Charting Your Course In Life
Introduction of Forensic Astronomy
Welcome to the portal to 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. For optimal benefit in absorbing this information, please give close attention to the advisory paragraph below.
Each item in the top line of the menu panel is an essay on the theory and technique of forensic astronomy. All this material is open source and free to the public. Everyone who comes here is a newcomer to Celestics. The essays are long-form due to my intention to fully explain this method beforehand to anyone who chooses to use it for self-discovery. I set out extensively the theory and practice of conventional astrology, and break down the structure of the horoscope, to highlight its differences with Celestics. As for astronomy, I know that it can be off-putting to many people. Be assured that the basic astronomy required to learn Celestics is simple and minimal. I make the astronomical technicalities crystal-clear and accessible. Each essay reprises some themes and topics from the others. This repetition brings to the forefront the many non-conventional and original features of Celestics. You will benefit by reading these essays in sequence, and reviewing them left to right. 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 the journey
Perhaps you have heard a story that is widely discussed in books and on 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 ocean-going vessels do today. 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 remote 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 only 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.
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 shown by the constellation where the mother planet, Earth, stood at your birth. This indication is a novelty of Celestics, one of many innovations that distinguish it from astrology.
As for astrology in the conventional format of sun-signs, it 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 social persona, but it does not go to the transpersonal factors of the human condition. Forensic astronomy is the tool-kit for investigation of those factors – that is, all that you have in your inner resources that transcends you as an ego/actor in the social order.
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. If so, that is not 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 definition of goals, but has its limitations. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the stars.
Astrology Without Stars
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 is 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 (shown by colored lines). Calculated by arcane 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.
So, to know what you are looking when you see a horoscope, let’s take a quick tour of those four components.
In the outer circle, you see the twelve uniform 30-degree divisions of the sign zodiac indicated by their symbols. They run counterclockwise from Aries around to Pisces. In example above, the sign Aries stands at 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 the signframe.
Next, note how the signframe overlays another circle, 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. 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 in 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 an uneven distribution of signs over houses.
Now look closer and pick out the line that divides house 7 and house 8, just above the three o-clock position. That is border of the 8th house, called the cusp. Aries is the sign that overlays that cusp at the 18th degree. This shows you that 18 degrees of Aries are in the 7th house and the remaining 12 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 for starters.
Planets And Aspects
So far, you are looking at two components of the horoscope, signs and houses. Next come two other components, planets and aspects. For this illustration, look at the moon. It is not hard to find once you identify the crescent shape. You see it in the first house in 10 degrees of the sign Libra. The notation Libra 18 tells you that 18 degrees of that sign overlay the 1st house and the remaining 12 overlay the 2nd house. There nothing mysterious about the horoscope structure and what it shows you, but again, you would have to know the interpretive rules to decode what “moon in libra in the 1st house” means in psychological terms. Notice that the moon stands just below the line marked Virgo 23 ASC. This tells you that the ascendent or rising sign of the native is 23 of Virgo. The ASC is the point looking due east from the location of birth, where the sun rises. Remember that the houses are a space-location format 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.
The moon, by the way, is not a planet but a satellite of the mother planet, Earth. Note that the sample horoscope does not include Earth. Conventional astrology excludes it. So where would be show up if it were included? The answer is simple: 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. It is next to the planet Uranus in 15 degrees, in the aspect of conjunction. Opposite 13 degrees of Sagittarius is 13 Gemini, the projected locale of Earth, placed in the 9th house. “Earth in 13 Gemini in the 9th house” is heavily encoded information which you cannot read without learning how astrology works. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how the horoscope displays this information.
Return for a moment to the ASC on the eastern horizon left in the format. Opposite it is the descendent, DSC, the sign setting at the moment of birth. The ASC-DSC horizontal line defines the local horizon. Everything above it is in the day sky, everything below is in the night sky. Knowing this, you can infer that the Sun is below the horizon and so the native was born sometime in the night. Over time during the birthday, the Moon rises in a clockwise motion across the horizon, becoming visible in the night sky, and when the Sun crosses that point, day breaks.
Finally, there is the fourth component of the horoscope to consider, the aspects. These are angular relations between Sun, Moon, and planets. Many horoscopes show these color-coded intersecting lines. Here only one aspect is shown by a broken line: the aspect of the Moon to Neptune. You can read exactly how 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 is close to the aspect called a septad, a separation of 105 degrees. The calibration of the aspect is five degrees from the exact septad, 105 degrees of separation. This difference is called the orb of the aspect. The expert astrologer reads not only the psychological bearing of the aspect but its exact orb as well. Aspects designate specific complexes. Observation of the orb fine-tunes how the aspect works. To borrow from medical diagnosis, close orbs are acute and wide orbs are chronic in operation.
Now, take a deep breath and consider what you are seeing in the Moon-Neptune aspect, including fine details: Moon in the 1st house in 10 Libra aspects to Neptune at a five-degree orb with the Moon (faster body) applying to that aspect (that is, reaching 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 the natal pattern. Add to that the fact that there are 9 possible aspects between all planets except Mercury and Venus, and the pairing of planets in aspect (called “duos,” such as Moon-Neptune, Moon-Mars, Sun-Uranus and so on) runs to 45 cases.
To summarize: Every horoscope comprises four basic components: 12 signs, 12 houses, 10 planets (including the luminaries, Sun and Moon, which are not planets), and 9 principal aspects. Do the math: (12 X 12) X 10 X (9 aspects X 10 planets in 45 pairs). The totality of possible unique permutations in each nativity runs to over 100,000 distinct lines of code. The astrologer has to consider a possible total of more than 100,000 permutations of sign-house-planet-aspect, although only about 700 occur in each individual birth pattern. A horoscope is a 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. Technically, 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?
Having learned to work out what a horoscope shows — although not what it tells or means! — you may wonder what Celestics offers for 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 most of the internal 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, plus a quasi-planetary body or cometoid (Chiron in conventional astrology), which it renames (Seshat) and redefines in a novel way.
The version 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. Take that fact on board and you will surely wonder, If Celestics uses constellations rather than signs, how does the format look? What does a constellation look like, anyway? Good question. All landing pages on Celestics.org answer that question in one way or another, but for a preview, consider this: 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 of straight lines and angles shown here contains all the stars in the composite of Taurus, as astronomers call it. But Taurus is the name of a starless sign, not a constellation.
Note that the composite does not present a graphic image or animation of the constellational figure. It does however present a star-to-star pattern that identifies the figure for naked-eye observation. This is the signature of the constellation. It is what you look for to find that pattern 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 composite stand at the base of the V. The bright object above and to the right of 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 of each constellation must be intentionally visualized. You combine observation of the signature with visualization of the “animal.” 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 long horns. Some of the massive body of the taurine creature fits the signature, but the lower legs do not. Consistent with many traditional visualizations from around the world, the Pleiades sit the hump of the leaping animal.
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 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 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 overlay the sign Taurus, or correlate or correspond to it. You need an entirely different model to replace the sign/house format and situate the planets of the horoscope in the real-sky environment. The tool for this graphic rendering is called the Rimsite. Fully explained in Optics, Zodiac, and elsewhere on this platform.
Your Journey, Your Choice
Remember that the manifold is the replacement in Celestics for the horoscope. Even before you get the first look at the manifold (in 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 chose the long route of learning how to do it yourself. That is a very long and demanding discipline. What you can learn with Celestics is both more and different from what you get in a chart reading, and you rely on yourself to decode your 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, or to discover it on your own. If you choose the second option, Celestics may be for you.
John Lamb Lash, author, mythologist, and visionary teacher, originator of StarBase, the source code of Celestics
contact: mail@celestics.org
