Tutorials for Celestics
Ongoing Education in Celestics

This unit in Celestics.org presents a series of texts and talks that explain the theory and practice of forensics astronomy including hand-on, eyes-on instructions for using it.

Your Sunstyle and Your Starry Destiny

This is a 34-minute talk on the background of Celestics posted on my YouTube channel in 2021.

By the way, the term “Starsign” is not completely wrong. In fact, the Sun is a star and the only one in the horoscope. In that exceptional case, your personality may be characterized by the position of a star. But still, the conventional horoscope does not show where the location of that star actually is in the starry background. For example, the Sun at birth in 20 degrees of the tropical sign Scorpio (on November 12 each year) is not a real-sky position. In the mythic panorama of the observable constellations, the Sun at that moment stands in the Scales, or Balance, and more precisely at the fulcrum of the Scales.

Stop for a moment and consider the difference. Conventional astrology can tell you about the dynamics, attitudes, and tendencies of your Scorpionic personality — your Sun-style, as I call it. But it cannot tell you about what it means to have the Sun at birth at the fulcrum of the Scales. That information is encoded in the themes and motifs of the constellations.

The Cosmic Code Beyond Astrology

In Quest for the Zodiac (2000), currently in revision, I attempted to describe the journey I made beginning in 1967 that led to the creation of StarBase Celestics, the method of decoding the transpersonal engrams of the real-sky constellations. You can find a resume of that decades-long adventure in the three talks below, interviews with Joanna Harcourt-Smith on the platform I created for her, futureprimitive.org.

In the talks I explain how systems such as Vedic and so-called sidereal astrology do recognize the observable star composites, but they do not represent them accurately, nor do they provide techniques for decoding the mythopoetic imagery of the Zodiac, as Celestics does. Also, practitioners of those systems tend to pre-empt and replace popular sun-sign astrology, claiming that it uses the wrong personality types. A siderealist will typically tell someone born on July 1st, for example, that their true sign is not Cancer, but Gemini. The siderealist, as well as the Vedic astrologer, will then proceed to ascribe the personalty traits, interests, and attitudes of a Gemini to the individual who formerly believed he or she was a Cancer-type. Imagine what that does to the mind of the client.

As explained below, Celestics does not trump or replace sun-sign astrology in this way. Not at all. I used both systems for decades, one for profiling the social personality and the other for revealing the deeper prospects of what may be called the transpersonal life, the path of higher purpose. It was always a delight to introduce people to the astonishing fact that they have a second horoscope they have never seen. Doing so I used the syntax specific to StarBase, a kind of double speak. For someone born July 1 of any year, it sounds like this: “You are a Gemini with the sun in the constellation of the Bull.” Notice I say Bull, not the sun sign Taurus. More on that distinction in the interviews.

I call upon your patience with some of the redundancy in my exposition of the two zodiacs. The primary premise of StarBase is so novel and unconventional that it requires a certain degree of repetition to get it across on the first attempt, and even after several attempts.

Festina lente. Make haste slowly.

Two Zodiacs

So, where to begin to explain the difference between Celestics and conventional astrology? This image on the internet illustrates the problem for which Celestics is the solution.

Here you have in a circular format the twelve well-known “sun signs” of conventional astrology, indicated by their symbols or glyphs. For instance, the M-shape with a long leg like a pointed tail: Scorpio. The arrow for Sagittarius, two wavy lines for Aquarius, and so on. These widely recognized symbols for are universally assumed to denote star patterns. Look at how the circular arrangement juxtaposes star-patterns with the signs. Doesn’t that lead you to infer that each symbol matches a star pattern in the sky?

If it does, you are off on the wrong track at the first look. In reality, the twelve sun signs have nothing to do with observable star patterns in the night sky. The signs by which millions identify their personality type are starless sectors plotted in a format of plane geometry that uses even divisions of the orbital plane of the earth. What you see in the above illustration are signs, yes, twelve equal divisions, but the star-patterns matched to them do not in fact match at all. The constellations pictured do exist, and can be identified visually when observing the night sky. They display the cosmic environment in which you live, but this grand pictorial setting of life is entirely excluded from the popular format of sun sign astrology. Moreover, the illustration I am using here does not even depict the observable star-patterns as they actually appear. They do not occupy neat, equal 30-degree sectors of the sky. And there are not just twelve of them.

*Tutorial note: By way of a cautionary note, there is one issue in the contrast between conventional, sign-based astrology and the star-based format of Celestics that requires clarification. It is obvious to ask, Don’t the personalistic characteristics of a Sign such as Taurus match up in certain ways with the mythic themes and tropes of the Bull? Yes, they can and do in some ways, but this apparent “correspondence” is misleading and confusing. The associations or crossovers of sign language and constellational language calls for an exercise of disambiguation. This is a term used in Wikipedia to clarify the use of similar terms for different purposes.

The reason why this happens is due to the fact that the operative syntax (OS) of the star zodiac long preceded the tropical zodiac that came to be codified about 150 CE by the Greek astronomer, Ptolemy in his works, the Algamest and the Tetrabiblos. By long preceded, I mean thousands of years. Skywatchers in ancient times developed an OS for the constellations that later came to be incorporated into the starless format defined (but not invented) by Ptolemy. So it was that from the 2nd century CE ahead, the mythic terminology of the real-sky zodiac merged into the language for starless astrology. This centuries-long development can be formulated like this:

real-sky zodiac > starless signs
mythic themes and plots > dynamics of personality
BULL > Taurus

It’s as simple as that. You can see how the astrologer describing the personality traits of the Sun-sign Taurus would, knowingly or not, draw upon the preceding zodiacal inventory — sidereal mythology. That language relies on inherited material from original sources — Sumerian and Egyptian astronomy, among others — that has long been lost, but can be recovered in Celestics. Disambiguation of one OS from the other is what I call a tenticular chore — like wrestling with an octopus!

Nevertheless, the difference is clear and explicit if you hold to the primary distinction: astrological signs describe the dynamic attributes of personality and the social persona, while the constellations describe scripting templates of a universal bearing, transcendent of the limits of personality. The former OS is psychological, the latter OS is biographical. The former explains how you behave, the latter describes how you script the narrative of your behavior. That distinction is the quintessential difference between the two systems. Knowledge of the scripting of the life-narrative is the mark of the sovereign, self-aware, and self-directing individual, the human singularity.

The Two Zodiacs

There are two zodiacs, one composed of starless signs and the other composed of observable star patterns, the constellations. Call them the sign zodiac and the star zodiac.

Elementary practice in skywatching shows that the star-patterns you can actually observe are uneven in size and shape, some long and some narrow, irreducible to a twelve-sector grid, and to top it all off, there are thirteen of them, not twelve. How do you match or “correlate” signs and constellations? You don’t. They belong to separate and distinct formats, like different computer scripts. The format of the thirteen visible constellations, which have been erroneously identified with the signs, is largely unknown to the world today. Celestics restores and reformats this celestial panorama. The result looks like this:

The graphic format of StarBase showing the real-sky constellations in the stellar zodiac, or constellational zodiac. The dark areas indicate the Milky Way. The outer circle running through the Constellations is the ecliptic, the flat edge of the orbital plane of the earth as it circles the sun. This model is called the Rimsite due to the way it situates the thirteen zodiacal constellations on the rim or edge of the orbital plane of the earth. When you observe these star-patterns at night, you actually situate or site them on the ecliptic rim, even though that rim itself is invisible and must be pictured mentally.

NOTE: This version of the star zodiac does not include the graphic details of the two ancillary constellations, the Celestial Anchor and the Cache, or Treasure Chest.

As you see, this display of graphic images looks nothing like a neat division of the sky into twelve equal 30-degree sections. Signs and constellations do not correlate, and never did. Nevertheless, every planet in your horoscope, including the sun and moon, the lunar nodes, and more, plots somewhere in the celestial graphics of the real-sky zodiac. For instance, if you are born on September 28 with the Sun in 6 degrees of the Sign Libra, its actual position in the sky is in the face of the Virgin, the constellation (shown head down) at the 3 o’clock position. Does that mean that you are not a Libra? Certainly not. Libra is still your personality type, complete with all the associated traits, but the position of the Sun in the face of the Virgin has another meaning. The graphic readout of sun, moon, planets, and earth (!!) in the constellations at the moment of your birth encodes an entirely different set of information that does not come to attention in the format of conventional astrology.

So, what can the real-sky zodiac of the constellations, the format of Celestics, tell you about yourself that sun sign astrology cannot? There is a short answer to that question, but it is more or less incomprehensible without a short study of phylogenetics. I leave that topic for another exposition to appear here on Celestics.org. As for the long answer, it is really, really long because explaining how StarBase works requires not only setting out the theory and the tools but also looking at biographic examples, case studies. That answer can be found in Quest for the Zodiac which is out of print and currently in revision. I will preview some of the revised chapters on this site. Visitors can also consult the landing page of Course 11 Skywatching for complementary orientation to Celestics.

For now, here are three interviews I did with Joanna Harcourt-Smith, recorded around 2006 in Andalucía. These talks were originally posted on futureprimitive.org, a platform I created for JHS to be used as an interview and networking tool. At that time, I did not use the word Celestics, which came into definition in January 2014. However, everything I say in these interviews can serve as background for your approach to Celestics.

“Destiny in the Stars”

Interview 1

Correction 16m: The Astrology of Personality was not written in the 1940s but in the 1930s and published in 1937 Servire/Wassenar in the Netherlands, associated with (caution advised) the Lucis Trust at the United Nations.

Phylogenetic record: The data bank of the racial memory of the human species.

*Tutorial Notes:

26m “the system used by almost all astrologers.” Emphasize, Western astrologers. I am aware that there are other formats of astrology in use today (2025), principally of two kinds: first, variations of the conventional tropical format, and second, other, non-tropical systems which refer to the real-sky panorama. The latter I call quasi-sidereal systems. For instance, Vedic astrology and the Western sidereal formats coming from Cyril Fagan and Diane Rosenberg, and  Anthroposophical schools expounded by Willi Sucher (with whom I studied) and Robert Powell (whom I met). I call them quasi- because they resemble the sidereal format of Celestics but stand distinct from it. Other variants are classical Chinese astrology, the recently revived models of Maya/Aztec astrology based on Mesoamerican source materials, and Tibetan astrology adopted by Michael Erlewine. I do not discount or dismiss any of these systems. They are all valid on their own terms, but none of them goes to the mythopoetic, transcendent dimensions of Celestics.

Interview 2

Note: In making the round of the star zodiac to show that it does not consist merely of animal figures, I cited the human figures, Twins, Virgin, Waterbearer, but left out the Snaketamer! How ironic, as I make a big point of the Snaketamer, Ophiuchus, the thirteenth Constellation, having been excluded from astrology since around 150 CE when Ptolemy canonized the twelve-Sign format.

Interview 3

Terrascope with Constellation graphics on the Rimsite, from the Ambergane Library and Archives.

Example of the unique astrological tool of the “terrascope,” (circa 1982) presenting the conventional format of the twelve signs, the houses, planets and aspect, etc, on the inside of the design, and including (on the blue rim) the display of the real-sky Constellations. I worked with this tool from the late 1970s onward, very extensively. To my knowledge, the graphic-geometric design you see here is the only instance in which an astrologer combined both signs and constellations, the sign zodiac and stellar zodiac. This tool allowed me to project the positions of planets in the starless astrological horoscope into the actual visible heavens, so that I could consider their real-sky celestial positions  — moon in the BULL, Saturn at the head of the TWINS, mercury in the ARCHER on the drawing arm, etc. It was quite a revelation, even though when I initially set up this system, I did not know how to interpret what those celestial positions signified.

Note also, the terrascope of those days included the position of Earth in the heavens at birth. That inclusion was a total innovation against all other astrologers working at the time, and remains so today, as far as I know. In this instance, you see the earth on the projection of a shaded ray emanating from the center-point of the format to the 10 o’clock position. This places Earth at the head of the TWINS, conjoined with Saturn and Mars, both retrograde.

*Tutorial note on Quest for the Zodiac: This book has been out of print for a long time. It can be purchased on Amazon.com and other outlets, often for an extravagant price, running to $900 or more. I do not advise anyone to purchase this book. (None of those revenues comes to me, by the way.) I am now revising it and selections of the new version will be posted here in TUTORIALS. Eventually, the revised version will be on sale here POD or PDF format with profits going to the author.

© John Lamb Lash 2025. All rights reserved