. The original purpose of this website was multiplex, with the objectives of 1. establishing a resource for integrating contemporary, progressive psychological astrology, astrological research methods, and Uranian Astrology and other midpoint astrologies. 2. promoting the distribution of recent and advanced literature from both English- and German-language authors that has not been heretofore available. 3. promoting the position that the course of astrology should be determined by intelligence and competence rather than simple, crass economic or astro-political factors or determiners alone. 4. in sum, promoting quality astrology that reflects the latest and most advanced developments and techniques in the field that have proven themselves practical and effective, with a special section on Uranian Astrology techniques, history, and interpretive approaches. The unifying theme of this website is intelligent and sound astrology proven by experience that promotes humane values and the creation of a more informed, intelligent, and civilized society on our planet. Another of our objectives is to promote the practice of techniques that are validated by current observation, and set aside pet techniques maintained simply due to sentimental bias or inability to let go of old astrological habits. A significant portion of the website is devoted to the works of Ms Ruth Brummund, one of the prime contributors to Uranian and Hamburg School Astrology. Ms Brummund has asked me to make available her email address at Ruth.Brummund@t-online.de ,where she welcomes questions about Uranian Astrology and the opportunity to share knowledge gleaned from her 30+ years at both the heart and forefront of Uranian Astrology developments in the 20th and now the 21st century. RESPONSE TO CRITICISMS Writing this response is an unfortunate necessity due to the underhanded activities that have occurred along the way during the development of what has today become Uranian Astrology. And it is hoped that the comments in this writing will contribute toward wrapping up the misunderstandings and inequities of the past and putting them behind us, once and for all. Alfred Witte, the virtual "founder" of modern midpoint astrology, was widely criticized nearly 100 years ago when he proposed the existence of planet-like bodies beyond Neptune; yet astronomers working with current technology are now verifying that a number of Transneptunian bodies, many highly gaseous in makeup, exist. Time will be required before the orbits of the newly astronomically-verified bodies will be known with any degree of certainty, and which of them correspond to the Transneptunians of Witte and Sieggrün. The discoveries are likely to continue to include numerous smaller asteroid-like bodies in the Transneptunian regions that do not correlate directly. Colleagues and early students of Alfred Witte were split apart during the Nazi reign in Germany. Witte himself was interrogated and tracked by Nazis, due to his resistance to their agenda, and he ultimately committed suicide when he saw indicators that he was likely to be arrested and sent to the concentration camps, or his family could be penalized or harassed for his opposition to the fascist agenda. The German public was generally kept in the dark about the most inhumane Nazi policies and actions, while many Germans were moved by calls to patriotic duty and therefore followed through on what they were asked to do, and this also had an impact on how astrology developed as it did during those times. With Witte dead, and Ludwig Rudolph censored and even for a time interned in a concentration camp, midpoint astrology survived openly during the war largely through the work of Reinhold Ebertin, who took up the label of Cosmobiology while rejecting various practices of Witte including use of the Transneptunians. After the war ended in Germany in 1945, proponents of Witte's original teachings, Ludwig Rudolph among the more noteworthy, were able to resume their work and publishing activities, so as to include those techniques omitted by the Cosmobiologists. English-language translations of the German Hamburg School literature suffered from numerous problematic dynamics. In the United States, early Hamburg School literature such as the Witte Rules for Planetary Pictures and its derivative Lexicon for Planetary Pictures, largely written and edited by Hermann Lefeldt, were translated and have been distributed since the 1960s under the name of Hans Niggemann, whose publications literally reflect the astrological perspective of their actual author, Hermann Lefeldt. The unauthorized, sometimes unacknowledged translations led to conflicts over copyright and royalty issues between the various factions involved, and they were subsequently distributed in the USA, sometimes with book titles changed so as to obscure their original German source. In this manner, Hamburg School astrology was propagated and taught in the United States as it was practiced by Lefeldt in the 1950s and 1960s, when the bits and fragments of techniques that Witte experimented with were still in the process of prioritization and systematization. The literature of that era incorporated Lefeldt's strong historical and curious ideological biases. He was a historian by profession, and tended to emphasize historical techniques (based on houses, Arabic parts, and rulerships) while de-emphasizing the less conventional or popular, but often more effective techniques that Witte used in his later years. In addition, Lefeldt espoused an exceedingly deterministic philosophy that was clearly evidenced in his interpretations and writings, often of a markedly negative bent, and this was reflected in Niggemann's translations. Witte, on the other hand, being innovative, eclectic, prolific, and interested in finding truth rather than proving or preserving tradition, had experimented with numerous techniques at various times, and sometimes later discouraged continued use of techniques he had written about earlier. According to master Uranian Astrologer Ruth Brummund, the same was true of his student, Ludwig Rudolph. In response to Lefeldt's conservative historical biases, other astrologers such as Ludwig Rudolph and Ruth Brummund ultimately sought to rectify the imbalance created by Lefeldt's historical and fatalistic biases, and set about to prioritize Hamburg School techniques based on practical considerations of efficiency, instead of historical validation, after Lefeldt's death. This issue has arisen among astrologers around the world, where systematic research has yielded validation of certain techniques while finding little to no validation for others, and a subsequent resistance by conservative astrologers already locked inflexibly into historical patterns and biases, and sentimentalism. This is not to say that some of Witte's techniques were not practiced before; but he was primarily an innovator, not a copier. He put each technique he encountered to the test, approaching astrology as a science rather than a religion to be simply 'believed' in, and after testing and discrarding numerous ineffective techniques, he set the ground stage for what eventually developed into Uranian Astrology and its derivative, Cosmobiology. Still more testing and clarification was to be done after Witte's death, and after further research resuming in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the historical techniques were again shelved by more progressive German Uranian Astrologers as they did not prove to be efficient. Those who did not understand the breadth of scope of Witte's experimentations tended to take a cursory glance at the sum of his work over time, and conclude that Hamburg School astrology is a jumbled assortment of inconsistencies and superfluous factors (a criticism forwarded very graphically by Geoffrey Dean in his Recent Advances in Natal Astrology). Indeed, the early translations in North America justify this assessment. However, what Dean, and those without access to more recent advancements in Germany could not or did not take into account was that Witte's work to test out astrology for ineffective techniques and move forward was not finished when he died, and that Witte's spirit of futurism and critical inquiry were revived in the 1970s by colleagues of Ruth Brummund, in an effort to further sort out remaining complexities through more critical testing and practical application. The later work of Ludwig Rudolph, often overshadowed by the influence of Hermann Lefeldt, and that of Ruth Brummund have continued the evolutionary thread of Witte's work in line with his innovative spirit, while the Lefeldt school (brought to the USA by Hans Niggemann) continued to practice many tangential historical techniques, still loaded with historical experimentations. One thing non-Uranians do not realize is that Uranian Astrology as it is practiced today by the actively skeptical German Uranians, such as Ruth Brummund, actually streamlines and de-complexifies astrology by eliminating the numerous discrete-point classical and historical methods that yield relatively minor or ambiguous information... that today's Uranian Astrology is based primarily on interpretations validated via continuous systematic study, research, and application since the early 20th century, rather than 'sacred' texts from the 60s and earlier, and in many ways is more clear-cut and less complicated than mainstream astrology methods based on classical techniques. Thus while Uranian Astrology does build on techniques developed in earlier centuries, it discards numerous techniques in favor of those that offer more precise and substantial information. Of all schools of astrology it is among the least historically-biased. In the anglophone world, it was only in the 1980s that direct links to the more recent developments in the Hamburg School were established in the USA, thanks in part to Hamburg School astrologer Ruth Brummund, and plans were finally made to translate and publish the newer German materials, which had evolved quite radically beyond the era of Lefeldt and Niggemann. The fatalistic and tradition-biased outlook and interpretations of Lefeldt had since been replaced with literature reflecting awareness of free-will choice and psychological factors within the range of inclinations delineated by astrological factors, and a much broader understanding of the planetary energies had developed due to extensive application and experimentation. Unfortunately, however, translation agreements sometimes fell through at midstream and writings were printed in an incomplete, sometimes unintelligible state. A fortunate turn of events occurred, however in the 1990s, when Ruth Brummund, a major producer of German-language reference materials since the 1970s, took the lead in reformulating links in the USA to bring Uranian Astrology back onto the track of progress and quality. It is through cooperative work with Ms Brummund that the Uranian Beacon and Uranian Institute editor has been able to present more recent developments in Uranian Astrology to the English-speaking public, and thus fill in a gap of nearly 50 years with comprehensible, up-to-date materials. Ms Brummund's extensive experience and research has enabled her to sort through and cut out non-essential techniques, in order to present a coherent and efficient approach to Uranian Astrology that contrasts with the fragmented and chaotic system presented in English in earlier years. During the learning process, the Uranian Institute editor's own perspective on Uranian Astrology has shifted radically to due the impact of Ms Brummund's penetrating insights, gradually phasing out relatively ineffective historical techniques as more intensive work with Uranian methodology presented by Ruth Brummund proved its superior efficiency and accuracy. In short, the editor has discovered that midpoint analysis according to Brummund techniques is more precise, more efficient, and sometimes presents the same information in a more direct and succint way. (This may not be apparent using the older Witte Rulebook, which was a collection of isolated early observations, while the new Brummund Rulebook presents more comprehensive and eclectic interpretations based on over 50 years of subsequent observations. Thus, those working with the older interpretive materials may yet not grasp this point.) It is direct work with Ms Brummund that has elucidated past ambiguities and led to the realization of Uranian Astrology as a highly functional system, relatively indifferent to established classical astrology methods, yielding more precise results when flushing away the dross of classical astrology and setting aside marginal experimental techniques that Alfred Witte and Ludwig Rudolph ultimately discarded themselves in their later years. In sum, the Brummund method is a rather significant development beyond the materials printed before the 1970s, and is more in tune with the level of sophistication and objectivity of other astrological schools in recent times. What this has meant for astrologers as a whole is that we now have access to newer Uranian Astrology materials that have evolved due to research and application that has been undertaken since the 1950s. Our most severe critics have emerged primarily from those whose talents lay far more in the realm of commercial skill than in astrological skill; and a number of deliberately falsified claims have been made, including one that Ruth Brummund's contacts with Ludwig Rudolph were minimal and insignificant, that Ruth and I caused unnecessary delays while we were simply protecting ourselves from unfair financial exploitation and continual jostling and interference, and that Ruth's contributions were of marginal significance to Uranian Astrology when in fact she has been the author of several major German reference texts applicable to current times, and is one of the most experienced astrologers among published Uranian authors. Opponents' underhanded business tactics went so low as to rename English-language books with ambiguous titles that confuse the public about what is current and what is old stock needing to disposed of to clear a profit, and attempts to copy printed texts into computer programs without permission of their authors and/or translators. Perhaps more significantly, such strategies spilled over into causing the overall quality of accessible English Uranian Astrology materials to stagnate or retrogress, and anglophone astrologers have subsequently been kept in the dark. It is time for the polarity between professional skill and profitability to be resolved. It is time that those who do the bulk of the work receive the benefits of their efforts, and that those whose function is primarily restricted to inequitable, exploitive profit-making be set aside to pursue more fruitful activities in line with their abilities. In doing so, we hope to see that the truly productive are rewarded for their efforts, and that the quality of astrology is upheld by the management of materials being coordinated by those competent and knowledgeable of what they are making available to the public. This summarizes some key issues underlying the background and affecting the current status of the Uranian Beacon and Uranian Institute and our work to promote understanding of Uranian Astrology. While we initially found financial incentives to be distasteful and incompatible with our astrological work, we now see that it is only practical and fair to benefit from what we have produced, and to combine business sense with competence, skill, and integrity required to produce the actual "product". Otherwise the inequities of a business/professional dichotomy remain problematic. Implementing this change entails becoming more actively involved in the actual manifestation and distribution of the materials we create and produce. Astrology will continue to be identified as charlatanism as long as we allow charlatans and hucksters to dominate our field and engineer its public image. We hope to see astrology evolve as a field as we begin to resolve the polarity that impedes the success of talented astrologers, to dispel traditional paradigms that obscure accuracy of insights, and play a role in the gradual building of a corpus of quality astrological literature accessible to enlightened and inquiring minds. We would like to see the concept of business ethics become less of an oxymoron and more of a reality, and to see astrology respected for its accuracy and for its usefulness for humane objectives. In reference to the credibility of Transneptunians, ample and convincing astrological work has been done with them for three-fourths of a century now; new space technology is proving unquestionably that there are numerous planet-like bodies in the Transneptunian regions; and observation over time that yields precise orbital information about the newly astronomically-verified bodies will need to be compared with the data yielded by Alfred Witte and Friedrich Sieggrün. None of this has occurred or will occur overnight. Much work is yet to be done to make astrology credible at all levels of society, and this will involve taking a critical look at history and historical techniques, and testing out a plethora of speculative techniques to see which are effective and then which are the most effective and economical for astrological practice today. At the Uranian Institute, we are committed to these objectives. Blake Finley San Francisco, 22 September 2001; updated 26 October 2005 |
