underlying premises of a hypothetical system have not yet been demonstrated to be sufficiently statistically reliable, even within a restricted framework like 'France from 1920 to 1960', one may doubt their extension to a global framework. Some would perhaps doubt that there is any such non-elusive thing altogether as 'personality' ('persona' is 'mask' in ancient Greek) that can be pinned down and qualified.

In my humble opinion the validity of tropical zodiacs for purposes of investigations of correlations amongst celestial and terrestrial events has yet to be sufficiently demonstrated either, although the yearly solar cycle provides many such correlations. For example, now we are experiencing hot weather in central Europe. The relative advantage of tropical zodiacs, however, is that to my knowledge there is a maximum of two of them, thus greatly reducing the number of variables compared to the plethora of 'sidereal' zodiacs to investigate.

For similar reasons i have elected to restrict my own research attempts to horary astrology and only to queries that have binary outcomes concerning external events.

Best regards,

lihin
Non esse nihil non est.