The Atlantean horoscope: which version counts?

Anyone looking for an Atlantean horoscope runs into offerings that contradict one another. One wants only your date of birth, the next also wants details about your appearance. One divides the year into twelve sections, the next into more. And in the end one provider gives a different result from another, although you supplied the same details. That is not an oversight — it follows from the way these systems are built.

Nobody can decide between two versions

With Western astrology you can look things up when there is a dispute. Texts from antiquity have survived, editions of them exist, and two astrologers who disagree can point to the same page and carry on arguing from there. A source of that kind is not always unambiguous. But it exists.

With the Atlantean horoscope that authority is missing altogether. No text exists that two versions could appeal to, and so no procedure exists either for preferring one of them to the other. Every version is as valid as the attention its publisher gets. The differences between the offerings are therefore nothing incidental, they are part of the matter itself: someone lays down a set of correspondences, publishes it, and nobody is in a position to contradict him.

What the name is good for

Everything known about Atlantis comes from a single ancient source. Plato brings the sunken island into two of his writings; no other testimony from antiquity exists, and everything later goes back to those two texts. Only much later did the island become raw material for explaining the world. An American book of 1882, Ignatius Donnelly's account of Atlantis as the origin of all the early civilisations, made the subject known to a wide public, and the theosophical literature of the decades that followed built it into a prehistory of humanity.

For a system of interpretation a name like that is handy. It sounds old, everyone has heard it before, and it cannot be refuted: behind it there is no text that could cut any version short.

When two systems say different things about you

Suppose that in the Western zodiac you are a Cancer, in the Chinese one a Tiger, and the Atlantean horoscope assigns you a plant whose description will not fit either of them. Which answer counts?

None of the three systems measures the same thing. The Western zodiac divides the solar year, the Chinese one works with a calendar of its own and a cycle of animals and elements, and a system of correspondences like the Atlantean one works with images that somebody picked out in the twentieth century. Three languages say different things about the same person without any of them having to lie — they are not talking about the same object. The contradiction is therefore not information about you, it is information about the systems. How the Chinese cycle is built is set out under Chinese astrology.

Two questions before you order anything

The first: is something calculated, or looked up? For a birth chart, positions are worked out that belong to your date of birth, your time of birth and your place of birth, and to no other combination. A system of correspondences looks things up in a table; anyone born on the same day lands in the same row. That is not a reproach, only a difference — and it bears on the price as well.

The second: do you see the table, or only the result? Where the correspondences are out in the open, you can tell within a few minutes how coarsely or finely they are cut and where their limits lie. Where they stay hidden, you are paying for a sentence and cannot check how it came about.

And if you already have a reading?

Then do not throw it away, but put it where it belongs. What you were assigned goes back to the decision of an author and not to a tradition. If a second provider confirms the same correspondences, it is working from the same template: two matching results prove nothing, they only show that the same book was copied out twice. A reading in which every sentence traces back to a position in the sky that can be checked by calculation works differently; how it does that is set out under astrology.