Episode 49 of the Casual Astrology Podcast is out today, and it features a 90-minute solo talk where I share some preliminary research and new discoveries about the way that void of course was defined in the Hellenistic tradition.

The audio version of this episode is attached to this post on Patreon.

You can watch the video version through this private link:

[locked link]

Over the past month I've been working on a new research project where I've been trying to reconstruct the history of how the concept of void of course was defined during different eras of the astrological tradition.

Recently I started working with Levente László to compile all references to void of course from the Hellenistic and Byzantine Greek astrological traditions, and he recently completed this survey and sent me the results. I was kind of astonished and excited by what he found, because it turns out that there were more definitions of void of course than I fully realized in the early tradition.

It turns out that the Indian tradition that shows up in the Yavanajataka may have been more connected with one variant in the Hellenistic tradition than I thought. Additionally, it seems that in some authors void of course was being treated as the opposite of spear-bearing, which is when a planet is surrounded and protected by bodyguards.

Part of the implications of this is that the tradition was much more diverse than I realized, and the Antiochus definitions only preserved one part of it.

In this 90-minute lecture I read through all of the Greek passages that have been collected so far, and provide some commentary and share my thoughts on the results, basically sharing with you the current state of research on this project. Some of these results are kind of fresh and preliminary, and I'll probably put this together into a more formal presentation at some point later on, especially once I've finished going through some of the later traditions. But in the meantime you get early access to some of this exciting new historical research, and some of the practical implications that is has for astrology.

I also attached a PDF of the doc that I read through in the video version to this post, which reflects the current state of the research project as of a few days ago.

Sorry for the delay in getting a Casual out this month, originally I recorded the episode with Rob Bailey as a Casual, but then decided to release it as the first episode of April on the main podcast.