The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 105, titled:
Light, Darkness, and Polarities in Astrology
With Chris Brennan and guest Michael Ofek
Episode originally released on April 24, 2017
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Chloe Plumb
Transcription released August 10th, 2020
Copyright © 2020 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hi, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. This episode was recorded on Sunday April 16, 2017, starting around 10:30pm in Denver, CO, and this is the 105th episode of the show. In this episode I’m going to be talking with astrologer Michael Ofek about the concepts of light, dark, and polarities in astrology. Before we get started with that discussion, just a couple of announcements about the giveaway that we’re doing at the end of this month. At the end of the month we’re giving away a pass to the NW Astrological Conference to one lucky patron of the show who donates on the $10 tier through our page on Patreon.com. The NW Astrological Conference, or NORWAC, will take place in the Seattle area from May 25th through the 29th, 2017. The conference will feature 30 speakers talking about a variety of different astrological topics, as well as some great pre- and post-conference workshops, a large bookstore with hundreds of different astrology titles, and more. I’ll be there along with several other astrologers that have been on the podcast over the last few years, and I’m looking forward to meeting many of the listeners of the podcast in-person. The other prize that we’re giving away this month is a copy of Benjamin Dykes’ forthcoming book, which is a translation of an astrological text by the 1st century astrologer Dorotheus of Sidon. Dorotheus’ work was extremely influential in the Hellenistic and Medieval astrological traditions, and it contains some of the earliest material on natal astrology and electional astrology. Ben will be announcing the release date of the book later in April through his newsletter, which you can sign up for through his website at BenDykes.com. All you have to do in order to be entered into the drawing this month is become a patron of the podcast on the $5- or $10-tier through our page on Patreon. For more information, just click the Giveaways tab at the top of the podcast website, at TheAstrologyPodcast.com. So, with those announcements out of the way, let’s get started with the interview.
Chris Brennan: Hi Michael, welcome to the show!
Michael Ofek: Hi, Chris. Thank you for having me back!
CB: Yeah, it’s good to have you back! So, it’s 10:30 at night here in Denver, on April 16th. What is it for you?
MO: Here it’s early morning. It’s about 7am.
CB: Perfect, alright, well, we’re in different time zones: you’re slightly in the future, but I think–yeah, this is a great topic. I’m excited about this topic. So, today we’re going to be talking about–you and I had some previous discussions, and you said that you’d been doing some research into the concept of light, and the role that light plays in traditional astrology, and in astrology in general, and that was kind of connected with a research project and some thinking that I’d been doing lately on the concept of benefic and malefic and just the idea of different binary pairs as being part of the fundamental basis of many of the building blocks for different significations in astrology, and different meanings. So, I thought we could kind of combine those two topics. I’m trying to think about the starting point, but you—this is a topic, the concept of light–you’ve been thinking about for many years now, right?
MO: Yes, I did a lecture about it in a conference we did last year, and the basis was this research on the concept of light in ancient thought, and it’s fundamental connection to astrological concepts. It proved to be a very, very intriguing line of inquiry, and it opened up many vistas of astrological and philosophical speculation, at least for me. My essential argument was that astrology is nothing but the story of light, and that almost all of the components of the system can be reduced or explained through the relationship of light and dark, vision, reflection. And you find those concepts embedded in the terms, in the language, and you see it emphasized strongly in many of the concepts. I think that maybe a big part of the reason is that the ancients had a much more direct experience of the planets–the “starry night.” They didn’t have the light pollution and many other things that made the sky less visible, so that the planet rising from the rays of the sun was a big deal. It was a very ominous experience.
CB: Right, so they had a much more direct experience because there was much more of an observational component to astrology back then. When you’re actually looking up at the sky, especially at night, that’s one of the primary things that you’re seeing: this contrast between the stars, or the Luminaries, and the light that they shine, versus the darkness around them, or the contrast with the rest of the sky.
MO: Yes, yes. There were also, you know, other phenomena that we don’t calculate, like the halo of the moon, or other visual phenomena that were considered ominous: you see that in such texts as Aratus or others that give explanations for what happens when there are such visual phenomena. So, I think that was a big part of how astrology was experienced. And I think we have lost that, in time, and there are many considerations that are connected to the concept of light, which was pretty much neglected. There were elaborate doctrines on the luminaries, for example, that were, i would say, a bit muddied in their translation over time, and the neglected but the earlier part of the tradition, like the phase relationship with the Sun, for example—which was a big part of Hellenistic astrology: it’s a problem knowing which parts of the doctrine were more emphasized or important in the original sources, because what we have is much more scattered and a bit less coherent. But you can see Ptolemy putting very strong emphasis on solar phase relationship, and I’m pretty sure he didn’t invent that, you know?
CB: Right, well that’s actually a really good point, in that the large part of the revival of traditional astrology in the past 10 or 20 years–a lot of the concepts that were lost to modern astrology that are being revived now–actually are concepts that relate to light and to visual or observational phenomena, like planets under the beams–which is in relation to the solar phase cycle–or the concept of sect, which is the distinction between day and night charts. In the Medieval tradition, you have the concept of transfer of light, or collection of light, and so on and so forth. And all of those are obviously things that we can get into, here, but as a just a general observation, that’s a really interesting point that you made, there.
MO: Yes, and I think that it’s really fundamental to start to reintegrate that back into our astrology: to look at a chart and to understand which planets were visible, which planets were invisible, which were rising, which were setting, and just, you know, to see it in a chart, and, in my experience, it really brings the chart alive, from that two-dimensional diagram for something that is luminous!
CB: Yeah, and maybe that’s part of the issue: we’ve gotten so far away from that that astrology in the 20th century and early 21st century, now, is very much like an abstract thing where you’re looking at charts: you’re looking at a chart, which is a two-dimensional diagram which is attempting to depict what’s actually a 3-dimensional thing, but you can only depict so much in a 2-dimensional diagram. Alternatively, occasionally, in a best-case scenario, you have astrologers looking at an ephemeris, which at least shows the movement of the planets along the ecliptic in degrees of longitude, but it doesn’t show other things, like latitude or other observational components that are kind of left out of that data, so that the recovery of paying attention to those other things, and then reconnecting with it in the sense of realizing that we’re looking at what is fundamentally observational phenomena that is meant to be looked at and experienced in that full 3-D perspective… I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
MO: Yes, yes, and it really brings it alive. You know, if you see a chart with a planet just rising from the sun rays and that person was born in the morning and the planet, let’s say, was rising, that was really strong—it gives it some experiential sense of, “well that planet was really luminous, and it was rising at the time when you were born,”—and, I don’t know, but the image is much more powerful, and then you can understand why such a phenomenon was considered more auspicious, or powerful as a statement of the planet: something that is really being emphasized. And the light phenomenon really emphasized or deemphasized many of the configurations in the chart. And you also see it in many chart examples in the texts, where they put really big emphasis on the visible phenomenon. You have, I think, Hadrian’s chart: he has like 5 or 4 planets rising before the Sun, and that’s a powerful image for a powerful man.
CB: Sure, you’re talking about the 2nd century Roman emperor Hadrian?
MO: Yes. I’m really not sure now if I’m talking specifically about his chart, but in many chart examples, you know, of people of stature, like him and others: this visible phenomenon is very much pronounced. And looking at the material, and starting to decipher it, and the language of light, brings out not only very interesting, essential concepts, but also something of the cosmology, of the philosophy of–“what is light?” “What is astrological light?”–because we have to make that distinction, because when we look at a chart and we look at the sun, for instance, we’re not looking at the physical sun, we’re looking at the astrological Sun. In the same instance, we’re not really dealing with physical light. We’re dealing with astrological light, which we can also call noetic light, or intellectual light, in the more symbolic sense. And if we decipher celestial phenomena in the same way that we delineate any other celestial phenomena, then all the relationship of light in the chart should be taken, you know, symbolically: should be taken as what is visible or invisible, in some sense, in the life of the native, or in the mind of the native. And the more that we can define light and how light works in the chart, the more we have a better understanding of the light dynamics in any chart that we delineate. For instance, in my lecture, I show an example of Einstein’s chart, and I ask the people about his Jupiter in the chart. I don’t know if you remember his chart, but your audience can pull it out, probably most of them know it by heart. So I ask, what do you see about this Jupiter? What is special about this Jupiter? And Jupiter is in the 8th sign, it’s in Aquarius, it’s the ruler of his Sun and the MC, at least–they’re in the 9th sign but the MC is inside it–and it’s the exalted ruler of his Ascendant, and all this is very important, but there’s something very auspicious about this Jupiter, and that is that this Jupiter is rising from the rays of the Sun. I don’t remember if it’s exactly in phase, or a bit more than that, but still, that’s an auspicious placement.
CB: Sure, because Jupiter’s recently come out. It’s gotten far enough away from it: it was recently at a conjunction with the Sun, not long before he was born, but then shortly around that time, it rose, or got far enough away from a conjunction with the Sun that it made a heliacal rising and was visible again for the first time around that time frame.
MO: Yes! And just by looking at that–in that morning of his birth, Jupiter was really powerful in the sky, and very bright and luminous. That puts it in a different perspective. That solar phase relationship really accentuates Jupiter in his chart, and we know that Jupiter had a big role in his life. So, this is just a taste of how powerful it is to look at the light dynamics in a chart.
CB: Sure. Alright, well maybe let’s back up a bit to get into solar phase in more detail, and break it down. Let’s back up a little bit to what I think is–and this is sort of my access point for this, which is the starting point, or the most fundamental distinction that you can make when it comes to something like this–which is, you know, one of the few concepts that the early Hellenistic astrologers starting in the first century BCE inherited from the early Mesopotamian tradition was this distinction that the Mesopotamians started making between benefic and malefic planets, which fundamentally seems to be an observational distinction, where if you go out and you look at the night sky, and if those planets are visible, then you’ll see a difference between, you know, if you look at the stars you’ll see a bunch of stars in the night sky, but if you look over successive nights, you’ll see that some of those stars will move, and the stars that move against the backdrop of the other stars are actually the planets that are in our solar system. So, one of the things that you’ll notice right away is that there’s a distinction between two of those groups of planets, and one of them is that Venus and Jupiter appear to be very bright, sort of white, glistening stars, whereas Mars and Saturn are a little bit different, because they’re darker, and Saturn has kind of like a dark brown sort of tint to it, whereas Mars has a reddish sort of tint to it, whereas both Venus and Jupiter are kind of bright and white and sort of translucent, and so right away that gives you a visual or an observational distinction between two groups of planets, which is Venus and Jupiter, and then Mars and Saturn. And then, from that, it seems that that acted as the basis in traditional astrology for… Right away it sets up a sort of contrast, or a polarity, between two groups of planets, where you have one of them that are kind of like brighter planets, and another group that are darker planets, which seems to have almost invoked notions of light and darkness as being a contrast, and then that acted as sort of the basis for many other significations that were then derived from that. Does that kind of make sense to you? Do you feel the same way? Is that the sort of direction your mind goes with that as well?
MO: Yes, yes, that makes perfect sense, and that just fits inside the conceptual framework that I was talking about. And even more, the planets themselves have their poetic names, which are all variations of light, you know? The planet Saturn is like Phainon, or something, which means “The Shining One;” Jupiter: Phaethon, which means “The Blazing One.”
CB: Right, so these are the original Greek names, so these are–before the names of the Gods were assigned the planets, they had these preexisting poetic names, and they were all based on different descriptive terms for light, basically, right?
MO: Yes, yes, yes! So, it just emphasizes the point even more: every planet has its own unique light. And what you said is very, very important.
CB: Right, so, what were some of the others?
MO: I think you also made that distinction in our last discussion, about the malefics being more dim and dark, and Mars being more red: it’s part of the distinction in making them less beneficial, as light is a more beneficial element. So, Jupiter and Venus being more shining and bright brings more energy of light and beneficence. I think that’s a really good distinction, and a very important one. Also, if you superimpose the planets inside the Thema Mundi, or inside the rulership chart, then there’s also this distinction between the two lights sitting together, and the most darkened planet, which is Saturn, is opposite both of them. So, you have that gradual movement from light to darkness also inside the zodiac circle, when the planets are placed inside.
CB: Right, so you have the Sun and Moon and the two signs that they rule, Cancer and Leo, which are the two signs which come just after the summer solstice, which is the hottest and brightest part of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, where western astrology was created, and then you get the rest of the visible planets fanning out in zodiacal order, first to Mercury-ruled signs, and then Venus, and then Mars, and Jupiter, and finally Saturn, being assigned to Capricorn and Aquarius, which are the two signs opposite the two luminaries, and those signs coincide with the darkest and coldest part of the year, where the days are shortest in the Northern hemisphere.
MO: Yes, yes. So this is part of our distinction, or the ancient distinction as the Lights as life-givers, and Saturn as darkness, someone that takes away life, in a sense, or contradicts it. And this also is reflected in its physical qualities of coldness and dryness, etc, which is said to be like “anti-life,” versus the wet and hot of the Sun, let’s say. Or a combination of the Moon and the Sun. So, I would say, if we take that light concept, and we try to use it as a model to look at the different components of the language, then there’s a very coherent way of articulating what is really happening. And I can take it anywhere, you know, you can talk about the zodiac in that sense, you can talk about the houses as you said, you can talk about sect, we can talk about distinctions of different planets, as we said before, we can talk about the Lots’ calculations. Let’s just, for instance, take the zodiac. The tropical zodiac is essentially a relationship between the Earth and the Sun, and this relationship is repeating a cycle of different relationships of light: different relationships, or you could say percentages, of light and darkness. So, already, there, you have different qualities of light emanating–or different radiation emanating–the whole year. So, you can say that the zodiac signs are, in a sense, different light qualities. Of course, they have a reflection on earth as wet, dry, and seasons, and all those things. But–there is maybe a higher sense in which every zodiac sign exhibits some kind of light quality, light intensity, light spectrum–which is invoking that energy that we are associating with that sign.
CB: And are you saying that because of the connection with the equinox as in the solstices, or because of some other concept?
MO: Yes, yes, the equinox, and then the solstices, are the most accentuated points of that light relationship, but every placement of the Sun in relation to Earth has a different light energy, essentially.
CB: That makes sense; let’s imagine the audience has no idea what we’re talking about when it comes to equinoxes and the solstices, so we break it down. As we were talking about earlier, the summer solstice is the point–or at least partially results in the point–where the days are the longest in the Northern hemisphere, and that’s the first degree of Cancer, whereas the winter solstice is when the days are the shortest in the Northern hemisphere, and that’s the first degree of Capricorn, right? So, how would you draw that out with the rest of the signs, or how does that relate to the rest of the signs? You’re saying the rest of the signs are sort of gradations between that, in some sense?
MO: Yes, yes.
CB: In other words, you could define Aries, which coincides or starts with the spring equinox as the point where you’re halfway between those two extremes of greatest darkness and greatest light, but it’s moving upwards towards more light because the first day of spring, of course, is when it flips over so that the days start becoming longer, and the nights start becoming shorter, so the concept of light is almost on the increase at that point, starting at the spring equinox.
MO: Yes, exactly. And there are probably other conditions that are hard to define which make that light energy what it is. But this is our access point to it. The percentage of light and dark, and you might say where it is going: is it increasing, or decreasing? That’s a kind of phase relationship between the Earth and the Sun, and it can be articulated through the percentage or the relationship of light, and I think this is essential, because I think–if I may, I want to touch on a very important point, which is the importance of the Sun. I think that, you know, in modern astrology, the Sun has been taken a little bit for granted.
CB: You think it’s being taken for granted too much?
MO: Yes, a little bit. I mean, it’s still very important, but I think some of its dimensions, and–
CB: So, certainly there are parts of modern astrology where the Sun is–like, in pop astrology–where it’s sort of overemphasized, but you’re saying once you get into advanced astrology, the Sun almost takes on a lower, or a lesser sort of role because people start paying attention to other things like the Ascendant or the Moon sign, and other things like that so that the Sun gets the backseat?
MO: I didn’t mean it wasn’t emphasized: it’s very emphasized in modern, or pop astrology. What I mean is that it has different dimensions that were neglected. Different considerations. I think our astrology is mostly solar astrology, in a sense. I always feel that I need to make astrologers remember proportions of the Sun in our system.
CB: Right, how huge it is, actually, compared to everything else in the solar system.
MO: Right. I think NASA says that it’s around 97% or 98% of the solar system–of the mass of the solar system. That means that there’s, like, 2% or 3% for all the other planets. So, essentially, the solar system is the Sun. And the Sun–also in a philosophical sense, the Sun has the seeds of all experience. In its light, in its spectrum, all the astrology, in a sense, exists. If you follow that point a little bit more, then, also, it’s a good point to validate the tropical zodiac, because we are looking at the relationship of the Sun with the Earth.
CB: Yeah, I mean I like that, looking at it from that perspective with the tropical zodiac, because it’s interesting: one of the things that it does is that it removes it, to some extent, from the purely seasonal component, and instead it puts it on the light component, and the light component of course then affects the seasons or ends up having this sort of side effect in that that’s what the seasons are largely predicated on, but then the zodiac itself isn’t, then, precisely predicated on the seasons, it’s predicated on the amount of light, and the Sun’s relationship with the Earth, and that’s a much–a slightly different way of thinking about it, or of conceptualizing the tropical zodiac than just from a straight seasonal perspective.
MO: Yes! And I think we can even go further than that. I don’t know how much we can go further than that in this podcast, but you can talk about higher dimensions of light in which physical light is an image. This is at least what the ancient philosophers were talking about when they were taking light as an analogy of the light of the mind, you can say, of intellectual life, nous–or noetic dimension of life–which is the dimension where the ideas are, where the seeds of experience are, where every potential exists. So, you can superimpose that on light and say that light is, in a sense, all potential, but this potential needs to be actualized through other configurations with the Sun. So, I would even go as far as to say that every planet essentially is a solar energy that is reflected from that planet. And that planet acts as a mediator, a regulator of that energy, in a sense extracting that essence from the Sun.
CB: One of the ways that that’s clear is with the Moon, for example. I think you make that point that the Moon reflects the light of the Sun, right?
MO: Yes, it’s the most obvious, in that regard: that it doesn’t have a light of its own; it’s reflecting the light of the Sun. But we forget that all the other planets are also like the Moon in that sense. They don’t have a light of their own: they’re reflecting the Sun’s light. So, their placement in the solar system–their distance, their composition, their size–all of these are elements that extract a kind of essence from the Sun. I don’t know, maybe that’s too much for our discussion for today?
CB: No, no, that’s great, that’s a really interesting point that I don’t think I’ve ever heard any astrology books mention. It’s mentioned, of course, or it’s traditionally mentioned: Valens says that the Moon is generated by the solar light, or from reflecting the light of the Sun, and that was known, and there were specific interpretations drawn from that, especially in a Hermetic or a Gnostic context, where they associated the concept of light with the spirit and the soul and the intellect, and then the concept of the body and physical incarnation with the idea of darkness and matter and things like that. But it’s an interesting point to point out there, just from a purely observational standpoint, that it’s like you have the rest of the stars in the solar system which are actual stars, like our Sun, but all of the planets, even though they look like stars to the naked eye when you look up at night: they’re actually just–they’re not emitting light of their own, they’re actually just reflecting the light that’s bouncing off of them from the Sun.
MO: Yes, and because they’re the satellites of the Sun, they’re always contemplating the Sun, philosophically speaking. It’s like they were born from the Sun, and they’re a part of the Sun, and they’re regulating some kind of energy from the Sun. I also have before me–I took it out of the Tetrabiblos–I have a quote of Ptolemy saying something in that spirit. He says the power of the Sun prevails if one looks at the overall structure of quality, or ambiance, but the other heavenly bodies, to a certain degree, either contribute to this or oppose it. So, in a sense, at least what I’m reading from that: I don’t know if you meant it in that way, but the Sun prevails. The Sun is everything: it’s the ruler of all. But every other heavenly body, to a certain degree, either contributes or opposes it. Its configuration to it takes out something from its essence: actualizes something from its essence. These are all the synodic cycles of the planets with the sun. And the moon is the most obvious, of course. And Ptolemy goes on to say that the Moon does this more obviously and more continually when it is New and Quarter, or Full.. the other stars do this at greater intervals and less obviously, for example in the rising and setting of their mutual approaches. So, there’s something very, very–I would say a big secret in understanding that. This is, at least, my perspective.
CB: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense in terms of–and we were talking about this last month, that–even though we often refer to it as waxing and waning in modern astrology, when you’re talking about the phase relationship between the Sun and Moon and the Moon cycles–that, traditionally, it was referred to as increasing in light, or decreasing in light, so that you have this concept of light built-in to the Moon’s cycle, and especially its solar phase cycle with the Sun.
MO: Yes, yes, exactly, and you know that a planet that rises from the Sun’s rays and still doesn’t make any aspect to another planet is said to be in its own light, and they also use that sometimes in the sect distinction, being in its own light.
CB: So you’re saying we could take that idea of how the Moon has its different phases–where it’s increasing in light when you’re going from a new Moon to a full Moon, and it’s getting brighter and brighter; and then it gets to the full Moon, which is its peak sort of brightness, and then after that it begins to diminish, and becomes darker and darker until it reaches the new Moon–that there’s a similar way you can apply that concept of almost increasing and decreasing… or being at the height of its brightness versus being diminished in some sense… that you could apply to the other planets as well.
MO: Yes, I’m sure you can! This is the solar phase relationship. You can put an analogy of a life cycle, and just like the Moon, when it’s really young and increasing in light, every planet–let’s take the superior planets, for instance–that rises from the Sun’s rays is said to be in the young phase. They have a different tone, a different energy. And then, they mature, as the cycle evolves. And their brightness, their luminosity, is very important in understanding that, or as something that reflects that. So, yes, I think you can take the synodic relationship of the Sun and the Moon as archetypal for every other synodic relationship.
CB: Sure, and that’s, then, one of the distinctions, or I think a major traditional distinction was planets and whether they’re visible: whether they’re far enough away from the Sun, especially more than 15 degrees away from a conjunction with the Sun–that they can be seen, versus if they’re too close to a conjunction with the Sun: if they’re within 15 degrees, then they’re hidden, or obscured, or they’re said to be under the beams or under the rays of the Sun.
MO: Yes, yes. Also, we can talk about different levels: it has the more occidental… or more, let’s say, corporeal or earthly level, and there is also the higher level of looking at these different light distinctions of visibility and invisibility in the sense of the Intellect–of the Mind. And this, at least symbolically, makes a lot of sense. A planet that is in the light of the Sun can be, in a sense, weakened in its more earthly expressions, and less individual in that sense, because it is less separated from the Sun: it’s not on its own, you can say. The Sun absorbs it into itself. So in a sense, it has more existence in the mind than in the world. It colors the light of the Sun as a general light in the chart, but it is less able to function in its own light, as individual: as something concrete. So in one sense, it gets weakened, but in another, it may gain something: it’s not one-sided.
CB: Right, and that was sometimes put in a very literal way, where they would say that a planet that is not under the beams can indicate things that are visible, whereas a planet that’s under the beams indicates things that are hidden or internalized in some sense. That makes sense. And you’re extending that to physical things versus sometimes the internalization being more of an intellectual sort of spiritual thing, when a planet is under the beams. Interesting.
MO: Yes! Exactly. And I think we can even go further. I can take it further in many directions. It depends. First of all, I think there’s one distinction that is very crucial. And that is what I said before: the philosophical level of light. There’s one analogy which comes up a lot, mostly in the Platonic tradition, of Light as analogous to the Mind, or nous. Nous is the Greek word for consciousness: pure consciousness. And this makes the distinctions very interesting, because if you think that you are looking at intelligible light, or incorporeal light, in the sense that it is the same–it’s the light of the mind, it’s how your mind works, where it sheds its light, it’s what your mind sees–then what is visible, for the Sun, in a sense is visible for your Mind’s eye. You can even take it further and say that there’s a traditional association with the Sun and Moon as the two eyes. The Sun is mostly the right eye, and the Moon the left eye, and in a female, it changes. It’s a very old association, you know? You have it in Egypt: the Luminaries are the eyes of Ra, or Horus.. So, if you take that, and you superimpose it on the Rulership Chart, or the Thema Mundi, and you see the Sun and the Moon as the two eyes of the universe, then the rays from those eyes are the aspects. So, you have the Sun looking with her rays and to her hemisphere, and the Moon looking with her rays on her hemisphere, and this is the archetypal model for the aspects in general. So, you can take that and put it in the chart, and say that the Sun and the Moon are like the two eyes of your mind, in a sense. One is more active, which is the Sun, and the other is more passive, in a sense, and you can see, through that, a kind of inner dynamic of what is more accentuated or less accentuated in your mind, because whatever is visible for the Sun or the Sun emphasizes with its light, is something that you will always see in front of you, in a sense–in your mind and in the world. It’s something that would want to be visible in the world. It wants to say something in the world, to declare something. And it’s interesting because, if you take, for example, some of the concepts of how to delineate a person’s career or actions, then the planets, most specifically Venus, Mercury and Mars, rising from the Sun’s rays, are said to be the tools by which you exercise this career or this action, because if Venus rises from the Sun’s rays, Venus will always take that energy: you will always see that in front of you. You will always want to make that visible. And in the sense also objectively, it is something that will become visible in your life, or from you to the exterior world. And you can make a lot of distinctions between the phases if it’s a morning star or an evening star, and we won’t get into that, maybe, today, but that’s another model which you can superimpose on the chart. You can look at the Luminaries as the eyes of the Soul, in a sense. And, if I may, I’m sorry if I’m speaking too much, but there’s a really beautiful analogy: Aristotle, when he speaks about passive and active nous–passive and active consciousness–it’s like he’s defining for us the principle of the Sun and the principle of the Moon, and he’s saying that the Sun is the active nous: is in a sense the power of the soul, or the consciousness, that makes things like itself. And the passive nous is the power of the soul, or the consciousness, changing like what it sees. It becomes what it sees, or what it– yeah. So, these are the two sides of consciousness: two sides of perception. We need those two sides. So you can say even in an optical paradigm the missive and intromissive concept: so you have one eye emitting light, or that rarefied fire that is active, and another eye that is receptive. And this dialogue between the active and receptive sides of the mind, like the left and right sides of the brain, are what give us the ability to perceive. And maybe that’s too metaphysical right now, but if you superimpose that in the chart– Yes?
CB: That ties back to what you’re saying with the traditional rulerships, or at least I always thought it did in the sense that you had–as you just said, in ancient optical theories, there were extramissionist theories, which is the idea that a ray is emitted from the eye and then it lands on different things that are within the observer’s field of vision, and that’s how vision takes place, and then there was an intromission theory, that there are rays that are emitted by objects, and they’re received in the eye, and that’s what allows vision to take place, and that you almost have both in the traditional rulership scheme, where you have the traditional rulerships that are always divided in-between the Sun and the Moon in Cancer and Leo, and then you have the Sun, which would emit a ray forward in zodiacal order, and that would be connected to the concept of overcoming: planets that are earlier in zodiacal order overcome planets that are later. And then, on the lunar half of the zodiac, the Moon would receive, and you’d have the intromissionist theory, because the other planets would be earlier in zodiacal order and therefore the moon would receive the sort of visual rays of those other planets.
MO: Yes, and I can’t really prove it, but I’m sure there was an optical theory that said that. That the right eye, or the more solar eye, is the more active, emissive part of the dynamics of vision, and the more feminine, receptive eye is the one receiving the light, in a sense, which is a nice corresponding concept for the two eyes being the two luminaries.
CB: Right, and those are my two primary keywords for the Sun and the Moon in that scheme: emitting for the Sun versus receiving from the Moon, and that creates part of the paradigm that it seemed like was kind of implicit in a lot of traditional delineations for the Sun and the Moon, was like that which emits versus that which receives, and it creates, again, another one of those binary pairs, or those basic polarities, where they then took those as foundational concepts or archetypal keywords, and then derived dozens and dozens of other, more specific significations from those two overarching concepts.
MO: Yes, for sure. I would say that the Sun-Moon relationship is the key to the whole language of astrology in that sense. Because it’s the archetype of emitting and receiving, which is further shown by other relationships of the Sun and planets, and even the Sun and Earth, of course, which shows both in the zodiac and in the houses: the diurnal cycle. So I think all this discussion is so fundamental because it really gives weight to very essential ideas of the dynamics that make up astrology. So, from that, you can start articulating many different dimensions of chart analysis. And of course, I would say that we have to bring back the solar phase, because we have two ways of weighing or defining a planet: one is relative to the zodiac, the other is relative to the houses, and the third was relative to the Sun–and this was pretty much neglected over time. And I think we have to bring it back, and we have to see the different phases, and try to understand what they mean, because Jupiter can be in the same sign and the same house but with a different relationship to the Sun, and that can really change its expression in the chart. Or, when in life is it more emphasized? Et cetera.
CB: Sure, alright, so I want to back up just a little bit, because you mentioned once or twice the concept of the houses, and how even the concept of the houses is tied in to the idea of the concept of light, so I was kind of curious if you could expand on that a little bit, as we’re getting towards the end of this, so that we can make sure we hit all of the main points that we meant to hit, here.
MO: Yes, well, just as the zodiac is a spectre of light in the sense that the different zodiac signs are like different light qualities, or different percentages of light and dark relationship–the same holds for the diurnal cycle, because as the earth rotates on its axis, it has a different relationship with the Sun, which shows different light dimensions. So, every cardinal axis, like the ASC-DSC, or the MC-IC, is relative to the Sun. You have the Ascendant as the place where the Sun rises, the MC is the place where the Sun culminates, the Descendant is the place where the Sun sets, and the IC is the place where the Sun is the lowest below the earth. So, again, it’s an expression of different percentages of light and dark, correlative to the annual cycle of the Sun. I think that many of the meanings of the houses are also relative to this light relationship concept. This is houses in a nutshell. We can go even deeper if you want: the way that we can articulate the diurnal cycle with this very basic light-dark relationship; and of course we have the sect concept coming out of that, also.
CB: How is that related, or how do you tie that into sect?
MO: Just the differentiation between light and dark, day and night.
CB: Oh, sure, so if the Sun is anywhere above the ASC-DSC axis, it’s a day chart, whereas if the Sun is anywhere below the ASC-DSC axis, then it’s a night chart.
MO: Yes. The more percentage of dark there is in the ambient, you might say, then the weight is shifted between the luminaries. So, if there is dark, it’s night, then the weight is shifted to the Moon, and it becomes a more dominant ruler in the life of the native. It expresses more active nous or passive nous in the consciousness, or in the soul, in a sense. So, then you can say things about being more reflective, receptive, becoming more like the things that one encounters.. I’m talking about at least the philosophical principle of that.
CB: Yeah, and that’s kind of tied into… A few years ago, one of the discoveries that Benjamin Dykes and I made when we published a paper on the planetary joys was that some of the early people that came up with the idea of the 12 houses, and who developed some of the first significations of those 12 sectors in a chart, seem to have had a major distinction where they treated the top half of the chart as if it pertained to the Sun and the concept of light, and the solar sect, and the things that they associated with that which included the mind and the intellect and the soul–whereas the bottom half of the chart they seemed to associate with the Moon and the concept of darkness and related concepts like the body and physical incarnation, so that you get this real–you have the light-dark distinction, where light is at the top half of the chart and darkness is at the bottom half, but that ends up resulting in specific significations being derived from that, and the potential for some significations that relate to the body to being more in the bottom half of the chart, whereas significations that relate more to the mind, to the soul, being at the top half.
MO: Exactly, and you can also take that two-hemisphere distinction and superimpose that on synodic cycles. Let’s take the Moon, for instance: its first waxing hemisphere pertains more to the day in the same sense as the higher hemisphere of the houses, and when it starts waning, then it pertains more to the inner side- to the darkened side. So, exactly. Beautiful.
CB: Interesting. Alright, and then that is kind of tied into our next–one of the other concepts we wanted to touch on, which is the Lot of Fortune, and the original conceptual rational tied into that, which seems to be based on the concepts of light and darkness as well, and that was something I–it was weird, because I pointed this out in a paper back in like 2008 I think it was, that was titled, “The Theoretical Rationale Underlying The Seven Hermetic Lots,” and I’d never seen this before, I mean I have to assume that somebody noticed it, you know, prior to when I did, but I was the first person that I noticed who published something sort of talking about it: how, if you calculate the Lot of Fortune, one of the things that you notice, if you’re reading about the Lot of Fortune or the so-called Part of Fortune in ancient texts, is that they don’t present it as an algebraic formula, but usually, they present it as more of a geometrical formula, where they say, “in a day chart, measure the distance from the Sun to the Moon, and then measure the same distance from the degree of the Ascendant. Or, conversely, in a night chart, most of the Hellenistic astrologers would reverse the calculation, and they would say, “measure the distance from the Moon to the Sun, and then the same distance from the Ascendant,” and so the question that I had at one point when I was trying to do some work on the Lots was, “what are the two things that those two calculations have in common that makes it so that both calculations result in the position of the Lot of Fortune?” Or, “why should both of those calculations result in the same mathematical point that has the same astrological meaning?” What I found is that, if you write them down on a white board or something like that, or on a piece of paper, and try to see what they have in common, is that in both instances, you’re measuring the distance from the sect light, which is the luminary that’s in charge during that part of the day–so the Sun in a day chart and the Moon in a night chart–and then you’re measuring the distance to the luminary that is contrary to the sect, or that is not in charge and that is somehow diminished, or, sort of “darkened” during that part of the day. So, you’re measuring the distance to, in a day chart, to the Moon, or, in a night chart, to the Sun, which has already set below the horizon. So the commonality in both calculations, or both ancient calculations for the Lot of Fortune when you reverse the calculation is that in both instances you could restate the formula as: measure the distance from the sect light to the luminary that is contrary to the sect in both instances, essentially. So basically, you’re always going from light to darkness, and the Lot of Fortune itself became associated with the consciousness of darkness and everything associated with that, which is primarily things that have to do with the physical body and physical incarnation and things that befall the native, and things like that.
MO: Yes, that’s beautiful, yes. I can add to that that it’s also interesting conceptually that the Part of Spirit and the Part of Fortune are always mirroring each other on the ASC-DSC axis. So, it’s like saying that the spirit is mirrored in matter, or vice versa. It’s like a reflection, which is also a kind of, you might say, a philosophical concept of matter being a mirror of the soul, or of the spirit, and I’m pretty sure that was the rationale. It’s beautiful what you said, also in the sense that you’re essentially putting the luminary on the Ascendant: the luminary of the sect, and seeing the projected arc of relationship between the luminaries, as you said, moving from spirit to matter, from matter to spirit. I would also put in, if we’re talking about light and properties of light, that it’s kind of… you might say that the placement of the Lot is analogous to the Sun/Moon relationship as it touches the Earth, in a sense. You might say it’s a light beam that, when it touches the medium of the earth, it has a refraction, and it’s bent to some specific place in the chart which is reflective of that luminary. So, if it’s the lot of Spirit, it’s the solar–it’s the Sun, and if it’s the Lot of Fortune, it’s the Moon; so you have those specific points which are like light refractions that are analogous to the light relationship of the Sun and the Moon, wherever they are in the sky. So, that goes further to the concept that you were talking about. So, yeah, that is very powerful in the sense of how those concepts formed in the minds of Hellenistic astrologers. Seeing those different light-dark relationships, and defining them philosophically, in a sense, and then finding ways to apply them to the chart and to delineate different specific things from them in the life of the native: this is one of your biggest areas of expertise–the releasing from Spirit, and the releasing from Fortune. You have first-hand experience of the way that it works. It’s really mind-boggling how they got to calculate those points.
CB: Yeah, and that’s a whole huge topic in itself, how they then developed some of these more advanced or more complex timing techniques, based on some of that, but it’s fascinating, the point that we’ve come to at this point in the conversation, just realizing that a lot of the basic concepts in Western astrology–in the fundamental fourfold system of Western astrology, which consists of the planets, the signs of the zodiac, the concept of the twelve houses, and then the concept of aspects–we’ve touched on all four of those at this point, and each one of them, we’ve found, is the distinction between light and dark, where the concept of light is being at the basis of some of the most fundamental concepts associated with those four parts of the system.
MO: Yes, and if you have two or four more hours, I can talk more in detail about the other, deeper resolution of how this light-dark relationship goes even further into the chart, and into other considerations that we take for granted, and, you know, sign-planet combination, and different other elements, So, this was one of the biggest insights, because, like you, going to the past and researching the roots of astrology, we are looking for the rationale, and we are looking for the arche: the ruling beginnings, the roots–the conceptual roots of the system, not only the historical roots of the system. And taking this so obvious of phenomena, this light phenomenon, and developing it philosophically, ontologically, and also physically: the physical properties of light, vision, and the dynamic of reflection, et cetera… give us a powerful access point to understand astrological dynamics in general, and in every chart. And I really push students and people and people listening to look at the chart in this way, and try to see what was visible the day they were born. What was rising in the morning? What was setting after the Sun? What was emphasized by the solar light, and what was invisible, et cetera? Start seeing that in the mind. I’m sure just this alone will increase their understanding of the chart.
CB: Yeah, and it seems like that original conceptualization of astrology in some of these things dealing with light was understood both in the Medieval tradition, where you have the development of new concepts that don’t appear to have existed in the Hellenistic tradition such as the concept that they called transfer of light, which is when you have two planets that aren’t aspecting each other, but then a third planet comes in and has a separating from one and then an applying aspect to the other, so that it’s said to transfer or translate the light between the two planets that are not aspecting. They also had other ideas: another notion called collection of light, where you have a similar dynamic of two planets sort of applying to a third planet, and, so that’s in the Medieval tradition where they have this understanding of light that’s continuing on as an integral concept in the aspect doctrine, and in astrology in general. But then, even in Indian astrology, if I remember correctly, I think I’ve heard before–it’s been said, I’ve read it a few times–that the term that Indian astrologers use for astrology is Jyotish, which means science of light.
MO: Yes, exactly. They understood it! Yes, exactly.
CB: So it seems that this is a widely-held understanding traditionally and in different cultures with astrology: this concept of light as being somehow the fundamental basis of it.
MO: Yes, yes, yes. And what you said about the collection and transfer of light: that goes back to what I said about the luminaries being pretty much neglected, because part of the Hellenistic doctrine of the Moon was so elaborate, and it took into consideration its application and separation, and its phase relationship–when it was applying, and separating, and other considerations, you know: the third day of the moon, seventh day, fourteenth (fortieth?) day: a very, very elaborate doctrine of the Moon that was generally neglected, or was not really understood so much. But I think the basis of it is this: the Moon is said to move the flux of the light of all the planets, because it’s the lowest sphere. So, everything needs to move through it in order to actualize, in some sense. So, the Moon carries the light of its last separation, and, you might say integrated light or translated to the next application. And this was very, very emphasized, and very important to the tradition. And somehow it just went away. Even though it’s mentioned in later texts, it’s just mentioned. I don’t remember seeing someone really delineating that, or doing something with that. So this is something I was also very much occupied with, trying to reconstruct. So, again, it’s the emphasis on the two luminaries. Much of my work was focused on trying to reconstruct this doctrine of the luminaries in that sense of the light mechanism, or the light dynamics. Hopefully it will become a book one day. But I really think this is something that we have to reconstruct. It is something that has to come back to astrology. We have to see that dynamic of light. We have to understand how the Moon functions in this sense. And that makes it very complicated, as we should look and integrate the Moon’s phase relative to the Sun, and its applications and separations, et cetera, et cetera.
CB: Yeah, and all of this is important because–going back to the first principles and things like this, one of the ways you have to approach it is: imagine you didn’t know anything about astrology, or that astrology didn’t exist as a system. How would you get from knowing nothing or having no interpretive framework to the elaborate system that exists today? And could you actually work your way back to, and rediscover, or find the path that would lead you to the sort of advanced forms of astrology that eventually developed by starting at square one? And where would you start, if you had to do that? The answer is that this is one of the most fundamental concepts that exists, and it seems to permeate. This distinction between light and dark seems to permeate so many different areas of astrology that it really does seem to be one of the foundational or the first principles that you would start with. And that goes back to things like malefic and benefic by just making an observational distinction between two planets that appear kind of bright versus two planets that appear darker. And that, in and of itself, leads you to the ability to start coming up with significations, because one of the tricky things that you don’t usually think about with significations is that, oftentimes, if there’s going to be something that signifies something, then there has to be a planet that signifies the opposite. So, if you have something that signifies life, then you have to have something that signifies death. Or, if you have something that signifies beauty, you have to have something that signifies the opposite. Or, if there’s going to be a planet that signifies peace, then there has to be something that would indicate war. So there’s this basic idea that in order for anything to exist–in order to be able to define a concept–you have to be able to also define its opposite. And that’s where this idea of polarities or this dualistic approach almost becomes necessary in order to create the sort of foundational framework for everything else.
MO: Yes, for sure. And this is one important thing that I have to add to what you said: these concepts not only permeate the experiential… you might say “access point” to start articulating the experience of the night sky, and the contraries: it also permeates in religious contexts and philosophical contexts, so much so that I think most of the big religions–we take it for granted, the speaking of light and dark and God and the Devil, and all these contraries–but all of this emerged from the same sources, you know? Zoroastrian religions, and different Gnostic religions, and philosophical inquiries on the contraries of nature, and Heraclitus, and Parmenides, and Empedocles… with love and strife, and… you know? So, it permeates all human thought in history, you might say, at least in Western history: this polarity of light and dark, and as you said, if you find a signification, you in some sense need to find its contradictory signification in a world which is expressed in polarities. We are talking about it now, but 2,600 years before us, the pre-Socratics were occupied with both thoughts: are there polarities? Are there unities in polarities? Are you a dualist, are you a monist, are there two ruling principles to the world, is there one ruling principle that became two? But this fundamental duality which expresses very essentially in light-dark duality is the beginning of human inquiry, you might say. And the question “what is light” still boggles the minds of scientists to this day. It’s just becoming more complex. Today, we have a very unsettling quantum phenomenon of particle versus wave: we still don’t know what light is. It’s still the most subtle energy in the universe, and we also know there’s a wide spectrum of light that is non-visible, you might say: the whole electromagnetic spectrum. So, this is really going back to basics, and trying to reverse-engineer concept formations that gave us the concepts that we have and take for granted. So, I feel obligated to remind lovers of astrology to go back to those basics: to try rethinking those relationships, to try to articulate basic principles through universal underlying concepts, like light, and this is what I did for the last couple of years, and hopefully I would be able to do more, to show the research more, maybe, and help other people develop those ideas even more.
CB: Definitely, and one place they could start–one thing that’s worth mentioning, just going back to it, is our previous discussion: the last time you were on the podcast a couple of years ago, where we did a show on, for any listeners who are new and didn’t listen to that, where we did a talk on mitigating factors in traditional astrology–because one of the points that’s worth perhaps making at this point is that, even though we’re going back to and using this idea of polarities or contrasting pairs in order to build up basic concepts from square one, that doesn’t mean, necessarily, that everything is completely black and white, or everything is completely one or the other, or that everything is always like that, but instead there are other concepts, eventually, that you can integrate in order to see all the different shades of grey in-between. So, even though we’re using that as a starting point, or you can use concepts like benefic and malefic and the observational distinction between a group of bright stars versus a group of darker stars–that doesn’t mean that those concepts are completely fixed; there can be reversals or mitigations or alterations to those concepts based on other factors that can be integrated and taken into account. That’s something that we did a good job of getting into more, I think, in our previous episode. It was episode 28, which is titled “Mitigating Factors in Traditional Astrology.”
MO: Yes. I think that’s a really good starting point, and for sure there are a lot of shades of grey, and also there’s the interpretive factor: if you step back and you don’t make judgments about the goodness or the badness of something, then you see that everything in astrology has another side. Even things that are considered “bad” in some sense, or “weak,” have their strong points. Or the “good” manifestations in the sense that they are needed, and they are valid, and they are necessary, you know just part of the dynamic of life, of the universe, you might say. It’s taking the eagle eye’s view and looking a little bit above those polarities as a unity of movement and cycles. So, I just took that to that place because I thought that that’s part of what you meant: that there are a lot of ways to see something, and we should really be flexible in our minds, and not get fixed into benefic-malefic distinctions, even though they are important, but to understand their relevance, and their potential.
CB: Yeah, I think the point is just recognizing both: that there are both dualities, or polarities, and it’s important to recognize and use those, especially because that’s an important and oftentimes fundamental starting point for developing and understanding anything–is to develop and draw out the distinctions between polarities. But then there’s a middle point, which is acknowledging the shades of grey in-between when they exist, which is frequently; and then finally a third position, which is sometimes the sort of transcending some of that. And I know, in terms of some of the debates with modern astrology, some of the things–like Eric Meyers, for example, in the debate that I had with him a few years ago, it was at one of the points that he was pressing from the perspective of the modern astrologer, which, even though I felt like at times he might be going too far with it, I didn’t fundamentally disagree, and I don’t think most traditional astrologers would necessarily disagree: which is this idea that there’s a larger sort of view where you can step outside those two dualities so that you don’t necessarily need to attribute value judgments to them, as you were just saying, so that even something experienced as difficult or hard or traumatic–there can be some greater purpose or something for it, so that there’s another perspective that’s sort of outside of those two things. But just because those different viewpoints exist, you don’t need to necessarily completely get rid of or dismiss one or the other.
MO: Yes, even though they can be really descriptive of life experiences, either “hard” or “easy” or that kind of contrast–still, looking from a higher point of view, these contrasts regulate each other. They’re two sides of the same continuum. They’re a spectrum which wants to reach that perfect mean, or the perfect balance in a sense. But being a mortal human being, we’re always struggling, in this sense. We’re always moving in waves of polarity. It’s part of the human experience. So if you look at a chart and you want to describe that, this is a powerful means to do that. But there are many, many nuances which may change this expression, or even–I think we said that in our earlier discussion–even give you more potential for inner growth, in a sense, because of the struggle. So, if we take that philosophical stance that we’re living in an intelligible universe, and everything has intellect ingrained in it, there’s no mistake in that. It’s part of the system, and it’s part of how we grow and develop, so it’s really important not to fall into the trap of looking at it just in that polarity perspective without being able to transcend that in a kind of objective sense.
CB: Yea, I think that makes sense. Alright, well i think that brings us to a good stopping point. I’m trying to think if there are any other points that we meant to touch on that we didn’t get a chance to, but it feels like we covered a lot in this discussion. What do you think?
MO: I can still talk a week about this subject, but I have so much to say. The only thing I didn’t talk about a lot, which maybe one day I will, more, is that the tradition–the philosophical tradition in the sense of that cosmology of light which I talked about, which… there is like a primordial lineage of these concepts, and it goes through the Hermetic philosophy, and it goes through Sufi philosophy–people like Suhrawardi, the Illuminationist… I hope I’m saying that correctly… and others that really try to articulate that hierarchy of light, that Platonic thinking about light as a noetic principle. And all this philosophical tradition goes hand-in-hand with astrological ideas and concepts. And I think this is also a major thing that we need to revive: that we need a coherent cosmology for astrology. Because today, we don’t have that, so much. We have a lot of fragmented ideas. But having, at least conceptually, a kind of building block–a cosmology that essentially, in the end, is reflective of how astrology works–is part of that motivation, is part of that reconstruction of the ancient system. So, if I had more time I would try to speak about that, more, but I will save that for another time, I guess.
CB: Yea, well we’ll have to revisit this again in the future. I think you’ve given us a lot to think about in terms of the applicability of studying ancient philosophy, not just ancient astrology, and going back to first principles with that, but sometimes the applicability of studying some of the ancient philosophers, and how they would approach attempting to explain and develop first principles and things like that, and how sometimes that can be very relevant when applied to astrology: I think that was part of the point you were just making, right?
MO: Yes, for sure.
CB: Brilliant. Awesome. Alright, well, we’ll pick this up again in the future, but in the meantime, I look forward to… I hope you lecture on this more. Where can people find out more information about your work?
MO: Well, I don’t have a site in English, yet. I am having a lecture in Kepler College: a webinar on the 6th of May. It’s about the rulers of life, the rulers of the nativity. But I hope to publish things in English more and more. Everything is in Hebrew right now, but I’m starting to translate some of my work, and I hope it will be accessible for people who have interest in it. And I also want to thank you for your help and for your support, and I also want to congratulate you on your book, which is such an important achievement, and, really, all serious lovers of astrology should have that book, because right now it’s the definitive work on Hellensitic astrology, and the most accessible one, and you’ve really done a great work. So, I thank you for that also.
CB: Thank you, I appreciate it. Yeah, we’ve known each other for about 10 years, now, so you’ve seen very, very early stages of that book, and you’ve seen it come a long way, compared to what the final product was.
MO: Yes, and it was really beautiful seeing everything grow, and the concepts grow, and your research, and you’re doing such a great service for the community. And as I told you before, for someone that is obsessed like you on that subject, on that research in ancient texts and translation, et cetera, it is such a hard and intricate knowledge that, to write such a book is a tremendous achievement, really.
CB: Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Well, thank you, and so, I’m sure, for those who do speak Hebrew, you have a URL- what is it again?
MO: It’s http://www.ofek-sky.com/.
CB: Okay, and if somebody just searches your name, “Michael Ofek Astrologer,” I think it’ll probably come up, or I’ll link to your website here in the description for this episode, and people should definitely check out that Kepler webinar. You said it’s May 6th?
MO: Yeah.
CB: Okay, excellent, and they can find out more info about that at https://keplercollege.org/. Thanks for joining me today!
MO: You’re welcome, Chris! Thank you for having me again. I enjoyed it very much.
CB: Yeah, me too! Alright, well thanks everyone for listening, and we’ll see you next time!