It is an old Eastern adage that there are many paths that lead to the summit of the mountain. While the final destination is the same, the scenery may vary depending upon which slope of the ascent you choose to climb. This does not necessarily make one approach 'right' and another 'wrong,' although some would interpret it this way depending on their own experiences and personal ideology.
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Astrology is no different from these trails in that the study of heaven can be viewed from alternate perspectives by different peoples. The Chinese, like the West, employ a division of twelve animals relating to the heavens, but they use different animals than those that we are familiar with. The Mayans divided the same space into a system of twenty.
Today there are usually thought to be two astrological offshoots that are related to each other. One is known as the tropical system, while the other is called the sidereal system. The latter is the older of the two, as it uses the 'fixed' stars of the constellations as its framework. Two fundamental methods of ancient observation used the sidereal system as a reference point. The twenty-nine lunar mansions were measured by the distance that the Moon traveled through the course of a day, completing its cycle after a month.
Egyptian Pharaoh
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The Egyptians divided the year into 36 ten day 'weeks' (to form the 360 degrees of the circle), with five days left at the end of the year during which the gods played dice and the people celebrated holidays (now observed as the week between Christmas and New Years). Both the lunar mansions and the ten day 'weeks' of the Egyptians had specific stellar boundaries which could be used to clock their passage. Indeed, the sidereal system of astrology is still the one used in India, and many astrologers there continue to employ only the seven traditional visible planets in their determinations.
The tropical system is the one that is currently employed here in the West and over most of the last two thousand years. Its premise is that each of the signs are exactly thirty degrees in length, representing precisely one twelfth of the circle. The cardinal signs which initiate each of the seasons begin with the equinoxes and solstices. These quarters are divided into mathematical thirds to determine the remaining eight signs of the zodiac.
One of the problems with this system is that the constellations don't really fit into neat and tidy packages of 30 degrees each. For instance, while Leo occupies 40 degrees of heaven and Virgo occupies 52, poor Cancer, whose stars are not very bright anyway, is left with only 18, barely over half of its tropical sign allotment.
While the tropical system is the more proportional, logical, and mathematically oriented system (and therefore more left brained), its older sidereal brother is more observational, intuitive, and the source from which the myths of antiquity are derived. As a result, the West has severed one of its principal connections with the myths. Tropical astrology commences the Age of Pisces sometime around 0 BC/AD, but the constellational epoch begins in 392 BC as the Vernal Equinox conjuncted the first star in the constellation Pisces, Al Risha.
Next week:
The Third Seal Opened
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