Charting Your Course In Life

Introduction of Forensic Astronomy

Welcome to the portal of Celestics.org. This introduction will orient you to the premises and practices of forensic astronomy, a ground-breaking innovation in the field of astrology, and then some. To benefit from this information, pay close attention to the text in the box below.

Advisory to Newcomers Each free-access item in the menu panel is an essay on the theory and technique of forensic astronomy. Everyone who comes here is a newcomer to Celestics.  The essays are long in form to fully explain this method beforehand, so that you know what it entails, should you choose to utilize it to navigate your journey in life. Also, I explain the theory and practice of conventional astrology extensively, with a breakdown of the structure of the horoscope, to highlight its differences with Celestics. As for astronomy, it can be off-putting to many people. Be assured that the basic astronomy required to learn Celestics is simple and minimal. The astronomical technicalities of this method are crystal-clear and accessible. Each essay reprises some themes and topics from the others. This repetition brings to the forefront the many original features of Celestics. You will benefit by reading these essays in sequence, left to right in the top menu panel of this site. If all this piques your interest, you can receive the beginner’s package by clicking here:  Sampler 1.0

Navigation by the Stars

It has often been said that what matters in life is the journey, not the goal. That may be true in one way, but is it not more inclusive, and perhaps more true, that both the journey and the goal matter? That they both can matter? If that is so, it is worth asking if there could be a map for that journey?

Perhaps you have heard a story that is widely discussed in books or websites. Taking its cue from the account of Atlantis in Plato, it’s about the existence of an advanced, world-wide civilization in pre-history. Speculation is rampant on this topic, but one thing can be assumed with certainty: If it was indeed a civilization with world-wide reach, its masterminds must have navigated the entire globe, and they could only have done so by using the stars, exactly as all ocean-going vessels did before GPS. The rise and setting of bright stars in the sky and the patterns they formed served to guide the seafaring adventures of our remote ancestors.

In that faraway time, the star-patterns observed by mariners all had stories attached to them — celestial narratives, you might say. The field of comparative mythology (a major resource for Celestics) has a sub-genre called, sidereal mythology. This is the body of myth and legend that concentrates on those myths which have been associated both on land and sea with identifiable star-patterns, the naked-eye constellations. Celestics is an outgrowth of this genre. It incorporates research in sidereal mythology spanning over 50 years.

The nautical trope weaves all through Celestics; it plays on the similarity of the journey through life to a treasure hunt. Thus, the goal, objective, or purpose of your journey can be compared to a hidden treasure you are seeking. Reading the celestial narrative is like following a treasure map to where “X marks the spot,” and there you find what you are seeking in life, whatever you aspire to make out of your life. In the method of forensic astronomy, X is indicated by the constellation where Earth, the mother planet, stood in the sky at your birth. This is one of the many innovations that distinguish Celestics from astrology.

The conventional format of twelve sun-signs does not present a map of your life-adventure leading to an ultimate goal. It is an excellent tool for psychological profiling, but, as such, it only tells you about personal dynamics including tendencies, complexes, and syndromes. To the Celestician, the astrological chart is a template of karmic pathology, not a treasure map. It describes the conditioning of the social persona, but it does not go to the interpersonal view of the human condition. Forensic astronomy is the tool-kit for investigation of the inner resources that transcend you as an actor in the social order, yet you are the sole agency who can discover and express them.

Astrology has survived through the ages in many lands and cultures. Its enduring popularity is due to the belief that it is a unique tool for understanding one’s destiny. In other words, a tool for decoding the pattern of personal destiny. And that is no an easy task. The astrologer who reads a horoscope must interpret patterns derived from complex permutations of four factors: houses, signs, planets, and aspects. Ideally, if the astrologer is competent and correct, these patterns can reveal not only personality traits and complexes, but it can also theoretically plot the direction toward personal goals in career, creative achievement, relationships, fame and fortune. At best an astrological reading can reveal the destiny of an individual, presumed to be written in the stars. But it cannot reach and reveal the transcendental dimension of destiny, as Celestics does.

Astrology can work on its own terms. It can serve as a tool for guidance in personal growth and to some extent, definition of goals, but has its limitations. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the stars.

Astrology Without Stars

Hand-drawn version of a typical horoscope, from the front cover of the original promotion brochure
for Celestics, 1999. Distributed with the release of Quest for the Zodiac

The belief that human destiny is somehow written in the stars is perennial. Its historical origin cannot be dated. The earliest accounts on record, found in Babylonian star lists from 3400 BCE, show that astronomy and astrology were joined at the hip like Siamese twins, but over time they separated. Few people in the world today, including most professional astrologers, know that conventional Western astrology has parted ways with astronomy and no longer involves the stars. In Quest for the Zodiac (1999), I noted astrology is not wrong on its own terms, but it is wrongly defined as “the language of the stars.” In fact, there is only one star in the conventional horoscope. That being the Sun, the central body of the solar system.

The typical horoscope (shown above in one of various formats or house-systems) may appear as obscure as a Babylonian clay tablet encoded with cuneiform cyphers, but it is not difficult to make out once the basics are explained. It shows positions of the Sun and Moon (called the Luminaries), and eight planets in twelve regions of the sky (the signs), distributed across twelve spatial divisions around the birthplace (the houses), plus the aspects, a set of angular relations between planets (typically shown by colored lines in computer-generated horoscopes). Calculated by rules of spherical trigonometry, both signs and houses are geometrical sectors of the sky surrounding the place of birth. Both sectors exclude the actual panorama of visible stars.

To know what you are looking at when you see a horoscope, let’s take a quick tour of those four components.

The Sign-House Overlay

In the outer circle of the horoscope above, you see the twelve uniform 30-degree divisions of signs indicated by their symbols. They run counter-clockwise from Aries around to Pisces. In the example above, the sign Aries stands above the three o-clock position in the format. This sector of the conventional zodiac model (called the tropical zodiac) is 30-degrees in extent like all the other signs. Thus, 12 X 30 = 360, the full circle. In Celestics jargon, this is called the signframe.

Next, note how the signframe overlays another circle, called the houses. Technically, the house format is a space-location system derived from spherical trigonometry. The horoscope is calculated for a precise time of birth (minute, day, month, and year) at a specific locale on Earth. The house format does not change the positions in the signs but it distributes them in a specific way oriented geometrically to the locale of birth. Positions of planets in the houses can vary according to the method of calculation. There are about eight different house-formatting systems.

Note the numbers inscribed next to the symbols of each sign: Aries 18, Taurus 18, Gemini 22, Cancer 26 and so on. These numbers register the exact degree within each sign of 30 degrees where the signframe overlays the house format. That is the house/sign overlay. The twelve numbers around the center of the horoscope indicate the 12 houses which are not uniform in extent, although they can be in the case of an equal-house format. The example here is not an equal-house format showing the house/sign overlay of equal signs and unequal houses. It shows a distribution of the uniform 30-degree sign sectors over twelve houses of uneven extent. Note how the extent of the 5th house is smaller than the 10th and others. Astrologers may attach significance to the compression and expansion of the houses, but in reality these differences a nothing more than artefacts of the spherical trigonometry used to construct the space-location system.

Now look closer and pick out the line that divides house 7 and house 8, just above the three o-clock position. That is the border of the 8th house, called the cusp. Aries is the sign that overlays that cusp at the 18th degree. This shows you that 1 to 18 degrees of Aries are in the 7th house and the remaining 12 to 30 are in the 8th house. Now you are looking at what a horoscope shows although you do not yet know what the design encodes. To know that you would have to learn the general rule of what the sign/house overlay means, and apply it to the specific case of 18 Aries/8th house. There are 144 variations of sign/house overlay. That’s just for starters.

Code Lines in the Horoscope

So much for signs and houses embedded in the structure of the horoscope. Next come planets and aspects. For this example, look at the Moon. It is not hard to find once you locate the crescent shape. There it is in the first house in 10 degrees of the sign Libra. The notation ‘Libra 18’ tells you that 1 to 18 degrees of that sign overlay the 1st house, and the remaining 12 to 30 degrees overlay the 2nd house. There is nothing mysterious about the horoscope structure and what it shows you, but again, you would have to know the full set of interpretive rules to translate “Moon in Libra in the 1st house” into psychological terms. You have to count  on — and trust — the astrologer to tell you what that means.

Back to the structure of the horoscope. Notice that the moon stands just below the line marked Virgo 23 ASC (ascendant). This tells you that the ascendant or rising sign of the native is 23 of Virgo. The ASC (the cusp of the 1st house) is the point looking due east from the location of birth, where the sun rises. Remember that the houses are a space-location framework relative to the birthplace. You know by looking at the position of the moon that it was below the horizon and rising at the time of birth. The rising motion of the signs across the houses is clockwise, opposite to how they are numbered. The degrees of the cusps change every four minutes. 1440 minutes in a day divided by 4 = 360 degrees of complete rotation of the signframe clockwise over the houses.

The Moon is not a planet but a satellite of the mother planet, Earth. Note that the sample horoscope does not include the Earth. Conventional astrology routinely excludes it. So where would it show up if it were included? To know where Earth would be in the horoscope, look opposite to the position of the Sun. In this example, you find the Sun in Sagittarius in the 3rd house — in 13 degrees to be exact. Notation: Sun → 13 Sagittarius/H3. Next to it you see the planet Uranus in 15 degrees, the aspect of conjunction. Opposite 13 degrees of Sagittarius is 13 Gemini, the projected locale of Earth, placed in the 9th house. Notation: Earth → 13 Gemini/H9. “Earth in 13 degrees of Gemini in the 9th house” is encoded information which you cannot read without learning how astrology works. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how the horoscope registers that information drawn from calculation of the birth data.

Look again at  the ASC on the eastern horizon left in the format. Opposite it is the descendant, DSC, the sign setting at the moment of birth. The ASC-DSC horizontal line defines the local horizon. Everything above it is in the daytime sky, everything below is in the night sky. Knowing this, you can see that the Sun is below the horizon and so infer that the native was born sometime in the night. Over time during the birth day, the Moon rises in a clockwise motion across the horizon, becoming visible in the night sky, and when the Sun comes around and crosses that point, the day breaks.

Most horoscopes today include an anomalous body that orbits in 52 years around Uranus and Saturn, the cometoid called Chiron (renamed Seshat in Celestics). Excluding Earth, the full count of celestial bodies is 2 luminaries (Sun and Moon), 2 inner planets (Mercury and Venus), 3 outer planets (mars, Jupiter, Saturn), 3 outermost of trans-Saturnian planets (Uranus, Neptune Pluto) and 1 cometoid (Chiron). Total = 11. Factoring in 11 celestial bodies, the math to this point looks like this: 11 celestial bodies in 144 variants of sign/house overlay gives 11 X 144 = 1584 distinct variations. Only one of these 1584 possible variants shows up in your horoscope.

For example, Neptune retrograde (R) in 1° Cancer in the 10th house is one out of the total 1584 possible variations, or three-factor horoscopic code lines. Quite a lot to decode there. But hold on, there’s more.

Aspect Patterns

Finally, there is the fourth factor of the horoscope to consider, the aspects. These are angular relations between Sun, Moon, and planets. Many computer-generated horoscopes show them by color-coded intersecting lines. In the example above, a broken line shows one aspect: the angle of the Moon to Neptune. Read it exactly as it looks: Moon in 10 Libra in the 1st house at a 100-degree angle to Neptune in 1 Cancer in the 10th house. This angle is close to the aspect called a septad, a separation of 105 degrees. The calibration at 100 degrees is five degrees from the exact septad. The variance from exactness is called the orb of the aspect. The expert astrologer reads not only the psychological bearing of each aspect, but its orb too. Aspects designate specific types of complexes. The distance from exactness gives a nuance to the aspect. Reading the orb fine-tunes the astrologer’s assessment of how the aspect complex works. To borrow from medical diagnosis, close orbs indicate acute, short-term complexes and wide orbs indicate chronic, long-term complexes. Such are the nuances of the horoscope.

Here is a paraphrase of how an astrologer would view the Moon-Neptune aspect. Bear in mind, this is merely one out of the range of nine types of aspects that the Moon can form with the remaining ten celestial bodies:

Moon in the 1st house in 10 Libra aspects to Neptune by a septad at a five-degree orb with the Moon (faster body) separating from that aspect (that is, from 105º exactitude) and Neptune ahead in the zodiac, standing retrograde at 2 degrees of Cancer in the 10th house.

That is densely encoded information. The astrologer must be trained to read the sign/house overlay, planets (direct or retrograde) in signs, planets in houses, planets in aspect, orbs of aspects and other fine details such as applying or separating aspects in order to detect and interpret the full array of psychological complexes encoded in single complex algorithms in the natal pattern. Add to that the fact that there are 9 possible aspects between all planets except Mercury and Venus and the Sun — hold on — the pairing of planets in aspect two-factor aspects (called DUOs) runs to 45 cases. Hence, the DUOs of Venus-Mars, Moon-Pluto, Sun-Saturn, and 42 more.

Do the math for a final time: Every horoscope comprises four basic components: 12 signs, 12 houses, 11 celestial bodies — what the hell, make it 12 to include Earth —  and 9 principal aspects that occur in 45 unique pairings, as just noted. So, you have 12  signs X 12 houses  X 12 planets = 1728, combined in 9 possible aspects = 15,552, formed between 45 pairs or DUOS = a total of 699,840 unique algorithmic code lines. That is the totality of possible unique permutations that can occur in the horoscope, although only a small selection (0.0003%) of them occurs in each individual case — about 210. But any one of the 700,000 variations can occur in that selection.

Sit back and think about it. The astrologer has to consider a staggering number of possible permutations of the four factors, then identify the selection of 200 or so that are unique to a specific individual, the client. Working from those 200 or so discrete code lines, the astrologer must construct a clear and coherent profile of the dynamics of the birth pattern. A horoscope is a very, very complicated affair.

Signs and Constellations

So much for a tour of the horoscope. At no point did you see any stars or star patterns. The only star in the horoscope is the Sun. Conventional astrology does not include Earth, although it can be included as noted above. Each house system is geocentric, computed with the home planet at the center in the perspective, but it is not cheating to project Earth to a location opposite the Sun. In fact, the home planet is out there in the sky like any other celestial body, isn’t it?  It just happens to be the one you are standing on.

Having learned what a horoscope shows — although not what it tells or means — you may wonder what Celestics offers as an alternative. In forensic astronomy, the counterpart to the horoscope is called the manifold. It presents an entirely different format with a different set of permutations of encoded data. It also eliminates the infernal mechanics of the horoscope. It discards the signframe, the house location format, and the aspects. It vastly reduces the number of code-line permutations to consider. It retains the planets and luminaries, of course, but specifies them in a different way. Also, it adds four other factors which are not celestial bodies but properties of the orbital cycle of the moon, and it includes the quasi-planetary body Chiron (Seshat), after the Egyptian priesthood of female scribes. In total there a 16 entries in the manifold.

The version of astrology described here is called the tropical format. It is a starless model. There are no stars in the signfame. The sign Aries is not a constellation. No sign represents a pattern or image of stars. Now you will surely wonder, If Celestics uses constellations rather than signs, how does the format look? What does a constellation look like? What does the manifold look like, optically projected?  Good question. All landing pages on Celestics.org answer that question in one way or another, but to begin, look at this:

Illustration of the real-sky constellations found in star atlases used by astronomers both amateur and professional

Every constellation has three parameters: the composite, the signature, and the graphics. The composite is the group of all stars within the boundary of the constellation established by the International Astronomical Union. The puzzle-piece structure of straight lines shown here contains all the stars officially included in the composite of Taurus. In astrology Taurus is the name of a starless sign, not a constellation. But wait a minute. Here in the astronomical atlas you see the name Taurus assigned to an observable star-pattern. More on that mix-up coming your way. Much more.

Note that the composite does not present a graphic image or animation of any constellational figure. It does however present a star-to-star pattern that identifies it for the naked eye. This pattern is the signature of the constellation. It is what you look for to find that constellation in the sky. The signature of the celestial “Taurus” is an extended fork or V mounted by a stem on a triangular base. The brightest stars in this signature stand in the V. The bright object above and to the right in the signature is the Pleiades, the most famous open star cluster in the world.

The third parameter of each constellation is the graphics, shown here:

The graphics for each constellation must be intentionally visualized. You combine observation of the signature with visualization of the “animal.” You SEE the signature and con-SEEVE the graphics or animation. The signature signals you to specific details in the imagined creature. The massive bright star Aldebaran matches the lower eye of the celestial creature. The cluster of the Hyades marks the upper eye, and two stars mark the tips of the extending horns. Some of huge hulk of the taurine creature fits the signature, but the rear legs, the rump and tail do not. The Pleiades sit on the hump of the leaping animal.

Below on left: Bas-relief from the Mithraic Mysteries showing Perseus, the constellation above the Bull, piercing its neck at the hump where the Pleiades is located.

Now that you know what a constellation looks like, go back and look again at the example horoscope above. Taurus is a starless sector of the sky, but does it relate or associate in some way with the star-pattern that mistakenly shares that same name? In the horoscope, you see a house/sign overlay. Is there any way to arrange a sign/constellation overlay? You might think that the constellation you picture here would overlay the sign Taurus in the one o’clock position on the horoscopic circle. An easy guess, but you would be wrong.

The constellation of the Bull does not correspond or correlate to the starless sign Taurus in meaning or its interpretive value or its intentional bearing in Celestics. But the starless sector of Taurus on the 360-degree register of the orbital plane of Earth does interface with a visible star-pattern. It so happens, however, that the star-pattern interfacing the sign Taurus is not a bull! This is maddening and it takes a while to sort it out in your mind. I explain it more fully in ZODIAC, but here in brevity is the essence of the confusion:

The practice of reading the sky in naked-eye astronomy predated sun-sign astrology for millennia. During that enormous reach of time, cultures all around the world developed narratives of legend and myth associated with those vast celestial images (hence, sidereal mythology). They encoded and decoded stories in the star-patterns. Much later, around 150 CE when Ptolemy defined the starless format of twelve starless sectors and named them Aries, Taurus, Gemini, etc, the pre-existing narratives associated with the constellations eventually leaked over into the characterisations of the sign-types. The material that previously comprised a vast inventory of stories morphed into a catalogue of stereotypes and character traits. For example, the mythology of the celestial bull — the source material of Celestics — migrated into the realm of astrological jargon, even though the bull in the sky and the starless sign Taurus do not correlate or correspond, and never did. They do interface, however!

It takes a special, custom-designed format to replace the sign/house format and situate the planets in the real-sky environment of visible stars. The tool for this graphic conversion is called the Rimsite. Fully explained in Optics, Zodiac, and elsewhere on this platform.

The Rimsite: graphic model of signatures of the constellations on the orbital plane of earth, the ecliptic.

Can you find the signature of the Bull here? It is down at the 6 -7 o’clock position. The bright eye-star is Aldebaran. The squiggle off-angle from it, just outside the defining rim, is the Pleiades. Due to the interface of signs and constellations, you can locate the Pleiades by reference to the 360-degree register of twelve signs. It stands at 1º Gemini or 61° in the full register of 360 degrees. More on this method of registering star locations in ZODIAC.

To summarize: The Rimsite above shows you the signatures (but not yet the graphics) of the 13 constellations on the orbital plane of Earth, the ecliptic. This is the graphic display template for Celestics. Note that the star-patterns are uneven in size and each has a unique shape. The circle that selects them from all other constellations in the heavens is the ecliptic plane, the orbital plane of Earth. Hence they are called ecliptic constellations, distinct from the starless uniform sectors of the format of the 12 signs.

Your Journey, Your Choice

Remember that the manifold in Celestics is the replacement for the horoscope. Even before you get the first look at the manifold (see OPTICS), be assured that Celestics is far simpler in design and technical structure than astrology. With astrology you rely on an expert to decode the information in the horoscope, unless you choose the long and arduous route of learning how to do it yourself. That is a long-term, demanding discipline. What you can learn with Celestics is both more and different from what you get in an astrological chart reading, and you rely on yourself to decode your own life pattern. The manifold is the compass in your hand for navigating your unique course in life.

So, the choice is clear: to have your life pattern spelled out to you by someone else’s subjectivity, or to discover it on your own. If you choose the second option, Celestics may well be just for you.

John Lamb Lash: author, mythologist, and visionary teacher, originator of StarBase, the source code of Celestics

contact: mail@celestics.org

©2025 John Lamb Lash. All rights reserved