← Encyclopedia of Astrology · lesson 226/235
Mundane astrology
What it is
Mundane astrology is the astrology of the world: nations and cities, governments and economies, wars and treaties, the temper of an era. The name comes from the Latin mundus, "world" — it has nothing to do with the everyday English sense of "dull".
It is the oldest branch of the art. The first Mesopotamian sky-watchers read omens for the king and the kingdom, not for private people, and Ptolemy devotes the whole second book of the Tetrabiblos to "universal" astrology — what eclipses and the seasons signify for whole countries — before he turns to individual births. Personal natal charts came later.
What it reads
Mundane astrology works from several kinds of chart and cycle:
- Great cycles. The slow planets' meetings set the backdrop of history. The best known is the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, roughly every twenty years. Abu Ma'shar, in the ninth century, built a whole philosophy of history on it: successive conjunctions stay in signs of one element for about two centuries before moving on, and that shift was read as a change of era. The conjunction of December 2020 in Aquarius is read by many as the start of such a series in the air signs. Modern writers add the cycles of the outer planets — Saturn–Pluto, Saturn–Uranus, Saturn–Neptune, Uranus–Pluto — each with its own tone.
- Ingress charts. Charts cast for the moment the Sun enters a cardinal sign — the equinoxes and solstices — for a given capital. The Aries ingress has long been treated as a chart for the year ahead.
- Lunations and eclipses. New Moons, Full Moons and above all eclipses, cast for a place: the same lunation has a different Ascendant in every city, and the planets on its angles colour how it is read there.
- Founding charts. A country, a city, a company or even a building can be given a chart for the moment it began — a declaration of independence, a charter, an incorporation. Many entities have more than one candidate chart (the United States famously has several), and astrologers often read them together as layers rather than choosing one.
- Rulerships. The traditional correspondences between signs, planets and houses and the things of the world: which sign is associated with which country, which planet with which trade or institution. Lists differ between writers.
The cyclic index
One modern tool sums up the whole sky in a single number. The cyclic index, associated above all with the French astrologer André Barbault and building on earlier work by Henri Gouchon, adds up the angular distances between the outer planets at a given moment. When they are spread round the zodiac the number is high; when they bunch together it falls. Barbault read its low points as periods of concentrated world tension — the early 1940s stand out — and the index fell to another deep low around 2020. It is read as a barometer of pressure, not as a forecast of any particular event.
How it is read
Mundane work is read in the same spirit as personal astrology: the sky is taken to describe the climate in which events unfold, not to decree them. A great conjunction or an eclipse on a nation's chart is read as a sign of an important season, and what fills it is history, made by people. Astrologers who work in this field also stress how uncertain founding times can be: a chart cast for a guessed hour is sound on its slow planets and weak on its houses.
In a reading here
The news readings here draw on these tools: the Barbault cyclic index for the moment of a story, the phase of the major planetary cycles and when each one began, lunations cast for the place where events happen, and the last time a configuration stood in the same signs.