Crisis Solar Returns for the U.S.
Crisis Solar Returns for the U.S.
Yes, Your Zodiac Sign has Changed
A Response to Chris Brennan’s Critique of the NY Times article,
Your Zodiac Sign is 2,000 Years Out of date
Chris has noted that similar articles has appeared several times in the past fifteen years, which he described as an attempt to discredit astrology. But there is a reason this issue keeps popping up over and over: it’s no secret that the zodiac, which is available to anyone who cares to look at the night sky, is completely disconnected from the tropical signs. That discrepancy quite naturally evokes the question, “Why do astrologers dismiss the matter as a non-issue?” Chris explains his way out of that conundrum, but I take issue with quite a lot of what he said. In my video, I respond to the most important points.
Response to 5:52 to 8:32: In the section on the zodiac Chris chose his words very carefully. He said that the Babylonians “identified,” then “developed,” and finally “standardized” the zodiac without mentioning the word associated with their renown in the ancient world: they discovered and mapped out the zodiac, which is the reference used today that is based on the plane of the ecliptic. The ecliptic is the centerline of the zodiac. The celestial equator, which is the terrestrial equator extended out into space, was the common frame of reference throughout most of the world, even in China, before the Babylonians incorporated ecliptic emphasis as the central theme of their astrological corpus.
The transfer of emphasis to the ecliptic, which became the basis of the zodiac, has earned the praise of historians of science as one of the greatest technical achievements of antiquity. The zodiac has some Sumerian influence and the Egyptians took into account the entire sky from horizon to pole, but it was the Babylonians who rendered earlier astronomical reckoning into the main instrument, the zodiac, that astrologers rely on to interpret the correspondence between the sky and the ground. The zodiac is a 100% sidereal achievement. The Greeks had no hand whatsoever in mapping out the ecliptic and systematically organizing the sky. It was an enormous Babylonian undertaking that took many centuries to complete. The Greeks adopted the Babylonian zodiac intact, lock, stock and barrel.
One could easily get the impression from what Chris said, that the Babylonians had only recently dropped Orion, Perseus, Auriga, Pegasus and the Swallow, incorporated the two fish of Pisces into one sign and made Perseus part of Taurus in the 5th century BCE. Nobody knows exactly when that happened, doubtless because it happened gradually, but there is good evidence that the twelve-fold equal division format was already a tradition by the time of Esarhaddon, who reigned in Assyria and Babylon from 681 to 669 BCE. It’s misleading to assert that it happened suddenly. The 12-fold equal division sidereal zodiac did not appear out of thin air fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus.
Response to 9:10 to 10:27 Chris states that the sidereal zodiac became part of the Babylonian calendar in the 5th century. Actually, the Babylonian calendar was tied to the zodiac from at least the 8th century. One can know that from Mul.Apin, the major Babylonian astronomical compendium laid out before the 8th century BCE. According to Mul.Apin, the civil year began when the Moon was observed in sidereal Aries on the first or second day after the new Moon closest to the vernal equinox either before or after it.
Chris casts aspersions on the sidereal signs as mere abstractions as if they’re not invested with merit. He doesn’t mention the most important things about the sidereal signs: you can see them, in the night sky and they don’t move.
Chris claims that the sidereal zodiac is partially aligned to the seasons. That’s not true. The sidereal signs were never aligned to the seasons even when tropical and sidereal reckoning were briefly aligned in the 3rd century CE. Many people automatically assume when they see the word “equinox” that equinox means tropical reckoning, but it’s just a marker, not an astrological fiducial. The Babylonians always noted the equinox but didn’t reckon celestial longitude from it, which is absolutely clear from their ephemerides, which were uniformly sidereal. Chris may be talking about Systems A and B which corresponded to 501 BCE and 358 BCE, respectively, that were accurate for an equinox of 10° Aries and 8 Aries. They were used in the Greco-Roman world long after they had become inaccurate. The point is that the equinox was described in terms of sidereal reckoning, during the era that preceded tropical reckoning, not that it was a point of reference for planets in the Babylonian sidereal context.
Response to 11:57 to 12:22 Chris claims that Hellenistic astrology is the foundation of astrology of the last two-thousand years. That’s a gross overstatement. The zodiac itself, discovered by the Babylonians, is the backbone and the foundation of astrology.
Response to 13:23 to 15:35 Chris emphasizes Greek domicile schemes as a prime example of Greek schematism, which is a substitute for the actual zodiac. The domicile schematism ignores the stars and focuses on northern hemisphere weather, which doesn’t apply in the southern hemisphere. The domicile schemes began the usurpation of the names of the sidereal signs. The adoption by Ptolemy and subsequent tropical advocates of the names of the sidereal signs is the reason behind the appearance of The New York Times article. Such articles are entirely reasonable because tropical zodiac placements are artificial and have nothing to do with the sky.
Response to 21:20 to 21:37 The idea that the exaltations are more connected to the seasons than the sky is extremely misleading because the exaltations that deal with the planets are explicitly sidereal and Babylonian. Chris may have brought up the issue of the origin of the exaltations due to the appearance of a recently published article in The Journal for the History of Astronomy by Professor Mathieu Ossendrijver entitled, The Exaltations of Greco-Roman Astrology and Their Relationship to Babylonian Normal Star Positions. Ossendrijver writes on page two, “Since the cuneiform evidence for places of secrecy pre-dates the Greco-Roman exaltations, there is no doubt that the latter were derived from the former.” The secret places, from bit nisirti in Akkadian, are the places where planets have their greatest power.
In other words, the exaltations of the planets are all sidereal, they don’t translate into tropical positions of the same name, and they came long before the Greeks had developed any facility with astrology beyond farmer’s lore.
Response to 22:25 to 23:10 Chris says that for the most part astrologers were not aware of precession, which is true, but an extreme understatement; but farther along in this video he says repeatedly that astrologers were completely aware of precession, which overstates their knowledge of it.
Hipparchus in the second century BCE determined that there was a very slow long-term movement between the ecliptic and the celestial equator, whereby they would eventually be in different positions with repect to each other than the positions of his day. Hipparchus didn’t know what caused the change between his own time and an observation 150 years older, or whether the movement was in the equator or the ecliptic. In other words, he wasn’t sure if the movement was caused by the Earth or movement of the sky as a unit. Professor Gerald Toomer, who translated Ptolemy’s Almagest thinks that Hipparchus was the one who could think outside the box, and toward the end of his career that he at least suspected, that it was the equator that was moving—which is correct. That means the precessional motion that Hipparchus and Ptolemy observed was due to the change in the orientation of the Earth’s equator with respect to the sky, not actual movement of the sky. Ptolemy was having none of that argument three hundred years later. His comment in the Almagest with regard to the motion of the equator versus the ecliptic was that Hipparchus was “confused.”
Chris states that Hipparchus thought that the rate of precession was 1° per century, but that’s not correct. It was Ptolemy who determined that the rate was 1° per century. Hipparchus’s estimate was much closer to the truth. The rate that Hipparchus determined was 1° in 78.3 years, approximately three hundred years before Ptolemy. The correct value is 1° every 71.6 years.
Response to 24:20 to 25:18: Chris repeatedly claims that Ptolemy made a clear and deliberate choice between tropical and sidereal reckoning, but that’s impossible to defend. Ptolemy explicitly stated in the Almagest that the Earth is without any motion of any kind, fixed in space in the center of the universe. He explicitly wrote that rotation of the Earth on its axis was impossible because everything not tied down would fly off. If your premise is that the Earth is absolutely motionless with no rotation on its axis and certainly no revolution about the Sun, nor movement among the stars, and you detect motion between the Earth and the stars, you’re forced to conclude that any motion between the equator and the ecliptic has to be in the ecliptic and not the equator. There is no way around that and it absolutely precludes any sort of choice.
Actually, the ecliptic, as a practical matter, taken as a whole, is close to being fixed. The ecliptic moves by less than a half second of arc per year, which is imperceptible then and now without exceedingly fine instruments, whereas the equator moves 50.23 seconds of arc per year, which is breakneck speed in astronomical terms and entirely perceptible. Fifty point two three seconds of arc amounts to 20 minutes and 24 seconds of time. That’s the amount of annual precession and the difference between tropical and sidereal reckoning which adds up to more than an hour at age 3, two hours by age 6, three hours by age 9 and so on.
There could be no possible choice between tropical and sidereal reckoning if one accepts as the gospel truth that the Earth is absolutely fixed, and by extension, the equator. But by insisting that the motion Hipparchus saw and he, Ptolemy, confirmed, was in the ecliptic and not the equator, Ptolemy founded a system built on a false premise that was not just a little off, but diametrically opposite basic facts of solar system geometry. Ptolemy got it backwards. Hipparchus was right, if indeed he did suspect that precession was caused by movement in the celestial equator. One of the results of getting it backwards is that tropical reckoning doesn’t track; rather, it gets out of sync with the sky at the rate of precession, which is why tropical transits don’t mirror the sky in era to era comparisons. It also means that tropical reckoning confounds figure and ground. They are reversed by Ptolemaic reasoning. It’s like saying that the station backs into the train or the cyclist is moving in place as the world passes him by. Ptolemy can be excused for not having available, critical knowledge of the configuration of the solar system, but to persist in his mistake begs the issue of how far that can be taken in the face of the facts.
It explains further why Chris overstates the matter with regard to a general understanding of precession: the only thing that was grasped by some people was that something was moving, but nobody knew how, why or what was causing it, which gave rise later to at least another unfounded and incorrect explanation of the matter called trepidation. Trepidation was advanced after Ptolemy’s death as an oscillation of the ecliptic.
Chris states that Ptolemy adopted the tropical zodiac because, for one thing, he believed it to be the intention of the people who developed Hellenistic astrology in the 2nd century BCE. My problem with that is that Vettius Valens, the major astrological figure of the 2nd century CE in the West wasn’t using tropical reckoning. Neugebauer and van Hoesen in their Greek Horoscopes, go so far as to say that Vettius Valens, a contemporary of Ptolemy, who some people think may have died in the same year—approximately 175 CE—used sidereal reckoning, when he used signs with degrees. Since Valens’s compendium of charts is not tropical and he was a notably conscientious and devoted astrologer, the issue of when tropical reckoning actually gained currency in the real world is debatable.
Moreover Hipparchus, who was working three hundred years before Valens, was not a friend of astrology and his frame of reference was right ascension and declination; at least that’s what he used to determine that Spica, the alpha star in Virgo the Virgin, was 2° farther to the east of the autumnal equinox in his own time than it had been in the time of Timocharis, another Greek who observed the star 150 years before Hipparchus’s time. What Hipparchus observed was the equinox moving to the west with respect to the sky. It was Hipparchus’s observations of Spica and Regulus that demonstrated precession.
Response to 26:40 to 27:20: Chris insists many times that astrologers were making a conscious decision to choose tropical over sidereal and that everybody “knew” about precession during the first years of the Current Era. That’s very misleading because it assumes reasonable literacy when it was very low in the West, a fairly high level of numeracy, exposure to previous works and an understanding of them, a mentor, stylus and paper, parchment or vellum, which was no small matter in those days, perhaps a quarterstaff or an astrolabe to measure angles and some degree of awareness of what was really happening vis-à-vis the equinox and the ecliptic. Exceedingly few people had all of that and in particular the understanding of the disengagement between the sky and the ground, not to mention a good idea of solar system geometry that didn’t exist until Copernicus, and which was much disputed even then in the 16th century.
Babylon had become a ruin, barely inhabited according to Strabo the Geographer whose dates are approximately 64 BCE – 21CE, who visited the place in his lifetime. And, except for Oxyrynchus, a sidereal enclave in Egypt, there is no reason to assume that there was sidereal material available with which to compare tropical and sidereal. In the West it was tropical or nothing. Worse, nobody understood precession until Newton, who addressed the matter in his Principia published in 1686, but even he struggled with it. Nobody realized that tropical transits are skewed by precession by a full degree in a single lifetime because tropical ephemerides were too inaccurate to show it.
Part of this problem is explained by Professor Alexander Jones in his masterpiece, Astronomical Papyri From Oxyrhynchus. Jones writes,
“Ptolemy’s longitudes are also professedly tropical, although his assumption of too long a value for the tropical year gives rise to a gradually increasing discrepancy between his zero point and the true vernal point. The longitudes in the papyri (the Oxyryhnchus papyri) are usually counted from a sidereally fixed zero point. A standard rule (‘Theon’s formula’) was used in antiquity to convert Ptolemy’s longitudes to the sidereal frame of reference.”
I don’t know if the ‘Theon’ Jones mentions is the Theon of the Handy Tables, but it’s likely since Jones mentions the Handy Tables twice on the page that I just quoted. In any case Ptolemy’s accuracy is suspect, especially over time, which only deteriorated, until by the 1460s Johannes Muller, the great mathematician, better known as Regiomontanus, found very serious problems with Ptolemaic astronomy, which translated into gross errors. Accurate astrology was not available until Kepler’s Rudolphine Tables were printed in 1627.
Response to 36:50 to 37:25: AGAIN, Chris emphasizes that astrologers from the Roman Imperial Era through the modern period deliberately, consciously and consistently chose to use tropical reckoning as if they were fully conversant with the difference between tropical and sidereal reckoning. That’s not remotely true. Nobody really understood precession in the ancient world. A few people must have grasped that the sky didn’t line up with the seasons several hundred years after Ptolemy, because they could see the sky and ground diverge with respect to the equinox. I don’t know if there is anyone who commented about it before the Muslim astronomer and mathematician, al-Battani in the 9th century CE fully seven centuries after Ptolemy’s death.
If astrology were practiced at a high level during the Dark Age in the West, the record has yet to be demonstrated. So, if there is a voice as yet unheard from the intellectual hibernation of the West when tropical astrology was uncontested, it is mute and doesn’t constitute support.
Even more to the point, there was no sidereal standard in the West during the Dark Age or the current millennium until Cyril Fagan, an Irish astrologer, demonstrated in the 20th century that sidereal astrology had been the standard in the ancient world. Fagan was a long-time tropical astrologer who realized after two decades of study that the ancient world was sidereal until Greek influence was felt. He is one of a small handful in the first rank of western astrologers of the modern era.
Fagan was met by intense, bitter, vitriolic resistance to almost everything he had to say about tropical and sidereal astrology in the relatively mild atmosphere of the 20th century, even though he was, hands down, the best interpreter of his era, still revered though he died 55 years ago. In the 16th and 17th centuries people were still being killed and tortured for unorthodox views. Most scholars think Copernicus waited to publish De Revolutionibis Orbium Coelestium, in which he proposed the literal heresy that the Earth orbits the Sun, until he was 70 because the church would not torture a septuagenarian. Giordano Bruno who espoused the Copernican theory was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600 for what were, in effect, thought crimes. Let there be no mistake, it wasn’t merely torture, though he had been tortured. He was burned alive to death. Bruno also said that the universe was infinite and that the stars were other suns. He was right but that didn’t save him or open any minds to his views.
In 1633 Galileo was threatened with torture if he did not recant his advocacy of the Copernican theory. It was much more dangerous to espouse new ideas in the medieval world that veered toward the esoteric than today. That was especially true after the 12th century with the rise of the Inquisition. Even without that undercurrent of fear, the degree of difficulty that presenting sidereal material would have entailed, especially as Akkadian and cuneiform were dead and ancestral to the Arabic spoken by Muslims, who were despised in Europe in those days, precludes the possibility of any sort of choice between tropical and sidereal until recently. There was no conscious choice, though Chris keeps pushing that idea. The order of the day was uniformly tropical.
Response to 42:30 to 43:25: Chris claims that it’s not only baseless, but absurd to criticize tropical reckoning, that to do so is even a nefarious attempt to mislead. He says that the signs are fixed with respect to the seasons, as if to leave the impression that the tropical zodiac is not actually moving with respect to the over-arching element of astrology— the sky. Tropical reckoning is known as the moving zodiac because it continuously gets farther and farther removed by the day from the sky.
Tropical reckoning caught on, not so much because of what Ptolemy wrote, when the West was overwhelmingly illiterate, but because it was indisputable that the stars in Aries rose with the equinox—you could see it. Now tropical astrology is much more difficult to defend because Pisces rises with the equinox in an equally indisputable manner, but the tropical position is that the zodiac begins with the northern hemisphere vernal equinox. One is expected to ignore the sky and ignore that the northern hemisphere vernal equinox is the southern hemisphere autumnal equinox. The appearance from time to time of an article like the one that appeared in September 2025 is evidence of how weak those argument are.
If one were to buy the argument that tropical astrology is beyond criticism, one would be inclined to castigate, punish, ostracize, damn and shun anyone for making the following true statements:
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The Earth is NOT motionless.
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The Earth is NOT the center of the universe.
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The Earth DOES in fact rotate on its axis and revolve around the Sun.
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The ecliptic is NOT moving except by less than half a second of arc per year.
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The celestial equator IS moving at the rate of 50.23s per year.
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The zodiac refers to the stars, hence astro logos, the word or study of the stars.
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The zodiac is not the seasons which are constantly moving against the sky.
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The earth’s spin axis precesses and the celestial equator is connected to it, which makes the equinox move in relation to the sky, not the other way around.
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In 11,000 years the tropical zodiac will be completely upside down with respect to the stellar zodiac, which will be much harder to defend than it is now.
In his concluding remarks, Chris says that the long run of tropical reckoning is a commendable thing in itself, as if the long run of 1800 years confers legitimacy. In reply I think it’s noteworthy that the conviction that the world is flat also experienced a long run.
I’ve noticed some astrologers quoting Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos in response to The New York Times article. The Tretrabiblos is about astrology and does not constitute a defense of the tropical zodiac in any way. Ptolemy’s Almagest is about astronomy, which is at the heart of the issues I’ve commented on here. Ptolemy’s Almagest is the book necessary to understand Ptolemy’s positions addressed in my response.
My book, An Introduction to Western Sidereal Astrology, has three appendices, one of which deals with the exaltations. The bibliography in my book is likely to interest anyone who wants to study this topic.
© Kenneth Bowser, 2025. All rights reserved.