Hellenistic Astrology Blog

Meredith Garstin and I created a couple of YouTube videos in order to show members of our translation project how to setup their computers so that they can type words in ancient Greek on their keyboard.   We created one video in order to show users how to setup their keyboards so that they can type in Greek for users of Windows XP, and one for Mac users.  If anyone else wants to create additional tutorials for other systems then please go ahead and do so and then let us know about your video.  We just setup a YouTube page for HellenisiticAstrology.com, so all future videos associated with our project will be hosted there.

Modern Greek and ancient Greek are quite different, particularly since ancient Greek uses more accent marks.   So, for the purposes of our translation project you need to enable ‘Polytonic Greek’ in order to be able to type out the words correctly with all of their proper diacritic marks.

Here is the tutorial for Windows XP users:

Here is the tutorial for Mac users:

Christopher Scott has provided us with a link to a page which explains how Linux users can set up their keyboard so that they can type in Polytonic Greek.

Once you learn how to type Greek then you can join us in our translation efforts on the Hellenistic Astrology Wiki.  We have a lot of ancient Greek texts to type up, so we could definately use some help.   Of course, we also need some help tying up some Latin texts as well if you would rather stick with a more familiar alphabet.  Just let us know if you are interested.

Yesterday Laura Michetti submitted a partial translation of Rhetorius of Egypt’s chapter on the twelve places from the original Greek text.  Aside from a paper that James Holden published a few years ago in the American Federation of Astrologers Journal which contained a translation of Rhetorius’ treatment of four of the places, as far as I am aware this is the first time that anyone has published a partial translation of Rhetorius’ treatment of all twelve places.

Although this is only a partial translation of this chapter and there is still a lot of additional material that needs to be translated from the Greek, Laura’s translation provides us with a very interesting and insightful overview of how Hellenistic astrologers dealt with the places, or ‘houses’ as they are called in modern astrology.  Rhetorius details the topics or significations that each of the places are thought to be associated with.  In the untranslated portions, which we hope to translate in the near future, Rhetorius goes into detail about different delineations for when the ruler one place is in another.

Here is a link to the translation of Rhetorius’ chapter on the twelve places.

We are still looking for more translators, so if you are interested in getting involved then please let us know.  I’m also looking for someone to help me with typing and editing the Greek texts themselves.

Thanks to Laura for submitting this translation of Rhetorius and contributing to the project!

This video is the first in what I hope will be a series of promotional videos for the site, and for Hellenistic astrology in general.   I’m hoping that other people will be interested in making their own videos for the site as well, and then uploading them to YouTube and submitting the link to us so that we can post them on  HellenisticAstrology.com at some point.  Send me an email if you are interested, or just post a comment on this article.

Today we launched the new wiki platform which will provide the technical basis for our cooperative translation project, and I am pleased to announce that we already have our first contribution to the translations project.

Christopher Scott has translated the entirety of chapter 5 from book 9 of Vettius Valens’ Anthology, which is so far as I am aware the first time that this chapter has been translated into English and published anywhere.

The translation is available on our wiki.

This is part of a larger effort that we are undertaking in order to form a cooperative translation project in order to translate the entire corpus of Hellenistic astrological texts.  The idea is that we will be able to use the wiki in order to allow multiple translators to work on the same texts, while at the same time cross referencing them and providing additional linguistic information for each of the words used in the texts.   Ultimately it is a quasi-open source translation project since we will make all of the translated texts available to the public online for free, although we are still working out some of the details surrounding multiple author copyrights and eventually we may publish the texts in book form.

We would like to thank Mark Kuenzel for helping us with the CSS code for creating the two column pages in the wiki. This will allow us to display both the original Greek text and the English translation side by side, thus allowing for greater cooperation between editors and helping us to continually improve translations in the future.

While this is a huge milestone for our project, there is still much work to be done.  The Hellenistic Astrology Wiki is now officially open and we are looking for more contributors.  If you are interested in joining us in our efforts to recover the Hellenistic tradition then please let us know!  For contact information please see the contact page on our site.

I launched www.HellenisticAstrology.com a few days ago, and although I’m still working on the rest of the site I thought that it would be a good idea to set up the blog. In this section we will have articles, news and updates about all things related to Hellenistic astrology. Stay tuned for articles from some of the main contributors listed on our website.