Four of the astrology texts I ordered from Amazon arrived yesterday afternoon, and a nice bit of reading it’s going to be. Let’s see, there’s William Ramesey’s Astrologia Restaurata from 1653… Astrological Practice of Physick by Joseph Blagrave, 1671… ooh, a modern text, Celestial Philosophy or Genethliacal Astronomy from John Worsdale writing in 1825… and Henry Coley’s Clavis Astrologiae Elimata or a Key to the Whole Art of Astrology, 1676. All of these are facsimile reprints from Kessinger Publishing, preserving the texts as they were typeset back in the day.
This last one is making me laugh as I return to Amazon to review its information page. Amazon, you probably know, lists Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs). For Coley, apparently Amazon merely scanned the book with some optical character recognition software. All those old-style long S letters, the ones that look like a lower-case f, have come out as f in the SIPs… eighth houfc, tenth houfc, fourth houfc, third houfc, pofited therein, being pofited, fad brown hair, tenth houfe, eighth houfe, confider alto, judge the fame, judge the contrary, fuch kind, fame nature, moft part, fuch perfons, fuch things…
Sorry. I’m probably the only one who thinks it’s funny. I’m easily amused. “Fad brown hair.” Serioufly.
What have you been reading lately?
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May 15, 2008 at 11:25 am
I was picking over Worsdale just this morning. I started reading it a while back, At first, it was tragicomic, and then it began getting morbid for me. I began to imagine Worsdale terrorizing the town of Lincoln, his neighbors running away from him every time they saw him. My favorite might be the first nativity death judgment — the two-year old kicked in the head by a horse and killed. He did the kid’s nativity at the age of 1, but when the danger period approached, he stopped by the parents’ house again and issued further warnings. But, he says, NOTHING COULD STAY THE HAND OF FATE (or something similar), and so nothing could stay “its” (he calls the child “it”) “dissolution”.
May 15, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Hey! Yeah, I foolishly chose Worsdale for 10 minutes of bedtime reading last night. Griping about other astrology writers… flip flip flip… endless math, right ascensions, oblique ascensions… flip flip flip… oh no, horse accident! Poor little kid.
Definitely not a guy I’d like to have over for supper. It’s almost a good thing for the town of Lincoln he didn’t have a computer. All that math slows him down.
“I HEAR A CHILD IS BORN IN THIS HOUSE. GIVE ME THE BIRTH DATA.” “Er, no, that’s okay, John…”