the-astrology-book

Mundane Astrology
and mythical king Osiris. Thus, the concept of the sky as an extension of earthly space
(the modern signs of the zodiac were known as houses and the modern houses as
places) survives from the Greek world, with each part subject to a ruling planet. The
Babylonian concept of astrology as the reading of signs continued, but parallel with an
alternative cosmology, derived from the fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. philosophers
Plato and Aristotle, in which God’s influence descended to Earth via the planetary
spheres. Hence, the idea of planetary influences developed only within the context of
a divinely ordered cosmos.
The overall framework for most western mundane astrology down to the present
day, though, was laid by the second-century Greek astrologer Claudius Ptolemy
in his Tetrabiblos (in Latin, Quadripatitium; in English, “four books”). In particular,
Ptolemy revised the Mesopotamian system of equating countries to stars or constellations
and identified 72 countries allocated to the 12 signs of the zodiac. He also codified
rules for interpreting eclipses and ingresses, and these rules have been repeated
down to modern times.
Following astrology’s revival in Europe in the nineteenth century, mundane
astrology was still broadly laid down by Ptolemy. It was crudely predictive in that there
was little concern with history, only with the future. It was crude because, while it
relied on classical astrology, it had discarded the complex interpretative structure and
multiple logical steps that allowed medieval and Renaissance astrologers to reach precise
conclusions. This is not to say that this revived Ptolemaic astrology was more or
less accurate, just that its interpretative process was much simpler. However, a series of
highly inaccurate predictions did eventually provoke a crisis. These were the highprofile
forecasts that there would be no war between Britain and Germany in the late
1930s, made by Charles E. O. Carter, perhaps the most respected astrologer within the
profession in Britain, and R. H. Naylor, the most serious of the high-profile British
media astrologers. The fact that there were also correct forecasts did not detract from
the embarrassment.
The result of the forecasts, after the end of World War II, was a series of innovations
designed to increase the efficacy of prediction. First, Carter proposed the creation
of sets of data for countries in order to reduce the dependence on the Ptolemaic
rulerships, a task he proposed in An Introduction to Political Astrology, which was completed
in Nicholas Campion’s The Book of World Horoscopes in 1997. Second, in
France, Henri Gouchon and André Barbault pioneered the use of outer planet
(Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto) cycles to provide long-term timing measures. Later, in
the 1970s, Liz Greene applied Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious, developing
an interpretative structure that focused not on more accurate prediction, but on
the derivation of meaning from astrological configurations. The result was a set of
accurate forecasts of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
that suggested these postwar innovations might be effective.
In the modern world, outside of the Indian subcontinent, mundane astrology
remains a marginal practice among astrologers, whose main concern tends to be with
the psychological form of natal astrology. In addition, demand from politicians is low
due to astrology’s poor standing, in spite of some high-profile patrons, notably former
[476] THE ASTROLOGY BOOK