Who Was Claudius Ptolemy?
Ptolemy was many things but he was never an astrologer. He never cast a chart in his entire life primarily because he was way too busy perpetrating a fraud on the whole of humanity. While he was not an astrologer, he was a liar, a fraud, a plagiarizer of the works of others, a fabricator of his data, a fabricator of other people’s data, and an incompetent astronomer. If Ptolemy was alive today, he would be one of those guys living in mommy’s basement playing with his man-bun cranking out “articles” on Wikipropaganda as a legendary “expert” in his own mind who thinks 200 Marines is a Marine “battalion” (from an actual Wikipropaganda article).
If that is true, then why do people hold out Ptolemy as an expert in astrology?
Because they are ignorant.
Let us remove the veil of ignorance so that we may become enlightened.
This is the story of a scientific crime…. I mean a crime committed by a scientist against his fellow scientist and scholars, a betrayal of the ethics and integrity of his profession that has forever deprived mankind of fundamental information about an important area of astronomy and history.
The Crimes of Claudius Ptolemy by Robert Newton, 1977, Johns Hopkins University Press
You can say the same thing about Ptolemy and his fake astrology.
Ptotally eradicating Ptolemy from astrology is the first necessary step to move astrology into the realm of credibility. So long as Ptolemy is falsely treated as an expert and his inane ideas taken into consideration and incorporated into astrological practices, astrology will never attain the credibility it deserves because people will never be able to interpret charts accurately.
You need to understand why that is true.
Ptolemy’s primary work was the Hē mathēmatikē syntaxis (“The Mathematical Collection”). It was translated from Greek into Arabic in the late 700’s (of our Era) and you know this work by its Arabic name Almagest, which, in a manner most nauseating, came to be inaccurately translated into English as “the Greatest.” Gerald of Cremona translated the Syntaxis from Arabic into Latin retaining the title Almagest. Since the Almagest is the worst astronomical work ever written and one of the greatest frauds perpetrated on humanity, we will follow the example of others and refer to it as the Syntaxis.
The companion work to the Syntaxis was a four-volume set known as the Tetrabiblos in Greek and the Quadripartite in Latin although its original title was likely Apotelesmatika.
Writing Ptolemy-Aristotle is time-consuming taking up a lot of space and using a lot of band-width. Since Ptolemy was a pturd neither worthy nor deserving of even one iota of respect, we lovingly refer to Ptolemy as “Ptotle.”
We will begin with a series of articles showing Ptotle to be a bumbling incompetent topah:
- Ptolemy the Pturd
- Ptolemy the Incompetent Astronomer
- Ptolemy’s Astronomical Fabrications
- Ptolemy the Confused Geographer
- Ptolemy’s Mythical Pterms
We encourage you to investigate the following good reads:
In 1819, J. B. J. Delambre proved Ptotle was a fraud. 148 years later, J. P. Britton stumbled onto Ptotle’s fraud while researching his doctoral dissertation.
- J. B. J. Delambre, Histoire de l’Astronomie du Moyen Age, Chez Mme. Veuve Courcier, Paris, !xviii (1819).
- J. P. Britton, “On the Quality of Solar and Lunar Observations and Parameters in Ptolemy’s Almagest,” a dissertation submitted to Yale University (1967):
- J. P. Britton, “Ptolemy’s Determination of the Obliquity of the Ecliptic,” Centaurus 14,29-41 (1969).
- The Crimes of Claudius Ptolemy by Robert Newton, 1977, Johns Hopkins University Press
- B. R. Goldstein, “Casting Doubt on Ptolemy,” a review of The Crimes of Claudius Ptolemy, Science 199, 872 (1978).
- The Ptolemy in Perspective series of articles written by Stephan Heilen, Alexander Jones and others