Forecasts on a large scale: mundane astrology

When astrological forecasts come up, most people think of their own life: work, love, the year ahead. Alongside it runs a second branch that takes no interest at all in the individual person. Mundane astrology — from the Latin mundus, the world — draws up charts for countries, cities, treaties and inaugurations. It is the source of the headlines that resurface every few months. It is worth knowing what this branch actually works with.

The older branch, not the younger one

Surprising to many: the collective came first. The early Mesopotamian observers wrote down their omens for king and country — for the harvest, the campaign, the throne. The chart for a single person is the later invention; personal interpretation is an offshoot of something that originally had the community in view.

The three charts it works with

• The ingress chart. It is set for the moment the Sun reaches the spring equinox, and calculated for one particular place, usually the capital. The same event yields different houses for Berlin, Lisbon and Helsinki — here the place makes all the difference.
• Eclipses. Solar eclipses occur at least twice a year, and the tradition looks at where they are visible and which degree they fall on. Similar eclipses return at intervals of a good eighteen years.
• The foundation chart. For the moment a state comes into being — for the Federal Republic of Germany, for instance, 23 May 1949, the day the Basic Law was proclaimed.

The cycles of the slow planets

The real working tools are the meetings of the slow planets with one another. Jupiter and Saturn stand on the same degree of longitude roughly every twenty years, and the place of that meeting moves further round the zodiac each time. Saturn and Uranus need about forty-five years for it, Saturn and Pluto a good thirty-three. Such conjunctions are treated as timekeepers: between two meetings lies a stretch of time that can be read as a chapter, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

That is the honest core of the branch — a grid for stretches of time, not a list of dates. Anyone who wants to know why one decade feels different from the last at least has a question in hand.

A difficulty of its own: who exactly was born?

With a person the beginning is beyond dispute. With a country it almost never is. Does the declaration of independence count, the constitution, the first election, reunification? For many states several dates are in circulation, and each one yields a different chart. Anyone who then picks the one that fits what happened best has arranged the result in advance.

On top of that comes the basic problem of any statement about a collective: it bears on millions of lives at once, and one of them always confirms it.

Where the branch regularly goes wrong

At the end of the world. The best known example of recent decades was 2012: in December of that year a large section of the Maya long count ran out, much as an odometer rolls over. Books, films and seminars turned this calendar event into an announced end. The calendar itself announces nothing — it goes on counting the next day.

The pattern repeats reliably: a rare configuration, a round-numbered year — and around it a market of books and seminars. That nothing happens afterwards costs those who started it nothing; it costs the reputation of the branch something every time. This is the place where it is damaged from within, not by its critics.

What stays usable

A language for stretches of time. Mundane astrology can describe which theme marks a span, and it can give its reasons, because its cycles are calculable. What it cannot do is the headline for the day after tomorrow. Anyone who keeps the two apart reads such texts with profit — and sees at once when someone crosses the line. What this looks like on the personal scale is set out under Horoscopes; you will find the groundwork under Astrology.