If you could predict death… would you?

John Worsdale’s 1825 book Celestial Philosophy or Genethliacal Astronomy is not light reading. Its chief purpose is to demonstrate, via some 30 natal charts and his meticulous calculations, how the time and cause of death may be determined from the birth chart.

A page-turner it is not. For one thing, he’s a bit of a ranter; don’t get him started on all those false, pernicious astrologers whom he deems a discredit to the art. He names names. He digresses, often, and often in mid-delineation. Perusing it, I frequently wished he’d had an editor to steer him back on course from his high-pitched rants.

For another, it’s just sad. Of the charts I reviewed, there are drowned children, ladies dead of consumption, a child who takes a horse’s hoof to the forehead; promises of marriage defeated by death; young men, thinking themselves competent astrologers, who sadly get their own predictions quite wrong.

The astrology itself is detailed, mathematical, and stark. Worsdale has parked some of the critical how-to information in the very final pages of the book, explaining how one determines the Giver of Life and the various killing events. I only just found those pages this afternoon, after jumping around from chart to chart, wondering when he was going to explain this key point. Each chart (which is composed in the older box-style rather than the round chart modern readers are more accustomed to viewing) is accompanied by lists of planetary events, motions, and directions, both in the zodiac and in mundo. The method, if I understand correctly, involves choosing the Giver of Life (Hyleg, Apheta) from several possible candidates based on the conditions presented in the birth chart, then composing and studying these long lists of events to determine when that Giver of Life is sufficiently threatened as to be extinguished.

Worsdale, it is true, often astonishes with his ability to hone in on the most dire time of the individual’s life, and on the cause of death. In one instance, he recounts how a lady came to him with the birth data for a female relative of hers, and asked what sort of adventures this relative might have in her life, whether she would travel, and so forth. He studies the chart and proclaims that the person in question died before the age of six, some 46 years earlier. The querent confirms this, admitting she had come to test him, but that he’d proven his art sufficiently by his reply. (He goes on to request her own birth data, and lets her know she’s got about seven years left, herself. It’s not nice to try to fool John Worsdale.)

Worsdale fixes his eyes on the Creator’s unerring laws; yet he rarely seems to express compassion for the lives lost. Too often he makes statements to the effect of “this prediction was made public a full year before it came to pass, just ask the family.” It made me wish for a few empathetic words. Yes, to shuffle off this mortal coil for the promise of eternal bliss must, in the grand scheme, be a fine trade indeed; but while still in this life, at least, some words of comfort for the grieving survivors must be in order.

That said, astrologers ought to know that this text is out there and not difficult to obtain. No, it is not an astro-cookbook; it requires concentration and real work, and its concepts are foreign to most of us peering in from the 21st century. But it is an interesting answer to those who believe that length of life cannot be determined from a birth chart. It does not, for me, answer whether death should be predicted. I think there’s more than one future blog post waiting to be written on that subject.