Recovering the sources

Perhaps the most important development in astrology over the past few decades is not a new technique but a recovery: since the 1990s the ancient, Arabic and medieval source texts have become available in modern languages.

What was missing before

Until then, practice in the German- and English-speaking world rested almost entirely on accounts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — a period in which astrology was reordered, in part by people who could not read the older texts.

The sources themselves lay in Greek, Latin and Arabic manuscripts, within reach of a handful of specialists who for the most part had no interest in astrology.

What the translation work has produced

Three things, and the third is the most uncomfortable.

Lost techniques. Time-ruler techniques, the doctrine of sect, the distinctions drawn under combustion and besiegement, reception as a factor in its own right — all of it there, fully worked out, and none of it left in the practice of the twentieth century.

Clarity about origins. It is now possible to say where a given rule first appears, how it was handed on and what happened to it along the way. That settles disputes that were previously undecidable.

Proof of errors in transmission. A number of rules that counted as settled turn out to be misunderstandings — a mistranslation, a copying slip, a marginal note that found its way into the text. They were handed on for centuries because no one went back to the source any more.

Why this has consequences

Because it makes the appeal to “the tradition” something that can be checked.

Before, that was a trump card: anyone invoking the ancients could hardly be contradicted. Today what the ancients wrote can be looked up — and now and then it says something else.

That works both ways. Some modern simplifications prove to be unfounded; some supposedly age-old rules prove to be young.

What this means in practice

That a claim about the tradition can and should now be backed by a passage: author, work, book, chapter, edition. That is ordinary scholarly care, and in astrological writing it is still rare.

Anyone working their way in should start with the translated sources and read the secondary literature afterwards. The order makes a difference.

See also: Indian astrology — a tradition that never broke off.