The First Newsletter

Who am I, what I’ll be writing about, and a bit on Homer and the Houses.

The Morning Stars by Sarah Paxton Ball Dodson, 1887

About me:

I know this is always the boring part. But I have to tell you a bit about me; the first newsletter must be, in a way, a first-house affair.

So: my name is Marcos Monteiro. I have been studying and practicing astrology for around two decades.

I grow up, as most people in the world, thinking that astrology was rubbish — something that only nutjobs would believe in, and only conmen would practice.

One day, however, I discovered that a Brazilian writer and philosopher whom I admired, Olavo de Carvalho, had been an astrologer. He openly — and, to me, shockingly — praised the art in his writings, and stressed the importance to know at least the basics of it in order to understand Western art, culture — even history and religion!

I had to know more about that. I searched the internet high and low about anything even vaguely astro-related; downloaded whatever I could find, and started reading. To be honest, it did seem to be more than mere debunked nonsense, but it hadn’t “clicked in” yet.

Afterwards, I came across a course of “Introduction to Traditional Astrology” (by prof. Luiz Gonzaga de Carvalho Neto — Mr. De Carvalho’s own son — and Pedro Sette Câmara).

It took me a good while to finally decide — I didn’t know it then, but I am a typical melancholic, changing gears is not natural for me — but I enrolled in the course, and loved it. Halfway through it, I discovered Pedro’s former teacher, the English astrologer, John Frawley.

That was a game changer. In 2012, I finally did his Horary Course, and I’ve been studying with him, and working in this wonderful stargazing craft, ever since.

I am also a Brazilian, born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, currently living in a small town at the Southern Brazilian Coast (Barra Velha).

I am a Catholic, and contrary to what one would expect, astrology helped me in my conversion process.

I have 5 kids (4 boys and a girl), three dogs, a turtle, a cat, a rabbit, and a couple of fish.

I’m a jiu-jitsu black belt, have a degree in biology, and I like to watch Sumo.

OK, enough about me.

Second house stuff:

This newsletter will always be free. But sometimes I’ll share things I’ve done, or services I offer.

What I plan to write about:

Anything related to astrology and symbolism, to be honest.

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Let’s do something fun now.

Homer and Cycles.

Homer and Frawley. Homer’s in the bottom image.

In the first four lectures of his Natal astrology series, John Frawley explains the symbolic orders of the events (the descent through the spheres, and the houses in two different directions) in Homer’s Odyssey.

The lectures are a delight, but they have a downside: they make us search for these patterns everywhere.

Not all works of art have these cycles, of course. But many of them do. And after one identifies them, it’s impossible not to notice.

The Iliad is a beast very different from the Odyssey, but I think there is also a clear astrological house-pattern there.

The poem is not a giant two-part adventure, with stories within stories, depicting a hero trying to get back home.

It’s a war song about pride.

It’s fitting, then, that the cycle of events is clockwise — against the order of the houses. It mimics the diurnal motion of the Sun (or the primary motion of the Heavens).

It all starts at sunrise. Due to the complaints of the priest of Apollo, the Sun god, Agamemnon’s pride hurst Achilles’s pride, and both would-be-solar-figures part ways. Then, the Acheans do terrible war decisions, and Paris commits his single most stupid action (and that’s Paris, so it’s really stupid); Pandaro shoots Menelaus, not killing him, but breaking the truce. Lots of self-undoing.

I won’t go through the houses now — that will come in another newsletter — but next we see eleventh-house stuff — gods intervening in the battle and Diomedes, gifted by Athena, doing supernatural things.

The story unfolds until we get back to the first house, when Hermes (Mercury, which joys in the first house) helps Priam, the Head of Troy, in rescuing his son’s body from Achilles. They have an honest conversation, and each of them recognizes the human being in the other.

And, of course, what follows after that — the story after the Iliad, told by Homer in the Odyssey and by Virgil in the Aeneid — is also full of self-undoing, animals (way) larger than goats and feet. Twelfth-house again.

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The Nature of the Houses and Signs.

Speaking of houses:

There has been a recent replay on the old discussions about which house is the best, and which house system ancient astrologers preferred.

I won’t go into it now (and I probably never will), but it’s an excellent opportunity to remember what they are.

First, the other houses — the Celestial ones, the signs.

The Sun goes around the sky in a perfect major cycle, completing its motion in one year. Its path is known as the Ecliptic.

The Ecliptic has a belt around it, 16 degrees wide (12, depending on the source), called the Zodiac.

This Zodiac is divided in twelve chunks — twelve quadrangles, each 30 degrees long, 16 wide) — called signs.

So, signs are small pieces of the sky, through which the Sun passes in its annual course, and by which the other planets go in their motions.

The concept can be expanded to include the entire sky, and even whatever falls below it — that is why we say a star not inside this belt is in one sign or another.

Having its origin in the Sun’s motion, and being part of the seven planets way in the sky, they are symbolically associated with qualities. They modify the planets. Moreover, the signs are, in relation to the sky, static, and in relation to us, indifferent.

The houses are also divisions of the sky. However, regardless of the method you use (Whole Sign, Equal, Porphyry, Placidus, Koch, Regiomontanus, Morinus…), they depend on where, on Earth, the division starts.

They are symbolically derived (and most of them are calculated) from two points: the Ascendant — the point at which the Sun’s path crosses the Eastern Horizon (“where the Sun is at sunrise”) and the Midheaven — the point at which the Sun’s path crosses the Meridian closer to the Zenith (“where the Sun is at noon”).

The important bit about the Meridian and the Zenith is that each point on the Earth’s surface has one. Your Ascendant and your Midheaven move as you move. They’re the Ascendant and the Midheaven of a location, not “of the sky”.

They are, in relation to us, dependent, and in relation to the Sky, changeable.

That means the houses divided the Sky not according to the unerring path of the Greater Light, but according to us.

That’s why they’re related to aspects of our lives, to affairs, to areas of human existence.

Regardless of how you calculate them — even if on the computer screen, they “coincide” — signs and houses are never the same thing.

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That’s it for now. This is already too long for a newsletter. See you again soon.