foreign one of my favorite topics because it's so uh it was used in Antiquity so far back and because I have an interest in Babylonian research this is one of my favorite topics and I haven't done too much um uh in the way of presenting public publicly on eclipses although I've worked with them quite a bit but um because I've focused so much on the language work but um I I decided to shake it up a little bit and do this for a change because this is another of my favorite topics so um anything that that really goes back to the really really early days of astrology is fascinating to me um so part of this talk will be using kind of a it will fuse some traditional but also some Modern approaches because we've kind of and that's true with all my work I tend to start off with the ancient stuff just by way of a theoretical reference and then try to build on that and try to test it out and then try to see how our modern world can inform what the Ancients knew and I think a hybrid of the two looking back and looking forward I think the hybrid of the two is usually the best approach um so um I want to talk a little bit just briefly about the astronomy of eclipses um because there's a lot to it and we're not gonna I don't want to spend too much time on it but I do want to give you an overview of the different kinds of eclipses and um uh how they're how they're formed and um I'd like to the diet the diagrams I'm using here are were done by a friend of mine um who's in Portugal whose book I've I've been translating a couple of friends of mine but Louis Rivera Rivera is the the one who does the graphics on the on the in the artwork in the book which is quite beautiful and I wanted to just uh give a reference to his work here because it's um I'm using it in in this talk um so there are um just to just to kind of as an overview of the types of eclipses that exist there are solar eclipses and lunar eclipses obviously and um there are three types of solar eclipses and um you have a diagram here of the three types there's a total eclipse and um that's that happens when uh the eclipse occurs close closer to the node uh and the in those eclipses the Moon is completely obscured by the sun then there's a partial eclipse and that occurs a little bit farther from the nodes and that those eclipses are where the Moon is partially covered by the Sun and then there's the annular eclipses and that's where the Moon is the farthest from the earth and covers only the center of the solar diff and um there's sort of like a ring left around the Sun um and there's diagrams here of what you see what you tend to see um the one in the opening slide here was an annular Eclipse because you could still see the ring around it um solar eclipses occur at conjunctions of the Sun and Moon and this is when these are within about 11 degrees of the lunar notes so uh it's and the lunar nodes are for those who don't know are the intersection point of the ecliptic with the moon's orbit um and when the orbit of the moon passes between the Earth and the Sun that's when you get an eclipse solar eclipse and this is of course these diagrams are from a geocentric perspective on the right and from a heliocentric perspective on the left you can see here that they uh the Umbra of the moon is shining upon the Earth and when it passes between the Sun and the Earth and that's the shadow that's cast Over the DRS and that creates a path which we'll be talking about a lot because that path is important to do more casting work with with the solar clutches with the lunar eclipses here in the heliocentric perspective on the left you see that the eclipse occurs at the oppositions of the sun and moon when these occur within 11 about 17 degrees of the lunar nodes and what happens is that the orbit of the earth passes between the Moon and the Sun and here in the geocentric perspective that Lewis Drew out you can see what it looks like you have um uh the Umbra and then you have the penumbra um and the moon passing and casting a shadow there on on the earth um the there are three types of lunar eclipses as well they are they have different names that's when the Min completely crosses the shadow of the earth there's a partial when the moon partially crosses the shadow of the earth and then the penumbral when the moon merely crosses the penumbra and these usually can't be seen um uh and you have diagrams here you can see why the number can't be seen because it only causes it partially and then the number is not cut is not uh shown um so uh a little bit about the frequency with which eclipses occur um there are usually two Eclipse Seasons per year and each season contains a lunar and a solar eclipse so you get four total eclipse usually for on average for total per year but every once in a while you can have as many as seven or as few as two and this variation depends on a couple of things it's the difference in duration between the eclipse season and the lunar cycle um that can create an extra eclipse and the regression of the lunar nodes can create an extra Eclipse season as well um partial eclipses can occur between 17 degrees and 11 degrees uh this is for 17 for lunar and 11 for for solar this is from the lunar nodes so anywhere within that range you can have partial eclipses total eclipses occur when the scissor genes the disease are just the moon sign Cycles our angles are within five degrees of the lunar node um so um so they're quite frequent um you know usually we don't get them in the news very often and as often as they occur only because uh certain eclipses are visible in certain populated areas and um that's when we hear more about them but at other times they're not visible in in very popular areas so we don't hear as much about them but they are quite frequent uh eclipses that occur within the same cycle and these um share the similar Sun Moon Earth alignment geometries and there are three different cycles that play into that so you can get the astronomy of it can get a little bit complicated but uh the ones that occur within these same uh geometric alignments um belong to the same family but they belong to Acero cycle what's called a cereal cycle and they repeat every 6585 days roughly that's 18 a little bit over 18 years um and this kind of uh geometrical alignment occurs because of the harmony that exists or the interplay that exists between three lunar cycles the synodic month so this is a cycle from New Moon to New Moon and you get 22 223 cycles of this uh between eclipses uh the anomalistic month and that's from perigee to perigee of the Moon and those are 230 and you get 239 of those in each Center Cycle or and the draconic month which is the cycle from note to note and you get 242 of these in every cycle but you can see that the serocycle that's drawn here in this diagram traces out these paths um every in regular intervals you can see them they go progressively they move progressively from pole to pole and you can see that here are some drawn out um over the course of 18 years every 18 years you get one and they go in a particular direction either North or South depending on where they are in this house as in the series so these uh all of these Sarah's um eclipses that belong to the same Sarah cycle Sarah's fam series belong to a family um and they're usually given a three-digit number by astronomers that identifies them as belonging to the same family so all of the ones back here in this diagram they all belong to the same Sarah's family 136. um there are there's a notation system so this these are just the ones drawn out from 1901 to 2045. but the the notation system that uses this three-digit numbers called the Vandenberg um the notation system um and there is a different notation system that's used by astrologers um that has like a north and on it or else there's a number in them with an N or an S and um that one that system is I find it a little bit more confusing I prefer to use this the astronomical Saros numbering system um because um they're just easier to spot and there there's less ambiguity with them there's some confusion that happens with the other system on some of the on some of the eclipses which I won't get into but um this system is eloquent because um the even numbers you know are for our solar eclipses near the moon's descending node and the odd numbers you know are for solar eclipse is near the moon's ascending notes um so usually the series will start off at one of the polls either the Northern or in the South depending where uh wherever the um and the alignment happens to be and it works its way north or south to the other pole and that completion typically takes between 12 and 15 centuries um so that's the whole lifespan of a pharaoh series and within that lifespan you may get from 69 to 87 eclipses anywhere in that range and so all of these eclipses are thought are sometimes thought by astrologers depending on who you read and we'll get into this a little bit when we get into the astrology of it but they're thought to be related because they're from the same kind of astronomical family so when they start off at the polls because of the angle the tilting of the earth and the way that the alignments work the they will start off as partial eclipses and become total as they get closer to the equators so when you're following a saro's family if you see the you'll see that there's like a bunch of total eclipses within that 15th century say there'll be a bunch of total ones in the middle there where they cross nearest to the equator and as they get closer to the poles they'll be more partial until uh the series dies and then the number is retired and they start with the new number so it's interesting that you know the whole Eclipse family is quite long and has a birth and a death and I think it's uh Bernadette Brady who has done some work with um trying to figure out what each Sarah's family is connected to um and she's written about this um it's just kind of a little overview of of eclipses and so you'll be uh so you'll understand when I talk about Sarah's Sarah's numbers or Sarah's cycles and you'll understand what I mean when we look at the interpretation of it um now what I want to do is my Approach is kind of a hybrid so I'll talk a little bit about what the Ancients thought and then kind of where I depart from it and why um and then what what some of the modern elements I bring into this um so the first question that I have at least is okay what is the difference between us and if you know any of my work you know I'm big on questions and I'm big on um the obvious questions like you know the comparative questions what is the difference between this and this that's like the Crux of all of my research work is always what is the difference between this and this um so we use a lot of stuff but we never we don't tend to ask what is different we know they're they're so lunar eclipses we sometimes interpret both but what is the exact difference between them is there a difference between them um and that's believe it or not is a hard question to find an answer to in the literature um it seems like it it hasn't either hasn't been asked enough or hasn't really been um answered enough because I have a hard time finding an answer to that in the actual literature but there is some there are some references in the traditional literature um and they tend to be along the lines of well the sellers are much more important than the learners but that's as far as the differences are taken um so Ptolemy talks about uh solar eclipses being more powerful and lasting longer than lunar well yeah um he means in terms of their impact their uh the astrological impact not their astronomical duration but their astrological impact um so the solar eclipses he says are uh are most impactful when the sun is rising or near the mid Heaven I happen to agree with this I I think that that's obvious when you start doing the research on them um the lunar eclipses he says are more destructive when in the Western Skies um I haven't done as much comparative work on the lunars to see if this statement is true but this is what he thinks thinks they're both pretty negative um a solar eclipses he says affect the Eastern lunar affect the West um and I guess if if either he's following Ptolemy or or he just has noted the same thing that lunar eclipses tend to have some kind of relationship with the West there's you know a tendency to divide up the Zodiac and in the tradition into hemispheres and giving one hemisphere to the Sun and one to the moon so that's probably I don't know that that's an empirical statement I think that's probably more of a theoretical statement than anything else um but it warrants Empirical research just just to see if that's true um Ramsay William Ramsey has um some some stuff on eclipses and he says that the effects of solar eclipses in each decade of a sign have different meanings um so this is just an example from from his work and he says referring to 20 eclipse is at 20 Libra and I would assume 20 to zero the end of Libra um says they portendeth the death of some great king under the Dominion of Libra seditions and families and you know this is typical of the way the literature has delineations they're quite you know if you've read any of the stuff you know they're quite direct about their uh Doom um but uh but it's it's interesting to see that some of them do try to make a distinction between solar and Luna um this is kind of my take on the difference from just working them a little bit and trying to see them empirically um what is the actual difference between these um from so first of all you know the eclipse itself what is what actually does it mean now going back to the Babylonian days eclipses were always very negative Omens so there's obviously some historical precedent for well not just president there's some historical tradition for thinking of them as as not being good things um and now I have read in the more modern literature that there can be good eclipses um and uh Charles Jane talks about this especially when you look at natal eclipses to natal charts and I think that's true only in the sense let me give you an example if I'm saying that all eclipses represented disruption in the light okay and therefore in the way life is extraordinarily experienced what I'm saying is that um I'm making a statement that light and this is a very important Concept in traditional astrology one has to have a good grasp on what light actually is for an astrologer because it has a meaning and what light is is just a reflection of life so if life is of reflection of life it's life is a reflection of life as it is ordinarily right what what so the equation of our life um is a translation of these configurations that come from planets as they are seen in the day of you know in the light of day or night uh but in in some light um so if light is our experience basically and that's pretty simple and accurate way to put it I think then an eclipse is a disruption to that white so it's a disruption to or our ordinary ordinary um way of life now normally we think of the word disruption as negative and and that's probably true in most cases but we can also have positive disruptions for example I can think of winning the lottery as being a disruption in my life but in a good way another positive disruption could be a a very uh distant move for example let's say I'm a student and I'm going to study abroad for three years that's a disruption in my ordinary pace of life or experience of life but it's a positive one it can be so I think any of these things can show up under eclipses so they don't all have to be dire and Gloom necessarily um when you talk about Nations um they do tend to be more negative um and this both in the literature and in what you see the eclipse is bringing up and it may just be because um in a nation of A disruption tends to cause a departure from the way things are normally occurring and those can often be hard on most people you know in a on a global sense so um if that's true eclipses that are total have a greater impact than those that are partial simply because there's a larger area the of the life that is impacted so we have a greater impact in the disruption um or from the disruption I should say the signs of the eclipse and its Lords have a lot to say about the type of event and how it will transpire and we'll come back to a lot of this as we as we go through some some examples I'm taking more of a depth approach here simply because I want to give you um kind of a deeper understanding of the eclipse rather than just giving you a bunch of examples and not going too deeply in the meaning of it so what I want to uh so I don't have a lot of examples to show you but I want to I do want to take a a deep approach to what those examples and how to go and the procedure how would I come up with how would I even get to this eclipse and what would it mean to me so I want to do that rather than give you a whole bunch of examples so um the solar now the distinction here between solar and lunar solar eclipses and this goes back to the idea of light solar eclipses um and by the way just as an aside uh light has this idea of light that I'm talking about and how light is impacts astrology um is also very relevant to discussions on sect um for any of you who've done traditional astrological work uh if you really want to understand sect and Rob Hannah has talked about this a lot uh you need to understand light and how light works so um that's true also for aspects um in any any time you have references to day and night um solar eclipses getting back to the distinction uh occur means that the sun which has more focused light and has brighter light um means that in a solar eclipse it's going to show you disruptions to uh from events that are highly visible or more focused in time or that affect specific