RohanMenon
Similar to my study notes thread on Lilly's Christian Astrology, these are my jottings on my feeble attempts to master Valens's approach to Hellenistic astrology.
My selfish motive in starting this course of study was adding Zodiacal Releasing as an additional predictive technique to my toolkit (I primarily use Solar and Lunar Returns + Transits). During a thread conversation with Minderwis, ZR came up, and Valens, and hints of other time lord techniques all of which sounded intriguing, so I thought I'd learn those too.
As with my Lilly Notes,
1. These are written from the perspective of a student, *not* that of an expert astrologer (I can't emphasize this enough)
2. As I get stuck I'll
(a) ask for help
(b) take some time to digest these sticking points thoroughly, and occasionally, just to commit procedures to memory bit by bit. (which I am doing right now for Lilly's basic chart examinaton procedure, almost done). So the writing will have a stop start quality, but when done, should be useful to other students.
3. I use Sidereal (Fagan Bradley) for my personal practice, though I'll be using Whole Sign Houses. Not sure if Valens uses Tropical or Sidereal, but there may not have been much of a difference in his time.
Unlike Lilly Valens doesn't seem to give actual charts.
4. I'll skip the 'calculations of planet positions' parts of his book.They seem to use strange months like Mechior (spelling?) which I can't make any sense of. I suspect for the charts I want, modern software tools should give me the precise position of ascendant, the precise rising degree and so on. I think this should be fine, but if anyone really thinks working through his calculations is useful, let me know.
5. Other than the above I plan to work through every single page of every single volume, and incorporate any techniques I find, and test it on a representative sample of charts (all of which will be logged here)
To start off, here are some *very* useful resources I've discovered to 'prep' for Valens study
1. This thread right here on this forum. http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=190689 where our own Minderwiz analyses a few charts with Hellenistic Techniques. I'm not sure I follow the Schmidtisms in the analysis, but I could get my head around the basic concepts, even Zodiacal Releasing
2. Free Software. Morinus Valens - available from https://sites.google.com/site/astrovalens/ . Installed easily on my Windows *and* Linux machines, and gives L1 - L4 breakdowns of Zodiacal Releasing for a given natal chart, and also a battery of other techniques I'm not familiar with.
Fwiw, I took a quick look at a couple of 'turning point' dates in my life, just for the fun of it, and the ZR symbolism is so perfectly on the dot and accurate *to the day*, it completely freaked me out (and this is from Lot of Fortune, using Fagan Sideareal, I didn't test with Tropical, fwiw). Very impressive, and very motivating.
ight now I'm working through Section 1 of Book 1, which is a description of planetary significances for the 7 classical planets. Not hard, but I like the writing style.
More later, as I understand Valens (and get stuck, heh).
Cheers
My selfish motive in starting this course of study was adding Zodiacal Releasing as an additional predictive technique to my toolkit (I primarily use Solar and Lunar Returns + Transits). During a thread conversation with Minderwis, ZR came up, and Valens, and hints of other time lord techniques all of which sounded intriguing, so I thought I'd learn those too.
As with my Lilly Notes,
1. These are written from the perspective of a student, *not* that of an expert astrologer (I can't emphasize this enough)
2. As I get stuck I'll
(a) ask for help
(b) take some time to digest these sticking points thoroughly, and occasionally, just to commit procedures to memory bit by bit. (which I am doing right now for Lilly's basic chart examinaton procedure, almost done). So the writing will have a stop start quality, but when done, should be useful to other students.
3. I use Sidereal (Fagan Bradley) for my personal practice, though I'll be using Whole Sign Houses. Not sure if Valens uses Tropical or Sidereal, but there may not have been much of a difference in his time.
Unlike Lilly Valens doesn't seem to give actual charts.
4. I'll skip the 'calculations of planet positions' parts of his book.They seem to use strange months like Mechior (spelling?) which I can't make any sense of. I suspect for the charts I want, modern software tools should give me the precise position of ascendant, the precise rising degree and so on. I think this should be fine, but if anyone really thinks working through his calculations is useful, let me know.
5. Other than the above I plan to work through every single page of every single volume, and incorporate any techniques I find, and test it on a representative sample of charts (all of which will be logged here)
To start off, here are some *very* useful resources I've discovered to 'prep' for Valens study
1. This thread right here on this forum. http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=190689 where our own Minderwiz analyses a few charts with Hellenistic Techniques. I'm not sure I follow the Schmidtisms in the analysis, but I could get my head around the basic concepts, even Zodiacal Releasing
2. Free Software. Morinus Valens - available from https://sites.google.com/site/astrovalens/ . Installed easily on my Windows *and* Linux machines, and gives L1 - L4 breakdowns of Zodiacal Releasing for a given natal chart, and also a battery of other techniques I'm not familiar with.
Fwiw, I took a quick look at a couple of 'turning point' dates in my life, just for the fun of it, and the ZR symbolism is so perfectly on the dot and accurate *to the day*, it completely freaked me out (and this is from Lot of Fortune, using Fagan Sideareal, I didn't test with Tropical, fwiw). Very impressive, and very motivating.
ight now I'm working through Section 1 of Book 1, which is a description of planetary significances for the 7 classical planets. Not hard, but I like the writing style.
More later, as I understand Valens (and get stuck, heh).
Cheers