Guess who's back?

Guess who’s back?

Long time no see.

I am sorry for the absence, I think I put too much on my plate.

Apart from my regular work, I’m at the last part of the course on natal astrology I’m teaching (in Portuguese), and, after having taught it, I’m editing the videos from the Course on the Basic Celestial Mechanics (in English — don’t worry, I will let you know when I’m done). And I’m finishing three translations at the same time.

In the middle of all that, the iPad with which I work broke :).

I cannot complain, but I guess you should, and I apologize for that.

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On good things that come from bad things: with the broken iPad, I was forced to used my old notebook. The frustration from working on it made me have if fixed, and now I have a fast notebook again, with old files and stuff I had forgotten.

One of these files is a pdf copy of Galen’s “On the Natural Faculties”.

People — especially from the “Science, bitch!” gang, but not just them — use to think of the four elements as if they were some lame version of the periodic table.

This is dumb, because the first person who thought of atoms, small balls that make up everything, did it after the four elements were a thing. That is, the “mental categories” in order to think of air, water, fire, and earth as “tiny blocks” just didn’t exist.

They’re pairs of principles, because there are two pairs of tendencies in matter.

Heat: the tendency to expand;

Cold: the tendency to remain in itself (this is the opposite of expansion, not contraction, which is “expansion in the wrong direction”);

Dryness: the tendency to resist influence from other things;

Moisture: the tendency to wield to influence.

These can happen in four ways in things (because the opposites don’t coexist. A thing can be cold in relation to one thing and hot in relation to other, but not cold and hot in relation to the same other thing), so we have the cold and dry (earth), cold and moist (water), hot and moist (air), and hot and dry (fire) principles.

Why am I saying that when telling you of an old Galen text?

Well, because he abhorred the atomists.

"This school also despises dreams, birds, omens, and the whole of astrology, subjects with which we have dealt at greater length in another work, which we discuss the views of Asclepiades the physician"

Unfortunately, his work on astrology is lost.

A nice horary that made me kick myself in the seventh house.

The house cat, Mingau (yes, it means “porridge”. I wanted to name him Smeagol. Long story) disappeared for a bit longer than was expected.

My wife was worried, and was voicing her worries.

The question arose naturally, as horary astrology seems to have been invented primarily for cats and their distraught owners.

Ok, Goll, I mean, Mingau is the Sun. Death — the most pressing concern in these cases — might be signified either by Venus, ruler of the radical eighth house, or Jupiter, ruler of the turned eighth house. Neither of them has been, or will be, in immediate contact with the cat. So far, so good.

The Sun will immediately change signs, into the sign ruled by Jupiter, which can also be me, as it rules the radical first house. Good, it will come back (and it’s an elegant way for the chart showing it coming back without making contact with the ruler of the first house).

We can also think of the Moon, natural ruler of strayed pets and lost objects, as Mingau, and it will aspect Mercury, my wife.

Excellent. But… where is the cat? None of the options fit. The Sun is in my ninth house, and conjunct its ruler, but it makes no sense, the church is too far from here, there is no university, or foreign countries in which he could be.

Mars is also my second-house ruler, but it was not in any of my stuff, I checked (and my wife double-checked the entire house, which is not a big one).

It rules the turned third from the seventh (my wife’s neighbours, which makes no sense, because we live in the same house, so her neighbours are my neighbours), and her turned eighth, which makes even less sense.

It’s also the ruler of the fourth and ninth houses from the cat’s house — but the cat doesn’t have a particular temple in which it adores its Cat God, it’s not going to any university as far as I know, and I am pretty sure its father is nowhere near to be found.

Mingau came back this morning. Apart from being a bit hungry (and apart from taking advantage of our happiness to pee on the bathroom floor with impunity), it seems ok.

And then it hit me, and that’s when I hit myself.

The chart does not have to tell me where it was, unless it was trapped somewhere I could go to and rescue it.

It’s telling me Mingau was alive; it’s telling me it would come back. It is not telling me things I cannot verify or ask the cat about.

St. Ambrose’s Hexameron is a nice read — even for non-Christians, if you’re wondering.

It’s a series of sermons on the six first days of Creation. He draws a lot from his good friend St. Basil’s work with the same name.

I wasn’t reading it for fun, though. I want to write something larger — maybe a book, who knows? — one day about the relationship between the Church and the astrological art. So, I’m reading and taking notes, including works that seem to bash astrological practice, as this one does.

But in one passage he clarifies a point of astrological technique: when do we consider a chart as a diurnal chart? Some people say it’s when the “Sun” (that is, the longitude of the center of the Sun’s disk) is above the horizon. Others, that we should allow for a couple of degrees before and after the Sun crosses it.

He firmly takes the second position — not talking about astrology, of course — and explains his motives for it (it’s in the second homily for the first day of creation), while discussing the light (which was created in Day One) and the Sun (created in the fourth day)

“We notice, therefore, that the birth of light, before that of the sun, seems to open the day; indeed, the principles of the day intercept the march of the night, and it seems that an end of time and a constant limit for the day and for the night is prescribed. The Sun brightens the day, the light makes it.”

That’s it for now. Thanks for your attention and your patience, God bless you all, and see you soon — I hope.

If you like it, as always, please: