Thema Mundi

I know, I know we're on the same page here.

Because if we're looking at the Thema Mundi, which is the birth chart of the cosmos, right, which is essentially this ancient teaching tool that tells us about the domiciles, exaltations and aspect theory and all of these different things, right? Um, it's a cancer rising, which means Scorpio is in the fifth house.

And I know we're going to piss some people off here by talking about Mars and sex, but I guess we're just, we're going full steam ahead with this controversial take.

Um, Scorpio is the fifth house in the theme of Moody.

However, it also partially represents, um, this brilliant invention—this deliberate invention that took place at the same time as well, where a group of astrologers deliberately took some different pieces from the earlier astrological traditions and combined them together, and then also created a number of additional technical constructs, uh, to practice and to frame the way that they used and conceptualized astrology.

And this was especially patterned after a series of diagrams such as the Thema Mundi, the planetary order of the seven-zone sphere, the exaltations, and then finally, um, the Planetary Joys scheme, which is a system for assigning significations to the twelve houses.

So over the course of the past decade, ever since I published my book on Hellenistic astrology in twenty seventeen, where I had several chapters, and really throughout the book, a lot of it is trying to reconstruct the origins of Hellenistic astrology and recognize both the element of gradual development, but also the element of sudden invention.

And there's been a lot of new, uh, discoveries over the course of the past nine years, almost ten years since I published my book, um, both archaeological discoveries where, where people are actually finding new materials and digging up new materials on astrology that we didn't know about until recently that are teaching us new things.

And then also, I've continued to expand my own research as I've been trying to reconstruct the origins of Hellenistic astrology, and especially the mysterious or shadowy collection of source texts that I talked about in my book that seem to lie at the very roots of that, that new tradition or system going back to the second century BCE, especially surrounding a collection of four texts by or attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, Asclepius, uh, a king named Nechepso, a supposed Egyptian king, and a priest named Petosiris.

So, um, there's been so many new discoveries that I wanted to do an episode today to, um, talk about that and to talk about where things are at at the present time and to sort of present my current synthesis in terms of my understanding of the origins of Hellenistic astrology, and especially its connection with ancient Hermeticism, both in terms of the ancient philosophical Hermetica as well as the technical Hermetica, because that's one of the most exciting things that's been happening in terms of some of the archeological research, is that Egyptologists have been finding, um, birth charts and texts and other things, especially in the ancient Egyptian language of Demotic, that have been showing us that astrology was, uh, practiced in the Egyptian temples during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and that sometimes they were using techniques that we didn't, uh, know existed up until recently.

So, um, what I did is over the past few months this summer, I decided to sit down and, um, pull everything together this summer that I'd learned in terms of the history, that I'd learned in terms of new archeological research, things that I pieced together from further studies on like ancient philosophy and religion over the past ten years, and sort of put this all together in order to, um, see what I come up with, in addition to, um, really sitting down with the Thema Mundi and some of the related diagrams like the joys and the exaltations and now the, the Order of the Seven-Zone Sphere, which I, I recently did an episode on, and see based on my current historical understanding if I can piece together better how this system was put together deliberately or created based on some of the new historical evidence that I've, I've learned over the past decade.

And the results over the past few months have been really spectacular, so that's what I wanna outline today.