Questions And Comments About The Mirror Zodiac
This article is a distillation of questions and comments based on my article The Mirror Zodiac, about the problem of adapting astrology's seasonally-derived Zodiac signs to countries in earth's Southern Hemisphere. The Mirror Zodiac theory is a combination of ideas originally presented in the last century by astrologers Dane Rudhyar and Marc Edmond Jones.
Mars and Saturn appearing to conjunct from our view on earth, with the constellation of Scorpius to the left, as seen from Malibu, California, August 2014.
One of the strongest comments about the idea of a Dual Sign Zodiac is that some astrologers in the Southern Hemisphere have not seen any indication of a reversed or dual Zodiac in their clients. According to these astrologers, people born in late March and the first three weeks of April, for example, still appear to be Aries Sun signs, not Libra or Aries-Libra ("Aribas"), and people born late December and the first three weeks of January still appear to be Capricorn Suns, not Cancerians or Cancer-Capricorns ("Cancercorns"). They still appear to retain their Northern Hemisphere derived Zodiac signs.
I'd like to address this dilemma in a threefold manner.
1. Confirmation Bias
As described in the web article The Mirror Zodiac, astrological evidence is not empirical, like the evidence used to test hypotheses in scientific experiments. What astrologers call evidence is usually a combination of observation and guesswork, so that, for example, if I observe someone's physical appearance and behavior, I might be able to guess their Zodiac Sun sign, ascendant or one or more planetary placements, but there is no way of accurately measuring these theoretical personality traits. Astrologers in the Southern Hemisphere who are still seeing personality traits associated with the Northern-derived signs could simply be picking out "evidence" which they want to see or expect to see, while ignoring those traits and characteristics which do not fit with these astrological expectations. This phenomenon is known to psychologists as Confirmation Bias.
2. Latitude
The second theory of why some Southern Hemisphere astrologers are not seeing a reversal of Northern Hemisphere derived signs concerns the latitude of the city or town where they are practicing. Darwin, for example, in Australia's Northern Territory is only 12 degrees below the Equator, or Lima, Peru is 10 degrees below the Equator, placing them in what Dane Rudhyar called the "Equatorial Zone" where astrological Sun signs would be equally divided between Northern and Southern polarities (please see the example of Richard Dawkins, born on the Equator, given in my Mirror Zodiac article). Once again, even though people might have a dual astrological make-up, astrologers could simply be picking out only the personality traits which conform to Northern Hemisphere derived Zodiac signs, while ignoring those traits which don't conform to these signs.
In the Mirror Zodiac/Whole Earth Zodiac, latitude is just as important as longitude when calculating a horoscope. Up until now, astrologers have only used latitude to calculate the House cusps of a chart, but have ignored it to calculate the signs of the Zodiac, assuming that date was the only variable that was important for signs.
3. Opposition aspects in the Natal Horoscope
Suppose someone was born in early July, shorty after what manifests as the Summer Solstice on June 21st in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Tropical Zodiac, their Sun sign would be Cancer. But in the Southern Hemisphere, early July is just after the Winter Solstice , and if we want to comply with Ptolemy's Tropical or Seasonal Zodiac, a person born at this time would have a Capricorn Sun sign. Now suppose this person insisted that they were a Cancerian, because they had had a history of stomach problems, and the sign Cancer is associated with the stomach. But on closer look at the person's horoscope, it was found that the Sun had an opposition to Saturn, the planet associated with limitation, work and difficulty. From a Northern perspective, we would say that Cancer Sun opposed Saturn in Capricorn. But from a Southern perspective, the Capricorn Sun opposed Saturn in Cancer. In the dual-sign Mirror Zodiac, we would simply say that there was a Sun-Saturn opposition in "Cancercorn". The stomach problem was due to the opposition, not the Sun sign. Similarly, before negating the idea of reversed signs, we should look at any oppositions in the natal chart which would influence a person's overall psychological and physical make-up.
As yet, no one knows how astrology works. Barring the theory that people who believe in it are just deluded, no one has come up with a causal mechanism which would explain why certain transits to a person's birth chart are often accompanied by major life changes, noticed firstly on an inner emotional level, and consequently in an outer form in one's relationships, work and behavior. One theory, mentioned in my article The Mirror Zodiac is that astronomical cycles of planets around our Sun correspond by ratio to cycles of psychological development, as put forward by the Developmental psychologist Daniel Levinson.
Another theory of a mechanism for astrology was put forward by astronomer Percy Seymour, who proposed that the Sun's electromagnetic energy is rather like a lather which is deflected by the planets and interacts with the earth's magnetic field. Seymour suggested that a baby developing in its mother's womb received a genetic imprint from this electromagnetic energy.
It's important to remember when considering these theories, that neither of them take away a person's free will, (or at least the illusion of free will) and are not fatalistic. Astrology is in some ways similar to the science of genetics, where just because someone may have a genetic predisposition to a disease does not mean that they will get that disease. What a person chooses to eat, and their general lifestyle can deflect natural predispositions.
The last theory of how astrology might work is the oldest, and perhaps the one which arouses so much objection from both astrologers and skeptics alike. It is the idea that stars and planets have a tendril-like physical influence on people and objects on earth. Although all electromagnetic radiation from stars ultimately must have some sort of effect on life on earth, it seems more logical to consider first the radiation from the star nearest to us, our sun.
If Northern Hemisphere derived Zodiac signs were in fact active in earth's Southern Hemisphere, contradicting Ptolemy's idea that Zodiac signs are linked to the seasons, it would mean that whatever is causing astrology to work was coming from space "out there" without any input from the earth itself, and was affecting our earth the same way all over, regardless of which Hemisphere and which season that place on earth was in. It would mean that the stars, constellations and planets really did have some physical influence on us, rather than being mostly symbolic markers in the huge clock of time and space. It would mean that "astro-logy" really was the word of the stars, rather than being a language the relationship between the Sun, Moon and the Earth, a relationship which has many scientifically evidenced causal mechanisms such as photosynthesis and ocean tides caused by the moon's gravity.
It would also present us with a rather difficult concept of stars which are from millions of miles to hundred of light years away having a physical effect on life on earth. The constellation of Scorpius, for example, shown in the picture at the top of the page, contains the big red star Antares, which is 604 light years from earth. What we see in the photograph is actually light which was emitted from the star in the year 1410. In comparison, light from our sun only takes 9 minutes to get to our earth and effects every single living organism on it. The sun also controls the earth's weather which in turn effects inorganic matter through geological processes, making our sun truly the "king" of life on earth.
Another problem with seeing the stars and constellations as having a direct effect on us is that some stars are not visible from either of earth's hemispheres. Stars in the so-called Northern constellations such as Algol in Perseus, for example, are not visible in Southern hemisphere countries - perhaps to those countries' gratitude as Algol has a particularly nasty reputation. Unless the light, or other electromagnetic vibrations emitted by Algol were to travel in curved lines, around the earth*, the bulge of the earth would get in the way of any supposed physical effect.
* Modern physicists do know that light is in fact bent by the gravitational mass of large objects, as first proposed by Einstein in the early 1900s. But this deflection is only slight - far less than enabling light to curve around the whole circumference of the earth.
One objection which came up in discussions about the The Mirror Zodiac was the change it produces in the signs on house cusps, and consequently the change in ruling planet of those houses. In my experience of correlating a horoscope to a person's biography however, it is not whether the planetary rulers of house cusps are in certain signs or houses which is as important as the aspects between various planets in a horoscope. In a reversed or Dual Sign horoscope, these aspects stay the same. A Sun-Pluto opposition, for example, is still going to be a Sun-Pluto opposition whether it is in the signs Virgo and Pisces, or Pisces and Virgo.
This makes sense philosophically, because the planetary orbits were here long before humans decided to name a particular area of the sky according to an agricultural calender.
Similarly with the Elements in astrology, Fire, Air, Earth and Water, while it is true that reversing a chart will change Fire signs into Air Signs, and Earth signs into Water signs, the aspects between planets does not change. So, for example, a trine (aspect of 120 degrees) between the Moon in Leo and Jupiter in Sagittarius would become a a trine between Moon in Aquarius and Jupiter in Gemini. In astrology, Fire is said to have an affinity to Air, and Water to Earth - they are said to "support" each other, in a corresponding mental way to their actions on the physical plane. Unless the person concerned was born at the North or South pole, or at very extreme latitudes, each of the 6 Dual signs is going to have a decent proportion of either Fire and Air or Water and Earth in each of their 6 Dual signs in the Mirror Zodiac, while retaining the aspects between planets, so that the objection that chart flipping changes the elemental content of a horoscope does not stand for the majority of cases.
Also, although the House cusps of a reversed/flipped chart change, ie. the Zodiac sign within each house, each house still contains the same planets. Venus in the First House in Aries becomes Venus in the First House in Libra, with any aspects to it. Since houses represent the environmental part of astrology, ie which "stage" in life the planetary "actors" perform, all we have done by flipping a chart is change the "costume" that these actors are wearing, represented by the signs of the Zodiac.
We have probably all heard the aphorism "As Above, So Below", which is the catch phrase of the Hermetic treatise called the Emerald Tablet. It was supposedly written by a mythical character named Hermes Trismegistus or "Hermes the Thrice Great". In fact, the name Hermes, which is the Greek version of the god Mercury, is the root of the word "hermetic" and simply means "sealed" or secret. In the hermetic,secret philosophy known as occultism, what we see "above" in the sky has some sort of correspondence with what is "below", as in life on earth.
Of course this gets us nowhere in this age of science and rationalism because wherever we have secrecy and mysticism we also have a semblance of power and control. When people are asked to believe doctrines just because someone long ago made them up, humans have invariably gotten ourselves into religious conflicts and battles in philosophical superiority.
However, what if science could actually prove some of these theories which for the past 3000 years or so have only been expressed in mystical pronouncements from intuitive prophets? Science has harnessed electricity to light our homes and power our computers, and gravity to send rockets into space, the next frontiers being the quantum world within the atom and unifying physics' known forces into a unified theory of everything. We have Space-Time, String Theory and the Higgs-Boson, but when it comes to astrology, I don't see anyone at Caltech or MIT applying their research grants to the subject of consciousness, let alone the quaint subject of astrology.
.. Apart from one person who in my humble opinion has opened up the doors to possible scientific investigation of astrology and closed those doors which lead to continued ridicule by skeptics. Michael Shermer , publisher of Skeptic Magazine did an experiment a few years ago testing astrology which conformed to all scientific protocols for eliminating bias. "Bias", caused by inside or extra information getting into a testing process is one of the main reasons why tests of astrology have met with so much criticism in the past, and the elimination of it was something that was taught to me in my course in Experimental Psychology at university.
Schermer tested Vedic astrologer Geoffrey Armstrong to see if he could correctly analyze horoscopes at a success rate better than what would be expected by chance. After controlling for bias with blind and double-blind tools, Shermer's results validated astrological analysis at a success rate of nearly70%, which is much better than chance.
Of course this doesn't prove that there is a causal mechanism for astrology, only that there is correlation, between the "above" (the sky)and the "below' (people's personalities on earth). The relevance of all this to a possible Mirror Zodiac is that other occult principles such as the so-called Law Of Vibration, and Law Of Polarity, Law of Gender, might one day be proven by science to have the same sort of correlation. We already see the gender and polarity ideas in the way that science describes electricity and magnetism, with their positive and negative poles, and of course gender is the driving force in biological evolution. For a summary of polarity in astrology, please see the section in the article The Mirror Zodiac entitled Polarity In Astrology.
Although none of Armstrong's subjects were from the Southern Hemisphere as far as I know, to the embarrassment of astrologers who favor the Tropical Zodiac, invented by Ptolemy, Geoffrey Armstrong used Vedic Astrolgy, which uses the Sidereal Zodiac, based more closely on the actual constellations as seen from earth. So these results do raise some questions about which Zodiac might be better correlated to human personality. But the experiment does show that astrological patterns are linked to human personality.
Perhaps another reason why people are reluctant to entertain the idea of a Dual/Mirror Zodiac is the shere difficulty of imagining such a construct, let alone drawing or printing it. Astrology software is designed to generate signs as they were named by people living in the Northern Hemisphere, and since the majority of humans live in countries above the Equator, perhaps astrologers have simply just not found any necessity to change the way charts are drawn and printed for inhabitants of the Southern latitudes.
And even if software programs did include a "Southern Hemisphere Flipped Chart" it would confuse the vast field of astrology even more than it is confusing already, with its alternative Zodiacs (Sidereal and Tropical) and alternative House Systems such as Placidus, Koch, Equal House, Campanus, Regiomantanus, Albabitious and Porphyry systems.
Perhaps, most dangerous to the idea of a "Flipped Chart" would be the mistaken premise that a horoscope is either Northern or Southern. As I have tried to argue in The Mirror Zodiac, the whole idea of a Dual Zodiac incorporates the idea of change in weighting of the poles of the 6 signs, so that, for example, as birthplace moves from North to South for a birth from August 21 -September 21 in any given year, the Sun sign would change in weighting from mostly Virgo to an equal weighting of Virgo and Pisces at the Equator, to mostly Pisces.
To prevent confusion and complication, therefore, it is probably best to keep things as they are when drawing or printing a horoscope, while making the mental adjustments for a weighted, dual-sign Zodiac in one's imagination.
One of the biggest misunderstandings about the Mirror Zodiac is that it is a static reversed Zodiac where Tropical signs simply become their opposites. In theory however, the Mirror Zodiac is based on the idea of weightings and graduation between alternative poles of the six dual-signs.
When I first thought of this concept, based on Dane Rudhyar's idea, I called it the "Bipolar Zodiac" as I thought the word bi-polar described the idea of each sign having two poles. Unfortunately though, the word bipolar has too many associations with mental health issues so I decided that "Mirror" Zodiac was probably a better alternative for the concept.
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