Article by Naomi Bennett, USA

It is well known that Egyptians started their solar year at 0 Cancer. This was the time of the annual flooding of the Nile, the reappearance of Sirius, the star of Isis and the season to plant crops. They made the southern boundary of Egypt fall on the exact position of the Tropic of Cancer on the first Cataract of the Nile and then they extended the north boundary of Egypt exactly 7 degrees latitude because Mercury had the most extreme latitude of the visible planets. Mercury defined the width of the zodiac belt to be a total of 14 degree and they associated Mercury as the God of Measurement.

So the sign Cancer was all-important to the Egyptians and they assigned the Moon as its ruler. The next sign Leo was given to the Sun, then came Mercury to Virgo and Venus to Libra, Mars to Scorpio, etc. This drove me crazy in my first studies back in the 1960’s. Why, why did they give the planetary order as Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, etc? Any basic education

given in elementary school shows us the solar system in the order of Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc. Were they stupid and didn’t know better? It’s impossible for the Sun to be closer to Earth than Venus or Mercury.

Heliocentric Solar System

The Egyptians had studied the skies for more than 4,000 years. How could they get this so wrong? They were obsessed with the sky and creating Heaven on Earth. They knew the circumference of the Earth and that the Earth flattens at the poles! The Great Pyramid is aligned exactly to the cardinal directions. Only modern instruments can get as exact as the Egyptians did in the Age of Taurus! What is wrong with this picture?

I began a quest that started in 1992 to confirm astrological theories that I had been taught, find their basis and the proof. I acquired over 200 publications through interlibrary loans in the 1990s looking for the documentation. I took multiple trips to Europe to look at Egyptian artifacts searching for these clues. It lead me to London to the British Museum, to Paris to the Louvre and to Egypt to Esna, Luxor, Dendera and Cairo. In the course of 20 years of study, I found some of my best discoveries were not in astrological texts but in other fields like archeoastronomy, ancient mathematics and history. Luck, timing and synchronicity all played their part in piecing the puzzle together. I think I now have enough verification to finally write about the first of these elements to help astrology advance in this new century.

Classic Hellenistic sign and planet rulership looks like this:

Cancer and Leo are the only signs solely assigned to a single luminary of the Moon and Sun respectively. Then the co-rulership signs go in order of Virgo-Gemini ruled by Mercury, Libra-Taurus ruled by Venus, Scorpio-Aries ruled by Mars,

Sagittarius-Pisces ruled by Jupiter, and finally Capricorn-Aquarius ruled by Saturn.

The first big stroke of luck came at the Louvre in 1993. In the bookstore was a copy of the magazine Archeologia with a colored picture of the Egyptian Sky Goddess Nut. She had the signs of the zodiac running down both sides of her body in the co-rulership order. It was from the Hellenistic Egyptian period of 200 A.D. There are at least three of these images documented in various museums. Inside the lid of the sarcophagus was the planetary order that I had been looking for. The order is very important. It starts with the two luminary signs of Leo and Cancer on opposite sides of her body. Leo and Cancer have single rulers and then the co-rulership signs extend down Nut’s body.

In 1996 I was at the Project Hindsight Conference in Ithaca, NY with Robert Hand and Robert Schmidt on Hellenistic Astrology. The large room was full of astrologers and closet academics from Cornell University. During a lunch, I had a conversation with Avery Solomon who had a Ph.D. in Mathematics and taught at Cornell University. I shared with him that Carl Payne Tobey had claimed that the planetary order assigned to zodiacal signs was based on the average mean distance from the Earth. Avery had the necessary software on his PC to model the principal of celestial mechanics. He showed me that Mercury and Venus did stay the majority of the time behind the Sun, from the Earth’s point of view. It conformed to the Hellenistic planetary order. Sadly I didn’t get a copy of his program. I saw the proof but I didn’t have the evidence.

Yet with the Western World discovering planetary motion by Kepler and Galileo re-discovering the Sun as the center of the Solar System, why did this astrological order persist? Below is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Vezelay, France still displaying the old order with Christ rather than the Goddess Nut dividing the signs between Cancer and Leo.

The Ancient World believed in keeping knowledge secret so that rulers and priests could maintain power. Many truths and knowledge were recorded in picture form. You had to have enough learning to understand the messages left behind. Most of the mathematical and astronomical discoveries we attribute to the Hellenistic Greeks were already known in Egypt. They were the great geometric experts in the Ancient World. The Greeks gained their knowledge from what was left of the Egyptian priesthood. This is well documented by an expert in ancient measurements, Dr. Livio Steccini. The Egyptians already knew about precession, pi, phi, the Golden Mean, right triangles, the Fibonacci numbers and a form of calculus (discovered by Newton). They did this with geometry and ratios, long before Arabic numbers or algebra (a form of mathematical notation).

But much was lost with the conquests of Egypt. We just have pieces of this knowledge through monuments, objects and fragments of texts that have been translated multiple times. The libraries at Heliopolis where destroyed. The rulers and priests were killed so the conquers could control the population. There was the Persian Conquest of 525 BC and then Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 330 BC. Nick Campion points out that there is a 600 year gap of no astrological writings after the fall of Rome. What we have was preserved by the Persians and transmitted to Europe during the Persian occupation of southern Spain. This was the start of the Renaissance and our recovery of Hellenistic astrology.

As astrologers, we have forgotten to look at the astronomy side of this picture for the answers. All of our astrological structure is based on sacred geometry, astronomy and mathematics. The best minds in the Ancient World were astrologers until the Church and the Scientific Age suppressed astrology. We are still recovering this knowledge thanks to serious academics like Robert Zollar, Robert Hand, Robert Schmidt and Benjamin Dykes in reconstructing our past with new translations. Now we have a new generation of traditional astrologers trying to put the pieces together, like Chris Brennan and others. Add to this the power of computing and the Internet to disperse this knowledge. We can now share this subject with our colleagues in India and the Arab World. There is said to be over a million untranslated manuscripts in India, let alone the Arab World and China.

Carl Payne Tobey discovered this answer back in the 1933 because he studied the sacred geometry structure embedded in astrology’s design. But he left no proof, no references. It wasn’t the style of astrologers in the early to mid 20th century to do so. A good portion of what they discovered for themselves was given to their private students but not necessarily published. We can thank Robert Holden for some of this documentation and to the few astrological libraries we have in the USA and UK so we can reconstruct the work of other astrologers in the past century.

This is a screen shot of John Mick’s video on the geocentric model of the Sun and Mercury traveling around the Earth. He used the real position and velocity data from NASA JPL. This is a video on YouTube that I highly recommend watching. The Earth is at the center. The Sun is a small dot going around the Earth in a single circle. The rest of all the curved lines are many years of Mercury transits from the Earth’s point of view. The key element is that most of Mercury’s transit time is outside the Sun’s circle. Mercury spends more time behind the Sun from the viewpoint of Earth. The loops are Mercury stations and retrograde periods.

The second image is a screen shot from John Mick’s video of the Sun and Venus traveling around the Earth.

The Earth is in the center of both images. The Sun is a small dot in a single circle around the Earth. All the outer circles are either Mercury or Venus moving around the Earth over several years.

It is very clear in both images that Mercury and Venus spend more time on the far side of the Sun. The Sun is closer to Earth during most times of the year than Mercury or Venus. When the inner planets of Mercury and Venus cross in front of the Sun’s path that they slow down and appear to us as retrograde motion. This is the proof that these ancient astrologers knew that the Sun is closest to the Earth, after the Moon, most of the time. They weren’t so stupid after all. They knew about average mean distance!

Which brings us to the discovery of the outer planets of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. If we maintain this planetary order of average mean distance, then Uranus must be assigned to Aquarius, Neptune to Pisces and Pluto to Aries. This is not haphazard. This is beyond coincidence.

Carl Tobey discovered this in 1933 and published it in 1938 and 1954. Under the modern rulership of sign assignment to planets by average mean distance, Carl deduced:

“If we agree to identify the Moon with the zodiacal sign Cancer, than the accepted system of rulership around the zodiac from Cancer to Pisces [Moon thru Neptune] in a counter-clockwise direction follows an arithmetical pattern. It coincides with the mean distance of each body from the earth. Since the [modern] astrologers did not consider mean distance in associating the planets with the various zodiacal signs, the probability of this pattern conforming with mean distance may be expressed as follows:

___________1____________ = _____1__

11 x 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 6,652,800

Thus, the odds in favor of mean distance from the earth being the factor that determines what the ancients called ‘rulership’ of the planets over the zodiacal signs are 6,652,799 to 1. From this mathematical point of view alone, Pluto, being the first planet beyond Neptune, must coincide with Aries. Its nature must be that of Aries.”

As a minor side note, please remember that one of the original meanings of the word ‘rulership’ is ‘to rule’ or ‘ruler’ was to measure or to measure lengths. I believe this is the original meaning of rulership in astrology. It is to measure. Just like the Egyptians were the master geometers, they made Mercury the God of Measurements!

I understand this stirs up the debate about the assignment of Pluto to Aries but it cannot be avoided^. As a student of modern and traditional astrology, I can understand the avoidance of using the outer planets. It upsets the Essential Dignities. The only way to use the Dignities is to only use the old co-rulersips. Using the old rulerships keeps all the Hellenistic rules and techniques in place. The Jyotish astrologers have the same problem using the outer planets in evaluations. They only use the old co-rulers for the Dignities but Jyotish astrologers incorporate the discovered ones. There is just too much evidence that the transits of the outer planets are real and they work. At some point these conflicting issue needs to be addressed. But at least there is now strong evidence that average mean distance from Earth was the basis of the underlying pattern behind Hellenistic Planetary Order.

About Author: Naomi Bennett has practiced astrology since 1970 and is currently President of the Astrological Society of Austin, TX. She has a B.S. in Psychology, had an 11 year career in computer sales with Fortune 500 companies and 15 years as a RE investor. She teaches astrology as a branch of sacred geometry and advises clients. Quarterly mundane and financial forecasts are on YouTube at naomibennett360 and she has a new book coming in 2014.