Bianchi

For this birthday, I chose a new bike. It is a member of 125-year-old family of Edoardo Bianchi (although not his famous celeste colour, as I prefer black horses).

I went to pick it up at the time of the new solar chart, which looks quite promising:

Let's see what the solar year will bring.

Japan earthquake

In January 2011 I wrote in a public forum of Russian online newspaper gazeta.ru that by June 2011 Japan could experience a very significant earthquake. This online thread can be found here.

I mentioned a possible earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or higher, with wide publicity due to the scale of destruction, and I expected the earthquake to be triggered by the solar eclipse in June.

As we now know, it happened at magnitude 8.9 on 11th of March 2011, three months earlier than I expected.

Human papillomavirus

1.5 years ago I wrote an astrological post about oral sex as the reason for throat cancer. Last week, a friend sent me a link to a press-release on the same topic. Maura Gillison of the Ohio State University has collected statistics and reviewed bibliography that traces similar medical studies back to 1998.

Several groups independently came to the same conclusion. Some spent years in the lab studying biological samples, others collected and analysed behavioural statistics. Knowledge may be acquired by so many various means.

Brief report

Just to report briefly on a couple of predictions this summer.

After the full solar eclipse on July 12, which was visible over Southern Pacific, I posted a public comment in the Russian online press 'gazeta.ru'. I expected that during the summer a noticeable earthquake (up to 8 magnitude) may occur in the region, and I expected it in Latin America. On July 15, there was an earthquake of magnitude 6.5 in Chile. Then on 26th July there was an earthquake of 7.6 in Philippines (this one was very deep and did not cause any damage). Finally, on September 3, a very shallow earthquake of magnitude 7 hit New Zealand (it was stronger than the one on Haiti after the winter eclipse, but due to the good construction technologies nobody died).

In January 2010, I had a LiveJournal discussion with an atheistic sceptic whom I told, as an example of astrology in action, that by the autumn of 2010, Italian prime-minister Berlusconi would have problems again, due to the Saturn transit over his natal Sun. Indeed, in August 2010, he got a new press scandal with ladies, and then some political mess.

And something less astrological but still predictive. In December 2009, I had a discussion with another sceptic, a climate one (with some background in paleoclimatology), and I predicted that with increasing global warming the ocean shores would experience more precipitations while central areas would suffer harsh heat waves and droughts. He claimed that global warming would cause humidity in central Russia, etc. The recent events with heat and fires in Russia are well known, as well as the disastrous flood in Pakistan.

A friend of mine asked me once whether it is possible to couple modern geophysics and such a marginal knowledge as astrology. I firmly believe this should happen in future (although not soon, I am afraid). It is important to understand that eclipses cause various hazards on Earth, and it is equally important to study the plate dynamics and climate system to estimate where these hazards are most likely to occur. Both branches of knowledge are invaluable.

Update of November 5. More news about Berlusconi. And just to compare with the results of the recent midterm elections in the US, the post on Obama's inauguration of 2008.

Newton, the Man

More than three years ago, I wrote a post about insight, where I showed in the charts of Newton and Einstein the role of strong and well-aspected Moon for scientific intuition.

Having read more about Newton recently, especially the lecture by John Keynes, it is very interesting to see how the strong full Moon in Cancer with aspects to Venus and Jupiter in Newton's chart manifested in his research process:

"I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary - 'so happy in his conjectures', said De Morgan, 'as to seem to know more than he could possibly have any means of proving'. The proofs, for what they are worth, were, as I have said, dressed up afterwards - they were not the instrument of discovery.

There is the story of how he informed Halley of one of his most fundamental discoveries of planetary motion. 'Yes,' replied Halley, 'but how do you know that? Have you proved it?' Newton was taken aback - 'Why, I've known it for years', he replied. 'If you'll give me a few days, I'll certainly find you a proof of it' - as in due course he did.

Again, there is some evidence that Newton in preparing the Principia was held up almost to the last moment by lack of proof that you could treat a solid sphere as though all its mass was concentrated at the centre, and only hit on the proof a year before publication. But this was a truth which he had known for certain and had always assumed for many years.

Certainly there can be no doubt that the peculiar geometrical form in which the exposition of the Principia is dressed up bears no resemblance at all to the mental processes by which Newton actually arrived at his conclusions.

His experiments were always, I suspect, a means, not of discovery, but always of verifying what he knew already."

"Verifying what he knew already" - that is the strong natal Moon. "Hold a problem in his mind for hours and days and weeks" - that is the natal square of Mercury and Saturn.

Magic

In the comments to “Pond” post, my opponents were ready to believe that Newton was religious but, in their opinion, there was no evidence that he could be interested in astrology, and his apparent interest in alchemy was nothing but a minor oddity of the genius of the modern science.

Here I present a series of quotes from a remarkable book by Dr Charles Webster “From Paracelsus to Newton. Magic and the making of modern science” (Cambridge University Press, 1982). The author is a historian at the University of Oxford, and the book is the Eddington Memorial Lectures given in 1980.

The main idea of the book is that there is a firm link between occultist Paracelsus (1493-1541) and physicist Newton (1643-1727), because both of them were natural philosophers in their perception of life and science, and although this influence on Newton is generally denied by some modern studies, “it is unfortunate for any proponent of this line that figures of outstanding importance, including Newton himself, turn out to display a lively interest in the occult”.

“The literature of alchemy, hermetism and Paracelsian natural philosophy was […] required reading among the serious scholars of Newton’s generation”, because there existed “the self-evident kinship between hermetic, alchemical and scriptural sources”.

“Somewhat inconveniently for standard interpretations of the Scientific Revolution, the decades following the foundation of the Royal Society witness an outburst of judicial astrology, the continuing flourishing of Paracelsian medicine, undiminishing appeal of alchemy and hermetism, and the full fruition of Cambridge Platonism”.

“The changes in fortune of judicial astrology should not attract attention away from the continuing appeal of such ideas as divine plentitude, metaphysical hierarchies, or the existence of fundamental harmonies and correspondences between celestial and terrestrial world exercised through the intervention of a variety of spiritual agencies and intelligences. This animistic view of nature provided the intellectual underpinning for magic […] Magic retained its appeal as a useful spiritual exercise, and it was also recognised as of value for medicine and relevant to scientific explanation. It is therefore important not to assume that the decline of popular operative magic entailed the wholesale abandonment of the magical worldview”.

F.Manuel, “The religion of Isaac Newton” (Oxford, 1974): “The more Newton’s theological and alchemical, chronological and mythological work is examined as a whole corpus, set by the side of his science, the more apparent it becomes that in his moments of grandeur he saw himself as the last of the interpreters of God’s Will in action, living on the eve of the fulfilment of times”.

As John Keynes beautifully formulated in his work “Newton, the Man”, “He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child bom with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.”

Update of June 16. Newton's alchemical works are now available online.

And look at this text...

Cinemundane-III

Last month I had a LiveJournal discussion with a sceptic whom I told (continuing the cinemundane topic) that Jupiter entering Aries would produce lots of action films. I told him that films like “Rambo” or “Die Hard” should appear.

Jupiter enters Aries on 6 June 2010. It will move towards 3rd degree of Aries in the middle of July 2010, then turn to observed retrograde motion and come back to Pisces on 9 September 2010. It later will come to Aries for a proper direct transit only in January 2011 and move through Aries until June 2011.

Which means we could expect fight movies of all kinds during these periods.

This was my theoretical reasoning until yesterday when I came to cinema and watched trailers of films to be released this summer. Most noticeable is, of course, “The Expendables”, whose cast includes

Sylvester Stallone
Bruce Willis
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Dolph Lundgren
Eric Roberts
Mickey Rourke
Jet Li

Ah yes, there will be also releases of “A-Team”, “Karate Kid”, “Knight & Day”. And “The Loser” has just appeared (featuring Zoe Saldana who virtually played in Avatar).

Enjoy the action summer!

Margot Fonteyn

Cinema is an educating media, not just entertaining, and BBC is especially invaluable in providing biopics of exceptional quality. I just watched a film about Margo Fonteyn, and her miserable family life attracted my “scientific curiosity”.

Even the brief wiki info speaks for itself. “During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Fonteyn had a long relationship with composer Constant Lambert which did not lead to marriage. In 1955, Fonteyn married Dr. Roberto Arias, a Panamanian diplomat to London and playboy. Their marriage was initially a rocky one due to his infidelities. In 1964, a rival Panamanian politician shot Arias, leaving him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life”. The relationship with Nuriev, who was “notoriously impulsive and did not have much patience with rules, limitations and hierarchical order”, ended up in separation. To pay medical bills for her paralised husband, Fontayn should go on tours at quite elderly age, and “during Fonteyn's absence from Panama on tour as a ballerina, a socialite named Anabella Vallarino would move into the house as his shadow wife and move out again before Fonteyn's return.”

Reading all this, I recalled Cardano’s aphorism about affliction of family life. In Lilly’s edition, it is N 2.75: “A prime cause of men leading single live is the combustion of the Moon in their nativities with Saturn, or eminently afflicted by him, so in women if a planet be combust or the Sun in Taurus greatly afflicted.”

My immediate hypothesis was that Fontayn's Sun should be afflicted as Cardano described. And here is her natal chart, with Sun in Taurus in conjunction with detrimented Mars on Algol and in square with detrimented Saturn.

Cardano's "plagiarism"

There is a known story how Tartaglia (shown above) accused Cardano of “plagiarising” his results on cubic equations that Cardano published in Ars Magna in 1545.

It is easy to find out that the solution was first obtained by Scipione del Ferro, and his pupil Antonio Mario Fiore met Tartaglia in a mathematical disputation in 1535 (those were popular and provided good income for scholars). Tartaglia derived his solution during that disputation and considered it as a great treasure and did not want to disclose when later Cardano asked him. Finally, in March 1539, Tartaglia told Cardano the derivation in an encrypted poem and required that Cardano would never tell this secret anybody.

However, later Cardano and his pupil Ferrari found Ferro’s work in Bologna, kept by Ferro’s pupil and son-in-law Annibale Nave. Furthermore, Ferrari solved quartic equations under Cardano’s supervision. After that, Cardano decided that there was no point in keeping the cubic equations secret, and he published the whole research in Ars Magna, giving proper credit to both del Ferro and Tartaglia.

Tartaglia protested publicly, with great anger and insults. Ferrari decided to protect his teacher and challenged Tartaglia for a public disputation. On 10 August 1548, the disputation was set to discuss 31 problems that contestants posed to each other in previously sent letters, and they met in front of governor of Milan, who had been named judge. Ferrari was declared a winner.

Here is the chart for the disputation set for noon in Milan. The birthdate of Tartaglia is unknown – however, we know that Cardano’s ruler of ascendent is Venus, which is strong in this chart, and his ruler of 7th Mars is here in detriment. Also, transit Saturn forms a square with Cardano’s natal Sun, in retro motion – this means that in the last months his life was not easy due to the unfair accusations.

In fact, modern academics admit that Cardano’s publication of the cubic equation solution, with given credits to both authors (del Ferro and Tartaglia) and his pupil’s results on the quartic equations (also with proper credit), are one of the earliest examples of honest citation and fair research, which became well and widely known for the common benefit – and nowadays this solution is named “cardano formula”. Tartaglia wanted to keep it for himself, probably for a profit in disputations. Who was an honest scientist?

End of matters

When I attended a lecture of John Frawley about traditional astrology, I learnt a good idea from his example of William Lilly. Frawley said (in my words) that tradition is not about strict following some rigid old rules, but about understanding and keeping the spirit of the art, adapting it to the modern reality. In the case of Lilly, in his time he was testing various “modern” techniques (like unconventional aspects), and they surely led him to the correct result – why was that happening? Because his thinking was rigorous (Saturnine), whatever techniques he used. On the other hand, the strictest “tradionalism” cannot help when there is no understanding.

I recalled this because I was thinking over the End of Matters which is signified by the 4th house. I was taught about receptions and dignities, and these can be applied to the analysis of the End of Matters in its various meanings.

It is about the ending of things that have been done, as well as the end of life - and rulers of the houses can give a hint about the native’s perception of the end of matters. If the ruler of ascendent (the native) is in the sign of the ruler of 4th house (or has dignity on the cusp of 4th house), this signifies that the native is satisfied about the matters of 4th house (as Frawley says, “loves” them).

Given that houses are more or less equal in middle latitudes (i.e. not overstretched with one house dominating others, and 4th-10th axis is more or less perpendicular to 1st-7th axis), if the native has ascendent in some particular sign (see below), he will be “ruling” the End of Matters. It does not mean the End of Matters should be necessarily “good” – but he will be satisfied as the active participant (even if the involved planet is a malefic).

If the ascendent is in Aries, 4th is in Cancer, and Mars, the ruler of Aries, has a triplicity dignity in Cancer. Not bad. For the ascendent in Taurus, 4th house is most probably in Leo, and there are no major dignities for Venus there. One can continue along the zodiac with the same considerations.

This means that the luckiest in the above sense are those who have ascendent in Gemini (Gemini and Virgo are ruled by Mercury), Libra (Saturn rules 4th and exalts in ascendent), Sagittarius (Pisces in 4th are ruled by the same Jupiter), and Capricorn (Mars rules 4th and exalts in ascendent).

But yes, sometimes the houses are not that equal… Or the ruler of ascendent is in the sign of detriment/fall of the ruler of 4th house… Things happen…

Well, the end of the year is a mini-end-of-matters, too, and it is good to see how the traditional approach to such a modern medium as cinema helped me to make a correct prediction back in 2007, when I used Jupiter as the significator of the annual trend in the film art. I wrote in December 2007 that Jupiter entering Aquarius in 2009 would give rise to sci-fi movies. And look at the cinema of 2009… Avatar, Watchmen, 2012, Star Trek, The fourth kind, Gamer, The rise of cobra, Knowing, Moon, 9, Planet 51… Not to mention such properly Aquarian weirdos as Land of the lost, The men who stare at goats, Time traveller's wife, Underworld, and Up…

What an impressive confirmation of the traditional approach in our modern world.

Having had the ascendent in Libra and 4th house in Capricorn (both of Saturn dignity), with reception Venus-Saturn, I am usually satisfied with my Saturnine End of Matters…