Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you're listening to the astrology podcast.

In this episode I'm going to be talking with astrologer Sam Ogden about the

Anticathera mechanism and its relationship to astrology.

So hey Sam, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Chris. Yeah, I'm

excited to do this with you today. So in this episode we're going to be talking about the

anti-cathere mechanism, which is a complex mechanical device from the first century

B.C. that was found in an ancient shipwreck. And this device was actually capable of calculating

the positions of the planets, as well as doing other things like predicting

eclipses and other things like that. So we're going to talk about the device today as well as its discovery and also discuss the relevance and possible uses of such devices in ancient astrology.

Yeah, so Sam, you have an interest in what I like to call like ancient astrological paraphernalia,

and you and I have been researching and working on an episode for a while now on ancient astrologers boards, which were like these wooden boards that astrologers would use in consultations in ancient times.

And I thought you would be good person. consultations in ancient times.

And I thought you would be a good person to join me so that we could research this episode

together and put it together because it's kind of adjacent in some ways to the Antica theory mechanism in terms of the different ways

in which astrologers potentially different tools that astrologers may have

used in ancient astrology? Yes definitely and the astrologers boards were much more, you know, crude forms of

of astrological, you know, calculations of charts and things and the anticathera mechanism is so much more complex, but yeah, I'm looking forward to getting into it. This is really an amazing, you know, mechanism and piece of technology so for sure yeah in a major discovery

so let me give a brief overview of the device and the circumstances surrounding it and then we'll get into a more detailed

discussion after that.

So the short version of the story is that in the year 1900, just over a century ago, a group of sponge divers one day discovered a shipwreck

by an island, an ancient Greek island that was named Antichetera, and it's still named Antichera. So at the bottom of the

ocean they discovered ancient statues, pottery, and a bunch of other stuff from this shipwreck that had occurred where for some reason this Greek merchant ship sank somewhere around the year 60 BC.

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