The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 386, titled:
Deborah Houlding and Whole Sign House Denialism
With Chris Brennan
Episode originally released on February 10, 2023
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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 Mary Sharon
Transcription released February 15, 2023
Copyright © 2023 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: All right. Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining me for this live stream tonight. Hopefully, it’s coming through okay and everybody can hear me. This is going to be kind of a long and unique live stream where I’m going to be talking about Deborah Houlding’s recent talk on the Whole Sign Houses where she denied the historical existence of whole sign houses in ancient astrology, and then also claimed that it was invented some time recently in the 1990s by Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt and other members of Project Hindsight. I’m going to be presenting evidence today that just shows that that’s not true and that there’s lots of evidence to the contrary, and also going through and providing commentary, like an extended commentary on a number of other things that were stated in that talk that were distortions or misrepresentations, or in some instances just outright fabrications. So it’s going to be kind of a long discussion tonight, but let’s buckle up and get right into it.
Alright. Let me first start by showing my slides. I need to give a lot of introductory statements, so I prepared some PowerPoint presentations just to make sure I get some of the main points before we get into the commentary. This lecture that Houlding gave was titled “The Sign, the Whole Sign, and Nothing But the Sign … Really?” It was given at the Astrological Association of Great Britain’s annual conference back in September, actually on September 24th 2022 starting around 12:30 pm, I believe, London time. And actually, interestingly if you look up the chart for that time, perhaps relevant is transiting Mercury was retrograde opposite Neptune while the Moon was applying to a square with Mars. So, take that as you will, astrologically.
Houlding released this video recently, publicly. She just posted the recording publicly late on the night of February 4th or early on the day of February 5th. As I said, she makes the false claim that whole sign houses never existed and was never used in ancient astrology, and she also claims that it was introduced for the first time in the 1990s by Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt under the auspices of Project Hindsight. She makes this as well as basically dozens of other false claims as we’ll see during the course of tonight that I plan to respond to in this video.
To get that out of the way right from the start because I don’t want there to be any ambiguity about what the claim was, this was written out on one of her slides in her lecture at one point where she says, “The number of historical astrologers who have explained it– and she’s talking about whole sign houses– taught it, recommended it, argued for it, or suggested that it’s the best, zero.” She says, “No historical astrologer advocated the system, not a single reference can be found of an historical astrologer explaining it, demonstrating it, recommending it or advising us to use a whole sign for each house rather than commencing the division of the houses from the Ascendant degree.”
That’s the primary claim. And she has been saying something similar for a number of years now but usually more privately, and this time is the first time she’s really put it in a matter of public record through a lecture and now through sort of spreading basically this conspiracy theory through the internet, and it’s gone viral this week because everybody has watched this video that’s been circling around. It’s kind of an easy claim to dispute just because if I only had one piece of evidence, if I just showed literally one chart that used whole sign houses or calculated it from literally any ancient source, you could easily dispute it, right? Because it’s such an extreme claim that it makes the impression that there’s literally nothing out there whatsoever to dispute it. So, one of the things we’re going to talk about and go through during the course of tonight is what is some of the evidence to dispute that claim. And it turns out there’s actually quite a bit.
So, part of the subtext of this talk is something I call whole sign denialism. Part of the subtext of a lot of these discussions approximately over the last seven years since 2015, but it actually spans back much further to some debates that were happening in the mid-1990s that Houlding herself was involved in. But part of the subtext of the discussion is that–or this house division quote-unquote “debates”–is just that there’s some astrologers who simply do not like whole sign houses, and do not think it’s a legitimate form of house division, and they will go to great lengths to deny that it ever existed in ancient astrology.
So a couple of years ago, I coined the phrase ‘whole sign house denialism’ to refer to people who do this. So far, one of the things I want to be clear about is that it’s only Deborah Houlding and one of her students, Wade Caves, who are the astrologers that actually do this or promote this very extreme position or this very extreme idea. There are actually a lot of historical ambiguities and legitimate points of historical debate about house division in antiquity, how the house division issue developed, what systems were used by different authors at different points. And so one of the things I’m going to clarify at the start is that this phrase whole sign house denialism is not meant to be applied to those who have investigated or even questioned whether the different quadrant house systems were used more commonly in antiquity than has previously been assumed. So I’m not painting just any investigator that has different opinions, only those of which I only know two astrologers– and Deborah Houlding is the principal one– who just don’t like this form of house division and therefore try to go out of their way to deny that it existed in ancient traditions, of which there were several different ancient traditions where it was actually used and practiced in languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Sanskrit, including the Indian tradition where whole sign houses, of course, is still widely practiced to this day.
So whole sign house denialism only applies to those who completely deny any historical evidence for the existence of whole sign houses in ancient times. I want to make that clear who specifically this is directed at, or that at least I’m responding to, because this is a response video. And I think anybody that’s seen the lecture understands that it’s a response or that I am responding, but I want to make that clear up front that I’m not looking for this argument and in fact I’ve tried to ignore it for quite a long time. But because her lecture kind of went viral especially on Facebook over the past week, I saw a lot of people just adopting her claims at face value, assuming that she was just a neutral historical researcher who was presenting this counter-narrative that whole sign houses actually never existed in ancient astrology even though almost every legitimate historical historian or astrologer who specializes in the study of ancient astrology at this point acknowledges that whole sign houses existed in ancient times.
Another thing I need to say is, we’re separating here the history from the current practice. Whether whole sign houses existed as a form of house division in ancient astrology, is a completely separate question from whether it is a useful form of house division that astrologers should use today. So this debate and everything I’m talking about now is not really about what works best in practice today.
I’m purely focused on the historical issues in this discussion, and specifically the claim of whether or not the whole sign house system existed in ancient times. I want to make that really clear because sometimes when this debate comes up, different astrologers start taking different sides based on their personal preferences or personal practices. But that’s really not necessary and what is actually good to keep in mind is to separate those two issues, because even if you don’t use whole sign houses or don’t prefer it or even don’t think it works in your birth chart, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to then by extension deny that it existed in ancient astrology or that some other astrologers hundreds of years ago may have used it. That seems like a really obvious point, but it’s actually a point that some people– primarily, actually just Deborah Houlding–struggle with.
But I want to make that clear to everyone that I’m not directing any criticisms at anybody that doesn’t use whole sign houses or what have you. I do not care if anybody chooses not to use whole sign houses in their practice today, to each their own, but I think that trying to deny its historical existence in ancient times simply because you do not like that approach is bizarre and really disingenuous. While this is often framed as if it’s simply part of a healthy historical debate, the complete denial of the existence of a form of house division like a technique in ancient astrology, that there’s ample evidence for in the form of hundreds of horoscopes, dozens of written astrological texts of astrologers practicing it.
The complete denial of that is beyond the scope of any sort of academic debate, and instead it’s rooted in a personal agenda of attempting to mislead people so that they can get people essentially to stop using whole sign houses in practice today, basically just because they don’t like that system of house division and it doesn’t match their own approach. It’s being framed as a historical debate but it’s really coming from a very personal place in terms of personal preferences and personal practice that then is being projected backwards in history.
So, whole sign house denialism is a really extreme view and it’s kind of unfortunate because it distracts from more useful discussions that we could be having about how to reconcile the different approaches to house division today, and instead we have to keep coming back to spending time re-litigating and re-outlining the abundant evidence that whole sign houses did actually exist in ancient times. In fact one of the points that I would make here is that it seems like the Hellenistic and early medieval astrologers used both whole sign houses and other forms of house division like quadrant house systems such as Porphyry or equal houses at the same time, and they tried to blend or synthesize or merge those two systems together.
And personally, I had hoped that this is where we would be headed more in the direction of by this point, and following what some of those early astrologers were doing in terms of trying to find a way for all of these systems to work or to have a sort of place for all of them. But instead, I’m going to have to give this long lecture where we’re debating the existence of whether one of those systems existed in ancient times, which is kind of a waste of time at this point because it’s been thoroughly documented.
So, everytime this essentially stupid debate is brought up again by the whole sign house denialists, I kind of get annoyed all over again that we’re having to waste time reestablishing that whole sign houses existed, rather than talking about how to reconcile these different systems at this point in time. But here we are. Unfortunately, I have to address this. I need to address this not just because it offends my historical sensibilities, but also because a lot of false things were said about the recent history of the revival of ancient astrology over the past 30 years, specifically about astrologers who I knew in person, some of which are no longer alive to speak for and defend themselves. And some of their positions or some of the things they did or did not do have been misrepresented.
Deborah Houlding and I have had debates about this before, for example in a famous episode of my podcast that was released in November of 2015, where we debated whole sign houses and whether it existed in ancient times and things like that. But I’ve generally tried to ignore when her and her students subsequently continually keep bringing up these debates and spreading these false claims about whole sign houses. But this time, they’ve actually gone too far and I’m sort of forced to respond at this point. Partially because I’m basically one of the only people, one of the only authorities in the world that has enough background in this subject, both in terms of the ancient history of astrology as well as in terms of the contemporary revival of traditional astrology in the past 30 years. I’m basically one of the few people that’s able to point out the extent to which she is deliberately distorting the historical record and misleading people. I don’t actually want to be doing this, I’d rather be recording. I was supposed to record an episode on the astrology of comedians this weekend, which I’m still going to try to record.
My interests had moved on beyond debates about house division years ago, but unfortunately now I have to come back to this just because I’m essentially being forced to. While this may seem pointed or harsh on my part, I’m actually responding to a series of highly aggressive and often very personal attacks on the character of a number of astrologers that I know, including Rob Hand, Demetra George, Robert Schmidt, even to a certain extent James Holden, or distortions about Robert Zoller and Zoller’s practice. And, you know, Schmidt is dead. He died in 2018. Zoller passed away a few years ago as well, Hand is not as active recently, James Holden passed away about a decade ago. So one of the things I have to do is I have to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves at this point. So people should understand that my response represents a defense on the behalf of those who are being attacked and whose reputations are being besmirched. Yeah, so I’m going to try to keep things as neutral as I can, but some of that piece of it does bother me so you’ll have to excuse me if occasionally I get annoyed.
Those that have been around the astrological community for the past decade know that this debate comes up periodically. As I said, I hosted Houlding on my podcast in 2015 and you can still listen to that exchange. Since that time, a number of her students periodically bring up this topic. It’s not a two-way dispute, though, because typically it’s them initiating the debates and then me and other people having to respond. This largely stems from the fact that she just doesn’t like whole sign houses, and her goal is to tear it down. Or as Wade Caves told Demetra George at NORWAC last May, he came up to her– Deb’s student– and said that his goal was to demolish whole sign houses or something like that. She told me recently.
So it’s like this very personal agenda that they’re going to take down whole sign houses or this technique, which is kind of a bizarre motivation that you don’t see very often in the astrological community in terms of people whose entire agenda is attacking another technique or just getting rid of it. So, while whole sign house proponents have been enthusiastic sometimes in promoting whole sign houses, especially in the past when it was first being recovered and when it only occupied like one percent or less of usage in the astrological community, generally people that use whole sign houses at this point in time are just trying to do their own work and do their own practice with whatever system they prefer. Their goal is generally not to go out and destroy other systems of astrology in the same way.
Again, I’m therefore not eager to respond to this, but I have to as a result of not having a choice and in terms of just correcting the historical record. I also have to speak up for the sake of the tradition itself and that professional astrologers know the actual, existing historical record and are not misled by something that seems rhetorically appealing or accurate when taken at face value. And I know there’s a lot of astrologers that just don’t specialize in the history of astrology, or specialize in having read all these different texts or compared all these different historical arguments or all this other stuff. I understand that it takes a lot of background and so there’s a tendency when you see somebody authoritative who’s an elder in the community to take what they’re saying at face value or for granted, especially if it looks new or if it’s like a counter-narrative from what you’d heard before. But in this instance, unfortunately, it’s really easy to be misled if you take some of those arguments that face value. And that’s the reason why the purpose of this, once I actually get into it, is going to be to watch some parts of the video and actually comment on them and talk about some of the things that are said and why some of the things that were said are actually misleading or just completely fabricated.
Alright. So, responding to her lecture. I listened to her lecture in October when a recording of it was first released on the Astrological Association website and a number of people sent it to me. I waited to respond though, because she stated her intentions to release the recording publicly and so I was kind of just waiting for the past few months and hoping she wouldn’t do this again and hoping we wouldn’t have to go through this entire thing again. But then, according to her, in a Facebook post, she says that she got drunk the other night on Saturday and decided to release it. That was her justification, even though I’m sure she’d been intending on releasing it for a while and then finally decided to. But that was her excuse.
I wanted to wait also to see her final version to see if anything was different. And in fact in the video recording, there were a number of things that were different in the version that was released this week compared to the last one. It was just an audio recording with what looks like an earlier version of her PDF slides that did not contain a lot of information that was actually in the final version of the video that was released this week. That’s another good reason in terms of why I waited.
After she released the lecture for free publicly, it was kind of interesting seeing the reactions on Facebook. There were a number of astrologers who assumed what she was saying was true and that whole sign houses didn’t exist in ancient astrology and that she had just blown the lid off of this big conspiracy, and that it was just a made-up modern invention. So it actually did pretty well in terms of getting a lot of likes and a lot of discussions over on Facebook.
But since that time, actually a number of scholars who specialize in different astrological traditions have come out saying that she is wrong by pointing out evidence for whole sign houses in different languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Arabic. You can see all of this if you go to my Twitter page at twitter.com/chrisbrennan7 because I’ve retweeted all of these tweets and threads by different people.
This is from Levente László who does a crowdfunded translation project for Greek astrological texts, where he has been translating all these Greek astrological texts over the past few years. It’s basically the new version of Project Hindsight in terms of the Hellenistic material at least. And he had a long thread where he stated very clearly, he says, “As a historian of astrology, let me make some assertions concerning the whole sign house controversy that’s been reignited again. These are strictly historical statements,” he says, that he’s making, “a not value statements.” He says, “Whole sign houses is the ancestor of all subsequent house systems. It was a system built on certain principles, not a rough approximation or the lazy astrologer’s choice.” Because at one point, recently on social media Deborah Houlding was saying that whole sign house users must be lazy or that it was a lazy house system somehow.
So Levente goes on to say, “It is unambiguously defined in a number of Hellenistic sources and unequivocally referenced throughout extant astrological literature. It is the only or the default system in all surviving Hellenistic and Byzantine horoscopes ever using houses.” He keeps going on…
There’s other scholars. There’s a Sanskrit scholar who does work on ancient Indian astrology, who wrote a thread about whole sign houses in the Indian tradition going back to the earliest Sanskrit sources in India. There’s another scholar named Ali A Olomi who posted some charts that were written in Arabic using whole sign houses. There’s another scholar who just today said she did a PhD dissertation in 2001. And she pointed out that in this 11th century, astrologers work, that he used both whole sign houses as well as al-Qabisi’s houses at the same time.
Finally, also Jeffrey Kotyk who’s a scholar of Chinese works, of Chinese and Japanese astrology, pointed out that there was a tradition of horoscopic astrology in China and Japan starting around the year 800 that lasted all the way until about the 17th century, and he says that it also used whole sign houses. And he’s documented in some of his work, including I think his PhD thesis.
I’m pointing to a lot of this– and we’ll get to more of the evidence and looking at actual charts later here– because one of the things that I want to bring up is this sort of rhetorical question that’s worth asking yourself at this point once you actually look at all the different scholars and the different people with language skills that are saying that whole sign houses work. One of the questions is, why does everyone with training in ancient languages seem to think that whole sign houses existed in ancient astrology, but Deborah Houlding says that it didn’t? Is it because Deborah Houlding found something that everyone else didn’t, or is it because Deborah Houlding simply doesn’t like that house system and refuses to acknowledge any evidence for it?
So, this is especially important in this context of the tweets that I just showed you by different scholars who speak different ancient languages and have actually studied the texts in their original languages such as Arabic, Greek, Chinese, or Sanskrit. That’s important because Deborah Houlding herself doesn’t speak any of those languages, so she’s not actually able to make an analysis of most of the texts she’s talking about. She has to read them in translation. That’s not always a huge stumbling block because I’m also not a huge ancient language expert myself and I’m not necessarily going to pretend to be one in terms of knowing all of those languages, but in some instances when you come up against an issue like that where you don’t know the language, sometimes you do have to establish what the consensus seems to be from people who are authorities in those fields. And sometimes when all of the authorities are saying one thing from many different traditions in many different perspectives and cultures and time periods, versus this one person who has an expressed personal agenda and has expressed many times that they don’t like whole sign houses and says in her lecture that she doesn’t think it’s quote-unquote “a real house system”, perhaps that’s not the most reliable person to take advice from about the history of ancient astrology when it comes to this technique.
All right, so one of the things I’m going to do here is I’m gonna watch the lecture, part of it, because it’s out there for free and I would like to do a commentary and a sort of reaction to it in order to talk through specifically what some of the problems with it are. My commentary on Houlding’s work will fall into the category of fair use, which covers works of commentary, criticism, research, teaching, and news reporting. So this video will not be monetized on YouTube. The nature of Houlding’s lecture is an academic historical debate, which I’m going to… She’s put forward a number of historical arguments and propositions, and so we need to hear what her actual arguments are in her actual words, and then I can dispute them.
The video she released is available online for free and people can find it by Googling the title of her talk, which is “The Sign, the Whole Sign, and Nothing But the Sign … Really?” Deborah Houlding will probably try to dispute that my commentary falls under fair use, but that’s largely because she does not want people to hear genuine critiques of the conspiracy theory that she’s trying to promote about whole sign houses being a modern invention. She frequently tries to cast herself as the victim of attacks by whole sign house proponents, even though she’s often the one– virtually always the one in the position of the aggressor. And then when people respond to her, she acts like a soccer player that falls over on the grass like somebody just hit her or something like that, when she was the one that slide tackled into one of us. So for me, this is primarily a historical debate though, because historical arguments were made, and therefore a detailed analysis is both necessary as well as acceptable.
All right. I’ve done other treatments of this issue, I actually wrote a 50-page chapter in my book titled Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune that dealt entirely and exclusively with the issue of house division and how the different systems of house division originated and were used in ancient astrology as well as some of the debates about them. So one of the things about that book is because I published it in 2017, because I was writing it and finishing it the year after my debate with Deborah Houlding in 2015, I actually went out of my way to expand that chapter in order to take some of her arguments seriously where she said whole sign houses, you know, there’s no evidence for it in ancient times. And so I went through in that chapter and that’s why it’s 50-pages long and I collected all of the evidence for whole sign houses in ancient times.
One of the things I’ve done recently in order to make that information more accessible is I’ve released that chapter online for free, that chapter of my book. And you can read it and download it right now as a PDF and study the evidence yourself at hellenisticastrology.com/brennan-house-division.pdf. Obviously, you can also buy a copy of my book but the point is that I want to release that out there for free because it’s more important for me at this point to set the historical record straight and get the information out there, than it is to make a little bit of money off of the proceeds of my book or what have you.
I also released a video lecture in 2019 summarizing the main points of that chapter of my book and summarizing the main points of what is the evidence for the different methods of house division both in terms of whole sign houses, but also what is the evidence for quadrant houses and equal houses? And how were they used together? How did those systems come about? And how did some of the Hellenistic astrologers attempt to reconcile them and put them together at the same time? So, that was released as episode 227 of The Astrology Podcast titled, “The Origins of the House Division Debate in Ancient Astrology.” You can just Google that and you’ll find the video version on YouTube or you’ll find it on the podcast website.
Please see that lecture or that book chapter for my full treatment of this topic. One of the reasons I’m saying that is because Houlding actually went out of her way to avoid citing any of that, or directly engaging with my more recent and complete treatments of this topic. And instead, she continually cited a much older and less serious blow-off lecture on whole sign houses that I recorded almost a decade ago. But if you read some of those things that evidently she doesn’t want you to read because she’s not citing and actually engaging with the recent debate where I sort of set the gauntlet and I said, “If somebody wants to say that whole sign houses doesn’t exist, then these are the pieces of evidence that you need to dispute.” And she’s disputed none of that. She just says rhetorically there is no evidence, and then refuses to mention that somebody may have presented otherwise.
One of the things you should do for your own self is don’t take my word for it, but read those presentations and come to your own conclusion. Don’t take my word for it, don’t take her word for it. I’ve collected all the evidence, so you can look up the texts yourself, and then look up those texts and read them. Read the chart examples that different astrologers like Vettius Valens or Dorotheus of Sidon or Mā Shā’ Allāh or other astrologers use, and come to your own conclusions. I will present some of those charts later on here but I just want to state that this is not meant to be the comprehensive treatment of all of this, but instead what I’m going to focus on is Houlding’s specific points and the specific claims that she made in her lecture, and responding to those. But if you want a more detailed analysis of my actual historical analysis of the different methods of house division, then check out those two resources.
All right. Finally, one last thing I have to preface this with before we get started is the sneak diss. Rappers have this thing that they sometimes call a sneak diss in rap songs. Here’s a definition of it from dailyrapfacts.com. It says, “The slang term ‘Sneak Diss’ is a noun and verb that is used to reference disrespect someone without saying it to them or mentioning their name. A sneak diss is something disrespectful aimed at someone without saying it to them or mentioning their name.” Houlding does this constantly not only in her lecture, but also in her written work such as her book on the houses. Not just to me, but I’ve noticed her doing this to a number of different scholars. She seems to do it not just to be disrespectful generally. It’s not just disrespectful generally, but it’s also counter to academic citations and the standard of citing your sources, and how you’re supposed to directly reference what you’re arguing against so that people can look at the evidence themselves and decide for themselves.
So one of the things I’m pointing out is that she will often misattribute false arguments to her opponents, and she won’t cite them. She’ll just say, “Whole sign house users do this,” or, “Proponents of whole sign houses that say that it existed in ancient astrology say this.” But she’ll mischaracterize their arguments and then not actually talk about who she’s referring to. This is part of a misdirection tactic, because then she can say whatever she wants without her audience being able to track down the sources and compare and see if what she said was true.
Sometimes she will disparage or undercut certain arguments in a very subtle way because she doesn’t actually refer to the people who are making the arguments that she’s disputing. That’s why I think it kind of falls into this category of what you might call a sneak diss. Part of the problem with this is that she’s depending on the majority of her audience to not have enough specific background knowledge to know what’s missing or what’s distorted in her arguments. Her fundamental gamble here is knowing that most of her audience is not going to delve into this material independently, and so they will just accept arguments based on how confidently she speaks about it, and the information that they won’t realize is missing in the talk. That’s one of the things I’m going to fix here today.
Also, depending on her audience being largely quadrant house practitioners, because that’s actually the majority of astrologers today use Placidus and other quadrant systems of house division, she rests on that as well as the othering that she’s doing with people who use whole sign houses, and that this will succeed because the audience may just have a vague idea or a stereotype of what she’s talking about. This is why I have to give this detailed talk in commentary, and my goal here basically is to be as open and really kind of brutally honest or even candid or even blunt, obviously, at this point about what’s going on. Because this is the only way that I can counter this where if there’s a lot of stuff that’s being misrepresented, if there’s a lot of things that are being said that are not the truth, the only way that I can counter this is to give people just all of the context and tell you everything and all of the backstory and all of the subtext and everything that’s happening so you know what’s going on and so there’s no illusions or mirages here. So this is what I’m going to try to do to let people know what’s going on, is to sort of talk about everything very openly and be kind of brutally honest about it.
All right. I think it’s time, let’s begin. Hilariously, that was all the preliminary. That’s the introductory stuff. So…
[plays video]
WENDY: Now, we’re very privileged to have Deborah Houlding talking–
[pauses video]
CB: We’re going to watch some of Deborah Houlding’s lecture and talk about it today.
[plays video]
W: –to us today. I can’t wait to hear the subject matter. Deb, I know it’s gonna be fantastic. I’m sure Deb needs no introduction, she’s one of world’s greatest traditional astrologers. Her work is endless; she’s the founder and tutor of the STA. Her Skyscript website is incredible, as is her book, The Houses: Temples of the Sky. She was the founder of Ascella Publications, editor of the Traditional Astrologer magazine, and she’s been teaching lecturing for many decades since the ’80s. And we’re really lucky to have her. She’s here speaking today on behalf of the STA, and she’s just a really great woman. So I’m gonna pass it to you now, Deb. Thank you so much, so great to have you here. Thank you.
DEBORAH HOULDING: Thank you, Wendy. I appreciate the big build-up, but you’ve set a standard for me now, so… [laughs] Thank you for joining me, everybody, on what’s possibly the most controversial talk. I will admit, I’m not here for a popularity contest today. In looking at the issue of “The Sign, the Whole Sign, and Nothing But the Sign…”
[pauses video]
CB: Popularity contest. So that’s really important, because one of the things that she does is she puts herself as the renegade. She’s the one that’s going against what everyone else is saying. Even though quadrant houses are actually the majority of the… Astrologers use quadrant houses at this point. And she does this sometimes like a false modesty thing of saying that she’s going to be the intrepid one that’s pushing against the establishment. But it’s this really weird dynamic of like, what really is the establishment? Is the establishment the house system or the approach that the majority of astrologers practice in the world today? Because if so, that’s quadrant houses.
[plays video]
DH: …Really?” I’m particularly stirred to give this presentation in view of the quote on the screen, “The whole sign house system is the oldest form of house division, and remain the preferred method of determining houses for about a thousand years after its inception.” That definition is all over the internet on many credible, authoritative websites. And any new student coming into astrology is obviously going to think, “Well, everybody’s telling me this is a great house system.”
[pauses video]
CB: Look at the source of that quote, she’s getting it from the Co-Star website, the app Co-Star which is one of the more popular astrology apps today. But Co-Star is actually paraphrasing me. Co-Star is actually paraphrasing my book that was published in 2017, Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune, where I said as part of my summary– not just saying, but in the introduction and then the conclusion of the 50-page house division paper– I said that whole sign houses was the original system of house division, and that it was the predominant or the most popular method of house division for about the first thousand years of the practice of western horoscopic astrology from approximately the second century BCE, until about the eighth or ninth century CE.
One of the things that’s really interesting here is that she is not quoting me, basically. Instead, she’s going to somebody else that was doing a synopsis of me in order to quote my position. And this is one of the sneaky things that’s being done in order to avoid engaging in the actual debate or as an academic historical debate, like your actual debate opponents or the people that have the opinion that you’re going to be arguing against. It’s a pretty common assumed thing that you’re going to quote the people that you’re debating or who have presented evidence to the contrary directly.
But instead, one of the things she does is sidestepping that by quoting some random website for an astrology app that doesn’t really matter, it doesn’t really have any bearing in terms of them being an authority on the history of astrology. They’re citing me, so I’m the one that should be quoted in this instance. And I’m not saying that as a point of personal annoyance on my part, per se, because I don’t really care necessarily who she quotes. It’s just one of the things I realized is this is the first clue that this isn’t going to be a straightforward lecture, there’s going to be some misdirection and there’s going to be some weirdness, and it starts literally in the first minute by quoting somebody who’s paraphrasing somebody else, which is me.
[plays video]
DH: -preferred for a thousand years. So, you know, why would you not use it? Let’s take a look at the issues. I want to say that what’s of interest to me is I am a pre-computer astrologer. When I started studying astrology, you had to manually calculate your charts. And the internet, the world wide web wasn’t invented. There was forms of the internet, but there wasn’t a public web that we all shared. And I remember in the ’80s and early ’90s, there wasn’t any semblance of a house system called whole sign houses. I mean, I would like to say there was zero recognition of it in the western tradition. I don’t know about Vedic systems or Hindu astrologers using Sidereal systems might have used something like that.
[pauses video]
CB: “Might have used something like that.” One of the things she does is they don’t have a good answer for what about the Indian tradition where everybody who’s even vaguely familiar with Indian astrology knows that they’ve been using whole sign houses as their primary system for the past 2000 years. She doesn’t have any answer for that so she continually in this argument sidesteps the Indian astrology issue, which is really crucial because it’s one of the obvious things that anybody, immediately if you present the notion of whole sign houses has never existed in ancient astrology until the 1990s, literally everybody I’ve ever talked to is always like, “Well, what about the Indian astrologers?” And they don’t have a good answer to that. So it’s true that whole sign houses wasn’t very well known in the West until the 1990s, but there was actually more acknowledgement of it than many people realize. And I’ll get into that here in just a little bit.
[plays video]
DH: But certainly as an astrologer that was in the community at the time, there was no awareness of anybody ever using whole sign houses, showing charts, teaching on it, talking about it. It just didn’t exist. Prior-
[pauses video]
CB: So didn’t exist. That’s a really important point that you need to keep in mind. She keeps repeating over and over again through this lecture that it didn’t exist. And one of the things that she’s going to try to convince her audience, and judging by the social media post afterwards that she, for some people, unfortunately convinced of was that it didn’t exist prior to 1993. And eventually, what she’s going to end up doing is she’s going to blame Rob Hand, and potentially Robert Schmidt for proposing or inventing whole sign houses. So one of the problems… Actually, let me wait. I’ll wait because I was going to present the evidence that there was more knowledge of whole sign houses than she says. But let’s just take what she’s currently said and let’s see where she goes with that.
[plays video]
DH: -to the 1990s, when it was launched with a big fanfare by Project Hindsight. You know, this is just 30 years. We’ve moved from a situation where there was virtually no recognition of this system. And I would say zero, but there might have been one or two people using it. Like there was some people claiming there’s 13 signs in the zodiac. But it didn’t exist.
[pauses video]
CB: She says two things there. One of them is she hedges a little bit and she is like, “Maybe there were one or two people that acknowledged it or knew about whole sign houses or used it,” but then she tries to cast it, in her view, as something dumb or something wacky. Like, she makes an analogy of the 13th sign or the 13 sign zodiac, which she views negatively. And so the point is then both to sort of hedge and downplay because she knows she’s over- I think she knows she’s overstating the point by saying there was literally nobody, but also to cast aspersions on whole sign houses.
And one of the things we’re going to see in this lecture and one of the ways that it ties up nicely is presumably… Ostensibly, the point of the lecture is historical and she’s going to spend a lot of time talking about historical stuff. But it’s going to circle around in the end, and in the very end she doesn’t end on a historical point. She ends on a point of why she doesn’t like whole sign houses and why it doesn’t make sense to her, and why she chooses not to practice it. So ultimately, it’s important to understand that this is not coming from a historical place, even though she’s framing it historically. It’s coming from a personal place of preferences and not liking that system, and having developed this weird extreme hatred of this specific technique in astrology or this specific system that other astrologers besides her use, both in modern times as well as historically.
[plays video]
DH: -within the mainstream astrological practice prior to the 1990s. We contrast that with today, and I don’t know the statistics of what is the most popular house system. A lot of websites report that Placidus is the most popular, followed by Whole Sign, followed by Porphyry. Certainly whole sign, I would say, has become the most popular house system for a tremendous amount of new astrologists who have come into the subject. I would-
[pauses video]
CB: I don’t completely disagree with that and that’s kind of true. And part of the context you have to understand for why this is happening and why she freaks out about whole sign houses so much is that she’s right. It really was not well known until the 1980s and 1990s. It started becoming more well known before Project Hindsight because people started translating a bunch of ancient astrological texts such as James Holden, for example, and discovering whole sign houses over the course of the past century, over the past 100 years. But it didn’t become popular until over the past 30 years when some of those texts were fully translated into English and there became a greater awareness of that as actually a very early legitimate system of house division.
That was awkward and it created this awkward situation though because at first when it was discovered, it was just like less than one percent of people used it. 95%, let’s say, of astrologers use quadrant houses like Placidus, for example, or Porphyry or Regiomontanus or what have you. But over the course of the past 30 years, more and more astrologers have started to use whole sign houses. And I think part of the thing that happened and one of the things she doesn’t like is she doesn’t like this becoming so popular and has started kind of freaking out about it because there have been at least two polls that I’ve seen recently– one of them was actually conducted on her own website, I think on the Skyscript forum– and it said that quadrant houses like Placidus and Porphyry were still the most preferred system, but that whole sign had become the second most preferred system amongst astrologers in general.
So it’s not just younger astrologers. I mean, there may be some generational divide to a certain extent, but I think that’s being over-emphasized here because it’s really just become more popular amongst astrologers in general. And that dramatic rise has created some tensions or some uncomfortableness sometimes, and I can understand and sympathize with that to a certain extent in terms of like if you don’t use whole sign houses and you prefer quadrant houses, you know, that can be kind of awkward sometimes, anytime two different people use different systems of astrology or especially if there’s an alternative approach that’s becoming more popular. And I do sympathize with that to a certain extent. I also sympathize with that sometimes early on with whole sign houses when it was being revived when it was such a minority practice in the community or practice of so many of us that were in the minority, there was a lot of enthusiasm about promoting it and saying, “Hey, this is a useful system of house division,” or having to defend it as a practice.
So there’s a lot of enthusiasm surrounding it. I understand that as a result of some of those things, there could be greater tensions in the community as a result of this semi-dramatic rise over the past 30 years. I mean, it’s been 30 years. A lot of things can change in 30 years, so let’s not over-dramatize the rise. But my point is just that even though I sympathize with some of those reactions to a certain extent from the perspective of quadrant house users or especially in terms of her perspective as a quadrant house proponent, that still doesn’t justify going to this extreme place of hating something or trying to sort of demolish it or get rid of it or convince people that it never existed historically. That’s when things start getting a little bit weird and a little bit underhanded.
[plays video]
DH:- say that most of them are very aware of whole sign. And the general trend is for an astrologer to believe that they are well-trained, having been taught how to use whole sign houses. We can look at Astro Database, which was recently Incorporated. It’s such an important site, Astrodatabank, the way that it’s my first go-to place for any chart to get the chart data. They now give three options; you can calculate a chart in Placidus, you can calculate it in whole sign, or you can calculate it in equal house, which for some reason that I don’t understand Astrodatabank has decided is a system called English style. I don’t know where that is coming from or why they do that. Believe me, equal house system is nothing to do with the English nation, but-
[pauses video]
CB: That’s actually a really important point and I glossed over it. I thought it was weird when I first watched the lecture and I didn’t understand why she was… Because she actually knows the answer to that, of why astro.com is calling equal houses the English style, and it’s because of a British author from the UK named Margaret Hone who wrote a textbook on astrology in the mid-1950s. And Margaret Hone, I think she had read Firmicus Maternus or somebody like that like an early author that used equal houses, and she really liked that approach and she promoted equal houses. So equal houses had a period of popularity in the second half of the 20th century, and I think Margaret Hones’ textbook became standard reading at the Faculty of Astrological Studies, which is one of the schools in the UK and one of the more respected astrological schools in the UK.
So equal houses to a certain extent, especially I’m sure from the perspective of some European astrologers where Astrodienst– the website she’s talking about is Swiss, I believe– why they would call it the English system. She knows all of that because she studied, I believe she studied at the Faculty of Astrological Studies in the 1980s. But the reason why she dismisses it as being English or associating with English, which I admit is a little bit weird for them to label it that, but she knows why they did.
She’s not actually bewildered, she’s faking being bewildered. What we’ll find out later in the lecture is that she’s not actually just trying to suppress whole sign houses, she actually extends it and tries to suppress evidence of equal houses throughout this lecture at different points as well. And this is actually new information to me that I didn’t know up until this point in watching this lecture and seeing what she actually does is that she’s not just targeting whole sign houses, she’s also targeting equal houses. And she’s going to try to downplay the use of equal houses in the ancient tradition, even though like whole sign houses, there’s abundant evidence that that system was used. We’ll see that come up again later.
[plays video]
DH: -this is just an example of how popular whole sign houses have become. So I want to just very briefly look at what happened in this-
[pauses video]
CB: I’m gonna take a little break for just a minute because my throat’s a little scratchy, and I’m just gonna grab some more water. So everybody should talk amongst yourselves. I’m sure the live chats are lively, I’m trying to not follow them too closely right now. And I’ll be back in just a few minutes.
[Intermission]
All right, how are we all doing here? We’re about 58 minutes or an hour into this. Buckle up, people. We got a ways to go. Get your favorite drink and let’s get through this. Let’s do this. All right, this is where things start getting interesting.
[plays video]
DH: How did we go, as they say, from zero to hero in such a short space of time? And one of the problems with this talk, one of the reasons why many people have felt uncomfortable discussing this issue is people do tend to get very emotive about the whole sign house system. And in order-
[pauses video]
CB: One of the common rhetorical strategies– and this keeps happening over and over again, it happens at least once a year, sometimes once or twice a year every year or so– is her or her student, Wade, will come out and say something really inflammatory and really personal and negative and say not just that whole sign houses never existed in ancient astrology, which is such a wild claim to begin with, but they’ll say like, “And it was only invented and the people that are promoting it are just trying to make money,” or they’ll say other bizarre historical things; that the evidence is being fabricated so they’ll attribute false motivations to those of which there’s many scholars of ancient astrology besides me, for that matter, or any one she cites in this lecture that say that whole sign houses existed such as the ones I showed earlier today.
They’ll say these really inflammatory things which are basically attacks. And then when some people start responding and pushing back against it and saying, “Hey, that’s not okay. That’s a really weird attack to be making,” they’ll then say that the whole sign house defenders are being emotional or that they’re attacking them or different things like that. So it’s one of the things you have to be really careful about here, because it’s presented in this sketchy way where she’ll say that we’re the ones that are attacking or other things like that. But once you see the entire lecture itself, you’ll see that she’s the one that’s constantly initiating this debate, and constantly coming up with new claims. Because what happens is the goalposts keep getting moved every other year, because what will happen is some claim about how whole sign houses didn’t exist, like a new angle on that argument she’ll propose it. And then people will pull out evidence and show like no, again, that’s not true again. And then she’ll move the goalposts and come up with a new argument a year or two later. And it just keeps evolving into this thing over and over again that is kind of tiring, I have to say, for a lot of us. But to attribute things like being overly emotional is kind of annoying.
[plays video]
DH: -you know, for people like me that have watched the whole thing. I don’t like to talk about personalities, I like to look at the theories and the principles. And so-
[pauses video]
CB: She says that she doesn’t like to talk about personalities, but one of the things she’s going to do throughout this lecture is talk about personalities. And she’s going to talk about and do these complex analyses of the personalities and the motivations, and she’s going to infer or often invent things about the personalities and the motivations of a number of different astrologers throughout this lecture. So that’s a really important point, because pay attention to what she says that she doesn’t like to talk about personalities versus what she actually does.
[plays video]
DH: -it’s difficult for me to say this happened in this way without bringing in certain personalities. But I have decided that it is not possible to look at the phenomenon of the rise of the whole sign house system without understanding the psychology of the movement behind it. So I’m gonna give you my witness account of how I saw this system develop and get so popular.
[pauses video]
CB: And what she’s going to do here is she’s going to blame Project Hindsight for inventing whole sign houses, and she’s going to say a bunch of things about the history of Project Hindsight that she doesn’t have any way of knowing because she wasn’t actually there and she wasn’t involved in Project Hindsight. And she never even went there and sort of met in person some of the principal people that she’s talking about. That’s going to be a really important point, is a lot of her firsthand experience isn’t actually firsthand experience. It’s her experience from reading some of the translations and sometimes engaging occasionally in online discussions with some of the founders like Schmidt, but not actually being there at Project Hindsight or being involved in it.
[plays video]
DH: As I say, there was no definition of whole sign house system or awareness or recognition of it at all in the historical literature and the traditional literature or the books that have been published by the historical astrologers or people like JD North who wrote about all the various house systems available, or Morin where he outlines all the available house systems and discusses each one of them; what are the merits of this? And what are the merits of that? None of them mentioned a system called whole sign houses. They all seem to be aware-
[pauses video]
CB: All right, so that’s really important. The principal claim is she says nobody was talking about whole sign houses prior to the 1990s, she says no historical sources, no ancient astrologers mentioned it, and she says that her third claim is that no academic discussions or no academic historians talked about it either.
So, one of the questions I would think that people would have at that point is: is that true? All right, let’s talk about that a little bit. I wanted to first talk about my friend, James Holden. She hasn’t mentioned James Holden yet, she’s about to downplay to his—actually 10 years before Project Hindsight–-publication of the discovery, at least from his perspective of whole sign houses. Actually, let me see if she says that next and then I’ll play this.
[plays video]
DH: -So we go back to that opening quote, “…and it was supposed to be the preferred method for a thousand years,” and yet we don’t have a single historical astrologer championing it, defining it, discussing it, recommending it, or saying, “This is what you do.” Not a single one. And the first awareness of it really came in the 1980s when James Holden made a suggestion quite rightly that a lot of ancient astrologers, in his opinion, seem to just use a very rough user sign for a house. They weren’t too precise, sometimes they didn’t give the full degrees of the planet. But James Holden did acknowledge the other house systems that were in existence and were used. But he did make the suggestion that sometimes they just appear to be using a sign for a house.
[pauses video]
CB: All right, really important point. She’s really downplaying the extent to which James Holden acknowledged and was one of the first people writing in English that I know of to really highlight that whole sign houses existed in ancient astrology. Because James Holden… Well, first thing I should say part of the reason she is acknowledging, she has to at least acknowledge it a little bit because the last time I debated Deborah Houlding about this in 2015 and she started saying Project Hindsight had invented it.
And I was like, “What about James Holden? He was writing about whole sign houses 10 years before.” And if you go back and listen to that debate, she tried to actually lie about James Holden’s and say, “No, he didn’t. He wasn’t describing whole sign houses there.” And in the middle of that debate, we had the super tense moment where I actually had to pull out a copy of James’s book and read quotes directly about what James Holden said, because she was lying about what my friend James Holden who passed away in 2013 had actually said about whole sign houses, and that was one of his most important contributions and I think discoveries as an astrologer.
Now, it would later turn out that Holden wasn’t the only person and there would be independent discoveries of whole sign houses in ancient astrology by people, not just Project Hindsight but also earlier in the 20th century. I’ve discovered there were discussions of it in German by a German academic– actually the inventor of the Koch system of house division. There was a French discussion of it, and there’s also Spanish discussions of it earlier in the 20th century.
James Holden, though, James was this guy that studied classics in college. He was pretty old when I knew him, he was like in his 80s, so I think he went to college and he did a master’s thesis on William Lilly and the text of William Lilly, and a biographical sketch of him. So he had an early interest in traditional astrology. And James Holden, as a result of learning classics, he was pretty good with languages and he learned different ancient languages such as ancient Greek and Latin. But he also knew a number of modern languages so he could read some of the literature by different astrologers in different countries that was contemporary in the 20th century. And James Holden was essentially one of the greatest– he was, I think, one of the greatest historians of astrology in the past century. I don’t wanna say he was the greatest, but he’s definitely one of the greatest. And his book, A History of Horoscopic Astrology is one of my favorite all-time books on astrology, and especially on the history of astrology. I also like Nick Campion’s book, A History of Western Astrology, Volume One and Volume Two, which are very good, but Holden’s book really ignited my passion in learning about ancient astrology.
What you need to know about James Holden is that in 1982, he published a paper in the American Federation of Astrologers journal, it was Volume One, number one. He actually had just become the research director of the American Federation of Astrologers and he was really into academic research. He was doing all these translations of all these ancient texts, and he was one of the first people to do that in terms of the US and stuff like that, because most contemporary astrologers in the 20th century weren’t super interested in older forms of astrology necessarily, and more importantly, they didn’t have the language skills to go back and read some of the ancient texts. But James Holden did.
So he was one of the first astrologers to go back and start looking at ancient astrology and piecing together what they did and how the techniques sometimes were different in ancient astrology, as well as tracing the path of where different techniques that we use today came from. So in that first journal of the AFA in 1982, he published a paper titled “Ancient House Division”, and what he does in this paper is he gives an overview of some of the different systems of house division that existed especially in Greek astrology. But one of the first systems that he defines is whole sign houses. And he says in this paper, “Starting from the rising sign, the houses were numbered off in succession. In the example given above, the first house would have been Leo, the second Virgo, the third Libra, etc.” He says, “This was the first system of house division. I have not encountered any name for it in the literature, so, for convenience, I shall refer to it as the Sign House system. Note that the reckoning was by whole signs. This means that if the first house was Leo, then the entire sign of Leo constituted the first house, the entire sign of Virgo the second house, and so on and so forth. This is the primitive form of Equal House division. It is found in the papyri from the earliest to the latest, and it is still in widespread use in India.”
This is James Holden’s original discovery about whole sign houses which he called the Sign House system, and he was able to see this used in ancient astrology and he says it’s all over in the ancient texts because if you sit down and read the Greek and Latin text, you start realizing that they’re using the signs as houses pretty frequently. So this is important because one, Deborah Houlding in the past has denied that Holden found this. Now she’s acknowledging that maybe he may have talked a little bit about whole sign houses, but she’s downplaying the extent to which Holden actually was one of the first people in English to recognize it, as well as the extent to which he actually treated this as a major discovery. To further demonstrate this and to also show that some of his analysis of things is actually similar to conclusions that other scholars have come to, here’s another paper by James Holden just in case that last passage was ambiguous at all.
This is written in a really brief article called The Sign House System that he published in the AFA periodical or newsletter back in the year 2000. And he says in the second paragraph, “The original system of house division was what I have called the Sign House system. It was devised by the Alexandrian astrologers who invented horoscopic astrology in the second century BC. It was used by the majority of classical astrologers for half a millennium. Its system was very simple, the rising sign all of it constituted the first house. The next whole sign was the second house, the next whole sign after that the third house, etc. The 10th whole sign from the Ascendant was called the Midheaven. There were no cusps in the modern sense of the word. Or, if you will, the cusp of each house was the first degree of the sign constituting that house.”
All right, so that’s basic stuff that’s whole sign houses. Holden is one of the first people in English that’s talking about it in 1982 and he’s seeing it because when you read through the texts of the ancient authors, you start seeing them–- one, defining it. And this is one of the claims that Houlding is making sometimes, is that no ancient astrologer or ancient source ever defines whole sign houses. So, this is a passage that I quote in my book in my house division paper that contradicts what she’s saying. This passage is from the second century author, Sextus Empiricus. And in this introductory section on astrology, it has a little section outlining the houses. And what it says is– let me read it from this recent translation, “Moreover, of all of these, the zodiac signs that are dominant at each birth for the coming forth of results, and from which they especially make their predictions. They say that there are four in number, which for a common name they call centers, and more specifically, the Ascendant, the Midheaven, the setting, and the under the Earth or anti-Midheaven, which is itself too a Midheaven.” He says, “The Ascendant is the one that happens to be rising at the time the birth is completed. The Midheaven is the fourth zodiac sign from that one, including that one itself. The setting is the one diametrically opposite to the Ascendant, and the under Earth or anti-Midheaven is the one diametrically opposite to the Midheaven.”
Then he goes on, he gives an example. He says, “For instance, it will be clear with an example when the crab [which means Cancer] is in the Ascendant, the ram is in the Midheaven, the horned goat [which is Capricorn] is setting, and the scales [which is Libra] is under the Earth.” And he just keeps going on and he reiterates the point a few times on the next page. “Moreover, the zodiac sign that precedes each of these centers, they call Declination, which means cadence.” So he’s saying that the sign which precedes the angular signs is the cadent whole sign house.
He goes on. He says, “These centers they call declination, and the ones following after, rising. Now they say that the one that rises before the zodiac sign in the Ascendant, which is in plain sight, is the zodiac sign of the evil deity. The one after this, which follows the one in the Midheaven, is that of the good deity”, that means good spirit. “The one that precedes the one in the Midheaven is the lower region and single distribution and is called God. The one that comes up– the setting– is an idol zodiac sign and the principle of death.” So that’s the eighth house. He’s calling the eighth zodiac sign the eighth whole sign house, the house of death.
Then he goes on, he says, “The one after that is setting and not in plain sight is penalty and evil fortune, which is also diametrically opposite to the evil deity. The one that is going under the Earth is good fortune, diametrically opposite the good deity. The one that departs from the anti-Midheaven towards the point of rising is goddess,” that’s the third house, “diametrically opposite to the God,” which is ninth house. “And the one that follows the Ascendant is idle, which is again diametrically opposite to the idle one.”
And then he summarizes it all and he says, “Or to say it more concisely, the declination of the zodiac sign in the Ascendant is called Evil Deity, and its after-rising is idle. Likewise, the declination of the Midheaven is God, and it is after rising good deity. In the same way too, the declination of the anti-Midheaven is goddess, and it’s after rising good fortune.”
Anyway, he keeps going on but that’s kind of the end of his treatment essentially, of outlining the basic definition of whole sign houses. So one of the things that basically Houlding has been saying is that nobody ever defines it in any ancient source since she actually says zero in this lecture. So right away, we just have an ancient source that’s not only defined it, but he actually used an example with the Ascendant in Cancer. And then he says Cancer becomes the first house, Libra becomes the fourth house, Capricorn the seventh, and Aries the 10th. Right away, lecture over. End of story. If it only takes one source to demolish an entire argument and we have one source that does it, then that’s kind of like I could wrap it up here. But let’s keep going, actually.
That’s not the only ancient source that defines it, because one of the things I can anticipate… I should actually do that. I should anticipate what their next argument is going to be because they’re always trying to find a way around things like that, where they’ll find evidence in an ancient source of whole sign houses or somebody will and they’ll say, what about this? And they’ll try to find a way to dispute it. So I can anticipate already, because I’ve seen her sort of hinting at this, that source is from Sextus Empiricus from the second century who was a skeptic of astrology who wrote in Greek. He’s setting up and he’s doing an introduction to astrology and outlining the technical principles, and then he launches into a detailed attack on astrology after that to dispute it.
One of the things that Houlding does sometimes is I think she’ll say– or I’ve seen other people say no astrologer ever defines whole sign houses. And it’s a little bit of weasel wording, because then they can say that what they said was true because technically Sextus Empiricus wasn’t an astrologer. He was somebody that was reading the astrological texts in the second century and who wrote an actually accurate introduction and synopsis of astrology before he attacked it. But they’ll try to criticize that as a piece of evidence saying, well, he’s a skeptic so he didn’t know what he was talking about or something like that.
So that can be dealt with if we just only look to see if there’s any other definitions of whole sign houses. Turns out Levente László has found other definitions of whole sign houses, including a source that was writing in the 14th century in Greek, who had access to lots of the earlier Greek astrological tradition and had been reading the texts. And at one point, this source defines whole sign houses. He has an actual chapter discussing some of this.
So this was translated by Levente László as part of the Horoi project, and it’s a chapter that’s titled “On The Division of the 12 Places”, which means basically on house division or on the 12 house division. It says, “Concerning the separation and division of these twelve places, there has been much disagreement and dispute among the astrologers, for some define the entire place as the sign itself the degree of which is found to mark the hour or culminate in the Midheaven. For this reason, other faults also result, especially since the distance between the hour-marking and culminating degrees is not always 90 degrees but either more or less. And if more, a superfluous sign results, and if less, a place. Others delimit the places in a similar way, taking 15 degrees from the hour-marking and culminating degrees on both sides.” So that latter one is outlining a different form of house division, but basically in this text it’s saying that some astrologers define the first house as the entire rising sign.
So we have that definition, there’s also other definitions of whole sign houses. And then once you see that definition and you understand it, you start understanding why there are all these charts that survive from either in ancient texts or just little charts that survived from the ancient world, that list just the sign of the Ascendant, and then the rest of the planets by sign because they were using whole sign houses. Here’s a little piece of papyrus that’s been found from around the second century in Egypt, and it has planetary placements written on it. So it says, “Nativity…” Or here’s an example of a chart like that. It says, “Nativity of Philoe. Year 13 of Antonius Caesar the Lord.” And they list the date and the fourth hour of night. And it says, “Sun in Pisces, Jupiter and Mercury in Aries, Saturn in Cancer, Mars in Leo, Venus and Moon in Aquarius. Scorpio is the Ascendant.” And this chart has been dated to March 11th or 12th 150 CE.
So what they’re doing there is it’s just like in those two texts that we just cited that defined whole sign houses, they tell you what sign the Ascendant is located in. Not necessarily the degree, but once they’ve established the sign then you know what house each of the planets is placed in. There’s other birth charts just like that, there’s actually hundreds of other birth charts that have been discovered that are just like this that list the sign of the Ascendant, and then they list the sign that each of the planets is placed in. Because once you know the rising sign, you know exactly what whole sign house each of the planets is placed in. And so this was a basic method of house division that was simple and widely used in ancient astrology. That doesn’t mean that they didn’t use other forms of house division, which they did sometimes, especially as a secondary overlay on top of whole sign houses in order to give you additional information. But for the most part, the vast majority of charts that we have use this format.
So one of the things I went through and did in my book is I went through and calculated different things like the distribution of how many times the rising sign is listed versus how many times they give us the rising degree, versus how many times they list both the Ascendant and the degree of the Midheaven. This gives you some idea of the distribution that it’s like the vast majority of the charts that have been found on their own just list the rising sign, and therefore the only house system you can calculate when all you have as the rising sign is whole sign houses.
Those are standalone charts, but we also have a bunch of instructional manuals from different authors who wrote textbooks on astrology, and included examples in their booklets for students. This is an example from Vettius Valens where on the left he has the text and he tells you what the chart placements are. And then on the right, this is like a graph or a diagram that I made that exactly illustrates the placements as Valens describes them.
He introduces this section where he’s going to do example charts and he says, “We will make use of illustrations for the diagnosis of the above matters, setting a notable nativity at the beginning.” And I think this might have ended up being the horoscope birth chart of Nero or an emperor or something like that. He says, “Let the Sun be in Scorpio, the Moon in Cancer, Kronos in Aquarius, Zeus in Sagittarius, Ares– which is Mars– in Scorpio, Venus in Libra, Hermes in Scorpio, the Ascendant in Libra.” And then he goes on to proceed–- the chart and talk about the different house placements and what they mean. So this stuff is just all over the place.
There’s even another source that I should actually bring up at this point. So Vettius Valens was the astrologer who lived in the second century and we’re going to talk a lot more about him in a little bit, because Deborah Houlding ends up making him the focal point of the lecture. However, there’s also other sources for ancient astrology that have example charts that use whole sign houses, and one of them is Dorotheus of Sidon who lived in the first century. He has at least eight example charts that all use whole sign houses, or maybe it’s 10 charts that use whole sign houses, and where the diagram has been transmitted with the text as part of the textual transmission.
What’s interesting is that Deborah Houlding knows this. And why does Deborah Houlding know that Dorotheus of Sidon used whole sign houses in his example charts? Because she actually republished a translation from an earlier scholar named David Pingree in 1993 under her publishing company that was called Ascella Publications. She published a translation of Dorotheus of Sidon. Here is the cover page. Here’s the copyright page. I have a print version of this, but I’ve scanned it just for the sake of showing it here. And it shows that it’s a reprint of Pingree’s translation.
So right away, early in the text I believe in the first book is where most of the chart examples take place. And what do we find here? There’s this weird-looking square chart that lists the Ascendant at the top of the chart as being in Leo, then the next sign is Virgo, and the next house is Libra. The house after that is Scorpio. It lists Jupiter is in Aquarius in the seventh, and a bunch of the other planets are in Taurus in the 10th. And then it goes through and delineates them and gives actual interpretations based on the house placement.
He just keeps introducing chart after chart just like this that lists the sign of the Ascendant, and then just the sign placement of the rest of the planets, but it still uses the houses. So this is Dorotheus from the late first century. And what’s weird about that is if Deborah Houlding published that, then she knows there’s evidence for whole sign houses from ancient astrology from the first century, but for some reason she’s claiming that there’s not. And she’s claiming and telling people, at least, that it’s the opposite. So why is that? Ask yourself that question.
[plays video]
DH: So it wasn’t until the 1990s, and this was around 1993. I think Project Hindsight started at about 1992 and started launching seriously in 1993. And they were the group that really defined the term ‘whole sign houses’. Rob Hand took to that term and personally kind of created the term.
[pauses video]
CB: Hand may or may not have coined the term whole sign houses. I think Hand does think that he coined the term whole sign houses. James Holden, obviously, was calling it the sign house system. So Holden did have different terminology for it and Hand may have coined the phrase whole sign houses, which became the popular one. But it’s a big difference between coining the phrase versus actually inventing whole sign houses, which is what she’s going to try to allege that Hand ended up doing.
[plays video]
DH: -rather than a convenience that is done when you’re talking about charts in abstract terms, and you might say, “Well, you know, if you’ve got Aries on the Ascendant, you’re gonna have Leo on the fifth house. You’d be talking in abstract terms.”
[pauses video]
CB: So one of the things she’s doing here is she’s trying to hedge a little bit by saying maybe somebody at some point used a chart like whole sign houses abstractly as an abstract example, but they wouldn’t have actually used it to delineate charts or interpret it in somebody’s life. But the problem with that is that in the text we just saw in Dorotheus, he is actually using it as a real example and he’s connecting the whole sign house placements with actual events that occurred in somebody’s life. So clearly, they weren’t just using it abstractly or hypothetically, but they actually thought that there was something useful interpretively to the whole sign house placement.
So that’s really crucial, and the important point is that everybody needs to go back and even just browse through some of these ancient astrological texts when they use chart examples like Vettius Valens, for example. And you’ll see him using whole sign houses over and over again, but then connecting the placements to very specific things, the house placements to very specific things in a person’s life.
For example, here is Valens talking about- He’s giving another chart example and he’s using it within the context of annual perfections. And, again, he just gives you the rising sign and then the sign placement of the rest of the planets. So it’s only possible to calculate whole sign houses, it’s not possible to calculate quadrant or equal houses if you don’t have the degree of the Ascendant, which Valens doesn’t give in 95% of his example charts. But here, he’s talking about the placements of the Moon and Mercury in the eighth house of death, which is in the whole sign placement, and then he’s talking about actual events that happened in the person’s life. So he’s talking about inheritance here for that.
Elsewhere, he’s talking about in his 45th year, this native had a distinguished Office of Public Affairs, because Venus was at the Midheaven and it transmitted to Mars, which indicates trouble. So Venus here is in the 10th whole sign house because it’s in the 10th sign relative to the rising sign, and that’s part of the placements. So he’s connecting specific events to specific whole sign house placements.
And it’s not just like one or two examples, Valens literally has over 100 examples, and 95% of them are using the houses and they’re only giving the rising sign, and they’re clearly using whole sign houses. So just keep this little scroll that I’m doing– for those watching the video version– where I’m just going through countless charts of Valens, over a hundred of them using whole sign houses if you calculate the chart as Valens has it in the text. Which is actually a really important point that we’re unfortunately going to have to come back to, because one of the things that Houlding may try to do here later is she doesn’t want those charts to be in whole sign houses, so she’s going to try to find a way around that to somehow superimpose other systems of house division upon the charts in Valens that seem to use whole sign houses. All right.
[plays video]
DH: Now what happened around the time that Project Hindsight started off? This was around 1993. This was the same year that the World Wide Web became available to the public. So the launch of Project Hindsight-
[pauses video]
CB: Oh, yeah. Sorry to interrupt again. But there’s one other thing with James Holden and I needed to tell about the other history, because this is actually new research that I wanted to unveil tonight and maybe I should do it now before I get too tired and pass out from this marathon.
I always thought, and in my book in the House Division chapter, I attributed to James Holden the discovery of whole sign houses because as far as I knew, when I published my book in 2017, James Holden seemed to be the first source. He was certainly the first source I was familiar with in English that was talking about whole sign houses.
It turns out, though, that there’s actually other earlier work both in terms of academic scholars who have done work on the history of astrology, as well as astrologers in different languages that recognized the use of whole sign houses in the ancient astrological traditions that actually predated not just Project Hindsight, but also James Holden.
One of them is this German book that was written in 1959 by Wilhelm Knappich and a scholar named Walter Koch. If the word Koch sounds familiar to you, it’s because Walter Koch is actually the inventor of the Koch system of house division, which actually became somewhat popular in the second half of the 20th century, and it was up there for a while in terms of some one of the top quadrant house systems that was used.
So Koch and Knappich were astrologers, they were practicing astrologers, but they also had some classics training in Greek and Latin. So they were actually able to go back and read some of the ancient Greek and Latin texts, which over the preceding 50 years, a number of academic scholars had been going around Europe and they would have been collecting together all of their surviving Greek and sometimes Latin astrological texts, and then editing them and comparing the different manuscripts to see what the variations were. Or sometimes they would have the first half of one text, but then they would find another manuscript that had the missing first half and so they would try to reconstruct what the original text was.
So through this process for the first 50 years, essentially, of the 20th century, a bunch of academics recovered a bunch of the ancient Greek astrological texts that had fallen out of circulation for over a thousand years at that point and that astrologers just didn’t have access to. The problem, though, is these academic scholars that had these trainings in ancient languages, they didn’t translate these texts into modern languages once they put them together again. But instead, they just printed books that contained the text, but in their original languages like Greek and Latin, basically, which is the process of doing what’s called a critical edition.
As a result of that, a bunch of these texts were locked away. Even though they were sitting in university libraries around the world, astrologers weren’t using them because most astrologers don’t know Greek, basically. However, Walter Koch and Wilhelm Knappich, a couple of astrologers from Germany published a book in 1959 on the history of house division, and they did know Greek and Latin so they went back and they actually looked at some of these texts, and one of the things that they found was that the ancient astrologers were using the signs as houses.
So in 1959, they actually were talking about whole sign houses in German decades before James Holden or Project Hindsight. And one of the things I should point out about that is, I looked through James Holden’s bibliography as well as the bibliographies of Project Hindsight, and none of them have this work in their bibliography or seem to be aware of it. In fact, I think this is a pretty obscure book that fell out of circulation and was never terribly popular, because there’s not that many copies of it on the second hand market, or there weren’t until recently. And it took me a lot actually to get a copy of that book. It was actually recently reprinted by a modern company in the past few years, so it’s now probably going to become more popular and more accessible so that anybody that reads German can read this.
But check out what they say when they’re discussing the early history of house division. So they say, “The Egyptian lay astrologers, who were, as Bouché-Leclercq accurately said, in ‘absolute rebellion’ against the intricacies of the theory of the ascensional times, sought to determine the rising ecliptic degree or Horoskopos,” which is the ancient word for the Ascendant, “with their on mere progression touching ‘table of Petosiris’ and used no other cardinal points. They placed, as shown in the horoscope from Abydos, the planets and the Horoskopos in the twelvefold schema of the zodiac and viewed the sign in which the Horoskopos resides as the 1st house, the next sign as the 2nd, and so on. They equated signs and houses. The oldest, actually house-less manner was used later also by learned astrologers, like for example Palchos around 490, who, alongside the Horoskopos, also inserted the true Midheaven into the diagram.”
So they’re pointing out that even when astrologers were using whole sign houses, they would sometimes put the MC into the diagram while still using it in the context of whole sign houses. Anyway, to continue the last sentence. “This ‘sign equals house’ method was also adopted by the Indian astrologers and is still in use today by orthodox Hindu astrologers. Thus it is also explainable that in many Greek horoscopes, also in the horoscope of Manetho, no other houses are specified beyond the Ascendant and Midheaven, even though they are interpreted according to the Dodekatropos, which is the system of 12 significations of destiny.” And shout out to my friend Jenn Zahrt for translating that from German for me.
So, why is this important? This is important because it turns out that there have been a number of different scholars in the 20th century that have independently rediscovered through reading the Greek and Latin texts, that whole sign houses existed in ancient times and have come to the same conclusions. And these are all different scholars with language skills that are actually reading the texts on their own. That’s part of what’s important, just interesting and historically for me. Actually, one thing I will say about this whole house division thing even though this is so annoying to have to keep talking about over and over again, one of the things that it has done is it’s forced me to look back at some of the 20th-century sources, and dig deeper in order to see if other people were talking about whole sign houses before James Holden or before Project Hindsight. And it turned out there was.
So that’s the point that’s important here, because Deborah Houlding’s central thesis that she’s going to develop and she’s already kind of stated at this point in the lecture is that Project Hindsight invented whole sign houses, it’s not a real house system, and it’s not in any ancient sources and they were the ones that came up with it, basically. She wants to blame Project Hindsight, and specifically Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt for inventing out of thin air, she says, whole sign houses.
That’s obviously not true at this point. It’s just not even arguable and we’ve just established that not only is it not true because James Holden was already talking about whole sign houses 10 years before Project Hindsight very clearly, but now we have these two other German astrologers from 1959 talking about whole sign houses decades before Project Hindsight.
What’s funny about that is Knappich went on to publish a book on the history of astrology, which he mentions in passing that the Greeks were using whole sign houses at one point. That book was translated into French at one point, and it contains the whole sign house reference. So it wasn’t just in German, it was also in French. What’s additionally funny– and I didn’t know this, I discovered the German thing a couple of years ago. The last time Houlding was making this allegation, I found that German text in order to disprove her and I’ve actually been waiting until now to unveil that, because I was basically just waiting to see if she was going to actually do this and actually make such an absurd over the top claim in print that would be easily disputed by just showing that there are other scholars that used or talked about whole sign houses existing in ancient astrology prior to Project Hindsight and James Holden.
I discovered other sources recently over the past week because since this whole debate has come up again, lots of people are talking about it. And then there’s been different people that speak different languages that have been able to point out that there’s actually more references to whole sign houses or more recognition of it in different languages over the past century than even I realized. So here’s another one that was just found a few days ago.
A friend and former student of mine Régis Hervagault from Paris, I believe, or from France, pointed out this book to me from 1961 by an astrologer named François Labat called The New Astrology. The New Astrology: attempt to reconstruct the true Astrology of the ancients where basically—this astrologer seems to have also had some training in Greek and Latin, and he seems to have gone back and studied some of the ancient astrological texts. And so he wrote an introduction to astrology and outlined a system for astrology where he’s trying to reconstruct the astrology of the Ancients. Which is actually really interesting because then that means that what he was doing was actually a precursor to Project Hindsight decades before Project Hindsight actually did it.
But when he first introduces the houses, surprisingly he actually defines them as whole sign houses and that’s the system of house division that he actually uses throughout the book. So he says, “The zodiac also divides into 12 equal parts or houses of 30 degrees each. The houses are not named, but have a simple numeric order from I to XII. In the present astrological system, the houses correspond to the zodiacal signs, and the first house is placed in the zodiacal sign which contains the birth sign. We call these “cardinal houses” or “angles” or “cardinal points of the horoscope”, the houses I, IV, VII, and X.” So shout out to Régis and Nick Dagan Best for translating that passage for me so I could be sure that French was correct.
One of the things I was anticipating in putting that one out there is that somebody could be like, “Well, he’s just using equal houses. That’s not whole sign houses.” And you might be right, if he didn’t, then later in the book actually start using example charts with whole sign houses, where he specifically just lists the rising sign and says that entire sign is the first house. And then in many instances, he’s just placing the planets in the different signs without degrees, and using whole sign houses in that context throughout this book.
That’s interesting because now all of a sudden, we have a French astrologer from 1961 who’s using whole sign houses. What’s further interesting about that that Régis pointed out to me is that that book was published in France in 1961, and it was actually translated into Spanish and published once or twice. It may have been reprinted, because read just pointed out that there’s different covers for it, but the same book by François Labat was translated into Spanish and reprinted at least once in the 1960s. There’s actually a lot of copies of it on the second hand market that are available if anyone wants to order it, which actually implies that it was a somewhat well-read book, if there’s still copies of it that are lying around today that have survived basically and that are still for sale. So, that’s a really important point and I’m kind of unveiling some of that evidence here and there may actually be other evidence.
There was one other piece that somebody sent me that I didn’t get a chance to integrate tonight, but there may be more instances of this than I’m not even aware of. And for the purpose of research and continuing to study and explore this, I would love if people find any other instances of whole sign houses being discussed over the course of the past century in 20th century astrology, let me know. Especially if it was before the advent of Project Hindsight in the 1990s. Let me know if you find any other sources that were talking about it or using it in practice or talking about in a historical context because I’m interested in seeing them and I’m interested in…
You know, sometimes when we are presented with new evidence, we have to revise our thinking. And in my book, I can tell you right now at the beginning of my House Division chapter, I thought James Holden was the first major astrologer or historian in the 20th century that talked about whole sign houses, but it turned out that I was mistaken. So in a future edition of my book, I’m going to be clear that while Holden may have rediscovered it independently, there were other people that were going back and reading the texts and coming to the same conclusions over the past century. So I’m just going to revise my statements about that in the future and revise my thinking because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re presented with evidence that contradicts your hypothesis, as opposed to just doubling down and staking your entire career and reputation on something that’s been proven false. I think that would be inadvisable.
All right, that was fun. We’re almost at two hours so I’m gonna take another little five-minute break, get some more water, and I’ll be back to continue the lecture and the live stream here in just a little bit. So stay tuned.
[Intermission]
All right. How’s everyone doing tonight? This has been an exhausting week, getting prepared for this, getting different things together, wanting to do this as quick as possible under a decent electional chart. Yeah, and many things. Maybe I should begin again, though. All right, let’s focus. One thing I need to say to wrap up the last section is even though I said, for example, that I sort of had this reference– and I’m putting out some of these references tonight– these are not things that Houlding is unaware of necessarily. She just doesn’t care because she doesn’t like whole sign houses and she’s actively trying to suppress it and pretend that it didn’t exist in history, in order to influence the contemporary astrological tradition.
In fact, that German work that I found, the only reason I found it or knew about it was through a thread on Skyscript, which is her website, where a German astrologer talked about how whole sign houses was already known in Germany before all of this stuff, and he cited this book from 1959. So a lot of these discussions existed. There’s lots of other scholars that have talked about this stuff at this point. And even though there’s been for sure much more awareness of whole sign houses over the course of the past three decades, I don’t want to pretend it hasn’t gotten popular over the course of the past three decades, partially even through the efforts of obviously people like Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt, even through the efforts of myself, but there’s been a lot of different astrologers that have been using whole sign houses over the course of the past three decades, and it turns out that we weren’t the first ones. It didn’t just appear out of nowhere in 1993 through the translation of the Greek texts. And there’s different scholars that have been going back and seeing that this is just what was used in the texts.
For example, I did an episode with an Arabic scholar named Ali A Olomi on Buran of Baghdad I think a couple of years ago, it’s a really good episode. But at one point in the course of the episode, there’s this little aside where house division came up, and he was vaguely aware that sometimes some people were saying that whole sign houses didn’t exist. And he’s like, “Oh no, it’s all over the Arabic texts.” So here’s just a little snippet or a little clip from that interview that was on my YouTube channel.
[Plays snippet]
ALI A OLOMI: It’s a weird kind of twist of history that it’s just a translation issue. In the medieval Islamicate tradition, if you’re reading the sources, from Masha’allah to Al-Khayyat, even Al-Buruni, all of them are using whole sign houses, and it remains so up until the 18th century. We have Safavid charts, we have Timurid charts, Mongol charts, and they’re all whole sign houses; all of them, with, again, minor exceptions.
CB: Yeah. And that, from my analysis of the Greek tradition, is pretty much consistent with the Greek tradition as well, where they’re also primarily using the signs as houses. But then they will use quadrant divisions or sometimes equal houses as a secondary overlay, especially for specific techniques, like the ‘length-of-life’ treatment, where they’re doing ‘primary directions’ or ‘circumambulations through the bounds’.
AO: Yeah. When it comes down to why they did it, it’s likely because they were trying to remain faithful to the Hellenistic tradition. The Islamicate astrologers were very keen on preserving what came before them, advancing it, developing it further, but they were very keen on whatever the ancients did. And they very clearly say it, “The ancients were wise when they did this; that was a good technique,” and that’s the technique that they wanted to continue. And so, it’s likely as a result of people like Dorotheus and others, that they are very keenly aware of what techniques are being used. They’re aware of Valens’ techniques as well, and they’re very clearly using quadrant when needed, but again, it’s only for specific predictive techniques. It’s only with particular moments of prediction. The actual natal chart itself is cast in sign-based division just like the Hellenistic astrologers did.
[Snippet ends]
CB: Okay, so that’s Ali’s opinion as somebody that knows Arabic and as an Arabic scholar working on medieval Islamicate astrology. And one of the things that was interesting about that is he says that they’re still using it all the way through the 18th century, and I thought that was interesting because in the Western tradition, we do see whole sign houses fall out of usage and knowledge of it was lost eventually. Although that’s the thing, is that we’re still sometimes finding examples of it being used much later than we thought. I actually just found one that I wasn’t aware of the other day.
Actually, before I get to that, one of the medieval Islamicate astrologers he’s talking about using whole sign houses was Mā Shā’ Allāh who wrote one of the earliest full textbooks on astrology that survives, which is titled On Reception. You can actually date Mā Shā’ Allāh’s charts, his Horary charts, and they all date to around the 790s. So he seems to have written his book around that decade. But with the charts, when you cast the charts giving the placements that he talks about, even when he talks about the degrees of the planets or the Ascendant or what have you, he’s placing those charts within the context of whole sign houses and then interpreting them like that. This is from Ben Dykes translation of Mā Shā’ Allāh’s text, On Reception just showing some of the placements of these charts and whole sign houses. And that was the conclusion also of Ben Dykes when he did some of these translations, a very similar conclusion that Ali came to.
In the Western tradition, though, we have this assumption that whole sign houses completely dropped out of the tradition in subsequent centuries, especially once astrology was transmitted from Arabic back to Europe through Latin translations during the 12th century translation movement. But what’s weird about that is there may be evidence that knowledge of whole sign houses didn’t completely disappear. One of the things that turned me on to this was there was a blog post by the astrologer Anthony Louis who showed and said that there’s an example in the work of the 17th-century astrologer, Morinus, that uses whole sign houses. And I ended up pulling it out, there’s a translation. It’s in Book 18, I believe chapter 15.
If you read it, basically the synopsis– anybody can read these few pages– and the translators, Anthony Louis actually was the translator but there’s also a commentary by James Holden. They saw that what Morinus talks about is he gives an example chart of somebody like a king who died while traveling or died in a foreign country. And he says the reason why this happened is because Saturn was in I think the eighth house by quadrant, but it was in the ninth house by whole sign houses.
So evidently what Morinus was doing is he was using both the whole sign and the quadrant house placements in some instances, and then blending the interpretation to come up with a more complex delineation. And it gives a couple other examples there. So this is an interesting and tantalizing possible example. I’m not a scholar of Morinus, but this is something I’m hoping more people will look into. Because maybe one of the issues is that we haven’t been paying close enough attention and maybe there was more knowledge of whole sign houses in the Western tradition that went all the way up into the Renaissance, potentially, even if it ceased to be the default method of house division, or even if it wasn’t as widely used. It’s something that’s worth researching and looking into more, because evidently even with just this passage, it’s something that has been overlooked.
All right, let’s get back to the lecture.
[plays video]
DH: -you know, corresponded with the change in social media anyway. And around that time, as part of their project, they set up user groups that you could subscribe to with them. They also sold courses, subscriptions, there was a lot of attention, focus, commerce… A lot of those around this translation project. And every astrologer at that time who was anybody with an interest in traditional astrology, myself, and everybody that worked with me on the Traditional Astrology magazine were hugely enthusiastic. We subscribed to them–-wanted to really support this new project that was going to translate and make available the textbooks of the ancient astrologists. And I’ll just say at that time, I had some pretty good knowledge of the scope of ancient astrology myself. I think James Holden had an interest in translating certain words from Valens. And although the work of Valens wasn’t translated in full, most of it was before Project Hindsight. I mean, this is… You’ll have to see from the-
[pauses video]
CB: That’s not true. She claims the majority of–-most of Valens was translated before Project Hindsight but that’s simply not true. And what she does at this point is she holds up a copy of Greek horoscopes by Neugebauer Baron van Hoesen from 1959. And in that work, they dated all of Valens’ example charts by using planetary positions to find out what the date was. And they do have just his examples and some snippets of his examples in the text. But it doesn’t contain any of Valens’ actual explanation of the techniques or where he tells you and introduces what he’s talking about.
The vast majority of Valens is not in that text and many of those Greek horoscopes actually don’t even make sense if you try to just look at the chart itself, because you haven’t learned some of the techniques like the Time Lord techniques that had been lost up until that point. So one of the things she’s doing here is she’s exaggerating one, her knowledge of… She’s trying to set herself up as an authority on Greek astrology prior to Project Hindsight, but that’s simply not true largely because she doesn’t have the ability to read ancient Greek. Which isn’t really a knock on her because it’s like nobody normally does have knowledge of ancient Greek at this point, I would estimate that the number of astrologers that know how to read ancient Greek is like 0.1% at this point in time. Which is fine, there’s nothing wrong with that. But she’s setting it up as if she was a Greek scholar or a scholar of ancient astrology prior to this.
And that’s the other piece I want to mention. Part of the cultural context that you need to understand because she’s going to overemphasize it here is–-starting in the mid to late 1980s, there was a revival of interest in older forms of astrology starting in the UK. There was a little bit in America with Robert Zoller who published his book in 1980 on the Arabic parts that was based on Guido Bonatti, and he started doing some stuff. But really, in the UK there was a lot of excitement, especially around 1985 when the work of the 17th-century astrologer William Lilly was republished, and all of a sudden a lot of people who had never had access to that text had access to it suddenly and started reading it.
So I don’t know the precise year but as part of that, there was a woman named Olivia Barclay who helped to encourage that text to get republished and then started teaching classes on Horary astrology using Lilly’s methods from the 17th century. And she started teaching that, I think, especially and having students graduating from her course in the later half of the 1980s. Deborah Houlding was one of the people I believe that graduated from Olivia Barclays’ course according to her biography in 1989. So that means Deborah Houlding’s transition, just like everybody transitioned in this time period from modern into traditional astrology– that you go from a modern astrologer, because that’s what everybody learned at first and that’s what Deborah Houlding learned at first because she studied at the Faculty of Astrological Studies and studied Modern astrology starting in 1982. But it’s not until 1989 that she gets her qualifying Horary diploma. So she may not have fully made the transition into being a traditional astrologer and studying astrology in that context until as late as 1989, maybe a little bit earlier. That’s only three or four years before Project Hindsight. So keep that in mind because she’s going to continually contrast how extensive she says that her knowledge of traditional astrology was against other people at Project Hindsight’s knowledge just three or four years later.
[plays video]
DH: This is my copy of Greek Horoscopes which has been, you know, every chart within this has been hand-drawn, drawn out, and analyzed. And I’d done that for about three or four years before Project Hindsight started.
[pauses video]
CB: Okay, so that actually does confirm. That actually confirms it. So she was studying traditional astrology for three or four years. That’s really important. It’s not a huge span of time. Yes, it does mean she was ahead of the curve compared to the vast majority of other people who were just doing modern astrology and then started getting into traditional when Project Hindsight became popular in 1992 and 1983. But let’s not overemphasize the point here in terms of being way ahead of the curve if we’re only talking about three or four years. Three or four years ago from now from 2023 is like 2019. So yeah, we’ve all learned some things and been through some things over the past few years especially at the pandemic, but in terms of the amount of information you can learn and take in during that time, let’s not pretend we’ve been studying something for decades if we haven’t.
[plays video]
DH: So even though they were the first to fully translate some of these words, there were those of us who could see from the start that this wasn’t mirroring with what we were seeing in other translations of the same work. Anyway-
[pauses video]
CB: That’s a really important point. And this is the crux of where the issue starts and goes back to, is that the traditional revival originally started with Lilly and focused on Lilly’s text in the late 1980s when astrologers, especially in the UK, started going back and reading Lilly’s text again once it came back into circulation as a result of the Regulus edition that was republished in 1985. And then there was a lot of excitement surrounding that where people started getting excited about, “Hey, there’s all these ancient texts on astrology, why don’t we go back and try to reprint them and recover them? Maybe there’s actually valuable information to be had from some of these texts from centuries ago.”
Because I think up until that point, there was instead an opposite perception amongst modern astrologers typically, which is that modern astrology is the result of an evolution of the subject. And that astrology has improved and we have outer planets, and that astrology is in the form that it is in today because it’s grown and changed and developed entirely in positive ways. But what happened with the traditional movement starting in the late 80s and early 90s is there started to be this perception of, you know, ‘we don’t know what we don’t know and there’s a lot of texts out there that none of us have ever read.’ And then once we started reading the texts or once astrologers started reading the texts, they started realizing that there was techniques that were lost in the transmission of astrology over the past 2000 years that could actually be recovered by going back and studying some of these ancient texts.
That’s part of what starts happening at this point in time, but it starts with recovering William Lilly in his approach to astrology from the 17th century. His book was the earliest major English textbook on astrology that was published in 1647. And one of the reasons that Lilly was recovered first and why it was important is not only because it’s the earliest textbook written in English up to that point– because up to that point astrological texts before that time were written in Latin in Europe, which is the educated language for philosophy and mathematics and things like that– but when you go back and read Lilly, even though some of the language is archaic because it’s from the 17th century, it’s still in English. So you can still read it and get by and understand what he’s saying more or less. So it doesn’t require any specialized language skills in order to go back and study Lilly texts and study his example charts and then start practicing or emulating his form of astrology from the 17th century, which is interesting and useful because it’s a more predictive form of astrology than modern psychological astrology was. And it especially focuses on Horary astrology and answering specific questions.
I mentioned that because Deborah Houlding was one of the people starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s that really dedicated herself to Lilly’s methods and really liked William Lilly and felt a resonance with that text, so that she started to pattern a large part of her astrology in her conceptualization of what she thought the best form of astrology was like after Lilly’s text and Lilly’s approach. And even to this day, a large part of her approach is largely predicated on her understanding of what she thought Lilly’s methods were.
So she was part of a group that was excited about Lilly’s methods. She started a magazine called the Traditional Astrologer, I believe, Traditional Astrologer magazine, where it became like a hub for stuff. Actually, maybe I should… I’ll mention that later, I’ll come back to that. She was emulating Lilly’s methods from the 17th century, but then what happened is that a few years later like four years later, Project Hindsight comes along and it starts producing translations of Greek and Latin texts that were older than Lilly that went back to either the Greek astrological tradition from, let’s say the first century through the sixth century, or they were also translating some medieval astrological texts from the eighth and ninth centuries such as that text on Mā Shā’ Allāh that I showed you earlier.
And one of the problems with that, with the fact that traditional astrology was dug up backwards in stages starting with Lilly then going backwards to the medieval and Hellenistic tradition, is there was this early generation of traditional astrologers that started with Lilly, had already built up a lot of excitement about going back and studying traditional methods and recovering what they thought was the tradition itself or the traditional astrology as a singular thing, and had gotten so much enthusiasm into that. And they created a method that they thought was way better than modern astrology and encouraged a lot of people to join them, and built up a lot of excitement surrounding it, and created magazines and publication companies and lectures and classes and everything else.
But then all of a sudden, this other group came along and started translating texts from an older tradition of astrology. And sometimes those older traditions of astrology did things differently than Lilly did them in the 17th century, which is like 1700 years, almost 2000 years after Ptolemy or Valens or Dorotheus. As a result of that, it automatically started creating tensions because all of a sudden, people like Deborah Houlding who thought that they were practicing the older form of astrology from the 17th century realized that their astrology actually wasn’t as old in its approach, and that there were these even older methods that in some instances they felt like contradicted or clashed with the methods that they’d recovered from the 17th century.
So, this is a large part of where this debate and this whole whole sign house denialism thing comes from, is this sort of cognitive dissonance or this issue of establishing who’s practicing the real traditional astrology, and these attempts to project and take the way that astrology was done in the 17th century and project them backwards into the first century and make the earlier tradition conform to the later tradition rather than just recognizing that astrology grows and changes in different eras and different cultures and different languages, and it’s not always going to be like the same in different eras.
And that we don’t have to always justify our personal preferences and our personal practices just based on whatever the ancients did or what the most ancient source did. It’s okay to go back and look at those sources and take things that are useful to you. But if you base your entire conceptualization or your entire ego on the idea that you’re practicing the original form of astrology, you may run into some issues at some point if somebody finds an older form of astrology that does things differently. I think that’s part of what happened here with Deb, which I kind of sympathize for if you think about it from her perspective, but then again, it doesn’t give her the right though to… It doesn’t justify the extremism and the attempts to then suppress these other forms of astrology or to pretend they didn’t exist or to badmouth them or what have you. And that’s where things go awry and where my sympathy here starts drying up pretty quickly.
[plays video]
DH: Just to talk a little bit more about Project Hindsight. It started off– for those who don’t realize– it started off as a project with three Roberts, and they came together with a dream team, really; Robert Hand, Robert Schmidt, and Robert Zoller. But it’s important to realize that at this time when this project started, there was only one of these Roberts that had any real understanding, training, and serious study of traditional astrology. Robert Hand is now known as being a great expert in his interest in traditional astrology and his study of medieval texts, but at the time that Project Hindsight started, Robert Hand was a big, famous, well-known popular astrologer. His books were quite psychological with interest in modern astrology, he was well-known for being an astrology software programmer, he was involved in producing ephemerides. His books were immensely popular. And his philosophical stance on things has always been hugely appreciated and respected.
[pauses video]
CB: So, “Hugely appreciated and respected,” but what she’s doing here is she’s trying to set up this thing where she undermines and is going to proceed to attack Robert Hand’s credibility by saying that up until this point, he was only a modern astrologer and he didn’t know anything about traditional astrology. Which is really overstating the point because even though it’s true that Hand did primarily practice modern astrology up to the 1980s, Robert Hand had always had an interest in the history of astrology. And you can see in his different works that he was going back and looking at different traditions of astrology at different points in time.
For example, in his book Essays on Astrology that she shows up on the screen at one point, he has an essay about Nostradamus that I remember reading in the early 2000s, where he was going back and doing some analysis of some of Nostradamus’s predictions and some of the relevance or astrological angle on that and different things like that. Robert Hand had also gone back and he had read some of the texts like Ptolemy, and he had an active interest in other traditions of astrology and talking to different astrologers, especially in terms of his place as one of the leading astrologers or most popular astrologers in the world at that point, as well as his orientation as a research astrologer.
He wasn’t unlearned in other methods, and it wasn’t like he just came in off the street. He had been studying astrology for decades at that point and also way longer than Deb Houlding had been studying astrology up to that point, even though she’s about to try to criticize his reputation and his ability to look at traditional astrology from an objective standpoint. So I just want to say that at this point, it’s one of the ways one, of the distortions, is like there’s these little truths throughout the lecture that sometimes get exaggerated for rhetorical purposes because she wants to tear down and basically say that Robert Hand didn’t have any credibility or any ability to be working in traditional astrology and that only she has the authority to analyze those texts at that point in time, or something like that doesn’t really make any sense.
[plays video]
DH: So he was a big name. And I remember as the editor of The Traditional Astrologer, it was a year or two after he started Project Hindsight that he came out as a traditional astrologer. And it was such a big thing for those of us that had been involved in traditional astrology for quite a while that I actually wrote about it in the Traditional Astrology magazine and quoted him with evidence. We’re not all maniacs. We’re not all, you know, like fuddy-duddies. Even Robert Hand is one of us now. But that was after Project Hindsight started. He didn’t come into the project with expertise in traditional astrology.
[pauses video]
CB: The other thing was Rob Hand, in addition to doing astrology since 1960, he was also partially aware of some of the stuff that was going on in the UK with the traditional astrology movement that was happening there starting in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He was also friends with Robert Zoller from the early 1980s forward. And Robert Zoller, who she’s going to talk about next and actually heap a good deal of praise on about his vast knowledge of medieval astrology, Hand and Zoller were friends, so it’s like Hand wasn’t unaware of or not completely unfamiliar with traditional astrology. Well, it’s true that he did, like many astrologers during the late 20th century or more recently, go through a transition from primarily practicing modern astrology to using more traditional techniques or eventually using some synthesis of the two. There’s an over emphasis of trying to tear down Hand’s knowledge for rhetorical purposes here in order to say eventually that his discoveries and observations about whole sign houses in the ancient texts weren’t valid. That’s where all of this is going, basically.
[Plays video]
DH: Robert Schmidt was a brilliant mind trained in the study of ancient Greek and ancient Greek philosophy. He had not had any training in traditional astrology, historical astrology, or even astrological practice. He didn’t come into this translation project as a practicing astrologer. The only person that came in-
[pauses video]
CB: So there is some truth to that, in that Robert Schmidt didn’t come into Project Hindsight as a practicing astrologer. But instead, he was somebody that had a gift for ancient languages and he read very fluently ancient Greek and Latin. He could also read German, French, and I think one or two other languages. So he had this gift for languages. He also had a focus on ancient history and ancient philosophy, especially Platonism.
So he spent a lot of time… He went to St. John’s which has the Great Books programme, where their entire college curriculum is based on going through and reading all of the major texts of the Western intellectual tradition, essentially. So he was steeped in ancient philosophy and also in ancient mathematics, because he had a major focus on mathematics. And before Project Hindsight, in the decade before Project Hindsight, him and his wife had started an earlier version of Project Hindsight where they were focused on translating ancient mathematical texts into modern languages.
What happened is that in the late 1980s, his wife… In the 1980s, his wife got into astrology. She exposed him to it and eventually they became friends with John Townley, who was the inventor of the composite chart technique. So they’re friends with John Townley, and Townley takes Bob and Ellen, Robert Schmidt, to a conference at one point that Michael Erlewine of Matrix software is hosting around 1989. Erlewine is so impressed when he meets Schmidt, like the depth of his thinking and the broadness of his his studying in terms of ancient history and philosophy and mathematics, that he invites Schmidt to join him on this panel of astrologers that are talking about important things in astrology.
I can’t remember all of the names right now but this panel just had this amazing lineup of some of the biggest names in astrology. I think it included Michel Gauquelin and Alois Treindl from astro.com. I think Robert Hand was there. What ended up happening is that Michael Erlewine ended up hiring Schmidt because of his language skills and told him to come work for him at part of Matrix software, which was one of the biggest astrology software companies at the time and one of the earliest. Erlewine wanted to build an astrology encyclopedia, like an early version of Wikipedia basically before the internet that people could buy that would be on a disk or something. And he wanted Schmidt, and he hired Schmidt to use his language skills to begin going back and reading some of the ancient texts so that they could define early astrological terms and so that they could speak authoritatively about the history of astrology and different techniques and things like that, different astrologers.
So Schmidt started researching that, and I think this was Schmidt’s entry point into astrology aside from his wife’s interest in it, their friendship with the famous astrologer John Townley, and other things like that. So Schmidt, it’s true in terms of his biography. He didn’t come in to Project Hindsight as a practicing astrologer, but that was actually one of the things that made him unique and in some ways that made him useful, because then he didn’t come in with preconceptions about what astrology should be like or what techniques they should expect to find there.
He did do a literature review in the three or four years prior to Project Hindsight, where he’s doing this work for Townley and he starts studying the astrological tradition. So he’s fully aware of it and he’s sort of become an academic almost expert on the history of astrology, without necessarily being somebody that was consulting with individual people, individual clients on a day-to-day basis or something like that.
I just want to say that because on the one hand, it’s true and it’s an important part of Robert Schmidt’s biography that he wasn’t an astrologer when he started Project Hindsight. And there’s some interesting questions about like, at what point did Robert Schmidt become an astrologer during his lifetime? But at the same time, I don’t want that little kernel of truth to be used and distorted to then say that he had no business researching ancient astrology, or no ability to read the texts and translate the texts and accurately assess some of the things that they were finding there when they started translating these texts, especially compared to somebody that was coming at it from more of an agenda of wanting her personal practice to be validated when some of these texts were being translated from these ancient languages.
[plays video]
DH: to the project with theories, interest, knowledge of traditional astrology, and the whole scope of the subject was Robert Zoller who had a tremendous reputation as a translator of works from Al-Kindī, Bonatti, the Arabic Parts… He was a well-known traditional astrology expert. So-
[pauses video]
CB: She’s going to proceed to really, really build Robert Zoller up here, and there’s a specific reason why she does that which we’ll see in a second. But one of the things I want to say is a number of some of the translations that she just mentioned were translations that Zoller did as part of Project Hindsight, subsequently once Project Hindsight got started. And while he had translated some portions of Bonatti that he included in his 1980 book on the Arabic Parts, a lot of his major translation output really happened as part of Project Hindsight from 1993 through 1995. He’s being built up here, though, for a specific reason. Let’s find out why.
[plays video]
DH: -the three, there was a dream team; big popular astrologer with a very credible reputation, a Greek translator very knowledgeable on Greek philosophy, and Robert Zoller. Within only a matter of months, Robert Zoller pulled out of the project. He was not in line with the direction that the-
[pauses video]
CB: “Within only a matter of months, Zoller pulled out of Project Hindsight.” That’s a lie. I guess it depends on what you mean by a matter of months, but I think what I get from what’s being conveyed by the intention of that statement and the way that it sounds to me is she’s saying that Zoller, who she builds up as being the only one that has any credibility– is the rhetorical argument she’s trying to make. She says he leaves after just a matter of months or just a few months or whatever.
In reality, Project Hindsight started around May or actually it was April of 1992 when there was the United Astrology Conference and the three Roberts; Robert Hand, Robert Schmidt, and Robert Zoller got together and had a series of conversations about going back and recovering ancient texts. And then eventually by the following year by 1993, it turned into a more fully formulated plan to start translating ancient texts, and to sort of crowdsource or crowdfund it by creating a unique subscription model where people could sign up to get a new translation every month. Or every time they had a new translation to be sent, it would be mailed to you. It was actually a really cool way to fund and to basically recover our history and to have the entire community behind it and involved in doing it. But Robert Zoller, then, was there at the beginning of those discussions in early 1992 and he didn’t leave the project until 1995. So that’s a three-year period, you know?
Even if the translation started coming out themselves in 1993, Robert Zoller produced six translations of different Latin texts, different astrological texts at Project Hindsight, and he didn’t produce that in a matter of a few months. Those all have publication dates between 1993 and 1994. So at the very minimum, Zoller was there for like two years, and at a maximum he was there for about three years. Either way, though, knowing that and knowing how long Zoller was actually involved in the project, notice how she’s already bending and twisting things and basically misrepresenting things in order to do what she’s trying to accomplish, which is to cast Project Hindsight as this thing where Zoller was the only smart one, and then he immediately left and then it just left these other two guys that she’s already torn down.
[plays video]
DH: -was going with. And why I assume this was, you know, I did have private correspondence with Robert Zoller. He met me a few times in his life and shared-
[pauses video]
CB: She’s talking about why Zoller left. And notice the wording, she said “Part of why I assume he left…” And then she starts saying she had private conversations with him to give what she’s about to say some legitimacy. But she says, “I assume,” because she doesn’t know this for sure but she’s about to speculate about why Robert Zoller left Project Hindsight.
[plays video]
DH: … you know, some of his thoughts with me. But one of the problems that we have with Project Hindsight was that this project started right from the beginning with absolute answers to everything. Even before the first text was released, they were giving us answers. And this as what everybody was doing. And they weren’t asking questions, they were selling a new package of astrology. It was simplified. All the aspects– there’s no such things as orbs, there’s no such-
[pauses video]
CB: None of this is true. She’s saying that they didn’t ask questions, they already had the entire system worked out ahead of time, and they were just selling a package of astrology that they had already figured out. None of that’s true. I know this is difficult now because the translations are out of print, but if you pick up and you start reading any of the Project Hindsight translations, which are these little booklets that were stapled together.
They were printed out on this old printer I think that you had to crank with a hand, and they staple bound them. Because this was really like a punk rock almost, you know, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type situation where they were translating the text, they were printing them, they were mailing them out, they were going out and getting copies of the ancient texts that they were going to translate from the library and photocopying things and different things like that.
If you read the translations, each of them has an introduction by the translator as well as introduction by the editor, which is Robert Hand. So Hand was acting as the editor and Schmidt was translating the Greek texts, and Zoller was translating the Latin texts. So in their introductions, and they also had extensive footnotes running throughout the texts, and what’s so cool about reading these early translations is that you could tell they were always talking about things that they saw in the texts, and then they would present different observations. They would present different questions that they still had that they didn’t understand, they would mark some words as provisional, like they didn’t know how to translate certain terms yet, so they would bracket it or they would leave it in its original language until at a later date they would come up with a way to translate that term.
Schmidt would note when things were ambiguous. And during the course of the translations, when you read each of the translations in succession based on their publication number, you can actually see the evolution of their thinking over the process of Project Hindsight and how they started to understand things better the more and more they translated. But they knew that they needed to start somewhere, so they eventually just started by translating Paulus Alexandrinus, which was an introduction to astrology that was written in the fourth century in Greek.
But there’s so many things about that early translation that you can see if you compare them to the later translations over the next few years that grew and developed because of their thinking grew and developed, because a lot of this stuff was new to everybody. A lot of the techniques had been lost like Time Lord systems, sect, zodiacal releasing, all sorts of different things, even whole sign houses for that matter. They were still getting a grasp on different things or getting a handle on different things as they went. So it’s quite the opposite of the way that she starts presenting everything here as if everything was a foregone conclusion from the start. That’s not really the case at all if you read the texts, and the only like way that you can come to that conclusion and she’s kind of banking on this, is if you don’t actually read the texts yourself. But if you do, I promise you you’ll see something quite different in terms of what she’s saying.
[plays video]
DH: -aspects just from one sign to the other. There’s no such thing as house cusps. It’s just, you know, 12 signs. You definitely got to be able to count 12 and you can pretty much get on board with this system. The teachings were not up for it– and there were teachings, you know? It was set up as a translation project but it was the community group that mainly the feeling was. There was kind of a sense of everybody sits around Robert Schmidt’s feet and he guru-like gives his philosophical slant on things. They were not –
[pauses video]
CB: That’s a personal dig at Robert Schmidt in terms of his like Guru-like are trying to make implications there. I just want you to note that because that’s part of a personal animosity between Schmidt and Houlding that goes back to the 1990s, where there was some sort of mailing list for Project Hindsight. And Deborah Houlding was on it and got into some sort of huge blowout fights or like legendary fights with Schmidt in the 1990s about issues like this that she’s still arguing with people about today. I wasn’t around for those, I’ve heard legends of them and different things like that, but I was very much aware of it because when I came into the community, I could start to see some of the animosity between the two of them and the way that they… The attitudes that they had towards each other as a result of previous apparently tense debates.
But some of that is sort of the context that you have to understand. Anytime she’s talking about Schmidt and Schmidt’s personality or different things like that was some of those tensions that go back to the mid-1990s. And I think that’s really important information and I’m saying it because one, she’s speaking like she was actually there in person, which she wasn’t; even though she’s describing things like people sitting at Schmidt’s feet, which is something that she never would have personally witnessed if she wasn’t there. But also a lot of younger astrologers that are just getting into the field over the past few years, unfortunately with some of our teachers, they have preexisting histories. And there’s pre-existing personalities, there’s pre-existing debates and disputes and different things that sometimes can influence the present that you don’t know about if you haven’t been around long enough. That’s one of the things of why I’m doing this, is I’m trying to provide all of the contexts that’s actually necessary in order to be able to evaluate some of the claims that Houlding makes. And one of them that you need to understand is that there’s some personal stuff there that goes back to the ’90s that this lecture is still reacting to, in some ways. Yeah.
[plays video]
DH: -for discussion. And this wasn’t a project set up to answer questions or even explore questions. It was set up to give an absolute meaning of what was happening at a stage where I would say we didn’t even know what questions we should be asking at that time.
[pauses video]
CB: So she says that you couldn’t ask questions and nothing was up for discussion on questions. But she herself knows that to be not true because she was the one that participated in some of those online discussions at those times. I think the issue was just that she didn’t like some of the conclusions that they were coming to, and became a vocal critic of it from that point forward, and is still now three decades later after some of these guys are dead and no longer able to defend themselves. But clearly, there was a lot of discussion taking place and it wasn’t just being handed down that way. They had a lot of open forums, including the discussion list that she was a part of. So it’s not true to say that there was no discussion or no openness for questions, or no ability to ever change opinions at any point.
[plays video]
DH: So what happened was very quickly Robert Zoller fell out of the project. Robert Hand became very attached to this idea that Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt promoted right from the start, that there was no such thing as house cusps or quadrant house systems in ancient astrology. All-
[pauses video]
CB: That’s a lie. They did acknowledge at the very beginning of their translation of Paulus Alexandrinus. They do make an observation. After translating it in the introduction, they make an observation that Paulus is using the signs as houses and they say that’s kind of interesting and that’s a weird parallel with the Indian tradition right from the start. But then they didn’t deny the use of quadrant houses or equal houses in ancient astrology, and there’s lots of different discussions in the Project Hindsight translations and some of the different literature and lectures around that time about the role of quadrant houses because they would come up in authors like Book Three of Valens. They have a commentary because Valens introduces Porphyry houses and so they talk about it and they’re like, “Hey, this is interesting. It’s weird, we’re trying to understand and reconcile some issues like the fact that Valens mainly uses whole sign houses in his example charts. But then that he also introduces quadrant houses.”
And so they would try to come up with theories for why that was or how he integrated those two together if he did at all. They had discussions about Ptolemy’s use of equal houses, for example. Yeah, there were actually lots of different discussions about the different forms of house division. In fact, in his 1996 translation of Book Three of Ptolemy, Robert Schmidt wrote a pretty detailed essay about the house division issue in ancient astrology and about what sources we find different forms of house division in, including the different forms of quadrant houses.
But he also talked about how we find equal houses in Book Nine of Valens. That’s actually something later that she’s going to claim that they never talked about or discussed, like she’s doing here when she says that they’d never talked about quadrant houses or tried to suppress it. That’s not true. I’m pointing this out because one of the things that’s going to happen here as a recurring theme is projection. She’s going to accuse Schmidt and Hand and other people who talk about whole sign houses of suppressing knowledge of quadrant houses or equal houses. But she herself is doing that when she talks about the treatment of house division in the work of these two astrologers, or actually three astrologers, Hand, Schmidt, and Zoller who despite her greying him out and acting as if Zoller wasn’t part of the project for two or three years, Zoller was still there. So yeah, it’s a bit of projection to say that they completely didn’t talk about these other forms of house division.
[plays video]
DH: -astrologers just did the houses by the signs. And they would hold conclaves and a lot of well-known American astrologers– Demetra George, Joseph Crane, Meira Epstein, Dorian Greenbaum. These were all astrologers that before Project Hindsight started, did not– They were known for being psychological astrologers. That was their interest. They were modern psychological astrologers. And in the conclave there would be lots of new astrologers.
[pauses video]
CB: Everybody was a modern psychological astrologer. Even Deborah Houlding was a modern psychological astrologer up until the point where three or four years before this, she transitioned into traditional astrology. So she’s criticizing a lot of the astrologers that started learning traditional at this point, even though she herself had only started learning it three or four years earlier. And it’s a weird rhetorical thing, I don’t know why she thinks she can get away with this in terms of what she’s saying about them, when she also made a similar transition at some point not very long before them just a few years earlier.
[plays video]
DH: Chris Brennan lived with Robert Schmidt. Ben Dykes-
[pauses video]
CB: This is, I believe, the one time I’m mentioned. I believe–I didn’t write down this, but I’m pretty sure it’s the one time I mentioned even though slides from my lectures, most of the pictures from this were taken from some of my YouTube videos, and a number of other arguments are actually taken from me. I think this is the only time that she does the professional courtesy of actually referring to me or using my name.
[plays video]
DH: -learned from them, attended their conclaves when he was getting into astrology. So all these new young American astrologers and the older astrologers like people like Demetra George very quickly shifted from their previous style of practice to this new, wholly different style of Hellenistic astrology.
[pauses video]
CB: That is another lie. I should have actually a lie counter, I actually considered that. But Demetra actually had this whole 10-year process that was actually very slow and very careful and deliberate in terms of her eventual transition to studying and using Hellenistic astrology in practice between 1982 and 1993 and 2002. And it was actually a long process that involved while she became one of the first people through chance or through an accident to subscribe to Project Hindsight and start getting the translations, she describes in her story– because I’ve actually interviewed her, and you can go back and listen to the episode in which we tell her life story.
If you go back and listen that episode, it was this long process of getting the translations, not really understanding what they’re saying because they were very hard to read even though they were translated into English because the ancient astrological concepts were so oftentimes foreign to modern astrology, she would attend some conclaves and ask questions but sometimes not be fully sure about it. Because she was still in her modern astrology and asteroid and dark goddess phase in the early 90s.
Eventually, she ended up going back to college and studying classics, and learning ancient Greek partially just in order to get a degree in history, which a lot of astrologers were doing at that point. There was a lot of astrologers going back into academia, but she wasn’t doing that for the purpose of studying Hellenistic astrology, necessarily. Even though she had some interest, but she hadn’t fully switched to using whole sign houses or traditional relationships necessarily at that point. Eventually, she starts teaching at Kepler and then she starts developing a course on Hellenistic astrology, partially due to the need and the interest for that at Kepler and because she had some of the language skills then at that point that she had learned in college in the process of getting a degree.
So Demetra’s story is one of tentativeness and a gradual transition into practicing Hellenistic astrology. But one of the things that Deb does here is she just does this rhetorical thing where she’s saying that practically overnight, these people just transitioned into adopting Hellenistic astrology and just parroting all these things they were learning from Schmidt in the hand without any consideration or fourth thought as if they just signed up and bought this whole package of astrology that was pre-made and then that was the end of it. But that wasn’t the case at all. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m doing this because I need to tell some of those stories and set the record straight, both the historical record but also, you know, to speak up for some of these astrologers who are being misrepresented here. Yeah, I want to get some more water and take a little break. So I’ll resume this here in like five minutes. I’ll be right back.
[Intermission]
All right, I’m back. I needed a break there. This gets a little dicey for me because it’s like Demetra was my first teacher that I learned Hellenistic astrology from. So it’s like I know her story and I know when that story is being misrepresented, and it kind of bothers me. All right, let’s continue.
[plays video]
DH: Within a year, people that had no previous real interest or experience in traditional astrology were teaching as a new level of instruction of people that knew all about Hellenistic astrology and teaching it to a new generation of astrology.
[pauses video]
CB: Within a year, she says. So Demetra, you know, Project Hindsight starts in 1992 and ’93, Demetra starts getting the translations. When did Demetra start teaching Hellenistic astrology? 2002. Nine or 10 years later after Project Hindsight started. So she’s completely exaggerating this whole thing about people turning around and learning Hellenistic astrology and then beginning to teach it. But for many of those people, for many of us, because eventually I did come along and go through part of this myself, it’s actually a much longer-term process of learning some of these things that some of us dedicated a lot of time and effort or dedicated large chunks of our life too. And she’s treating it as if it’s this thing that we just converted overnight, and then immediately started teaching classes on or something like that. And that’s certainly not the case when it comes to Demetra.
[plays video]
DH: And this happened very quickly in the middle of the 1990s. It was very intense. I was amazed by the rapidity by which some people that have never really been interested in traditional astrology before, so quickly became experts. And I’m, you know-
[pauses video]
CB: So, there was a lot of excitement surrounding traditional astrology with Project Hindsight and a lot of people got into it and got excited. But the same thing was happening in the UK, it just happened a few years earlier. And she was a part of that. She was one that started a magazine on traditional astrology, she was one that started a company that started reprinting some older astrological texts like Dorotheus and Firmicus and other authors. She was doing the same thing basically just a few years earlier, so these weird criticisms and this projection of saying that there was these people that were modern astrologers that started doing traditional astrology and were excited about it, she’s just as guilty of. Which isn’t even something to be guilty about. There’s nothing wrong with learning a new approach to astrology and becoming excited about it, because she did the same thing.
[plays video]
DH: I’ve been studying and researching traditional astrology now, nigh on 40 years. And I will admit that I’m still-
[pauses video]
CB: 40 years. So she contrasts. A little weird bit of thing there, she contrasts her 40 years with saying that people were learning it and turning around and teaching after only a year of study. But remember at that point in time that she’s talking about, she also had only made the transition to traditional astrology a few years earlier.
[plays video]
DH: -getting a grasp on some things. I am still only just starting to understand some things. But that-
[pauses video]
CB: That’s a false bit of modesty that she commonly does, where she actually has very firm and very strong opinions about a wide variety of things that she will argue extremely aggressively and sometimes be very sort of arrogant about, especially when it comes to things like house division, but she kind of deflects by adopting this false sense of modesty and saying she’s still learning and she doesn’t know anything, or saying that we don’t know about this subject. It’s a really common thing where she’ll try to pretend that, especially when it comes to whole sign houses and house division, that we don’t really know anything and it’s all very ambiguous and nobody should draw any conclusions. And then once she establishes that ambiguity and creates this sense of mystery surrounding everything, she then proposes her own approach, which is to use quadrant houses. So just pay attention to that because it’s a really common rhetorical strategy that she will employ here, as well as elsewhere.
[plays video]
DH: -that delayed. This wasn’t a project that explored and asked questions. It was pretty much an entirely American-driven movement. And it was termed a movement. It was marketed as a movement. And over in Europe, Over in Europe we have people like Beza, all the people that had previously been associated with traditional astrology that had seriously studied the subject, they didn’t really move on this.
[pauses video]
CB: Beza who had started his own Italian translation project, so it’s like he had his own thing going on where he was doing an Italian version of Project Hindsight, I don’t know what she means then or how that works since he didn’t move on the subject. Notice how she’s put Robert Zoller over on her side.
So even though Zoller was in Project Hindsight, was one of the founders, and was there for the first three years of the project and produced a bunch of different little translations at Project Hindsight, for some reason Zoller is over on the right side where he’s evidently not an American. Because she’s somehow contrasting the Americans, which she tries to portray Project Hindsight or portray especially whole sign houses as an American invention and American fad, which is really funny now because as we’ve seen, there were other scholars and astrologers that were already using whole sign houses who were recognized in ancient astrology in German, French and Spanish many years earlier.
But somehow she’s trying to hijack Robert Zoller. She’s also interestingly hijacking other people here like Geoffrey Cornelius and Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro. And I kind of wonder how they feel about being used for stuff like that. I kind of wonder how they would feel about that. Unfortunately for Robert Zoller, I have a pretty good feeling how he would feel about that. But unfortunately, this is one of those instances where because he passed away a few years ago, he can’t speak up for himself right here. But I think we can infer how he might feel about that since he was actually still part of Project Hindsight during the period she was talking about.
[plays video]
DH: You know, we already knew some of the stuff from before anyway, and what was coming out was flying at odds with what we were seeing elsewhere. And when I say… Before I move on from this because I don’t want to make-
[pauses video]
CB: Hold on, I need to make one additional point. I mentioned Helena Avelar and Luis Ribeiro because they were, I believe, students of Robert Zoller and studied with Robert Zoller at one point. So to the extent that Zoller is… You know, part of Project Hindsight wasn’t American that was doing medieval astrology, Project Hindsight did start influencing people around the world. And she tries to treat it as an American phenomenon but there were many international subscribers to Project Hindsight around the world and many different people that would travel there and sometimes hear what was going on, or sometimes become involved in the project.
It sometimes influenced different things because then sometimes people would get their interest in ancient astrology there but then they would go off and study it on their own and start coming to their own conclusions, or in some instances, even studying ancient languages because they were inspired to by people like Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt and Robert Zoller who were translating all these texts.
Somebody that did that, for example, is Eduardo Gramaglia. He attended conclave and studied some of the Project Hindsight stuff at one point, but then he went back to school and he studied ancient Greek and became capable of translating the ancient texts. Since that time he’s produced a number of his own translations, including a translation of Book Three of Hephaistio of Thebes in 2013 with Ben Dykes. And Eduardo has written his own book on Hellenistic astrology in Spanish that I think is going to be reprinted soon.
So, one of the things is she really wants to treat this as an American phenomenon whole sign houses, but even though by virtue of the fact that Project Hindsight was a translation project and it was one of the first translation projects in the astrological community that produced some of the first translations of these texts in English and that there was a lot of excitement surrounding that, and then that that started influencing other people in different countries or different parts of the world by virtue of the internet or what have you, aside from that, trying to treat whole sign houses as if it’s sort of an American phenomenon is one of the ways that she tries to rhetorically downplay it and dismiss it. But it’s kind of sketchy.
[plays video]
DH: One of the things Project Hindsight did was they refused to look at astrology in a context of a tradition.
[pauses video]
CB: I didn’t mention that, but I actually want to mention. First… Well, what’s on the screen? My name is on the screen. I don’t know if anybody’s noticing that. But let’s let her say the point she’s going to make and just ignore what’s on the screen now and we’ll come back to it.
[plays video]
DH: They didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts, because that wasn’t part of the Hellenistic texts that-
[pauses video]
CB: Okay, this is huge. I gotta back that up so we get that last statement. So this is 17:54… Let me see if I can rewind it.
[plays video]
DH: -a tradition. They didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts. [rewinds video] And what was coming out was flying at odds with what we were seeing elsewhere.
[pauses video]
CB: It was at odds with what her practice of astrology was. That was the problem.
[plays video]
DH: When I say… Before I move on from this because I don’t want to make it all about this point, but one of the things Project Hindsight did was they refused to look at astrology in a context of a tradition. They didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts, because that wasn’t part of the Hellenistic texts that were being translated.
[pauses video]
CB: ‘They didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts. Project Hindsight didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts.’ Wait a minute, what is this? Oh my god, it’s the very first Project Hindsight translation in the medieval Latin track, and its of an author named Al-Kindī from the ninth century titled On the Stellar Rays that was originally written in Arabic by an astrologer who is sometimes referred to as the first philosopher of the Arabs. So one of the very first Project Hindsight translations was an Arabic text.
Other translations were of Arabic texts like Umar al-Tabarī or Mā Shā’ Allāh from the eighth century. So, ‘They didn’t care what was in the Arabic texts,’ again, was a lie, and is directly contradicted if you pay attention to and if you what the publication history of Project Hindsight was. She’s banking on her audience to not catch that as a lie because most people, unless you’re a super nerd like me or into traditional astrology or happened to have been around for some of this stuff, you won’t know that that’s a bold-faced lie. But now everybody does.
[plays video]
DH: They didn’t care about the Babylonian texts that preceded them. They were wrong.
[pauses video]
CB: ‘They didn’t care about the Babylonian texts that preceded them.’ So, one of the Project Hindsight supporters was a woman named Maggie McPherson and she was somebody that was super brilliant, and Schmidt saw her as his intellectual equal to a certain extent. That’s what I’ve been told by Demetra George, that he did see her as his intellectual equal and he was really impressed by her by her intellect.
One of the things that she did is she specialized and really focused on the Mesopotamian tradition, the Babylonian tradition, and went back and learned Akkadian, so that that tradition could be studied. That was something that she then brought into Project Hindsight and was able to give presentations on at conclaves, and that she conveyed in terms of her findings to Robert Schmidt, and that Schmidt was open to talking with and hearing about. And so much so that Maggie McPherson was one of the people besides Demetra that was sent by Project Hindsight and given permission to act as a representative of Project Hindsight to teach some of the more advanced Hellenistic courses at Kepler once Hellenistic astrology started being taught there in 2002.
Unfortunately, Maggie passed away I think from cancer at an early age. So again, she’s not here to defend herself or point out the fact that actually there was interest in Project Hindsight about the earlier tradition from the Mesopotamian tradition. But yeah, I can tell you that that actually was the case, that they were interested in the continuity of the tradition, and both what came before the Hellenistic tradition as well as what came after.
While it is true that Robert Schmidt as his career or as his life progressed, especially after the departure of Zoller eventually, and then eventually later Hand, Schmidt did become more focused on just the Hellenistic tradition as his primary focus later on, although never exclusively. At least… It gets a little dicey.
He decided to specialize in the Hellenistic tradition and put his primary focus there, which is fine. But it was never done in complete sort of isolation of any awareness or interest in what was going on with the rest of the tradition, especially during the period that she’s talking about of Project Hindsight in the mid 1990s. She’s trying to frame it in this inaccurate way as if they never had any interest in other traditions. But as we’ve just demonstrated, they had both interest in the tradition that came after the Hellenistic tradition, which was the Arabic tradition, and they had interest in what came before, which was the Babylonian tradition.
And in some of their writings and some of the preliminary translations, you can see Hand and Schmidt talking about the earlier tradition, like for example the Egyptian astrological tradition where Schmidt talks about some precursors in the Egyptian tradition that may have led to the use of the Ascendant. That’s kind of like a commonplace thing nowadays because other scholars such as Dorian Greenbaum, for example, have done work on Egyptian astrology and have continued to expand and validate some of that research even more in terms of the Egyptians developing some of the precursors to things like the Ascendant through the rising decan. But Schmidt was talking about some of this stuff back then as well because he had a genuine interest in the continuity and in the entire tradition. Additionally… I forgot. There was another translator. They also brought in Meira Epstein and she translated one book of Ibn Ezra from Hebrew into English.
So they weren’t just interested in the Hellenistic tradition. They weren’t just interested in the Babylonian tradition or the medieval tradition. They were also translating works from Hebrew from the later medieval tradition. They also had some Renaissance works that they translated as well. And then finally, they even had interest in the Vedic tradition because they’d had some Vedic astrologers come out and do presentations. K.N Rao visited I believe in 1995 or 1996, who was a famous Indian astrologer and they had discussions with him. Because one of the things that Project Hindsight was actually interested in was comparing the different astrological traditions because oftentimes, they had things to learn from each other. Or there would be instances in which the way that another ancient tradition did things could sometimes inform and help us to better understand the way that astrologers in other traditions were doing things. So this whole idea that they didn’t have interest in other traditions or anything like that is just… It’s not just bizarre, but it’s counterfactual in the most extreme way possible, especially during the period she’s talking about in the mid 1990s.
[plays video]
DH: They didn’t have the view that astrology developed, they had a view that it came to a one golden area of one specific moment in time, which was the time that was captured by the particular text that they were translating. And anything that followed that was a corruption that we can just forget about. So-
[pauses video]
CB: One of the pieces that she’s picking up on that has a grain of truth to it is that Schmidt, increasingly, the longer he studied astrology and the more he continued to focus on the Greek tradition in later years, especially like a decade after Project Hindsight was started once we get into the 2000s as well as towards the end of his career in the 2010s, he did develop a focus on the Hellenistic tradition where he thought that most of the techniques originated in the first– actually, I guess it was little earlier– but a little bit before the first century BCE. He developed this theory where he thought that they were invented by a singular individual who came up with a system of techniques that all fit together in different ways.
And that could sometimes lead Schmidt to a sort of fundamentalism in his later years that I sometimes didn’t agree with and we had major differences or even to some extent falling out partially based on that, but it’s really important to distinguish Schmidt’s later views a decade or two after the time period she’s talking about from the mid-1990s where that tendency was not quite as pronounced and he was much more open because of his lack of commitment to specific systems at that point in time. So I don’t think you should take somebody’s later views from two decades later and then project them entirely backwards into an earlier historical era in their life. That’s part of how things are being a little misleading here.
[plays video]
DH: There was no… You know, they didn’t come into this with, “Oh, I recognize what’s happening here because this is exactly what Abu Ma’shar is saying in his text or Al Qabisi. You know, this has been translated in the work of Al Qabisi and we can see. We can see the parallel.” There was none of that.
[pauses video]
CB: There was none of that. They didn’t compare Abu Ma’shar and Al Qabisi. Oh, my god, what is this? It’s a translation of Abu Ma’shar on Solar revolutions by Robert Schmidt that he translated. He actually translated a work of Abu Ma’shar in 2001 or 2002-2001 because there wasn’t enough… There were some references in passing in the earlier Greek tradition to solar returns, but no complete works on solar returns survived so there was some ambiguity about how did the Hellenistic authors deal with solar returns? Or how would traditional astrologers use that technique? So what Schmidt did is he went forward in the tradition and found the earliest complete treatment of solar returns that he could find, which was the big authoritative treatment of that topic by the ninth century Arabic astrologer Abu Ma’shar.
And Schmidt didn’t… He wasn’t specialized in Arabic, he specialized in Greek but he found that somebody in the medieval period had done a Greek translation of Abu Ma’shar’s Arabic solar return work. So what Schmidt did is he completely dedicated several months or a year or whatever it was to translating this medieval originally Arabic work on solar revolutions, in order to better understand solar returns because that was a missing technique and piece in his thinking, that was incomplete in the Hellenistic tradition. So, contrast that with what she’s saying here that they had no interest in the Arabic tradition, and they refused to pay attention to any authors outside of the Hellenistic tradition and all this exaggeration and distortion and yeah, just things that are not accurate that are being said.
[plays video]
DH: There was no context of things. And so lots of things that were part of the tradition before and after this period were not recognized by them. Then we– because as I said that this phenomenon happened so quickly because then the internet developed and then we got Wikipedia. And around about the early 2000s, there was this young, upcoming, very dynamic, passionate movement of astrologers. They were the ones that were feeding in the information in Wikipedia, which would then feed through to a whole myriad of websites. You go into the back pages of Wikipedia and you can see the the Wikipedia wars going on between people defining things this way, defining things that way, very keen that this particular one vision gets promoted.
[pauses video]
CB: This is so funny because she has a picture of my Wikipedia edit history from 2008 up here, where I was having an edit war, I guess, with some guy that was… I was writing stuff on the houses entry on Wikipedia to include something about whole sign houses and this guy kept undoing it and stuff, or taking stuff out. And he was arguing that whole sign houses wasn’t a real house system or something like that. Ironically, it’s part of the screenshot that she’s pulling here.
One of the things, though, that’s very very important about what’s up here on the screen now that’s actually really interesting is, look at the top, it’s got a logo. Houlding has put the logo for Wikipedia at the top, and she has some old definition from who-knows-when from Wikipedia where it says, “Since in Hellenistic astrology and its cognate Vedic astrology, all aspects were from sign to sign and not from individual degrees. The very concept of “orbs” of aspect was unknown until the Arabs.”
She’s taking something that somebody wrote– who knows when– it wasn’t me because I’ve never written that, and putting that at the top that somebody was claiming on Wikipedia that the Hellenistic astrologers didn’t use orbs. Then at the bottom of the screen, she’s taken a screenshot from somewhere else that reiterates the same thing from some website– I don’t know why she’s citing here– called Thelemapedia that says that the idea of aspects in ancient astrology was somewhat different than modern application. Aspects were sorted by sign rather than exact degrees, blah, blah, blah.
So it’s another thing having to do with this thing she objects to, the notion of sign-based aspects, which was something that Project Hindsight was talking about early on, although I’m a little unclear about all the details because I don’t think it’s the way that she usually describes it where she tries to claim that they always said that there was only sign-based aspects. Anyway, she’s placed my edit history misleadingly right in the middle of this as if this is something that I wrote on Wikipedia, that then started influencing other sites. But in fact, that’s not what I wrote it all and the edit thing between me and this other guy that she’s describing is on something completely different, which is house division.
So I want to show you that. I wanted to point that out and pause and point that out just because it shows you how she will sometimes try to mislead people in very subtle ways. Because I think if you glanced at this with the Wikipedia logo in the top left, that paragraph in the top that supposedly from some edition of Wikipedia, and then the thing right below that, you would think that I was the one that wrote what’s on the screen there. But in fact, I didn’t. So she’s trying to give people a misleading impression here. Even though it’s very subtle, even though it’s a minor point, that’s still super super sketchy. I think anybody can agree that that’s a really weird thing to do. And it sets up a really recurring theme here where she’s constantly doing these subtly misleading things in order to attempt to rhetorically take people where she wants them to go, or to make people think what she wants them to think.
[plays video]
DH: And I would ask you to observe that if you look at what’s being said around this subject on the internet and different places, the champions of the whole sign approach are extremely passionate about explaining it, demonstrating it, recommending it. They are intent on stressing it is better than other systems, the other systems should be abandoned because this is the best.
[pauses video]
CB: What’s so funny about that is I gave this lecture in 2015, and here’s the backstory. I had to check with a friend to confirm this the other day, but it was actually really funny. In 2015… In November of 2015, Adam Elenbaas asked me if I would come give a talk for his school called Nightlight Astrology on whole sign houses. And I was like, “Yeah, sure. I can throw that together, it’s pretty easy,” and I gave it just some boring title. And he was the one actually that was like, “Could you come up with a catchier title to get more people to attend for marketing purposes?” And I was like, “Yeah, let’s just call it something over the top like Whole Sign Houses, Literally the Best System of House Division Ever.” And he was like, “Yeah, that’s funny,” and I’m like, “Obviously, people will get the joke.”
Funny point, people did not get that joke. Or at least one person did not get the joke, which was Deborah Houlding because it turned out I didn’t know that she had this long-standing preexisting thing where she just viscerally hates whole sign houses. And she freaked out when I released that lecture, and has never let me live it down at this point. Funny thing is Leisa Schaim, gotta have a shout out to her, said… She was like, “I don’t know if you should title it that because I don’t know if everyone’s gonna get the joke that it’s like tongue in cheek,” and I’m like, “It’ll be fine, what’s the worst that could happen?” And here we are tonight. So, sorry, Leisa.
But yeah, so I gave that title for that talk, “Whole Sign Houses: Literally the Best System of House Division Ever’. And I set it up as talk that was a number of points of like, “These are the reasons in favor of why you should consider whole sign houses, why you might consider a whole sign houses as a system of house division that you might want to try. And these are some of the reasons why I use it, and some of the reasons that I think are compelling reasons for why use this specific system of house division rather than some other system of house division.” And I go through and I make those different points, pretty much all of which I still stand by for the most part, even though it was a lecture that was like… It had historical but also practical components, and it wasn’t meant to be like a comprehensive treatment of the issue of house division in ancient astrology.
It was just a blow-off lecture that I put together for Adams’ school one time and then decided just to release the recording after as a podcast to fill my quota of four podcast episodes that I have to do each month. Even despite the over-the-top tongue-in-cheek title of ‘literally the best system of house division ever’, if you go back and you actually look at the end of my talk and the way that I concluded that talk, I actually ended it on a much more conciliatory note and tone than you might actually think, based on what Deborah Houlding says about it where she just continually repeats the title over and over again– Literally the Best System of House Division. That was episode 52 of The Astrology Podcast, and if you find the transcript for that, if you find that on the website, you’ll find my conclusion at the end of that.
And what I said was this. I said, “Ultimately, although I framed this lecture in the form of a polemical series of arguments about why whole sign houses is the best form of house division and it’s the primary one that you should use, you may actually not have to give up on quadrant houses completely. We’ve already seen earlier how you can take into account the degree of the MC and the IC, and how those actually get integrated into the whole sign framework in order to create an almost hybrid approach. But in the late Hellenistic tradition, they were actually using both whole sign houses and quadrant houses almost at the same time. So whole sign houses was the primary system of house division, but they also to some extent would pay attention to the quadrant house placements as a secondary overlay. In fact, that could be the solution for us today.”
And I continued, “It doesn’t have to be like in the ninth century, where it’s like somebody makes an observation or a discovery that there’s an alternative house division then everybody switches to it and completely forgets about the other form of house division for a thousand years. We don’t necessarily need to do that all over again by switching back to whole sign houses and completely forgetting about quadrant houses. Instead, there may be a way to synthesize the two together, or to use them at the same time or potentially for different things. Which is another suggestion that different astrologers have made, that whole sign houses may be more useful for one thing, and quadrant houses may be more useful for another. We’re still very early on in the process of recovering whole sign houses.
This is literally the first generation of astrologers who have started using it again, in the West at least, for over a thousand years. So much of this research is still early, and there’s still stuff that we’re working out about how to fully revive it, and what position it has relative to quadrant houses, and what potential there is for reconciliation ultimately. So there’s still work to do and there’s no final answer yet.”
I’m almost done, one more paragraph. And I continued, “Despite how I framed this lecture with the title in order to get you in here, unfortunately, I’m going to end this on a more conciliatory tone and say that ultimately what’s important here is just having good reasons for what we do. So no matter what form of house division you use, just make sure that you’re using that form of house division because you have good reasons for doing so and that you can back them up. And if you do that, then I have a ton of respect for you in whatever system of house division that you’re using. If you don’t have that, then try working on it and seeing what you can come up with in order to provide both a practical as well as a conceptual or philosophical defense or explanation for why you use whatever your preferred system of house division is. And if you do that, then I think your approach to astrology and your experience of using astrology and applying it as a technique and as a system will be improved significantly. So that’s it for this lecture.”
That was the end of my famous Whole Sign Houses is the Best System of House Division argument that Deborah Houlding has never let me live down, and that she continually brings up over and over again just the title as an example of how whole sign house users are supposed to be aggressive, and how they’re supposed to be saying that their system is the best and how they’re trying to dominate the tradition and that they’re trying to suppress quadrant houses and all this other stuff that simply isn’t true.
And that she’s constantly, her and her student Wade Caves, are constantly trying to misrepresent myself and misrepresent other users of whole sign houses in order to simply do what she’s saying we’re doing, in that she’s actually trying to suppress whole sign houses to sort of slander it, basically, that technique. And in order to get people to stop using it actively simply because she doesn’t like it and she doesn’t think it works and whatever else. I wanted to set the record straight on that because here again in the search in the video… In this screenshot that she was just throwing up random screenshots. At the very top of it, she of course has the link to my lecture that I put out on the podcast, “Whole Sign Houses, Literally the Best System of House Division Ever”, which is the full title. I think it got shortened in the podcast version, maybe it’s just “The Best System of House Division” or whatever. She has one of my slides up from that old lecture from 2015, as well as a link to one of my YouTube videos. Unfortunately, there’s also other astrologers that catch stray bullets here, including putting a picture of Kelly Surtees up and a picture of Maren Altman up.
And Kelly, anybody that knows Kelly Surtees knows that Kelly is a super easy going individual. She’s not aggressively promoting whole sign houses or saying it’s the only system of the house division or any of this other stuff, so she’s just catching a stray bullet here for no reason in this lecture which is really being directed at me primarily. And even directing at me is inappropriate because one, she’s mischaracterizing my lecture and how I promoted whole sign houses. And two, as I said, that was a jokey blow-off lecture that I put together and then released very quickly.
Immediately after I released that lecture, Deborah Houlding started accusing me on social media of being a liar, of exaggerating, of distorting the history of astrology, ironically. And then her and I had that debate where I was like, I tried to be the bigger person and invite her to have a debate about it on the podcast and to talk it out. And then she ended up just talking over me for the entire time, acting incredibly aggressively and rudely, and at one point lying about James Holden, my friend who had passed away, by saying that he didn’t really talk about whole sign houses or didn’t really discover it or something like that.
So all of this has a lot of history and the final thing is that after that experience with Deborah Houlding happened, I started being a lot more careful about my public statements about house division. And over the next year as I was writing my book, I took what was originally just supposed to be a little tiny chapter at the end of the chapter on the houses where I just made some statements about house division relatively quickly, I took the entire summer at that point to expand that chapter from a few pages into a full extensive 50-page treatment of the subject that very carefully outlined and detailed the different systems of house division in ancient astrology, but also outlined the evidence for whole sign houses and validated all of my statements.
That chapter has been out ever since 2017, and the lecture based on that has been out since 2018 and 2019, but Deborah Houlding refuses to engage with the actual more mature and actual historical treatment that I’ve done on this topic. And instead, she’s still cherry picking little titles from a blow-off lecture in 2015, or little slides that she’s not putting my name on. She’s not attributing to them to me, which would be a proper academic or just normal thing to do. But she’s still taking a shot at that because she wants to distort what actually happened, and she wants to pretend and wants to paint whole sign house users such as myself in a negative light. Yeah, and I need to be open about that because I can’t let this keep happening, because it has to stop. It’s gone too far at this point and it’s destructive for the community. And it’s really not good so she needs to cut it out.
[plays video]
DH: and preferred system of historical astrologers. So, this really heated discussion. But then as I said, the number of historical astrologers who have actually explained it, taught it, recommended it, argued it or suggested it is the best… Zero. There isn’t a single historical astrologer prior to the historical astrologers that we know of prior to modern times saying, “This is what you should do. Forget the other systems, this is the one that’s the best. Why I use whole sign house… Why use whole sign houses, not the others…” Not a single historical astrologer has approached the subject in that way.
[pauses video]
CB: “Not a single astrologer.” This is really important because this is the central claim that she’s making in this lecture that everybody needs to understand and that she needs to not wiggle out from this time. Because she’s actually been making this argument for several years because I started hearing her, and especially her students—especially Wade–-started repeating this argument, and I knew he was getting it from her because he was just parroting it back in 2015 and 2016 when I was writing my book. But the central argument is that she says “No historical astrologer advocated this system. Not a single reference can be found of a historical astrologer, explaining it, demonstrating it, recommending it, or advising us to use a whole sign for each house rather than commencing division of the houses from the Ascendant degree.” And then she goes on to say that it’s something that only came about in the 1990s.
So there’s such a huge amount of evidence, like some of which I’ve presented here already, that already just disputes this. She says zero, she even puts it up in big bold letters. And what’s so crazy about that, honestly, is that she could have hedged, she could have been like… She didn’t have to say zero. Zero is a really extreme claim where only one single source, one single piece of evidence could have destroyed the entire argument or entire claim that she’s making.
And she says as much. She said as much, I believe on Twitter recently or maybe it was Facebook, where she’s just like, “Where’s the evidence? There’s not a single piece of evidence, and if one was presented then it would end my argument.” But evidence has been presented and she’s just banking on the fact that the majority of her audience is primarily– at least so far, especially on Facebook– has been modern astrologers or contemporary astrologers who don’t have training in the history of astrology or ancient astrology or traditional astrology, so they don’t have a way to validate that statement or evaluate it so they just take it for granted because she’s stating it with such emphasis and such authority.
And surely somebody is not going to make such an extreme statement unless there’s really good evidence to back it up. And that’s what’s so wild about that, is just like, I think she could have– and sometimes with her public statements up to this point– she’s done little weasel words in order to say this, essentially same thing, but say it in a way that kind of cloaks what she’s saying or where she has plausible deniability. I’ve even seen this week where some astrologers even after watching her lecture, don’t realize that this is her central thesis and they’re like, “You understand she’s saying that whole sign houses never existed in ancient astrology and that it was invented in the 1990s, right? And that’s absurd.” And they’ll be like, “No, that’s not. Surely, she’s not saying that. That’s not what she’s saying. That would be absurd.”
And people don’t realize that really is her personal view and that is her central argument here. And I genuinely don’t know… For the longest time I struggled with this question of, “Why is she doing this?” Because there’s basically two options, which is one, she knows what she’s doing and she’s purposely being deceptive in order to mislead people. She knows there’s evidence for whole sign houses and she is just telling people there isn’t because she wants people to not use whole sign houses and because it drives her crazy that it has become such a popular form of house division because she prefers a different form of house division. So there’s that version of it, which is the version I assumed for the longest time. I still actually think is the preferred one because the alternative is just like, how could somebody go back and look at all the ancient sources and to have such a blind spot, where you just you see hundreds of different references to the astrologers using signs as houses, but you just absolutely refuse to accept it or can’t see it because you’re so blinded by hatred of it. There would have to be almost a reality-distorting thing that’s happening to her perception if she wasn’t doing this consciously.
I genuinely don’t know what the correct answer is but it seems like it’s one of those two. And yeah, this time though it’s gone further than usual, because she’s stating it in no uncertain terms, and so I just want everybody to be very clear about what she’s saying here and what she’s alleging. And she has it written out very clearly on this slide and also says it, because this time she’s gone too far because she’s made a claim that’s easy to verify is false. That’s one of the things that I wanted to emphasize at this point. And this is really, to me, the most important point in the lecture because this is where she fully comes out and says what she has to say, what she means, and what the primary thesis of this lecture is.
All right, I need another few-minute break and then we’ll resume here in another four or five minutes.
[Intermission]
All right. Let’s finish this.
[plays video]
DH: Nobody’s talked about it, nobody’s demonstrated it. Nobody has shown awareness that it exists. Every single-
[pauses video]
CB: Nobody’s shown any awareness that it exists in any ancient source or any modern source prior to Project Hindsight, that’s her claim.
[plays video]
DH: -time astrologers talk about the houses, they stress the importance, undeniably, of commencing division of houses from the Ascendant degree. So, here we get to hear our point. And this is Co-Star, the app that I don’t know much about it.
[pauses video]
CB: She’s going back to Co-Star for some reason. Co-Star somehow is the main target and is the biggest threat in terms of its page on whole sign houses that’s citing me.
[plays video]
DH: But I’m sure many of you do, and the definition that it’s claiming the whole sign house system is the oldest form of house division, and remained the preferred method of determining your houses for about a thousand years.
[pauses video]
CB: Again, quoting me or paraphrasing me, really. Again, citing some random astrology website instead of the person that she’s actually arguing against.
[plays video]
DH: Why does this matter? I’m just calm with my life oblivious to what goes on in the internet, until as a teacher of astrology, you know, I’m constantly getting astrologers to come to a course that is geared for people with good understanding and knowledge of the basics, advanced courses. And it’s becoming obvious to me that those students who say that they’re fully informed on how systems- they don’t even know what type of houses is. They really have no understanding of what houses are. And there’s only really four basic principles of astrology. You know, the zodiac sign, the houses, the planets, the aspects. And this whole issue of houses has become so poorly understood by so many astrologers who believe that they are well informed on it.
[pauses video]
CB: Part of her premise is that if you use whole sign houses, you’re not really using houses or that you’re uninformed about astrology. And I think she said on social media recently in the build up to releasing this, she said something that actually a lot of people on Twitter were mocking her for where she called whole sign houses lazy, or said something about whole sign house users being lazy. And it’s sort of become a meme where everyone’s like, “Well, I’m a lazy astrologer then.” And that’s part of her premise here, but it’s ultimately, while there is a simplicity to whole sign houses that we’re still paying attention to in calculating the degree of the Midheaven and the degree of the Descendant and IC in Ascendant. And in this day and age, everybody’s using pretty modern software programs or apps to calculate charts anyways. So making allegations about people being lazy or being… It just starts getting a little personal, a little unnecessary.
[plays video]
DH: Now, the Co-Star app, there’s a little bit of information here. It was started off and it was funded by about a 50-million pound grant. And according to them– this is going back, this is from April last year when I think this was reported– it’s had more than 20 million downloads. And it’s been downloaded by a quarter of all young women aged between 18 to 25 in the US. This is an app for calculating astrology charts so that people can do astrology. And so we are now in a position where the internet, Twitter, and everything is absolutely flooded with millions of new astrologers with this app who are championing whole sign houses being told that this is the preferred system. They’ve even given it a date as if it’s some point which whole sign system was invented. So, to some extent-
[pauses video]
CB: This point’s really important and actually really funny for context because I think she’s able to freak out a bunch of older astrologers with this. But one of the funny things about this whole Co-Star angle she’s taking here is that the default house system in Co-Star is Porphyry houses. They default to quadrant houses. They only recently in the past year or something, maybe it was a year or a little bit more than a year ago, integrated the option to calculate things with whole sign houses, or I believe also they integrated equal houses at the same time. Or maybe it was Placidus. Maybe it was whole sign and Placidus because a lot of their users had asked for that. And they had just put up this page, which was one page that explained all of the different house systems, explaining quadrant houses and their preferred system, Porphyry, first as well as outlining why it was their preferred system. And showing some quotes from different practitioners who preferred that system and used it and explained why they used it. So they did Porphyry first, then they had this little piece that talked about whole sign houses and some of the things about it, and some astrologers who use that system explained in a sentence why they used it. And then below that, there were people that explained why they use Placidus.
So if you think about one of the things that’s incredible here, is she’s freaking out here about Co-Star making whole sign houses an option at all, basically. She doesn’t want whole sign houses to be an option at all in software programs as far as she’s concerned. And she’s complaining about an app that defaults to quadrant houses just offering an alternative. That’s something really important to think about here. It’s not like this definition of whole sign houses, I don’t think is even in the app. It’s only on the website, and most of the users of Co-Star aren’t even going to visit the website to read any of this description or anything else. So all of this sort of dramatic stuff about how terrible this is that Co-Star has or talks about whole sign houses is just really unnecessary.
[plays video]
DH: I may as well be controversial in this talk, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I say. There’s a few of you here that are going to hear me, there’s a few of you less that or gonna listen to me. But at the end of the day, it makes no difference. Because there are millions, millions of astrologers out there now that know that this is the best system. And they are not going to change.
[pauses video]
CB: She kind of gets a little emotional there and her voice cracks I think a little bit. And I’m not pointing that out to be anything weird, I’m pointing that out because I think this was something that was revealing to me as another bit of projection. Because remember earlier in the lecture, she talked about how whole sign house users get so emotional about this topic and how they’re the ones that are being very over the top about this and championing it and everything else. But here when she brings up this whole thing where she has this false perception that Co-Star is brainwashing millions of people into using whole sign houses, even though she’s wrong, that it’s defaulting into quadrant, she actually gets really choked up about that idea that so many people could be using whole sign houses because that’s just utterly a terrible thought to her.
That’s part of this as well that’s really important is this huge emotionally… She has this really negative emotional reaction to whole sign houses for some reason, I don’t actually even fully understand, and it seems to go back to something that happened in the early to mid-’90s when Project Hindsight started talking about it. I don’t know what happened genuinely because I wasn’t around then and I didn’t know her and I was like only 10 years old or something at the time, but there’s something about this that’s at a deeper level that seems like it came out there in the lecture. And I wanted to note that because it’s an important contrast with what she was saying earlier about us, about people that use whole sign houses. Also, the Co-Star page didn’t say anything about it being the best form of house division. She’s again taking that jokey title of that old blow-off lecture of mine, and then she just applies it to anybody that ever says anything about whole sign houses. She tries to make it seem like they’re saying that it’s the best form of house division, and that all other systems of house division are bad or something like that, which is not accurate.
[plays video]
DH: Why would you be using whole sign houses? Why we should. Why are they the original? Why are they the best? And it all started off from Project Hindsight-
[pauses video]
CB: So this is fun. This is another slide that’s been lifted from- in the top right without attribution, my original whole sign house lecture from 2015. And then in the bottom right, I believe this is actually a tweet from Patrick Watson where he was summarizing some of my research. And he put some of the… I went through and counted up the number of charts that used whole sign houses versus other systems of house division, or that only recorded the rising sign and therefore only could have used whole sign houses. And I tabulated them and he put it in a graph and tweeted it at some point. And for some reason, that’s appearing here as a slide without any attribution, which doesn’t seem like a very good sort of academic convention.
[plays video]
D: -declaration. Their first really important project was to translate the work of Vettius Valens. And in ancient astrology, we get a few little random charts. But Valens’ work is the mother lode because that’s the one with all the chart examples in it. And so when they launched their translation, they were adamant from the start that Vettius Valens only used the whole sign systems, he didn’t use any other system.
[pauses video]
CB: That’s false. Already in Book Three, Valens introduces quadrant houses. He does have a bunch of example charts because he starts really going to town introducing example charts in Book Two of The Anthology. And all of those are in whole sign houses, because he’s usually just giving the rising sign with no degree as well as the planets with no degrees. So it’s only that you can only use whole sign houses in that context. But then when they translated Book Three, Valens does introduce quadrant houses when he starts talking about the length of life technique, and Hand and Schmidt acknowledge that and have an interesting discussion about the implications of that and different things.
So it’s really bizarre that she says that they were just trying to say that Valens only used whole sign houses when anybody that picks up a Project Hindsight translation of Valens knows immediately that that’s not the case. The only reason she can get away with this argument is that the Project Hindsight translations went out of print a decade or two ago and were never reprinted, so most people even if they have an interest don’t have access to them or haven’t read them. So she’s banking on the audience not actually following up on what she’s talking about.
[plays video]
DH: And they plotted that out right from the start. And then when they came across passages that they translated that didn’t seem to say that, it was like, “No, we got to try and put an epicycle on this because this doesn’t work.” You need to remember that that project was funded so that they would serialize the translations, so the first book that they translated was Book One. Book One of Valens is the one that gives you all the instructions on how to calculate. But the Project Hindsight translation of Book One is a very poor translation of that text.
[pauses video]
CB: Very important statement. So Deborah Houlding says that the Project Hindsight translation of the Greek text of Book One of Valens is a very poor translation. Deborah Houlding doesn’t know Ancient Greek. So she doesn’t actually have a very good basis for making this statement, but she’s making it nonetheless because of a rhetorical point that she’s going to try to make, where one of the things that Deborah Houlding has announced and seems to be saying that she’s going to do– and has already started, which I think she mentions at the end of this lecture– is she’s going to try to take quadrant houses or equal houses and superimpose them on Valens’s chart examples. And she starts building some sort of thing later in order to justify that, even though that’s literally going to be impossible because most of the charts don’t have a rising degree, and you can’t calculate quadrant or equal houses without the degree of the Ascendant if you only have the sign.
So I want to flag this though, because again, almost every little thing like this in her lecture where she says something like this, like the translation of Book One of Valens is terrible, and that she herself doesn’t have any real basis or background for being able to say that at least as far as a translator goes. The reason she’s saying that is because she wants to try to do something with Valens to use it to her own agenda, and this is part of the precedent for that that she’s going to start building up, is trying to make you think that Schmidt’s translation of Book One of Valens is terrible.
[plays video]
DH: And they even within the pages just pretty much say, “We don’t really understand what’s going on here.” So you know, they skimmed over certain passages and-
[pauses video]
CB: She’s really, really exaggerating if… Yeah, okay.
[plays video]
DH: -made it very clear to their subscribers, “But you know, this is the boring technical stuff, wait to get Book Two because we can start talking about the laws and the practical use of this stuff!” And then they really took off with Book Two and the other books.
[pauses video]
CB: So Book One of Valens is mainly preliminary stuff and he does introduce a bunch of calculations and different things like how to calculate the Ascendant or the Midheaven or different planetary things. He also introduces the significations of the planets, and at the end he introduces what it means when two or three planets are conjunct each other or in the same sign, which is a sign-based conjunction. And then in Book Two, that’s when he starts really introducing some of his primary interpretive techniques and that’s also when he starts introducing a lot of chart examples and demonstrating how these techniques work in practice.
I guess that’s why she’s sort of over-emphasizing this point because certainly Book One of Valens preliminary was more technique-oriented and is somewhat boring if you’re trying to learn techniques of astrology, and then Book Two is when you have the actual chart examples. But she’s sort of overstating the case about them not being interested in it or skipping over passages or whatever else, which isn’t really true at all.
[plays video]
DH: Yeah, the other arguments. The other arguments of why people say it was the oldest, the original. And very often you get people saying, “Where are the tables of houses, you know, if there was all these house systems.” There wasn’t even tables of houses until the seventh century.
[pauses video]
CB: I don’t really actually know who makes that argument and I’m not sure if I’m just not aware of something or if she’s making it up. I suspect she’s making it up but it’s like I don’t think objections about where’s the tables of houses is an argument that anybody that said whole sign houses existed in ancient times was really like a core argument, because Valens uses Porphyry houses and so you just trisect the quadrants into three portions, and you don’t really need advanced mathematical computations in order to do that. There already can be a recognition of quadrant houses, even without more complex tables of houses like there were in modern times to calculate more advanced quadrant systems like Placidus or something like that.
[plays video]
DH: And then the arguments’ being made that they must have been using whole sign houses because, you know, hardly any of the ancient horoscopes even had information about the Midheaven. And if you don’t have the Midheaven, how can you calculate the houses? So therefore they only gave the Ascendant degree, which means that they were only using whole sign houses and putting the Ascendant within it.
[pauses video]
CB: This is a really interesting thing that she does here at this point. It’s really crucial because this is becoming one of her core arguments. It’s a relatively new one that she has developed over the past couple of years but it’s one that seems superficially plausible and so I’ve seen a number of even traditional astrology students take it for granted because they think that it makes sense, but you don’t realize what she’s leaving out.
So Rob Hand, he got confident with whole sign houses by the late ’90s and he actually was using it in practice with clients. And he wrote a little two-part series in The Mountain Astrologer magazine in 1999 on whole sign houses, and then he turned that into a little booklet or a little monograph in 2000 titled “Whole Sign Houses: The Oldest House System” or something like that. And that was just a really basic work that was meant for astrologers to sort of present this little bit of the historical evidence for it, but also presented as an approach that contemporary astrologers might want to try out and some reasons for doing that.
But then in 2007, he did a more mature, purely historical paper that I think he originally presented at a conference among a group of academic historians that specialized in the study of ancient astrology who were not necessarily astrologers or practicing astrologers, but they were people that did work on the history of astrology and that all new ancient languages and different things like that and studied the text within the history of… Just history. Or history of science or what have you.
So he presented that paper and then he published it in 2007, and I’m forgetting the title but I think it’s “Signs as Places”. Just Google Rob Hand Signs as Places and you should find this paper on the Culture and Cosmos website because I believe it was published in the journal Culture and Cosmos in 2007.
In this paper, he proposed a unique thing in order to try to determine the frequency of the use of charts in the Hellenistic tradition, which is that he went through and counted up all of the charts, and he determined how often the degree of the Midheaven was mentioned. Once he did the tabulation, you end up coming to seeing that the degree of the Midheaven is very rarely mentioned in the Hellenistic tradition in the surviving charts. And one of the issues with that is that if the degree of the Midheaven is not calculated, then by extension, you can’t calculate quadrant houses because you need both the degree of the Midheaven as well as the degree of the Ascendant and the other two angles in order to trisect the arcs between the quadrants, basically.
So, this is actually a really good argument. What she does here is she develops an argument now saying that you don’t need… That once you know the degree of the Ascendant, you can calculate the degree of the Midheaven or you can infer the degree of the Midheaven approximately, especially if you know the place of birth in which the chart was cast. And there’s something to that argument, which is actually true if the premise was correct. But what she’s leaving out is that she’s making a false premise in saying that the degree of the Ascendant– the actual degree of the Ascendant, not just the sign– was known in all of the example charts.
But the reality that she’s about to proceed to leave out is that in the vast majority of charts in Valens as well as in other sources like Dorotheus or the standalone horoscopes that were discovered on their own, they didn’t record the degree of the Ascendant. They only have the sign of the Ascendant. So if you only have the sign of the Ascendant, you cannot infer or you cannot calculate the degree of the Midheaven. Yeah, and that’s it.
So it’s a totally bogus argument, but it’s based on her doing a bit of misdirection by saying that if you have the degree of the Ascendant then you can calculate the Midheaven. Which is true, but she doesn’t have the degree of the Ascendant in the vast, vast, I think it’s 95% of the charts in Valens actually. This was counted up earlier today by a friend of mine, Michael. 95% of the charts in Valens don’t have a degree of the Ascendant. So you can calculate them. She’s going to pretend that the majority of those charts do have a degree of the Ascendant and therefore you could calculate them, but that’s just a bit of misdirection, basically, in order to mislead the audience who she assumes won’t think through the argument to see if the premise is correct.
There’s another point to that as well, actually about the location of the birth, which is that one of the little funny things that she tries to do which is terrible is she tries to assume that she knows the location of all of the birth charts in Valens. And she tries to set it to Turkey, to modern-day Antioch or to a specific city, but one of the problems is that Valens didn’t just collect charts for his area or people he knew, but he sometimes would draw on charts from other collections from earlier astrologers from different parts of the Roman Empire.
For example, there’s at least one chart that’s been identified as the chart of a Roman Emperor. That would have been somebody that wouldn’t have been born near where Valens was born in Antioch, and it wouldn’t have been near where Valens eventually went to Egypt to Alexandria, but it would have been a different part of the Empire. So part of what she’s going to have to do, if she tries to impose quadrant houses on a bunch of Valens’s charts, is she’s going to have to pretend basically that she also knows the location of birth for those charts. Which she doesn’t, because the majority of them just tell you the planetary placements and they don’t give any further data about it.
So it’s a really obscure point that most people … I don’t know if everyone’s gonna follow that, but it’s really important for the future because I’m actually concerned that she’s going to try to … One of the things that she’s trying to do is she’s going to try to take Valens’s work and then basically disregard Valens’s own approaches and try to impose her approach from the 17th century on what Valens was doing in any way that she can just in order to make it look like whole sign houses wasn’t used in ancient astrology. And since Valens is– He’s not our only source, there’s actually a bunch of sources for whole sign houses in ancient astrology.
She’s over-emphasizing and overplaying the extent to which Valens is like the primary source or something. He is our most significant source because he has the most example charts and that’s why she’s targeting him because he’s our most important source for ancient astrology, but he’s not the only source for whole sign houses. The entire argument doesn’t rest on Valens and it never has and never did.
[plays video]
DH: Right. Okay, so what happened here was that they started off from the start declaring that there was only whole sign houses. Then Book Two and Book Three get translated and there’s passages within where it’s clear there’s use of quadrant systems going on here. I’m not-
[pauses video]
CB: Oh god, I forgot about this part. This is going to be a big section so I want to grab some more water and take another little break. This is turning into a marathon, I knew it would be, but thanks everyone for joining me tonight. Hope everyone’s having a good time. Lots of good discussions going on. Give me a few and I’ll be right back.
[Intermission]
All right, I’m back. Before I move on from that point, not to belabor the point but it’s worth revisiting so I can just illustrate what I mean by that. Here’s an example chart in Valens. These are the planetary placements that he gives. That’s all we have to work off of. And he just gives you the sign that the Ascendant is located in and then the sign that the rest of the planets are located in, but he still incorporates the houses into the delineation because he’s interpreting them primarily through their whole sign house placement. But there’s no degree of the Ascendant in this chart, so how you’re going to calculate the degree of the Midheaven if you don’t know the degree of the Ascendant? Ask yourself that. How? You don’t, basically. You don’t.
But she’s going to try to claim that you can even though that’s astronomically impossible. So that’s one chart. “So there’s one chart? Okay. So maybe you can’t in that chart. What if we scroll down? Oh! Oh, we’ve run into another chart that only has the sign of the Ascendant and no degree. How are we going to calculate the Midheaven degree in this chart if we don’t have the degree of the Ascendant?” We’re not, because that’s not what Valens was doing? “Well, at least it was only those two charts. Oh no, here’s another chart where we don’t have the degree of the Ascendant, so we can’t actually calculate the degree of the Midheaven.”
And if you just keep scrolling through Valens’s Anthology, you keep seeing all of these charts where 95% of the charts don’t contain a degree of the Ascendant. There are a few that do but they are not the vast majority of the charts and so you run into a real issue here with making this argument that she’s trying to make. And I’m pointing this out because this is one of those things that seems plausible on the surface like a new piece of information like, “Oh, you can calculate the Midheaven even if it’s not listed as long as you have the Ascendant degree,” she’s leaving out the point where we don’t actually have the Ascendant degree so the premise of the argument is not true.
[plays video]
DH: -comes up with a suggestion that, “Well, what they’re doing when they’re dividing by quadrant systems is they’re just giving a sense of strength to the planet.” But they were still using the whole sign houses for meanings. But that–
[pauses video]
CB: Right. So this was a thing that Schmidt proposed at least by 1996 because he wrote an essay talking about it in his preface to Ptolemy but he may have talked about it earlier in Book Three of Valens, where they were running into this issue where the majority of the time in the Hellenistic tradition, the different authors in their example charts were typically using whole sign houses, but then they’ll switch to using quadrant houses are equal houses sometimes when they’re trying to determine the predominator in order to do the length of life technique. Schmidt came up with the proposal that maybe part of what was happening was that they were using whole sign houses to determine topics or areas of life, but that the original use of the quadrant or the degree-based systems may have been to determine planetary strength or prominence.
Basically, it was an early attempt to reconcile, actually, the whole sign and the quadrant house systems. But I think this is why Schmidt and Houlding started arguing because the problem with this from Houlding’s perspective is that then the quadrant houses wouldn’t be used for the same purpose that she uses them for, which is that she uses them both for strength as well as topics.
And that’s what many of the later astrologers, especially in the late Hellenistic tradition by the time of Rhetorius and then in the medieval tradition and Renaissance tradition and forward, there was no distinction between topics versus strength. Everybody just picked the house system that they thought worked and that was the house system that you use. So I can understand why there would start to be some tensions there with this proposal because it was something that they were trying to work out, why there was this seeming discrepancy in the Hellenistic tradition of these multiple systems. And if they had a role for them or, because they were coming up within the context of the same author. The same author sometimes seemed to be using multiple systems.
And I can see why Houlding would have not taken kindly to some extent, but it’s still one of the points here though that she accidentally betrays, is that even though she said earlier that they weren’t paying attention to quadrant houses and they weren’t talking about it and they weren’t taking into account, she actually now has contradicted herself because she points out that Schmidt actually was talking about the use of quadrant houses in authors such as Vettius Valens or equal houses in the case of Ptolemy and so on and so forth.
Schmidt actually wrote a paper about this that you can actually Google. If you just do a search for House Division, Planetary Strength, and Cusps in Hellenistic Astrology, this is a reproduction of the essay on the different forms of house division in Hellenistic astrology that Schmidt wrote in 1996 in his preface to Book Three of Ptolemy. This was his early overview of the different systems of house division and his attempt to explain both some of the history as well as to attempt to reconcile how they were used.
And this is also important for people to read, because it’s just demonstration again that Project Hindsight was actively talking about this stuff and it was talking about the different systems of house division, it wasn’t trying to suppress them. Deborah Houlding just didn’t like some of the conclusions that they were coming to or some of the propositions that they were making about things, and that really was the core of everything, the core of all the subsequent disputes.
[plays video]
DH: -tell you how stronger a planet what … So that was a completely new theory that had never been heard of before, that you would do two kinds of houses; one to tell you how strong a planet is, and another one to tell you what it means in the houses.
[pauses video]
CB: Yeah, which was a new theory because they encountered this tradition of astrology where you had multiple astrologers that were using multiple systems of house division in the same work. And even though we weren’t used to that because that’s not the way it was done in the later tradition where things got kind of flattened out and people tended to just pick one form of house division and stick with it, things were different all of a sudden when we went back and started studying these ancient texts. So yeah, sometimes new observations and theories came out of that that weren’t common prior to that time, because we were recovering ancient techniques that hadn’t been used in a long time or ancient texts.
[plays video]
DH: It was all very uncomfortable for those of us that had a different scope on things.
[pauses video]
CB: Very uncomfortable for her in particular, and that’s the source of all of this. She started reacting super negatively to simple things that were being discussed like whole sign houses, and some of the discussions about the attempts to understand what the relationship was, if any, of whole sign houses to quadrant houses or equal houses. Which were perfectly fine discussions to have even if you didn’t agree with the conclusions, but it’s like for her, it was experienced as this super uncomfortable thing that part of her approach and her conceptualization of the houses was somehow being challenged.
[plays video]
DH: But Robert Schmidt never translated Book Nine. And he never had translated Book Nine, it just all got abandoned.
[pauses video]
CB: That’s a partial lie and a partial redirect, because in the essay on house division that I just mentioned and told people to Google which is from Robert Schmidt’s preface to Ptolemy Book Three, if you Google that– House Division, Planetary Strength, and Cusps in Hellenistic Astrology, you will find a section where Schmidt has an excerpt and translates an excerpt from Book Nine of Valens where Valens talks about the equal house system.
One of the things she tries to say is that this passage she’s about to read from Book Nine of Valens has never been known and nobody ever knew about it until 2010 when Mark Riley released his complete translation of Book Nine. And the kernel of truth to what she’s saying is that Robert Schmidt never published a complete translation of Book Nine but the problem with what she’s saying is she’s not telling you that Schmidt translated the portion that had to do with equal houses already in 1996. And she’s well aware of that because she actually quotes that passage in her book on the houses.
So the exact passage that she says that Schmidt never translated anything from Book Nine, she knows that’s not true because she actually has that passage quoted in her own printed work. Again, it’s one of those little things but there’s just so many things like this that add up. And that’s why I felt like I had to record this as a commentary because if I tried to just summarize the top five major things or the top 10 major things that are misleading about this lecture or that are false or not true or that are distortions, if I just tried to summarize and respond to a few things, you really wouldn’t understand the scope of what’s happening here and what she’s doing. And that’s the reason why I’m going to such great lengths to record this whole thing about it to give everybody the full context. Because otherwise, it’s like I would know that she did this and how many times she misrepresented things, but the vast majority of people wouldn’t otherwise know. So that’s why I’m doing this.
[plays video]
DH: -Mark Riley released his English translation to the public that we could all see that Mark Riley had translated Book Nine of Valens. And Book Nine is absolutely crystal clear, that you cannot believe that Vettius Valens only used whole sign houses. So some of the quotes from Book Nine where the system of the houses are taken back to the Egyptians and the ancient antiquity by Valens, and he tells us that they were discussed by the Chaldeans and Asclepius, who is very, very ancient source. And he describes the houses and how they start from the Ascendant and then he describes what they mean, and he tells us that these distinctions between the things indicated by the places are explained elsewhere, which is previously where he’s told us how to calculate it. And he tells us it’s necessary to calculate the positions of the places in degrees, and he tells us that often two places will fall on one side and will indicate both qualities so you might need to look at the ruler of both signs when you’re evaluating the matters of the house. If it is calculated that each place exactly corresponds to each sign in the chart as a whole-
[pauses video]
CB: Hold on a second. Something I forgot to mention here that’s actually really interesting and really not funny but not good. So she has this whole quote from Valens on the left side, right? And this is from Book Nine of Valens from Riley’s translation, and she’s emphasizing about how important this is and everything else. But she’s leaving something out and I’m pretty sure she’s actually doing this deliberately because I’ve seen it a few times in this lecture.
Book Nine of Valens, the most important piece of this is that in Book Nine in this passage that she’s quoting partially, she leaves out a paragraph. And the paragraph she leaves out is that Valens tells you how to calculate equal houses in this passage. And this is something that I didn’t realize until recently, Deborah Houlding is not just trying to suppress whole sign houses, she’s also trying to suppress equal houses for some bizarre reason. And she consistently is leaving it out in certain instances like here, because she also in addition to not wanting people to know that Valens used whole sign houses as his primary system, she seems more recently to be avoiding and downplaying equal houses. And this is actually something– I went back and reread her book recently on the houses, it’s actually something that she does in that book as well, where most of the book is dedicated towards the meaning of the houses and their significations down through history but at the end, she has some chapters on house division. In some of them, she’s arguing with Schmidt in those chapters without citing him or mentioning him most of the time. I realized later, I didn’t realize that until rereading it this week. But in those chapters when she outlines how to calculate the different systems of house division, she actually starts with quadrant houses. So instead of starting with the most obvious simple or even simplistic systems of whole sign houses and equal houses, she does it in reverse.
And I never understood. I had caught that before 10 years ago subconsciously, but I just thought it was a weird choice or stylistic thing. I didn’t realize that the reason why she’s doing that is because she also downplays them in the book and she, even going back to 2006, was trying to downplay both whole sign houses as well as equal houses. And even though she defines all the other system of house division and talks about their pros and cons and the different perspectives of them and gives a little historical tidbit about them, when she gets to the end of the chapter Whole Sign Houses and Equal, she just mentions them briefly in passing, lumps them both into the same sentence. And then she doesn’t even define them in the body of the text like she did with all the others, she relegates the definition of whole sign houses and equal houses to a footnote.
So she’s like, even back then in 2006, was so hung up on this idea that quadrant houses were the only real system of house division and whole sign houses and equal houses weren’t legitimate or whatever she thinks that she was already downplaying stuff in her book back then, but you don’t really realize it fully until you see it in the broader context of everything she’s doing here. One of the reasons I think she is deliberately omitting Valens or Valens’s outlining of equal houses in this chapter is I think that she is going to try to do the same thing she’s doing with whole sign houses, which she’s going to try to project quadrant houses onto this chapter of the book. But it would be too much of a detour for her to make that argument here in this lecture so she doesn’t, she just omits pointing out that Valens talked about equal houses in this passage. But I think we should take a look at it …
All right. This is from Riley’s translation of Book Nine of Valens. Here it is, it’s chapter three, the 12 places and their relationship to the propitious and unpropitious times. He outlines derivative houses or derived houses for the first time, which is really interesting. It’s one of the notable things about this chapter. I actually think I argued in my book that this chapter is actually Valens summarizing an earlier text attributed to Asclepius because this chapter has parallels with Firmicus Maternus where Firmicus Maternus has a very similar not just treatment in a chapter of his book, but also the sequence in which he treats things seems like he’s actually drawing on a similar source as Valens. And I think it’s this lost text of the Asclepius that doesn’t survive.
So he outlines derived houses and how to interpret them, and then eventually he gets to this passage where he says– and this is the passage that Deborah Houlding is quoting, this entire paragraph basically right here. But it’s really notable what she’s leaving out that she doesn’t want you to see. And what she doesn’t want you to see is that this passage has a pretty straightforward definition of equal houses. It says, “First of all, it is necessary to calculate the positions of the places in degrees: count from whatever point has been determined to be the Ascendant until you have completed the 30 degrees of the first place; this will be the Place of Life, which was the name of the first house. Then proceed until you have completed another 30 degrees, the Place of Livelihood. Continue in the order of signs.” And then it resumes with the passage that she’s talking about.
So every commentator, all the translators like Schmidt and Holden, James Holden, say that this is a clear example of equal houses. But for some reason, she seems to be omitting mentioning that in this instance, I think because she’s going to try to come up with an elaborate argument about how it’s actually quadrant houses. One of the questions, though, is if Valens outlines equal houses here, and he outlines quadrant houses in Book Three in the length of life technique, but then he uses whole sign houses in most of his chart examples, then what’s the deal here and what gives? And I think the answer and the answer that I presented in my book is I think that the Hellenistic astrologers had whole sign houses, which was often the basic method of calculating the houses or the 12 places, but then they would add on top of that, a degree based form of house division as a secondary overlay. And some of the Hellenistic astrologers used or preferred quadrant houses as their secondary overlay, whereas there’s other Hellenistic astrologers that preferred equal houses as their secondary overlay.
And I think what happens is that Valens actually preferred quadrant houses as his secondary overlay on top of whole sign houses, but in this passage because he’s actually summarizing from the text of this earlier author Asclepius, it includes this definition of equal houses that I think was in the original Asclepius text. And part of the reason I think that is because Firmicus right around the same parallel passage in the sequence of things, he also outlines equal houses at this point in his text. So I think Valens in different parts of his work, he talks about he’ll copy out or he’ll summarize different passages from different authors that he was reading, and he would take some of the techniques from some of those things or the things that he thought were important to record and pass on. But that doesn’t always necessarily mean he was using every single technique at the same time. And I think that’s part of what was going on here, or at least that’s the speculation or the way that I’ve kind of reconciled it.
Because one of the things that’s important to understand is that we don’t have a single example where Valens clearly and unequivocally used equal houses and drew out equal house cusps. But we do have at least one or two examples where Valens outlined Porphyry houses, quadrant houses, and outlined Porphyry house cusps. So as a result of that, as well as the fact that in the vast majority example charts he otherwise used whole sign houses, I think his preferred system was whole sign and quadrant, rather than whole sign and equal. Yeah, that’s the long part of that. But anyways, it just leads us back to this weird thing where for some reason if you look at Houlding’s stuff throughout this lecture, she’s kind of avoiding mentioning equal houses.
[plays video]
DH: So clearly, he’s not using whole sign houses because that would be the case every time. Then the native will be involved in-
[pauses video]
CB: So she draws from that. The conclusion she draws from this, and she’s been doing this for several years, where she’ll point to a passage in Valens where he outlines quadrant houses or she’ll point to a passage where he outlines equal houses and she’ll say, “Look, he’s defining quadrant houses or equal houses here, Therefore, he used that system of house division entirely and exclusively.” But the problem is she always does that and then hopes that you don’t look at the example charts. Because the problem is that once you start looking at the example charts in Valens, you very quickly realize that he’s using equal houses because he’s just using the rising sign and the sign of the other planets. So it’s really important to understand that context, though, going forward.
[plays video]
DH: confinement, violence, and entangling affairs. So he goes so far as to say, “If there is an equality of houses and signs, this is a bad-”
[pauses video]
CB: Oh, yeah. That’s really important. We have to back up to listen to that in detail.
[plays video]
DH: -both signs when you’re evaluating the matters of the house. If it is calculated that each place exactly corresponds to each sign in the chart as a whole, a circumstance which is rare, so clearly he’s not using whole sign houses because that would be the case every time. Then the native will be involved in confinement, violence and entangling affairs. So he goes so far as to say, “If there is any quality of houses and signs, this is a bad thing.” I guess one of the reasons why it could be a bad thing is because anybody that knows about the principles of the placement of cusps– if cusps are in very early degrees, that suggests change and disturbance or a very immature understanding of something. So for a historical astrologer to see all the house cusps in early degrees or any degrees, that’s loading it up with negative symbolism. But it’s absolutely clear that Vettius Valens did not only use whole sign houses, which was the whole premise that the whole argument got launched on in my-
[pauses video]
CB: I need to pause it. I need to back up a little bit because one of the things… She softens it in this lecture, but you have to be careful about it because what she does is there’s this passage in Valens at the end of the equal house discussion, where he starts to make this statement at the end of the paragraph, and she initially tries to spin it as if Valens is saying not to use whole sign houses. She tries to say it as if it’s Valens himself warning astrologers that something bad will happen to you if you use whole sign houses.
So this is… Let’s read the passage. It says, “If it is calculated that each place exactly corresponds to each sign in the chart as a whole as circumstances rare…” But then what happens is that actually the text becomes corrupted at this point and there’s a natal delineation from Book Seven of Valens that suddenly gets thrown into the text at this point, and it changes who it’s talking about and it starts giving a delineation of something bad happening in a person’s birth chart. And it says, “The native,” which is him referring to somebody that has a birth chart, “will be involved in confinement, violence and entangling affairs.” And then it goes on with this complete non sequitur where it continues giving natal delineation suddenly out of nowhere. And it says, “If the star of Mercury is associated with these chronocrators, these Time Lords (i.e with the sign of the Sun or with the signs belonging to the star of Mars), then the circumstance indicates that the attack or the confinement occurs because of documents. And so on.”
So what happens here, and Levente László has done an analysis of the Greek of this passage, and he’s pointed out that what happened was there was some natal delineations from Book Seven that was delineating a chart or some different planetary combinations. And the scribes accidentally… No, I don’t want the chart. There’s the text. Sorry, I didn’t have that. I was reading it but I wasn’t showing it on the screen. The point is that Levente László showed through analysis of the Greek text that there were some passages from an earlier book of Valens that some of the scribes who were copying Valens’ text in the Middle Ages, they accidentally copied over from the wrong page onto this page of The Anthology. So it’s a simple textual issue where the text obviously becomes corrupt at this point, which is obvious because it’s a total non-sequitur because it was talking about house division all the way up to this point. Unfortunately, we don’t actually know what the text was going to say beyond this point. Which is if it is calculated that each place exactly corresponds to each sign in the charts as a whole as circumstances rare, then the text breaks off and it suddenly starts giving a negative natal delineation that doesn’t make sense and comes from another part of the text.
A few years ago, Houlding was actually using this passage and telling people that Valens himself was warning astrologers not to use whole sign houses, which, you know, of course she was. But people have pushed back since that time including Greek scholars like Levente László and have pointed out that it’s just clearly that the text becomes corrupted, and that we’ve identified the passage that was copied from Book Seven into Book Nine. So she kind of softens and hedges a little bit here, even though she’s still emphasizing that passage and says, “Well, maybe it’s an interpretive thing or something like that, I don’t know.” But you should be aware of that argument because I suspect that they’re still secretly circulating that argument as one of their additional misleading ways to convince people that Vettius Valens himself, they say, was telling people not to use whole sign houses. Even though he does so in over 100 example charts. So clearly, that’s not true.
[plays video]
DH: -now. But at the time, it was because that’s what was assumed from the work of Vettius Valens. Now, Robert Schmidt at the end of his life did admit that, you know, did change his stance. And hopefully, this will play. I’ll just play one minute of Robert Schmidt speaking about a year before he died.
Sorry, just let me go back to that. I’ll just explain that. That was an interview with Eric Francis. And it was a two-hour interview and they were just closing and they were just about to end the interview, but they’ve just caught a little comment on the houses.
ERIC FRANCIS: The houses discussion is a beautiful one because it’s a topic dear to my heart and I think that it’s been overly simplified by the fundamentalist Republican classical astrologers.
ROBERT SCHMIDT: I am certain of that and, I mean, I’m partly responsible for the whole sign house movement. I mean, simply because we found all kinds of texts that were, you know, talking about whole sign places but you cannot conclude, from the prevalence of whole sign places in different texts that they were either the original system or the dominant system. In fact, that’s not really even true. There are, I mean there are all kinds of references to a system of equal places; Firmicus Maternus, Valens, this anonymous papyrus thing, another text that I’ve never published, Ptolemy. I mean, it’s all over the place. It has to be accounted for. Look, everyone is thinking so much, “Oh, well there [are] variant systems,” you know because we’ve got variant house systems today. That would be a…a Greek would never do that, ‘Oh, we’re going to have two completely different systems’? That would be a terrible flaw.
DH: Okay, I just wanted to make that point because that was Schmidt at the end of his life, and it was ringing a very different tune from the passion that the Project Hindsight message was delivered with, which was mostly taken up by Robert Hand. And Robert Hand is usually quoted as the person that gives the whole sign argument because he wrote a book-
[pauses video]
CB: Okay, I think she’s gonna move on at this point but we actually need to stop here for a minute because some important stuff just happened here, one of which I didn’t notice at first but a couple of other people did. One of them on Twitter after this lecture came out this week. An astrologer named SJ Anderson pointed out that Debra Houlding actually edited this clip together in a different way and pulled together separate sentences, and took out some important context of what Schmidt actually said in the process.
So he posted a screenshot that showed the beginning of the clip where Eric Francis says something about house division being over simplified by fundamentalist quote-unquote “Republican classical astrologers.” And then Schmidt starts to say in the clip, “I am certain of that.” But then everything after that in the actual original recording, original interview, there was a whole paragraph that gets cut out. Which was kind of a really weird edit in the way that then it removes an important piece of information about what Schmidt was saying.
So this is Deborah Houlding’s edited version of what Schmidt said. And then in bold, this is all of the stuff that got cut out in that, where Schmidt talks about how he actually gave a justification for the use of whole sign houses. He says, “I gave a justification for it. It’s just the interpretation of them is subtler than has been recognized. Just briefly: you’ve got a whole sign place, but you have to take into account the cusp of the equal place there, because it’s dividing the whole sign place into two completely different sectors, which have a completely different character.” And then it goes on with the part of the quote that Houlding quoted before about being partially responsible for the whole sign house movement.
So that’s, again, a little sketchy of a move there to edit something out of somebody, especially who died a few years ago, who isn’t here to defend himself or say that’s not okay or say what he was actually intending to say. And what you have to understand partially is… It’s actually really complicated because Houlding, Schmidt, and me were all intertwined in this, especially around 2015, and 2016. Because part of what happened is that I told you I gave that original whole sign house blow-off lecture in November of 2015. Deborah Houlding freaks out and calls me a liar. I thought I was extending an olive branch and I invited her to just debate it on the podcast, and I did and it did not go well. So Schmidt listened to that and then about six or seven months later in June of 2016, Schmidt suddenly releases this unexpected and very long and very elaborate workshop on house division, which ended up being his final treatment of the topic. And Schmidt actually says at the beginning of the workshop that he was motivated to do this after listening to the debate that Deborah Houlding and I had had the previous six months earlier in November of 2015.
So, what’s important is in the ’90s… We’ve already talked about it and Houlding has talked about how in the mid-90s in that house division paper that I mentioned of Schmidt from 1996, he talks about how there’s these three different forms of house division, which are whole sign houses, quadrant houses, and equal houses. So he’s talking about this in 1996 trying to figure out what the Hellenistic astrologers were doing with them, and then his proposal was that whole sign houses were used for topics and quadrant houses were used for strength. And this is how, in his mind at least, he thought that Hellenistic astrologers were able to use them in tandem, and why they would be showing up in the same authors at the same time. That was his proposal, but at the time he didn’t really know what to do with equal houses for a decade or two. And Schmidt could be very strong about saying, or sometimes even dogmatic about saying that he thought whole sign houses were meant to be used for topics like Valens does in the majority of his example charts, but that quadrant houses were meant to be used for just dynamic purposes and not for topics or areas of life.
So the big change that happened in 2016 is that Schmidt suddenly decided– not suddenly, but Schmidt announced that he thought that equal houses were also meant to be used for topics as a secondary overlay on top of whole sign houses. This was a departure from his previous like formulations in terms of what he thought Hellenistic astrologers did, or to him, what the original system of Hellenistic astrology was because he was convinced that it was invented by a singular founder or a small group of people. And that they created it as some kind of system at some point.
So one of the things that’s happening here is that Houlding, at this point when Schmidt made that change, she’s consistently tried to spin it so that Schmidt came around to her view somehow, or came closer to her view at the end of his life before he died. And what’s weird about that, which is not fully true because Schmidt in the end… One of the things that she seems to leave out consistently when talking about him in this is that Schmidt never in the end ended up saying that quadrant houses were meant to be used for topics. Instead, he restricted that to whole sign houses and equal houses. So fundamentally, Robert Schmidt and Deborah Houlding still fundamentally disagreed with each other on the topic of house division. And one of the things I don’t like now that he’s dead is that she’s consistently tried to say to people or tried to convey that somehow he eventually came around to her view, or something like that. One of the times that she did this that I felt was really inappropriate was shortly after Schmidt died. She had this post on Facebook that I felt like was kind of gloating about this and the fact that Schmidt came around to her views on house division towards the end of his life, which wasn’t really true, ultimately, and was an example of the extent to which even when somebody’s passed away, that you still want to want to be respectful. And bringing up the debate that you had with that person a decade or two earlier and claiming that they somehow agreed with your position now isn’t really the case. This is that Facebook post from right around when Schmidt died in 2018 that I found the other day, just to remind myself and make sure of that.
So that’s part of the context, additionally, of what’s happening here by playing this clip that’s partially been edited. She’s trying to spin it to make it look like Schmidt came around to her view much more than he did. And the one thing about this clip that is not great in a way is that Schmidt did actually– kind of what he was doing actually, if you understand the context, was kind of making a dig at me by saying that whole sign houses somehow wasn’t the most prominent or the original system of house division. Which is something I had been saying and he heard me saying in the debate with Deborah Houlding, so basically the only reason that statement is in there is to kind of take a shot at me. And I wrote him an angry email afterwards saying, “You know that’s not true. You know the majority of the evidence in the surviving horoscopes uses whole sign houses. And using this as an opportunity due to the personal issues of me going my own way with Hellenistic astrology to take a shot while I’m having this debate with Houlding is not going to be good for your legacy, because she’s going to use this at some point against you.” And that’s what’s happening right here in using that clip.
And one of the things that’s really important that I would encourage people to do if they’re curious about Schmidt’s views, this was just an interview that he was doing that was like a blow-off interview while he was doing a publicity tour to promote his Actual House Division workshop. So if you actually want to hear Schmidt’s actual views on House Division, this isn’t really it. You need to listen to that workshop, which was this very elaborate treatment of his conceptualization or his reconstruction of how he thought the original founder of Hellenistic astrology utilized these three systems together. And fundamentally, my issue with his reconstruction of that and why he’s saying what he said in that clip is that it’s predicated on the idea that there was for sure one singular founder of Hellenistic astrology, which he eventually named at one point and tried to claim it was Eudoxus, which I don’t think ultimately was a plausible scenario. But you have to understand that Schmidt’s statement about that is tied up with his notions about there being the singular founder of Hellenistic astrology. And that’s why he says it’s not really true that it’s like the original house system. Because for him, by that point in 2018 or 2016 or whatever, the original house system was all three of these systems used together at the same time. So it gets kind of complicated, there’s obviously a backstory here, but I’m just explaining it because there’s all this background stuff that if you don’t understand the context of all the different debates that were going on between the three of us, you don’t really understand why certain statements are being made that seem otherwise counterintuitive. But to use Schmidt at this point in order to achieve the goal of quadrant house supremacy is just a weird thing to do at this point in time and an inappropriate thing, especially if you’re going to edit clips of him saying stuff. Put him in the full context of what he actually said.
[plays video]
Schmidt: That would be like a terrible flaw.
DH: Okay, so I just wanted to make that point because-
[pauses video]
CB: Oh, yeah. It would be a terrible thought, that’s the actually important point. Schmidt says… Let me find the transcript. He says there’s these different systems, and he says, “I mean, it’s all over the place. It has to be accounted for. But everyone was thinking so much, ‘Oh, they’re variant systems,” and he means of house division. And then he says, “Because we’ve got variant house systems today,” but then he says, “But that would… A Greek isn’t going to do that. We’re going to have two completely different systems. I mean, that would be like a terrible flaw.” So that’s the important context of Schmidt. It’s like in Schmidt’s thinking at the end of his life where he has this singular founder theory, he doesn’t, at that point, like the idea that they would have had different systems that were just variant systems. And he doesn’t think his original founder or the Greeks would have done that. So he thinks that they have to be reconciled with each other and all three of them have to have a special place in the system, which is appealing conceptually, but I don’t actually think that’s necessarily what happened in ancient astrology. I think there were just these three different approaches to house division. The astrologers did try to sometimes reconcile two of them together, but I don’t think there was a singular system that somebody came up with that had everything together at one point in time, necessarily. And Schmidt’s views and comments have to be understood in that context.
[plays video]
DH: -Schmidt at the end of his life, and it was a very different tune from the passion that the Project Hindsight message was delivered with. Which was mostly-
[pauses video]
CB: It’s not that much of a different tune if you listen to the actual House Division workshop where he’s still primarily saying whole sign houses is like the primary system of house division, and you’re just using equal houses and quadrant houses on top of it.
[plays video]
DH: -taken up by Robert Hand. And Robert Hand is usually quoted as the person that gives the whole sign argument because he wrote a book defending it. And I think that it has to be borne in mind that Robert Hand’s book is an argument in favor of the argument that he made himself. It is not a book written by somebody that is critiquing the argument, but he was the person that proposed the system, and his book is written with many points that are slanted towards supporting what he wants to say. And one of the big things he–
[pauses video]
CB: Really important point, though. She attributes Rob Hand, she says Rob Hand proposed the system. And this is a really important point as she’s trying to allege that Rob Hand is the one that introduced or came up with the idea of whole sign houses, which is a really weird and wild, but it’s one of the underlying—It’s probably her second most important underlying thesis of this talk, that whole sign houses was invented out of thin air in the 1990s by Project Hindsight, and principally by Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt. Which is in the context of all the evidence at this point, a really not plausible claim to make. I think I have a slide where I have the quote, just to emphasize what was just said. Maybe hold on just a second… We’ll let it go. But the point is that she’s just said that Robert Hand proposed whole sign houses but as we’ve seen, that’s not true, but that is one of her central thesis that she tries to make in this in this talk and that she’s trying to spread around. She’s trying to blame Robert Hand for whole sign houses existing basically.
[plays video]
DH: -You know, the arguments that he made was the issue about the Midheaven, and he did a whole database of how many times a chart uses the Midheaven. And this proves that they must have been using whole sign houses. So let me just tell you a little bit about—I don’t know. Yeah. We’ll just let that table land for a moment. This is an indication of where we are in the modern age, that we now have tables of houses for whole signs. Anyway, yeah. So going back, I think I’m losing my place a little bit. I want to show you… What do I want to show you here? There it is. Yeah, I just don’t want people to think that I’m just sitting here, I’ve got no real investment. You know, I don’t translate Greek, and that’s true. But as I said, I’ve had a very, very long, sincere interest in ancient works even before Project Hindsight started. And-
[pauses video]
CB: She acknowledges that she doesn’t translate Greek. Contrast that with the earlier statement that Schmidt’s translation of Book One of Valens, according to her, was a terrible translation.
[plays video]
DH: What I’m showing you here is work that I haven’t yet been able to publish, but it’s the annotated edition of Mark Riley’s translation of Vettius Valens, where what I bring to the table is not a knowledge of Greek but I bring an overview of placing it into older works, contemporary works, later works. And what I wanted to deal with-
[pauses video]
CB: Especially later works, where she’s going to try to project Lilly’s approach back into Valens. And one of the things she’s going to do here with this addition of Valens, and you can see it in this chart that’s already up on the screen, is she’s going to try to convert all or as many of Valens’s example charts to quadrant or equal houses as she can. She’s already stated this is her intention and some of her students have been saying that this is possible and she’s told me that you can convert all of Valens’s charts to quadrant or equal or whatever. But the problem with this that she doesn’t tell people is that without the degree of the Ascendant, you can’t actually, at least in an intellectually honest way, impose equal or quadrant houses on over a hundred of Valens’s chart examples that don’t have a degree of the Ascendant.
[plays video]
DH: -work on Book One. As I said, Book One, Project Hindsight, they almost brushed through it and just don’t really understand what’s happening here, he must be making mistakes blah blah blah blah. Nobody has made a good job of interpreting Book One. I armed myself with the Project Hindsight version, the Andrea Gerhrz version, the Mark Riley version, every extract that I could find and studied them all. I beat my head against the wall so many times because I could not understand what was being said. But I had some kind of compulsive obsession disorder that made me not be able to turn away from this work until I understood what he was trying to say. And so in annotating this, what I realized was that Valens gives the full set of instructions that you need to calculate the chart in full. And because we don’t understand the methods, it seems that we don’t know how to do it. But we have to. He doesn’t provide the tables, but he gives you the instruction within this work so that you know how to calculate your own set of tables. And then following his formula, you don’t get everything you need to calculate a full chart. I hope to have this available probably early next year-
[pauses video]
CB: To calculate an Ascendant and Midheaven. He outlines how to calculate the Ascendant in the Midheaven in Book One. And then later in his example charts, you need to know how to calculate the Ascendant to establish the whole sign house or at least establish any of the houses. He uses example charts with whole sign houses in a hundred examples. He introduces quadrant houses in Book Three. She’s going to try to take that basically and exaggerate it into saying that Valens was using quadrant houses in the entire Anthology.
[plays video]
DH: -for free release so everybody can see it. But if you follow what he’s saying, and that’s all I’ve done on this is just follow his instruction. And I would-
[pauses video]
CB: I don’t know about… I don’t think so. That’s one of the problems is that when you start imposing stuff on the chart examples, I think that was a tell that she actually knows that she’s imposing external ideas onto the chart examples. Because you start putting them in house systems or including things that Valens doesn’t mention in the text specifically when he outlines each chart example. Because one of the things Valens does is sometimes he’ll use the same chart multiple times in the text, but sometimes he’ll only show you, for example, three planets if he’s just calculating something that only requires those three planets. But then later, he might use the same chart example and he’ll introduce other planets or other points in that chart that are relevant to the example.
So Valens tends to be pretty consistent in that every time he introduces a new chart, he’ll tell you exactly what points you’re supposed to know about that are in that chart for the purpose of learning and teaching and understanding his example. And he doesn’t mention things that he’s not including in the chart or that are not relevant. But what she’s going to try to do is she’s going to try to go back and insert stuff that Valens didn’t say in the text, which is actually a kind of gross way to deform the text or to change it in order to suit her agenda of getting rid of whole sign houses.
[plays video]
DH: -say that I am not a mathematical genius in any sense. I can add, I can subtract, I can multiply, and divide. I don’t understand anything technical beyond that. One of the reasons I love Valens’s work is because once you understand what he’s trying to say, it makes it easy. And suddenly, “Oh my goodness, I get it! I can do it. I can actually do this myself. I can actually, just knowing a few basic principles, calculate where everything is. I don’t need a computer. I don’t even need an ephemeris.” So this idea of where are the tables of houses, they were-
[pauses video]
CB: The whole reason she’s being so over the top about this and saying she loves Valens… She doesn’t really care about Valens. She’s really a Lilly person and a Renaissance person and that’s her primary astrologer. That’s her favorite astrologer and she’s never shown any particular interest in Valens or his techniques or, you know, doesn’t use things like zodiacal releasing or some of the other things taught in his text. The reason why she’s being a little over the top here about saying how easy it is and how much she loved learning how to do this from Valens is because she’s trying to set up and predicate an argument to justify how she’s going to start superimposing quadrant houses and the whole sign houses, or quadrant houses and equal houses potentially, although it’s like I saw one of the charts that almost look like she cast it an equal houses here, but I think she’s going to try to superimpose quadrant houses on this chart. And she’s setting up her basis or rationale or sort of excuse, essentially, for doing so.
[plays video]
DH: –in every word. They were in Ptolemy’s Almagest. They were in Firmicus’s work where he gives the table of rising signs. They were in Valens where he gives the table of rising signs. And-
[pauses video]
CB: Table of rising signs aren’t necessary in order to calculate the Ascendant, so it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no dispute about them calculating the Ascendant.
[plays video]
DH: -tells us how to use it. Until in the end, what we end up with– and this chart here is my version of the chart that he’s instructed us to calculate. And we know that this is the chart-
[pauses video]
CB: So what’s really interesting here is even though she’s talking about Book One and she’s purportedly flipping through a chapter of Book One of Valens, the diagram she shows in the bottom right is similar to the quadrant house diagram that Valens outlines in Book Three. So she’s conflating the one or two quadrant house examples that Valens uses in Book Three, and she’s pulling it into Book One for some reason. And she’s additionally recalculating the chart in a modern format in the top right corner in order to additionally convey the idea that Valens is constantly using quadrant houses. But it ends up being pretty misleading if you actually look through carefully and draw out the rest of the chart examples exactly as Valens describes them.
[plays video]
DH: -but later on in the later book he describes it in full. And this is drawn on a computer and this is the one that’s calculated just using the references that he gives us in his text. So that was an eye opener to me that there is nothing we’re lacking. And if I can return to my PowerPoint… Yeah, so what happened was when I realized this, there was something very strange happened. I was there watching the arguments about people saying, “But they didn’t know the Midheaven so they couldn’t do it.” And I said, But do you know what?”
[pauses video]
CB: It’s not just that they didn’t list the Midheaven, it’s that they didn’t often list the Ascendant degree. Like the chart that she’s actually showing right there down in the bottom and in the middle, most of the charts don’t have an Ascendant degree and you can’t calculate the Midheaven. So again, she’s misstating what the actual arguments are.
[plays video]
DH: Valens has told us we don’t need to know the degree of the Midheaven, the only thing you need to know is the Ascendant degree. That’s all you need to know.
[pauses video]
C: Ascendant degree. Ascendant degree, you do need to know that. But we don’t know that for hundreds of chart examples.
[plays video]
DH: -the Ascendant degree and the latitude. Then you use the rising-
[pauses video]
CB: And the latitude, which involves assuming the locations in a bunch of example charts that you don’t for sure know the location for.
[plays video]
DH: -and you get the Midheaven. And it’s as easy as anything once you have constructed your own table. And I did a little experiment on Twitter when I was just like, “I’ll just test this out. Somebody give me an Ascendant, let’s say Turkey, you know? Any day of the year, any time, any day, any month. Give me an Ascendant and I’ll tell you.” People thought I was psychic because I was returning with the information. So let me just stress this. I was really surprised… I think I’ve lost my relevant… Oh, this is the slide where I was having the conversation. And I was at that stage thinking, “Wow, this is amazing. I didn’t know that you could do this.” And you can all do it. So here’s a little test for you all. You all know where you were born and you all know what your Ascendant is. Now, you think that Midheaven is the Midheaven you have at that time in place. No. Take the place you were born and put your Ascendant, the degree of your Ascendant, any day of the year, any day of the year, any month, any day of the year… You will still have the same degree on the Midheaven.
So if somebody tells me what their Ascendant degree is and I know where they’re born, I can tell them with precision what their Midheaven is. And I only know that because I have worked through the text of Valens. And that came like, “Whoa, I didn’t know this could be done.” Paul Kiernan, who had also independently done his own study, was the one that made it clear to me that, “Actually, yeah. It works in his text. But don’t you know that you can computerize it so it works with precision? Because it is a reliable astronomical principle.” So we can forget about the fact that they didn’t know the Midheaven. It was like, I don’t need to tell you that Leo is the fifth sign from Aries. You know the zodiac and I will tell you it’s the fifth sign, figure it out. You can know that, you don’t need to put me into tables.
[pauses video]
CB: She said do a little test, once you know your Ascendant degree then you can calculate your Midheaven degree. So here’s a test also for you. If you don’t have your Ascendant degree but you only have your Ascendant sign, tell me how to calculate the Midheaven. The answer is you can’t, so it completely demolishes the entire argument that she’s making at this point about Valens inferring or expecting the reader to infer the degree of the Midheaven and then construct quadrant houses in all of his example charts. All right, that’s the end of this section. I think this is going to start going quicker once we get past this point. I’m going to take a little bit of a break and then we’ll come back in like five minutes.
[Intermission]
All right, let’s finish this.
[plays video]
DH: -very deceptive. And when this book was published, it was published with charts included. [crosstalk] So we can forget about the fact that they didn’t know the Midheaven. It was like, I don’t need to tell you that Leo is the fifth sign from Aries. You know the zodiac and I will tell you it’s the fifth sign, figure it out. You can know that, you don’t need to put me into tables. Now, another thing about this is the presentation that we give to charts is very deceptive. And when this book was published, it was published with charts included that was set up in the whole sign system, making it look like all the ancient charts were set that way. We have hardly any images of Asian charts. And none of the example-
[pauses video]
CB: What’s ironic as she’s saying this is that the chart down there in the bottom middle is the one from the Project Hindsight–-I think it’s from Valens, but it could… Yeah, it’s from Valens, in that format where they did that kind of square star format matches, ironically, one of the later Greek horoscopes that she’s showing there in the top left. So it’s interesting that she’s criticizing that format that they chose, because it actually matches one of the historical documents that she actually has on this slide.
[plays video]
DH: -in Valens’s work were showing chart graphics. None of them. They were just text examples and comments. So he’d be saying like, “Okay, so imagine the Ascendant is in Aries at this degree, then you’re gonna have this part in this degree.” You know, little snippets of details, but not illustrated charts.
[pauses video]
CB: So one of— the kernel of truth or partial truth of what she’s saying here is that in the surviving manuscripts of Valens, we just have the text. And any diagrams or tables that were originally in Valens’s text have largely fallen out of it after it was copied over for many centuries by scribe after scribe, and in the few manuscripts of Valens that survives. So what we have in Valens is when he introduces a chart example, it’s written out in text and he tells us what the placements are, basically. Which then either the student is supposed to imagine, which Riley told me is what he did when he was translating it, which I was actually kind of surprised about that he could just imagine it in his head entirely, or you’re supposed to draw it out yourself.
We don’t actually know if the original manuscript of Valens contained illustrations because it actually very well may have, and I suspect that it did because other astrological works like Dorotheus, for example, do seem to still contain illustrations or diagrams for the chart examples. And they’re in, interestingly, a square format. Yeah, square format which somewhat ironically for the argument Deb is making right now, this is the square format from the Ascella edition which was taken from Pingree’s publication of Dorotheus, which again kind of validates the Project Hindsight choice to put them in that format.
So we don’t know if Valens’s original manuscripts contained illustrations or diagrams. They very well may have or they may not have. We don’t know, it could go either way. And that square chart format is fine, so are circular charts as she’s showing down here in the bottom right with a circular chart that was discovered– although interestingly, that’s a whole sign chart because it lists the sign of the Ascendant, and then the sign of the other planets around the wheel. So what she’s doing here is she’s partially justifying her decision to put it in circular chart format, which is fine because I kind of did the same thing because they were both square formats and circular formats. But one of the things she’s trying to do is undermine or criticize putting diagrams in the text, and accusing other people of distorting the examples in their presentation of it. But she’s actually doing that. It’s a bit of projection because she’s doing that as a precursor to creating her own diagrams, and then trying to superimpose quadrant houses on Valens’s whole sign house examples. That’s why she’s setting it up. She’s accusing others of doing what she’s about to do.
[plays video]
DH: -piece of graffiti from an ancient astrologer in classical times. And the diagram up here is the oldest dated visual representation of a chart that we possess. This was for a chart dated to 478. And this is my English transliteration of it and it is drawn according to the Porphyry house system. That is the first one that we have. We simply do not have representation of charts from that period. If I was to draw a chart like that, it would be more in keeping because it’s got an upright Midheaven and it’s got the Midheaven at the top, than, you know, than something-
[pauses video]
CB: Okay, she’s trying to justify why she’s going to superimpose her preferred quadrant presentation of charts using that modern style in the bottom left, even though she has just demonstrated that in the bottom right there’s a simple whole sign chart, or in the top one there’s a more elaborate star chart.
[plays video]
DH: -and this is my English transliteration of it and it is drawn according to the Porphyry house system. That is the first one that we have. We simply do not have representation of charts from that period. If I was to draw a chart like that, it would be more in keeping because it’s got an upright Midheaven and it’s got the Midheaven at the top, than, you know… than something like… Maybe I’ll show it later.
Sorry, did someone have a question? Oh no, that was Robert Schmidt’s recording, sorry. [laughs]
Okay, so this idea that there was this lack of technical knowledge in the ancient period would have been horrifying to Vettius Valens. I am absolutely sure that Valens would be turning in his grave if he knew how much his work was being simplified and bastardized to make an argument that was completely opposite to what he would make in his own work, where he cares about serious attention and getting details right.
[pauses video]
CB: This part drives me so crazy when she starts projecting and talking about other people bastardizing Valens’s work when the entire thing that she’s trying to do here is ignore the primary system. It’s not the only system of house division that Valens uses, but to ignore the primary system that he uses in the majority of his example charts and to superimpose another system on that, and to try to convince people that Valens wasn’t doing what he demonstrated very clearly that he was doing and she’s trying to claim other people are bastardizing his work, that’s one of the most notable pieces of projection in this entire lecture.
[plays video]
DH: This is an example from Greek Horoscopes where they’re explaining how to calculate the degrees [that can trip] the 12 loci, which is the 12 houses. And this is somebody explaining how Ptolemy did it. Now when you follow the instruction in this, you actually get what we call the Alcabitius house system. The Alcabitius house system was known as that because he used it and he was a popular Arabic astrologer, but it was known to be used much more anciently. And most of the ancient astrologers knew it as the standard system. Al-Biruni talks about it all… It’s either the standard system or the common system of using houses. So basically in the ancient period, you’ve got Porphyry, which is the widely-known method because it’s very easy to divide. You get the angles and then you divide the space between them by simply dividing them by three. Or if you want to be more technical, then you would you refer to Ptolemy’s Almagest and then you would be able to work out the hour circles and you would divide the cusp more exactly. So, no, whole sign houses are not the oldest houses.
[pauses video]
CB: I think I skipped something. Yeah. She pulls out this example…
[plays video]
DH: by simply dividing them by three. Or if you want to be more technical, then you would you…
[rewinds video]
DH: So basically in the ancient period, you’ve got Porphyry, which is the widely-known method because it’s very easy to divide.
[pauses video]
CB: Yeah, that’s what it was. In this example, it’s actually funny. I don’t know if she comes back to it and that’s why I was waiting to see is she talked about it more. But she puts up this example and in the footnote, because she uses this as an example of like, “Well, the Greek astrologers showed how to calculate this quadrant house system, Alcabitius.” And then she tries to universalize this to say, “So, of course, they all preferred quadrant houses or they all in the Hellenistic tradition used quadrant houses.” But what’s funny about this is in the footnote, Neugebauer and Van Hoesen say this is from Rhetorius. Why that’s funny is because Rhetorius… Something that Deborah Houlding doesn’t want you to know while she’s emphasizing this passage from Rhetorius is that in chapter 113 of Rhetorius, he actually has an example chart. And it’s titled The Nativity of a Grammarian. I have a print version of this from Holden’s translation, I’ll put it up on the screen as well. If anybody has it, look to page 159 of James Holden’s translation of Rhetorius of Egypt. So when you do that, when you get to 159 if I can get there… There it is, The Nativity of a Grammarian. Here it is, pulling that on screen. There you go.
This is a chart where Rhetorius gives this elaborate example and this is from James Holden’s translation. He says, “This man was born at Thebes, a poor grammarian for 32 years. But from age 33, having married, he began to rise at Athens. And then fleeing into Byzantium, he attached himself to a great man, and representing himself as a wizard or priest, he became a quaestor, then a consul, then a patrician, and after this, as a traitor, he was killed in a military fortress at age 44 and one sixth.” [chuckles] And he is like, “And also, he was lewd.” So he’s not a fan of this guy. But he seems to know a lot about his life. So, Rhetorius outlines the placements first. He tells you the positions in the birth chart. And then he says, “Investigating the foregoing nativity, I found the Moon and Saturn and Venus and Mars by degree to have been cadent. But by sign, the Moon and Saturn and Venus are angular.” So what Rhetorius does in this example, is Rhetorius switches back and forth between whole sign houses and quadrant houses. And he keeps telling you what the placements are by sign versus by quadrant, because he’s taking both into account.
So he goes on, “And the Sun and Mercury and Jupiter by sign to have been cadent, but by degree the Sun chanced to be in the succedent of the Descendant.” And he goes on and he talks about Saturn and starts giving different interpretations basically. But my point here is that even though Deb wants to use this example from Greek- [crosstalk] She wants to use this example from Greek Horoscopes as an example of the Hellenistic astrologers using quadrant houses. The part that she’s leaving out is that the author that this passage is drawing from clearly illustrates both using quadrant houses and whole sign houses at the same time.
So again, it’s not always just about— One of the things everyone should learn from this lecture and this commentary when you’re sometimes watching people make arguments, is that you have to consider not just what the person is saying and what they’re putting in, but also what they’re leaving out of their argument. And unfortunately, sometimes when it comes to like persuasive arguments or somebody that’s really dead set on arguing a certain point, one of the not good things that sometimes like habits that people can fall into is not admitting the parts of their argument that are weak or where there’s an exception to what they’re saying. So here she is drawing on Rhetorius and she’s emphasising the part of his work where he talks about quadrant houses, but she’s leaving out that part where he also talks about whole sign houses at the same time.
[plays video]
DH: -be more technical, then you would you refer to Ptolemy’s Almagest and then you would be able to work out the hour circles and you would divide the cusps more exactly. So, no, whole sign houses are not the oldest house system. They’re not the original. The symbolism of the houses comes from the symbolism of the sky and the symbolism of time. And the use of houses-
[pauses video]
CB: So she hasn’t established or substantiated what she just said as well. She didn’t substantiate that it’s not the oldest system, nor has she substantiated that it wasn’t the most common or prevalent system in the Hellenistic tradition either, the most popular system. She didn’t deal with any of the evidence that she could have dealt with in order to try to go after that argument. She’s just made a bunch of misleading arguments that are meant to rhetorically make you think that she’s just demonstrated or proved that. And evidently, a number of people walked away from this lecture earlier this week being like, “Wow, she disproved whole sign houses.” But in reality, like you’ve just been, everybody’s just been misled at this point or kind of duped.
And she hasn’t even fully engaged in, you know, some of the people that actually outlined the evidence that she would have had to encounter or would have had to engage with and would have had to dispute, if that was really what she was trying to do, is have an honest historical argument about these things. I kind of laid the gauntlet down in my chapter on House Division in my book because I knew she was making arguments like this and because she had challenged me after I gave a much more casual lecture about whole sign houses and its history. So I was like, “Okay, I’ll validate. I will substantiate my case next time I do this.” And that’s what I did in my book. So that was the challenge that she then had before her if she wanted to make a counter argument and substantiate her case, but unfortunately she hasn’t done that and that’s not what this lecture represents. All she was able to do for the most part was resort to misdirection and smoke and mirrors and stuff like that.
[plays video]
DH: -assume is as old as the knowledge of time itself. Now, I wrote a book about the symbolism of the houses. And one of the reasons why I felt compelled to write that book was because there was such a mesh at the time of astrologers thinking that the meaning of the houses came from the meanings of the signs of the zodiac. So the first house means what Aries means, what Mars means… You know, there’s no differentiation. So I wrote the book to say the zodiac has its set of symbolism, the houses has its set of symbolism. And they unite in interpretation, but one doesn’t originate the other. They are separate, symbolic constructs. And when we’re–
[pauses video]
CB: She is conflating the whole sign house system with the natural zodiac or whatever it’s called when people associate Aries with the first house and Taurus with the second house and so on and so forth, which are completely separate issues here and it’s not really relevant in terms of this talk. And I saw some people be confused afterwards about why she started talking about this at this point and if she was thinking they were connected or something.
[plays video]
DH: -looking at the houses, we’re bringing in the symbolism of the local space. So it’s a different form of logic. And-
[pauses video]
CB: So she’s outlining her conceptualization of the houses at this point, which is entirely predicated on the diurnal rotation and the local space. And she has a hard time, she doesn’t conceptualize the houses at all as being connected to things related to the zodiacal signs, which is the conceptualization that some of the early Hellenistic astrologers seem to have had in terms of using whole sign houses, or even indeed in terms of how some of the contemporary practitioners of astrology use and conceptualize whole sign houses as the house system being connected partially through the zodiac through the rising sign at the time that’s rising over the Eastern horizon and setting up a sequence of 12 sectors, and that some of the meanings of the houses are then an extension of or related to the relationship between the rising sign and the other signs of the zodiac through whole sign aspects and the affinity or lack of affinity between the rising sign and the other 11 signs of the zodiac relative to it.
So, one of her things is that she’s entirely conceptualized the houses purely based on the diurnal rotation, and is unable or is unwilling to think about the houses outside of that from any sort of different perspective. That’s part of the the hang-up I think that she has here when it comes to this issue is because she has tied her conceptualization of the houses so closely to her specific quadrant house framework and how that works. She has this sort of inability to look at it from the perspective of how somebody that uses this other system might work and how they might conceptualize it, and so on and so forth. So that becomes kind of important here because of how she ends up ending the lecture here in just a few.
[plays video]
DH: And when I wrote the book, it was very controversial because at that time I wasn’t singing the popular song that Aries is the first house. But I got those ideas—there was nobody else that had written that material in that way. I got that from the study of traditional texts, from ancient Babylonian astrology, from knowledge of ancient Etruscan liver divination, of knowing that certain qualities attached to the West, they rise into to the East, that planets gain in strength as they culminate in the sky, that as they get past the angle, they become cadent-
[pauses video]
CB: She keeps switching back and forth between talking about that natural zodiac thing versus the house division thing and the meaning of the houses. And she said her book was controversial when it came out. I wasn’t around then, but the only thing that I know and have heard was controversial is that her and Schmidt got into some sort of debate about it. And Schmidt wrote a negative review of her book, and you can kind of I think I almost see them going back and forth a little bit in some TMA articles because he refers to her book at one point in a not very favorable fashion in a footnote. And I think that was some sort of exchange between them in the 1990s, but that primarily had to do with house division. Because he was sort of dissing her book, and then in the second edition of her book that came out in 2006, you can see her kind of dissing him without naming him—-again, these are all sneak, indirect references, but if you read most of the house division stuff, especially the stuff that has to do with Ptolemy, it’s Deb having a debate with Schmidt indirectly. And that’s why she’s defending things or she’s referring offhand to certain unnamed scholars and different things like that. I think that’s the only thing that was controversial about her book was that she was kind of defending and promoting quadrant houses while also downplaying equal and whole sign houses at the same time.
[plays video]
DH: They lose their strength. And that all these details about culmination and foundation, all the symbolic principles are related to the strength of position in the sky. So you can’t separate strength of position from the meaning, because it generates the meaning. So recently, I saw a post on-
[pauses video]
CB: This point is really important because increasingly in the second part of this lecture, the later part of this lecture, it stops being a historical lecture and increasingly just becomes her conceptualization of how the houses work based on the quadrant houses, and her rationale for why whole sign houses doesn’t make any sense. And this is really important because then you realize once you get to the end of this lecture, the note that she ends on is one of explaining why she doesn’t prefer to use it and doesn’t think it’s a valid house system in her personal practice. And at that point you realize that that’s actually been the motivating factor and that was the point of this entire lecture. It was never about the historical stuff, ultimately, it all comes from a place of personal preference. Which would be fine if she was just talking about a lecture on this of just how she conceptualizes the houses and her personal arguments for why she uses quadrant houses and what she thinks the conceptual rationale is. The issue where she gets into trouble is when she starts trying to deny whole sign houses existed, just because she doesn’t like it conceptually or something.
[plays video]
DH: Well, you know, I’m really interested in quadrant house systems but the thing is it’s only-
[pauses video]
CB: Sorry, one last thing. Again, my slide is up in the top right corner for some reason without attribution, which is kind of weird.
[plays video]
DH: -whole sign houses that give us this match between the meanings of the houses and like the fifth houses is good. And this guy uses quite a dated copy of one of my-
[pauses video]
CB: It’s weird, I meant to say, because she’s now arguing against me but she’s again not citing the fact that that’s me that’s saying some rationales for some of the significations of the houses coming from the whole sign house framework that she’s arguing against. But she hasn’t signaled who put forward these arguments that she’s now trying to dispute.
[plays video]
DH: -diagrams, actually. I thought, “Oh, I know that diagram. I did it.” And then I realized that you know, he’s presenting my-
[pauses video]
CB: Ironically, she complains about this other person using her diagram without giving proper attribution at this point, while doing the same thing to me.
[plays video]
DH: -work in a very false way. Because he’s right. Let me just quickly move over to what I said at the time. Like, “Yes, there is a meaning built into houses, such that the fifth house for example, is a good house because it conveys the meaning of the trine. But the meaning of the trine comes from a more fundamental source of the symbolism. It comes from the number three and the shape of the triangle. And that is invested into the meaning of the aspect. And it is also invested into the meaning of the houses. But the houses are not showing us the signs of the zodiac. This is not showing the ecliptic belt. This is showing local space. And when you use a quadrant house system, the meridian is always dividing the sky. You face the meridian, and you’re facing South, you’ve got North behind you, you’ve got East on your right. You’ve got– right or left, I might get them mixed up. But you’ve got East rising, West retiring… And everything about ancient astrology and the symbolism was about quartering that division of sky and then dividing the spaces between them. And there was no ancient astrologer who was not interested in seeing what culminates in the sky, what rises, and what sets. So those angles have always been very important.
[pauses video]
CB: Her point is that whole sign houses couldn’t exist because it doesn’t make sense to her conceptually, in terms of the conceptualization that she’s built up in her mind about how houses work, based on using quadrant houses for her entire career. So it couldn’t have existed because it doesn’t make sense to her conceptually.
[plays video]
DH: That’s where the symbolism comes in because when you have a set of houses, that’s showing me my local space. If I’m in the middle of this, then the houses are always going to show you the Midheaven. It’s always going to be in square to the Ascendant. Always. Those 12 divisions of houses are fixed, they don’t move. They vary according to the different ways that we calculate them, but they’re all aiming to do the same thing, which is equally divide the space between where a planet rises, where it culminates, and where it sets.
So within that, it is only the quadrant house systems that have this mirroring or reconnection of the meaning of the shape, the meaning of the number, and the meaning of the house. Because as you know, when you do it by quadrant houses, you’re not going to get an equal match of signs and houses. The celestial sphere is a perfect circle. It is always divided by four 90-degree angles. When you put the ecliptic, oblique circle of the ecliptic inside it, it has to be squashed. It has to be stretched.
[plays video]
CB: This is all very interesting, and I actually mean that genuinely in the sense that she’s outlining some of the pieces of quadrant houses that are genuinely good astronomical and symbolic factors for why we should take quadrant houses into account and integrate them in some way that are important and are valid. But notice how at this point this has entirely stopped being a history lecture about whether or not whole sign houses existed in ancient astrology that purportedly was supposed to be about the evidence and things like that, and it’s become this thing about what makes sense to her conceptually and how she conceptualizes the houses, and therefore how these other conceptualizations of the houses can’t be valid or can’t be correct. I kind of want to skip through some of this, but I don’t know if she will say other historically relevant things that need to be discussed. My voice is getting a little scratchy, though, so I do need to get some more water and make a little tea. So I think I’m going to take another five-minute break and I’ll be right back.
[Intermission]
All right, let’s get back to work.
[plays video]
DH: Because that is not a perfectly circular space around this, it’s projected into it. So one of the things I really want to bash home at the moment is, you know, constantly seeing new websites appear informing people of what the astrological chart is, and giving the suggestion that, “First we have the basic chart wheel. The 12 subdivisions of the circle or wedges of the pie represent the 12 signs of the zodiac.” No, they don’t. They never have. They represent the 12-fold division of the local space around us. And that is what the modern generation or young generation, many of them are failing to understand. Because they’ve been programmed to think that it’s all about showing the zodiac. And they don’t realize that astrology was like 2000 years in development before the zodiac even got equalized into 12 neat sides. And still, the issues of angularity were very important. I know I got a rush to get to the end of this, but I’m getting there now.
[plays video]
CB: I feel like I should have some commentary, but it’s like I feel like I’m just repeating myself at this point that a lot of that’s about her conceptualization where she’s taking good and true and valid astronomical elements about the quadrant conceptualization. And that’s the thing, it’s like she could be such a good and powerful just proponent of quadrant houses just by doing her own approach and explaining it her own way, and letting that speak for itself and letting the value in that shine based on the research that she’s done over many years and based on her experience and work conceptualizing things and everything else. It’s just this inability to let other astrologers do what they’re going to do using a different system that really drags her down. And that she’s now– for many years, not just now, but for many years– attached so much of her energy and legacy into attacking whole sign houses unnecessarily. I wish genuinely that she didn’t do that or didn’t have that compulsion to do it because otherwise, there’s a lot of good things that she could be doing instead. And I think this part of the lecture actually partially demonstrates that.
[plays video]
DH: -a good diagram for illustrating what the symbolic principles of the houses come from. Houses come from diurnal motion. Everyday as you think about the Sun, it rises in the East and it culminates in the South, and it sets in the West. And it’s that rising and retiring, and then transforming at midnight and coming back again, you know, read my book if you haven’t read it already. That is where the meaning of the houses arrived from, as well as the shapes that are formed between these areas of sky around us, and other issues too.
[pauses video]
CB: So the houses were informed by some of the things that she was talking about, but those are not the only considerations that the houses are based on or developed out of. And that’s what she’s leaving out, is that she has part of the piece of the puzzle but she’s over emphasizing that piece or looking at it to the exclusion of potentially other pieces that might be relevant as well from a historical standpoint.
[plays video]
DH: The zodiac, which is the house motion– the motion of the houses is the primary motion. It follows the diurnal motion of a planet on a daily basis; rising, culminating, and retiring in the sky. The zodiac deals with secondary motion. Over the course of the year, the Sun will move westward through the zodiac completing the circle in, you know, 12 months. And then the positions of planets within that oblique circle are projected in our scheme to give the meaning. But unless you want to practice an astrology that is only looking at a circle of the zodiac and not connecting to how all that fits within the local space around you, then you can’t expect that the zodiac is forming the basis of these divisions.
[pauses video]
CB: It’s misleading to say that if you’re using whole sign houses that you’re not paying any attention to the local space framework, especially if you’re also integrating the degree of the Midheaven into the chart and paying attention to its location even if you’re primarily using a whole sign house framework. So one of the things that’s misleading about this part of the lecture is she’s trying to say that you can only get this element if you use a quadrant house system. Therefore, you should only use a quadrant house system. And that’s really over playing things too much. It’s going unnecessarily far in setting up a premise that one doesn’t necessarily have to accept.
[plays video]
DH: I also want to say here that one of the points that gets set for these equal house divisions is that they fix the problem of the poles because-
CB: See? And that was a really important tell. She says the equal house divisions because some of this applies also to equal houses, which she also disparages and fundamentally wants to reject as well. It’s just not as popular as a competitor at this point as whole sign houses is, so she doesn’t spend as much time dismissing it or attacking it, I should say, as she does whole sign houses. But if there was an equal house revival, she would probably be similarly motivated to try to take it down.
[plays video]
DH: -quadrant house systems. There’s a problem, the systems break down in the polar regions. That problem can’t be fixed. It can’t be fixed whatever you do, whether you use whole sign houses or equal houses. The issue with the poles is that once you get beyond a certain extreme latitude, the ecliptic base systems, they cannot appear in the sky. The sky doesn’t have the zodiac as a circle around us.
[pauses video]
CB: This is responding to one of my conceptual arguments in the original whole sign house talk about whole sign houses fixing an issue where charts get distorted the further North you go. Like sometimes up in the UK where you have people that have houses that can become very large, basically, and occupy a lot of space. But it’s like I don’t need to spend time talking about or disputing this necessarily, because I actually don’t care about the conceptual or practical reasons for why somebody practices one form of astrology or another in this context. I’m really focused on the historical issues so I just want to get through and see if there’s any more historical stuff to comment on before we wrap up.
[plays video]
DH: So there is no way to have a system which actually presents everything as a circle around us when it’s not a circle around us. That’s a fundamental problem of astrology no matter what you do, and it’s not fixed by using an equal house. Maybe it might stick a little bit, but you still got the same problem there. You still got the same problem that certain planets can never culminate. They can’t ever retire. So you can’t use any house system that is showing the symbolism of a planet declining over the Western horizon, when it never does that. But that’s another issue, I need time to think about it. I got a couple of minutes left and I want to just very quickly bring in this wonderful point that my friend and colleague Wade Cave put together in his own exploration of this issue. And remembering that the symbolism of the houses comes from primary motion, this idea of rising—so 12th house is imprisonment, when you rise up to the 11th house, you get this sense of release. When you get up to the 10th house, you start to culminate. And Wade’s got a few graphics here that just illustrate one of the problems of whole sign houses, so here’s a chart.
[pauses video]
CB: So this is a new idea or a new argument that her student came up with, who’s the other person who’s been aggressively posting just constantly on social media for years how much he hates whole sign houses and he doesn’t like it, and telling Demetra last year that he’s going to find a way to destroy it or demolish it or whatever he said. He comes up with this conceptual argument against whole sign houses. And again, the only reason I’m going through this part, and this is relevant even though we’ve moved into entirely practical and conceptual arguments here against whole sign houses being a thing at all basically, she starts basically trying to argue that whole sign houses isn’t a real house system at this point in the lecture. And the only reason we’re still watching and have to be is because this is really where it contrasts and the true purpose of this lecture becomes clear, is that this was never about the history of astrology. This was never truly a historical argument, she’s not trying to engage with the actual evidence. Her primary motivation is not historical, it’s just practically speaking. She hates this form of house division and doesn’t think it’s valid conceptually, and that’s why she’s trying to suppress evidence of it and overlook or distort the historical record in order to promote her preferred approach to house division. So that’s why we’re having to do this at the end of what was a historical lecture originally.
[plays video]
DH: -at 8:15 a.m. in the morning. Look at the position of the Moon. Okay? It’s on the Ascendant. Now look at the position of the Moon one hour later, 9:15. But now look at the position of the Moon another hour later. It’s gone back into the 12th house again. And now we’ll look an hour later, and look where it is. So just look at this again, these are hourly shot snapshots of the house placement of the Moon. Going up, going down, going up. And so this whole concept of rise, decline, gaining. You know, maturing which is built into that system of the houses is just all taken apart with the whole sign house systems. And I just really want to end, I guess, by saying that I-
[pauses video]
CB: Yeah. I love that they think that this is this devastating conceptual argument against whole sign houses. But what’s notable about it is just that they’ve so thoroughly and entirely predicated their conceptualization of the houses on their specific approach to quadrant houses that they have an inability to think outside of how houses could be conceptualized in different ways. And so when they come across things they’re not used to seeing like this that happen when you’re using a system of house division that’s predicated on different principles, is they can’t handle it and they’re like, “Look at this, this doesn’t make sense in terms of my conceptualization of houses so it must be wrong.” But it’s like, no, the answer is just that this system of house division has different principles that are not purely or simply based on the diurnal rotation. That the diurnal rotation and some other forms of house division is not the only conceptual structure that’s being taken into account, even if for you, you think that’s literally the only thing the houses are about. So it’s like that’s great that you think that, but this is not a devastating conceptual or philosophical argument against whole sign houses. But it’s impressive that you think it is.
[plays video]
DH: -believe the word system is even appropriate. I think it is an approach, it is something…
[pauses video]
CB: This is important. At the end of this whole conceptual argument, she gets to the point. And the point is she says whole sign houses is not a real house system, it’s not even really a house system.
[plays video]
DH:-which is built into that system of the houses is just all taken apart with the whole sign house systems. And I just really want to end, I guess, by saying that I don’t believe the word system is even appropriate. I think it is an approach, it is something that is done, but it’s done through convenience and it’s done sometimes through laziness.
CB: “Through laziness”. [chuckles]
DH: But it’s not what any of the ancient astrologers championed us to do, encouraged us to do. And the suggestion that the other systems were not a part of ancient astrology, I think it’s insulting to the work of those astrologers.
[pauses video]
CB: Yeah. All right. So that was the point of the lecture, that she doesn’t think it’s a real system of house division because it doesn’t conform to her conceptualization of the houses, and therefore it couldn’t have existed. And that she therefore refuses to even entertain the notion that whole sign houses could have existed in ancient astrology, because it’s not a real house system and anybody using it must just be lazy or something like that. Which she’s applying both to ancient astrologers as well as contemporary practitioners of the subject, which is wild, honestly, that that’s going to be the hill that you want to die on is attacking other contemporaries.
I just wanted to point that out because that really undermines in a really serious way any of the historical arguments she made earlier in this lecture, because she ends this on fundamentally a completely not historical point, which is just that she doesn’t like whole sign houses. It’s not very well thought out, honestly, because if she had just wrapped it up at some point with the historical stuff, she could have played it off like this was a genuine academic debate about the origins of house division and blah, blah, blah, and that whole sign houses was never used. But she betrays her actual motivations and views at the end of the lecture because she can’t help herself. So it’s really important to keep that in mind at this stage.
[plays video]
DH: So I think it’s time that, you know… Okay, I’m not going to be a very popular person after this talk but I need to put my thoughts on record, and that’s what they are.
[pauses video]
CB: She’s not going to be very popular because she’s saying something that’s completely ahistorical, for one. And for two, even if she wasn’t saying something that was ahistorical now, she’s tying it in with an accusation that people that practice this approach to astrology, which has now become the second most popular house system, is lazy. Even though everybody at this point just uses computers or apps in order to calculate charts, and switch back and forth between house systems. So the accusations of laziness themselves are kind of absurd to begin with. But it’s like, again, that sort of false thing of claiming, “Oh, I’m gonna be unpopular for this.” Well, it’s like, yeah, you’re lying about the history of house division. And you’re also insulting large swaths of the astrological community needlessly in order to just champion an approach to astrology in an unnecessarily aggressive manner, which just doesn’t really need to be done. And is only being done because it’s coming from a place fundamentally of insecurity. Yeah, which is too bad.
[plays video]
DH: Okay, so here’s another point I’ll leave you all to think. The other thing that I’m thinking about just lately is that in the whole of the history of astrology, this is what’s called a standard chart presentation. The 10th house is always at the top, it always crowns the chart. The fourth house is-
[pauses video]
CB: Okay. So now she’s doing this thing about how chart examples that you always have to. So she’s not just saying… She can’t just impose her method of house division on everybody else, but now she has to impose or she’s trying to impose her actual style of drawing charts that we must all do it this way as well. And she’s trying to pretend that there’s a historical precedent that all charts should be presented this way.
[plays video]
DH: -always the foundation of the chart. And whenever you look through historical charts, they stylize them, they do wonderful artistic things, but they never take the 10th house away from the top. It is the crown of the chart. It is the crown. That’s the reason why it means the king. It’s only since the 1900s that we’ve come up with this chart form called the proportional chart form, where we’re no longer seeing a chart drawn with equal divisions, which is clearly to reflect the equal division of space around it.
And all of a sudden in France, by a movement of astrologers who don’t like the houses so they don’t care about the houses, they want to give the emphasis to the zodiac instead, start coming up with something called proportional and they start to make the sign divisions equal within the wheel. And that has now become the- It’s not called the standard, the other method is called the standard because that’s the way that it’s always been presented. What’s called the proportional one has become the most popular. When you go on the internet, every chart calculation program will by default do the chart without the Midheaven being at the top, which perpetuates this false notion that these 12 divisions are about divided the zodiac. They never were.
And so the other thing that I’m on a mission to do is get people to realize that the historical method of presentation is the standard method of presentation that does connect the symbolism of the houses and the symbolism of the zodiac and the aspects and everything else together as it should. And a proportional system, many people believe that they are being traditional now because they go for a proportional system because it allows them to see the terms printed within. But that proportional house system is so counter to the philosophy and allows us to break understanding of what the philosophy means, that we’re losing more than we gain from it. So I just want to bring that…
[pauses video]
CB: It has no relevance to the history of astrology and…
[plays video]
DH: Sorry, I was so quick, but I just knew I needed three hours for this one.
WENDY: Yeah, I know. It was great. It’s great. Exactly. Do you put any questions in? I know there’s lots of comments and lots of great people loving this, Deb.
DH: Well, that’s just an amazing surprise because even when I wrote my book about the houses and it talks about that, I would feel like people were throwing cabbages at me. [laughs] I was really braced for that. I know I’m not gonna be like, “But you know what?” There’s no reason.
[attempts to rewind]
–So there doesn’t really seem to be any use of the nons- whatever. And those never shift. They are talked about as if they are firmaments in the heaven. You know, the zodiac wills over and across them, but they don’t shift. So there doesn’t really seem to be any use of the nons- whatever.
CB: Oh yeah, I forgot she said this.
DH: So there doesn’t really seem to be any [inaudible]
[pauses video]
CB: Sorry, I’m having trouble rewinding.
[plays video]
WENDY: Yeah, did you notice that perhaps it was understood more in Vedic?
DH: In Vedic, they had a different system. They did have a different system. And I would never suggest, for example, I don’t know anything about Chinese astrology but I believe that it’s a great system. And I believe that the Vedic system is great in its own term. But I’m talking about the transition of astrology that came from Mesopotamia, Persia, came through another mystic culture, through the Romans, through the Arabian culture and all the Arabian scientists, over to the medieval Latinus. And what you might want to say is that the Arabian science was wonderful, they were translating the works of the Almagest. The Greek science of Alexandria was wonderful. But in the European Dark Ages, we were not astronomers. And I don’t know that there was great astronomical knowledge in India at that time. But I don’t know.
[pauses video]
CB: She tries to sidestep the Indian question by questioning whether the Indians were good enough astronomers to calculate quadrant houses. So that’s her answer to the Indian question. And I’ve seen versions of this, is like othering the Indian tradition, sidestepping it, ultimately saying something hugely insulting which is that they weren’t good enough astronomers in order to calculate quadrant houses, which is actually false because the Shri-Pati system was introduced I think at least by the 11th century. And that’s basically the equivalent of Porphyry houses in the West which is also used in India oftentimes as a secondary overlay, where they would use whole sign houses as the primary house system, and then also sometimes look at the quadrant house chart for additional information.
So that’s very consistent with what was being done in the Greek tradition, in the Arabic tradition, in the Latin tradition and everywhere else. But the problem for Debs’ argument that literally anybody with half a brain knows, is if you’re saying that whole sign houses was invented in the West in the 1990s, then why the hell have there been astrologers in India using it for over a thousand years even to this day? And her answer to that, the best she can muster for an answer to that is maybe they weren’t good enough astronomers, which is a really weak and culturally insensitive and inappropriate response to that, that’s actually really messed up. But that’s the best she can come up with because as always, there’s no answer to that question. Like, you can’t dismiss over a thousand years or even 2000 years if the Yavanajātaka goes back to the third century or if the Indian tradition goes back even further of horoscopic astrology. You can’t dismiss all of that practice and that usage of whole sign houses just because it’s inconvenient to your argument, which is what she’s trying to do. So let’s just diss an entire tradition of astrologers from an entire continent because they don’t use a system of house division like you and let’s just say they’re bad astronomers.
[plays video]
DH: It’s a whole new subject. So there could be something there but it’s a different system.
[pauses video]
CB: Could be something there about whole sign houses. Could be. Maybe. Maybe there could be whole sign houses in Indian astrology. Who knows? How could we possibly look that up? Could we just pick up a book on Indian astrology and see if that’s true? Maybe we could. But if we don’t, then we’ll never know. And I think that’s the strategy that Deb wants to employ.
WENDY: Right. Wow, thanks so much, Deb. That was just amazing. Thank you. I was so looking forward to this and it was great. So cool. Okay. Wow.
DH: Oh, yeah. There we go.
[pauses video]
CB: I missed something about the nonagesimal degree. There’s a question about that so let me back it up and try to find it. My apologies. [rewinds video] Here it is. I love this part.
[plays video]
WENDY: Absolutely. Scott asks, “Do we know how the nonagesimal point was used for delineation?
DH: Well, it wasn’t. Because they just use the Midheaven. Because, remember, it’s about the symbolism of the highest point. And those whole places are fixed. If you look at your-
[pauses video]
CB: All right, blah, blah, blah. The point is that somebody asks a question, “What about the nonagesimal degree? How is that used?” And what’s funny about that is what the nonagesimal degree is, and what it represents for our purposes is the nonagesimal degree is the 90-degree point from the degree of the Ascendant upwards to the top of the chart, and that’s the equal house Midheaven. So her response to that is like, how do people use the nonagesimal degree? How do you account for that? And her response is, they didn’t.
But that’s a complete lie because any astrologer that employed equal houses, which we found already in the text of Vettius Valens, even though she was trying to ignore or sweep under the rug the fact that Valens has that passage on equal houses– bizarrely, she excluded from the quote– or the fact that we find equal houses in Firmicus Maternus or potentially in Ptolemy, all of those would be uses of the nonagesimal degree. And so the easy historical answer would have been like, “Well, any ancient astrologer that used equal houses would have treated the nonagesimal degree as the Midheaven,” basically is the answer to that. That becomes the Midheaven in the equal house system. But again because she’s like a quadrant house chauvinist, she can’t even relent and give some space to equal houses. But instead, she just says they didn’t. Because the Midheaven is the quadrant Midheaven, and that’s the only true Midheaven to her.
But in reality, the term Midheaven was used in different ways depending on what house system you were using. In quadrant houses, the Midheaven when it was referred to, that was the meridian is the astronomical thing that the Midheaven was. In equal houses, the nonagesimal degree, 90 degrees from the Ascendant, that was called the Midheaven. And then in whole sign houses, the entire 10th sign was referred to as the Midheaven. So when you read the Greek texts, you have to be reading them contextually and understand what they’re talking about in the context of each example or each passage of what they’re speaking about, what the topic is, in order to understand if they’re referring to the Midheaven in that context as the 10th whole sign house or the 10th equal house, because sometimes the entire house itself was referred to as Midheaven. Or if they were referring to the meridian and the entire 10th quadrant house. But again, this isn’t just about dismissing whole sign houses, it’s also about trying to get rid of equal houses and basically any form of house division that doesn’t conform to her personal preferences.
So yeah, that’s a lot and that’s the end of the lecture. I have some final conclusions, I’ve written down some notes to make some final statements. Let me take just one more break, collect my thoughts, and then I’m going to come back and I’m going to wrap up this presentation with some concluding remarks. So see you again in a few minutes.
[Intermission]
All right, I’m back. So this has been fun. Thanks, everyone for joining me tonight. This has been very intense and long and drawn out and… Yeah, let’s all take a breath.
So one of the things I wanted to say is one of the things that’s annoying about it that bothers me so much is in the late 20th century in the 1990s and 2000s, there was this movement where a number of astrologers wanted to legitimize astrology more. And there was this feeling that a bunch of astrologers started going back to school to get advanced degrees like master’s degrees and PhDs, oftentimes in history or studying the history of astrology, and some astrologers started then entering into academia and engaging in doing historical scholarship as a way of, partially of both recovering our history by trying to legitimize the field a little bit to some extent. And that’s part of what Project Hindsight represented, as it showed that astrologers themselves can take matters into their own hands and can learn ancient languages and can learn the history of astrology, and can go back and recover their tradition.
And that sometimes when astrologers do that, that sometimes they can have unique observations based on their personal experiences using astrology in practice. That they can actually sometimes see things that an academic historian who sort of knows astrology abstractly, because they’re learned enough of it to be able to study its transmission in history in a purely historical context, but that sometimes an academic historian without that background of actually internalizing the practice of astrology because you actually believe it’s a legitimate phenomenon, sometimes can overlook things or not do as good of a job in some instances because they don’t have that personal experience with astrology. Whereas sometimes a practicing astrologer today can go back and see things that Vettius Valens is doing or some other astrologer like William Lilly is doing, and they can notice things that they’re doing in their practice because it resonates with something that astrologers are still doing to this day.
So one of the things that sucks about this whole thing and that this is a bad example of for our community is that this is an instance of the opposite of where sometimes there can be major shortcomings when astrologers try to get into these academic historical debates about the history of astrology because sometimes astrologers can bring their own personal biases into those debates. And sometimes that can mess up actual scholarship and it can cloud the history of astrology in a way that’s not going to be helpful in terms of either legitimizing our field or in terms of helping to actually truly reconstruct the history of astrology. That’s one of the things that I think is the most egregious about this lecture from a historical standpoint and from a community standpoint. It’s not a good look for astrologers to be making these sorts of arguments that are just really absurd and not grounded in the actual evidence in terms of the history of astrology. So that’s point one, is that it’s really disappointing from that standpoint.
Another point that I wanted to make. I was rereading Rob Hand’s 2007 article on whole sign houses. And at the end of it, he ended it on this really interesting note that I thought was relevant and I don’t know if he was already picking up on getting pushback from Deborah Houlding or why he added this to the end of his essay on whole sign houses in an academic paper. But what he said was this. He said, “Finally, whatever one may think of astrology in general, and Greek astrology in particular, some of the practitioners were very learned men. We should assume, therefore, that what they did, they did intentionally. We should not evaluate the integrity of ancient astrology based on criteria derived from a backward projection of later medieval and early modern astrological techniques onto the ancients. They must be evaluated on their own terms.”
This, I think, is where Houlding has failed in terms of this lecture miserably because she’s demonstrated that she’s intent on projecting her own conceptualization of the houses backwards into the history of astrology, and to have the audacity to claim that that’s the only conceptualization of the houses that makes any sense not just in practice today but also in ancient times, so much so that she thinks that invalidates all of these other examples or any evidence that might indicate anything to the contrary of her personal approach. So this is like a classic case of an anachronism in historical studies when you take something from a time period in the future and you project it backwards onto people in the past. It’s stuff you learn in history lessons 101 not to do when writing a historical essay or doing a research paper.
All right, a few final conclusions. So, astrologers who use whole sign houses in modern times are not seeking out these arguments. Both Deborah and her student– and now teacher at her school, Wade– just have this long track record of periodically attacking those who use whole sign houses and making false statements about those practitioners. And then when we try to either correct the inaccuracies or get them to stop, it’s mischaracterized as provocation—that they’re just being emotional like she said before or aggressive or what have you. This has been going on for years, and in the case of Houlding, it’s actually been going on for decades. And I’m sure actually this won’t be the end of it. They’re going to keep doing this in the future, which is why I’m telling you almost as if I’m psychic, like I know exactly what they’re going to do in the future because it just keeps repeating over and over again. So when I’ve tried to lay low for longer periods and not engage them, they just get emboldened and they start it up again. And they get louder and louder and louder until eventually there’s some pushback and they get checked. So that was the purpose of tonight because this needs to end and this needs to stop here, because it’s bad for the community and because we need to move beyond it. So this was meant to definitively end this.
It’s fundamentally an unethical tactic to make up false narratives about other astrologers after they’re dead or not likely to respond, in some instances not capable of responding, and this video has been full of these, which is honestly one of my biggest motivations for bothering to take the energy to address it this time. Since this has taken a lot of energy tonight. Houlding’s lecture was an attempt to undermine multiple professional astrologers’ legacies by taking advantage of the fact that almost no one else who is left has both the close firsthand community history and the textual knowledge to factually evaluate her claims. And there were so many claims and so many distortions or outright lies that were thrown out in that lecture, that it’s obviously quite overwhelming to attempt to answer any of them and it takes a lot to do that. And she basically wasn’t expecting anybody to be able to, and that was part of her gamble. But unfortunately, she was wrong and I’ve now called her out on it. I’ve called that bet. In other ways, though, much of the astrological community has moved on even if Deborah Houlding wants to stay stuck for decades in re-litigating the evidence for whole sign houses. While she continues to invoke caricatures of newer generations of astrologers using whole sign houses who are hopelessly uneducated, or fundamentalists who will never diverge from what someone at Project Hindsight said, there is actually a rich diversity of astrological approaches growing in the newer waves of astrology. And I want to thank Leisa Schaim for helping me to articulate that thought at the end of this.
My final pieces of advice are, as I said earlier, read the texts for yourselves. Don’t take my word for it, definitely don’t take Deborah Houlding’s word for it, sit down and read the texts yourselves and try to come to your own conclusions. I know that’s hard, but it’ll be worth it because it’ll put you in a stronger position when you have to evaluate arguments or debates or different things like this in the future. So, the arguments that Deborah Houlding put forward against whole sign houses and its existence will continue to morph and change in the future and there will probably be new arguments that I haven’t addressed in this video because the goalposts are always moving in order to accomplish the underlying goal of trying to deny or downplay or even destroy this technique of whole sign houses. So all of this has gone too far, though, this time, and I think it needs to stop. Houlding needs to stop trying to tear down approaches that differ from her own. The community needs to stop condoning or supporting this because it’s bad for all of us.
In some ways I’m glad for this debate because it’s forced me to dig deeper in my own historical research and to find new things. And also to develop a more moderate position during the course of all of that. But it’s over now, and we need to move on as a community. In practice, we should focus on synthesizing the different systems, or just using whatever approach we feel like without having to feel like we have the need to attack others that do things differently than us. In the history, we should build on the foundation that many scholars have made over the past 30 years because there’s been so much work done. And it’s not that any of the conclusions they’ve written or that they’ve made are not up for debate or discussion, but in this instance, there’s so much to build on and I don’t understand the point of attempting to tear down other astrologers and the work that they’ve done in that way simply due to personal preferences. That’s not acceptable. The future of astrology is actually very bright if we can use this moment to create a more stable foundation for the future, instead of just repeating the same arguments from the past over and over again. So let’s move on.
All right. I think that’s it. I think that’s the end of this lecture, and hopefully the end of this topic once and for all. I know it probably won’t be. And one of the things I should mention is that there’s this really interesting astrological correlation back in 2015 and 2016 I mentioned. I’ve mentioned it on The Astrology Podcast several times, but it was that when I first put out the whole sign house lecture and then shortly afterwards Deb and I did the debate, there was a Saturn-Neptune square that went exact in the sky almost around the same time. And then six months later when Robert Schmidt suddenly released this new house division workshop outlining this new approach or slightly different approach that he had never unveiled before, it was actually around the time of the second Saturn-Neptune square. And then finally, that summer when I was finishing my 50-page chapter on house division in my book, Hellenistic Astrology, I noticed that the third and final Saturn-Neptune Square was going exact. I always thought that was really interesting and I thought there was something about that Saturn and Neptune that ultimately was probably tied in with this whole house division issue, and the nebulousness of trying to draw firm distinctions between something that’s just happening in the sky that has this sort of nebulous quality to begin with. And I can’t help but note that in the next few weeks, next month, that Saturn is going to go into Pisces and we’re gonna begin the build-up to a conjunction of Saturn-Neptune that’s coming up here before too long. But from my perspective at least as a partially Hellenistic and modern astrologer, that that Saturn-Neptune conjunction is going to begin as soon as Saturn goes into Pisces where it’s in the same sign as Neptune.
So I feel like there’s another important chapter or turning point when it comes to the history of house division that’s coming up soon, and it’s my genuine hope that in giving all of this overview in this context and this background on everything that’s happened up to this point in way more details than anybody should ever know or ever have, that I’ve helped us to close one chapter of this series of debates about whole sign houses existing, and we can move on now into the future of whatever the history of house division is going to look like over the next century. So let’s focus on that, let’s move forward as a community, and yeah, I think there should be some good things in the future for us.
All right. I have had a long night and a long week so I’m going to go crash, get some food, and go to bed. Thanks, everyone for joining me today. If any of you watched this entire thing all the way through live, you should get a medal. And yeah, I’ll catch you again soon on whatever the next episode of The Astrology Podcast is. All right, thanks everyone for joining me. Have a good night or day, and I’ll see you again soon.