In an interview on The Astrology Podcast, Robert Hand, a respected figure in modern astrology who played a central role in Project Hindsight said, “as far as I’m concerned, the modern system is bullshit.” Once he could finally get up close and personal with the ancient texts, Hand scrapped the beliefs he held for decades about how to do astrology.Īfter a decade and a half of translation work, Project Hindsight claims to have revived the old astrological methods.
They called the effort Project Hindsight and styled themselves after Renaissance intellectuals reviving the lost art of ancient algebra. In the early 1990s, a group of astrologers decided to translate this and other classical works in the hopes that they would recover something worthwhile. The fragments filled 12 volumes, but they didn’t bother to translate any of it from the original Greek. The discovery set in motion a 50-year task of collecting as many of the overlooked texts as they could find in libraries across Europe. In the late 19th century, a group of German linguists stumbled upon previously unpublished fragments of Hellenistic astrological texts. When the Roman empire fell in the 5th century, Hellenistic texts of all kinds were scattered and fragmented over the millennium as their standing with Christian and secular European society fell in and out of favor. Ancient astrology looked to be delegated to dusty Greek attics. Originally, astrology flourished in the Hellenistic period alongside various sciences like mathematics, medicine, and engineering. When modern science was making humanity look smaller and more insignificant than ever, people found it reassuring to think of their personalities as being reflected in the stars. Historian Nick Campion notes that “sun-sign astrology domesticated the universe” at a time when astronomy discovered that our galaxy was one small dot among billions in a perpetually expanding universe.
The sun-sign approach to astrology continued to grow in popularity through newspaper columns in the first half of the 20th century and boomed when New Age went mainstream in the 1960s.
His writing garnered enough of an audience to provoke several legal battles in the 1910s for unlawfully practicing fortunetelling. Leo justified his simplification of astrology as serving humanity’s spiritual betterment. He was part of a group called the Theosophical Society that scoured spiritual traditions of all sorts looking for wisdom that would help society get to the next stage of development. Pop astrology was born in the late 19th century during the boom in new-age exploration, and was then fueled by developments in psychology in the 20th century. The notion that your sun sign indicates your character was popularized by esotericist Alan Leo in England in the 1890s. They kept careful records of astronomical phenomenon, looking for correlations between what happened in the sky above them and the material world around them. These ancient astrologers based their interpretations on centuries of observations recorded by the Mesopotamians who came before them. Astrology had its heyday in the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period, an era that took place between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century CE. The ancients looked to the sky for clues about why things happened in the material world around them. If we can set modern judgments aside and learn the language of the ancient astrologers-a language that is now newly available due to the recent revival of classical texts-we may discover lost insights. It’s because astrology has been ruined by modern psychology.Īstrology’s contemporary flavor has a closer relationship with the social science of psychology than the observational science it used to be based upon. But that’s not because astrology itself is inaccurate. Condemned by science and denigrated by much of society, you might think that astrological predictions are fluffy woo-woo that won’t help you navigate the year ahead. It’s time to speculate about what 2018 will bring.
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