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Mundane Astrology<<< Back |
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| Mundane astrology is the application of astrology to world affairs and world events, taking its name from the Latin word Mundus, meaning "the World". Mundane astrology is a branch of Judicial astrology and is widely believed by astrological historians to be the most ancient branch of astrology. In the Middle Ages mundane astrology was more commonly known as the study of Revolutions - meaning the study of the revolutions of the planets in their apparent orbits around the Earth, as they were then believed to do.
Political astrology is a branch of mundane astrology dealing with politics, the government, and the politicians/laws governing a particular nation, state, or city. A wider definition of mundane astrology focuses also on natural and man-made disasters. There are two major approaches to the study of mundane astrology. One is the focus on national horoscopes. It is held that certain countries have astrological charts (or horoscopes) just like a person is said to in astrology. For example, the modern state of India is widely considered to have come into being at midnight on August 15, 1947. This time gives rise to a national horoscope for this country, which can be analyzed in terms of the natal potential and the impacts of transiting planets in the horoscope at any given time. The other approach is the ancient practice of finding correlations that exist between geological phenomena (such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.) and astronomical phenomena (the movement of celestial bodies in the Solar System). This approach is based on the horoscope of the astronomical placements at any given time, without reference to a national horoscope. Mundane astrology had two purposes: one was to look back and explain history, looking for patterns and a sense of some greater purpose in apparently chaotic events such as the rise and fall of empires or religions. The other was to predict the future. Some philosophers believed that the world could be saved from disaster if future troubles could be predicted – and subsequently averted. Although it was originally developed in ancient Babylon there have been three subsequent major periods of developments. In 120 AD the Greek astrologer Claudius Ptolemy set down the fundamentals of mundane astrology in his famous treatise on astrology, the Tetrabiblos. In the ninth and tenth centuries the astrologers of the Islamic world added many more techniques, particularly the use of the cycles of Jupiter and Saturn to identify the rise and fall of states and religions. The twentieth century saw a major proliferation of techniques mainly based on the use of planetary cycles rather than, as had always been the case the interpretation of planetary positions in horoscopes or natal charts. An approach to studying longer-term history through astrology is through the use of "precession of the equinoxes" indicators, providing a source for the idea of Astrological Ages.
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