An Overview of the History of Western Astrology

The Astrology Podcast

Chris Brennan

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Spirituality

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2020

⏱️ 161 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Episode 280 features a lecture by astrologer Chris Brennan where he gives an overview of the history and transmission of western astrology over the past 4,000 years. The talk begins with the ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian astrological traditions, and then traces the development of astrology through the Hellenistic, Medieval, Renaissance, and modern periods. This is based on a lecture that Chris has been giving at conferences since 2006 about how Uranus-Neptune conjunctions have historically coincided with periods in which there is a major transmission and revival of older forms of astrology, which are then synthesized with whatever the prevailing paradigm is at the time. Part of the purpose of the talk is to contextualize some of the current trends in our own time period, and the recent revival of older forms of astrology. Chris recently appeared on The Strology Show podcast with Kirah Tabourn to talk about the recent revival of traditional astrology in modern times, and that episode would be great to watch after this episode of The Astrology Podcast if you would like some more information about the traditional revival. This episode is available in both audio and video versions below. Timestamps Here are some timestamps for topics covered at different points in the episode: 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:36 Mesopotamia 00:07:44 Invention of natal astrology 00:16:21 Egypt (Decans) 00:20:58 Conquest of Alexander the Great 00:24:23 Emergence of Hellenistic Astrology 00:32:04 Thema Mundi, Rulerships 00:36:19 Aspects 00:37:42 Houses 00:39:08 Planetary Joys 00:41:45 Elements and Zodiac 00:43:00 House significators 00:44:48 Core of the New System 00:47:00 Roman Empire in the 2nd Century CE 00:47:42 Transmission to Persia and India 00:51:40 End of Hellenistic Tradition 00:54:20 Expansion of Islamic Empire 00:55:17 Early Medieval Astrology 01:01:30 Four Traditional Branches 01:05:34 Transfer of Light 01:06:51 Late Medieval Astrology 01:12:10 Renaissance Astrology 01:17:12 Late Traditional Astrology 01:23:30 The Astrological Recession 01:29:06 Rebirth in 20th Century 01:33:12 Modern Astrology 01:43:00 Revival of Traditional Astrology 01:54:33 Uranus Neptune Conjunctions 01:59:30 Chart of historical timeline 02:05:03 Value of Studying the Tradition 02:10:40 The Current Revival 02:15:40 Contributions of Each Tradition 02:21:58 The Hermetic Nature of Astrology 02:26:25 The Future 02:32:34 Further Reading 02:36:10 Concluding remarks Watch the Video Version of This Episode on the History of Astrology Here is the video version of this episode on the history of western astrology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWDq6zJVX34 - Transcript A full transcript of this episode is available: Episode 280 transcript Listen to the Audio Version of This Episode You can either play the audio version of this episode of the podcast directly from the website or download it as an MP3 to your device by using the buttons below:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to the astrology podcast.
0:04.0	Today is Monday, November 23rd, 2020, starting at 133 p.m. in Denver, Colorado,
0:10.0	and this is the 280th episode of the show. In this episode I'm going to be giving an overview of the history of Western astrology.
0:20.0	So the genesis of this episode is I recently did an interview with Kira Taborne on the astrology
0:27.6	podcast where she wanted to talk about the recent revival of traditional astrology that's happened over the past 30 years and to place it in the context of the history of astrology.
0:38.0	And it was really good discussion and I really enjoyed having it, although it made me realize that I had never given an overview of the history of astrology on the astrology podcast, even though I've dealt with little individual topics during the course of little pieces of the history of astrology or subtopics, I've never really gone over everything.
0:58.8	So that's going to be my goal here today.
1:01.6	All right, so why don't we jump right into it with that said?
1:07.5	So this is going to be kind of one of those long detailed overview.
1:11.4	So it is an overview, but I'm also going to get into some detail. It'll probably be one of those longer discussions, but think of this like a class, like a deep dive into the history of astrology, especially for those of you that don't have any background in it and really want to know where it came from and how astrology in the west got started.
1:32.0	All right, so here's my little slideshow presentation. So as I said I'm going to give a
1:37.4	broad overview of the history and transmission of Western astrology. I'm going to focus
1:40.8	especially on periods of transmission and synthesis when
1:45.4	astrology in the West was transmitted from one culture to another which
1:50.8	essentially inaugurates a new era
1:53.4	in the history of astrology each time every few hundred years.
1:57.7	I'm also going to discuss some similarities
2:01.7	compared to back then when some of these transmissions took place and when there were these
2:06.5	revival of older forms of astrology and how that actually compares to now and how things are very similar in some ways.
2:15.0	I'm also going to explore the role of tradition versus innovation,
2:19.0	and by the end of this I hope to give you sort of an idea and some reflections on where things are headed now based on the
2:25.9	trajectory of astrology over the past 2,000 years, actually 3,000, 3,000 or 4,000 years I should say.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Chris Brennan, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Chris Brennan and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.