I've just posted an excerpted version of Alie Bird's thesis here:

http://www.astrozero.co.uk/articles/bird.htm

Titled 'Astrology in Education: An Ethnography', it documents and reflects on the return of astrology to academia in the UK, considers intellectual frameworks for framing astrology, and even fits in some humorous asides. By the standards of most theses, Bird's words are mostly very readable, and I commend this text most earnestly.

Hey, I'm in it!

But then it would have been brill anyway.

May I commend it too? Most enthusiastically.

I enjoyed reading this too but you rightly warned about modern academic language.I look forward to telling my friends that my hobby is studying a Foucauldian sixteenth century episteme! Still- it makes think we are going through a mini-renaissance at the moment when astrology is at last taken, if not seriously,then at least with respect.

Matt

Articulate and insightful.

Astrology as bricolage, the astrologer as bricoleur. I love it.

I hope by now to have demonstrated that astrological knowledge is subjective, partial and pragmatic, despite the fact that it masquerades as technical know-how that is purportedly acquired by the application of a supposedly normative method and promulgated as universal truth. It is their rival claims to absolute truth that fuel the agonistic nature of the mutual relations that exist between players of different astrological language-games.

Indeed. I have always believed this to be the case.

I would, nonetheless, make a distinction between the absolute and the relative empirical verifiability of any truth-claim. All absolutisms are not necessarily absolute, unless they imply recourse to independent refutation or verification. Unfortunately, many astrologers seem to confuse the one with the other, which gives rise to the "agonistic nature of the mutual relations" between and among them. What is even more disappointing is that such truth-claims often emanate from astrologers who seem to be astute enough to know better.

As a confirmed symbolist, Pluto's altered astronomical classification will have no bearing upon my horoscopic employment of its metaphorical image, which is tempered by its falling outside the traditional astrological schema whose symmetry, dictated by the visible planets years before the discovery of the trans-Saturnians, appeals more to my Virgoan tidy-mindedness.

Well, there is reasonable accommodation, and there is unreasonable accommodation, suggested by the structure of the symmetry itself. The Hindu astrologers assign domicile and exaltation to the lunar nodes, for example, though not without objection:

Although shrouded in Babylonian mythology, from a technical, astronomical vantage point the caput draconis was equated with the point where the moon passes the ecliptic from south to north, whereas the cauda draconis was equated with the other point, where the moon passes the eciptic from north to south. Hindu science took a step further and ascribed to those two points a definite astrological status, and this was a doctrine which Ibn Ezra could not tolerate.

(Abraham Ibn Ezra and the Rise of Medieval Hebrew Science by Shlomo Sela, p. 245)

If one accepts the apparent ambiguity of dual rulership in the case of the nodes, one might also accept the apparent ambiguity of dual rulership in the case of the trans-Saturnians. The symmetry of the schema can accommodate the inclusion of two trans-Saturnian planets, in direct relation to their proximity to the Sun: one to the domicile of Capricorn, one to the domicile of Aquarius. Beyond this (no pun intended), one must make the case for triple rulership, something which has no antecedents in the historical traditions of astrology, whether of the East or of the West.

I'd really like to read the rest of it when it becomes available.

This observation amused me:

if there is one universally valid statement which can be made about astrologers, it is that they seldom, if ever, wholly approve of each other?s approach to their supposedly common subject.

Hmmn. Jed, huh? I wonder who that could be, when he has obviously played such a formative role in Ms. Bird's astrological education, yet still somehow does not get the credit he is due or even a mention of his real name. Talk about an inconvenient truth, not just for the author either...



PS: A proportion of what is said about Jed is true, btw!