The History of Vibrational Astrology

The History of Vibrational Astrology

I’m going to introduce you to Vibrational Astrology, which has foundations in Harmonic Astrology, but has progressed to the point that it needed to be given a new distinct name to differentiate it from Harmonic Astrology.

David Cochrane, my teacher, has been researching astrology in great depth since 1972. In his research, his desire has been to understand what really works, reliably, and what is unreliable. In his research, in which he uses stringent evidence-based methods, he has developed a new, progressive form of astrology, which draws on the work and understanding of many esteemed astrologers of the past, including Kepler, Ptolemy, John Addey and Reinhold Ebertin.

First, I’m going to give you a little history about some of the work that Vibrational Astrology is founded on.

Ptolemy, an astrologer who lived about 2000 years ago and wrote a sort of Bible on Astrology, called the Tetrabiblos, popularized the use of just 5 aspects. The conjunction, opposition, trine, sextile and square. Around the 1960’s - ’70’s, astrologers, including Reinhold Ebertin, started to say that there are 8 aspects that have real impact in chart reading, including the 5 Ptolemaic aspects; the semi-square, sesquiquadrate and quincunx started to be used by some astrologers at this time. And John Addey popularized the use of Harmonic Charts, which are divisional charts, which are derived from the primary natal chart. Divisional charts have been in use in Vedic (Indian) astrology for thousands of years, but Harmonic charts are used differently to the Indian methods of interpretation. Most Harmonic charts are also calculated different to the way Indian divisional charts are.

Ptolemy wrote another book on harmonics. He said the planets get their energy from the “harmony of the spheres”. The planets give off a sound, and they might get their meaning and aspects from sound/harmonics.

To quote from this website from the University of Chicago -Microcosmos.uchicago.edu/ptolemy/features.html

“Claudius Ptolemy’s Harmonics was one of the most sophisticated works of music theory to survive from the Hellenistic world. Ptolemy related musical harmonies to the properties of mathematical proportions derived from the production of sounds themselves. Those harmonies he considered to be distributed in all aspects of the physical universe. In particular, they were there in the phenomena of the planets and the human soul.

Ptolemy argued that harmony was a kind of principle of activity, or form, reliant on the two highest senses, sight and hearing. Sight and hearing themselves generated two kinds of knowledge. Sight generated astronomy, since the heavenly bodies could be apprehended only through that sense. Hearing produced the discipline of harmonics. In the most nearly divine of natural entities in their respective realms, the soul and the heavenly bodies manifested and appreciate beauty to unusual degrees. That, indeed, was one of the insights that made astrology credible. So astronomy and harmonics were twin sciences, and it should not be surprising to find complementary characteristics in them.”

John Addey wrote the book on Harmonic Astrology, literally. Published in 1977, John Addey was an astrologer who took the techniques being used by other astrologers to the next level, by adding divisional charts, which he called Harmonic charts.

A quote from the Introduction of John Addey’s book Harmonics in Astrology, gives a perspective about Astrology that is very useful in understanding Vibrational Astrology or any form of astrology which is on the cutting edge, perhaps a little bit ahead of it’s time and not yet accepted by the mainstream users:

“There is nothing harder than to see old and thoroughly familiar ideas in a new and strange light, or to accept that the truths we have acquired by diligent study and tested in practice with care may yet, whilst they contain much truth and have a sound underlying basis, have become distorted or oversimplified in the course of long centuries of transmission in good times and bad, by competent and incompetent teachers, and through epochs when man had neither the means nor the inclination for radical research and reassessment.

No doubt some will feel that astrology is perfectly all right as it is and needs no radical reexamination. Yet the truth is that no science or body of knowledge can be effectively applied unless and until its constituent elements can be clearly distinguished and defined, and this state of affairs does not yet apply in the field of astrology. In this sense we are all, or should be, as astrologers, engaged in the building of a science, a science which, of course, has a practical application as an art.

But what are the “stones” with which this science is to be built? This is an important question, for before any science can be truly unfolded, so as to realize its full potentialities, it must first be reduced to its fundamental concepts, to the simple units of which it is really composed. This is absolutely vital. A man who tries to build up a science without first finding the real units with which it is to be built is like a man who must try to build a house out of the rubble from other buildings. Every time he picks up a brick he finds part of another building sticking to it, and probably part of the original brick missing as well. The pieces are the wrong shape and mixed up with other, non-essential elements. They are not flexible enough; they help him but they hinder him at the same time.

One can find plenty of examples of this in the history of science. Until the true basis of a science is found, nothing quite “fits” and each new discovery only raises fresh problems. Once it is found, everything falls into place and each new discovery confirms what is already known.”

Addey goes on to talk about all the uncertainties and clashing interpretations that various astrologers use. There is no clear agreement about house divisions, orbs, how to interpret aspects, and on and on. This is what Addey is talking about, regarding the need to get back to basics, to find the fundamental “unit” that the science of astrology is truly based upon. And this is how Addey, and now David Cochrane, have approached their work with the science of astrology: not by just taking other people’s word on what the tools are to work with and how to use them. But by digging much deeper, questioning all aspects of the science, to make fresh discoveries and develop much greater, expansive understandings of what is possible in the art and science of “readings the stars”.

David Cochrane began his obsession with astrology in 1972, just after graduating college. He was lucky enough to be offered a cabin to live in rent free, which allowed him to dive fully into researching astrology, as many hours a day as possible. His approach was quite unique from the start, in that he didn’t just read and learn astrology from books, he felt the need to test out what he was learning, by conducting over 10,000 interviews, and simply asking questions, to see if what is believed as astro fact was actually aligned with people’s direct experience and personality. He found that many things were not accurate in any measureable way. This lead him to spend the last 50+ years doing research, experimentation and contemplation. And this is the foundation of Vibrational Astrology. Vibrational Astrology is based on what has passed rigorous evidence-based testing. Through this approach, David found that many of the ideas that are generally accepted as truth in the astrological world are incorrect, too generalized, or skewed in the entire lense that astrology is understood through.

The biggest aspects that have made the cut into this form of evidence-based astrology, as David Cochrane has christened Vibrational Astrology are: Vibrational charts (which are basically the same as Harmonic charts or divisional charts - being divided by a fraction of 360, to allow the astrologer to see more easily all the aspects that are in the natal chart, that are too difficult to see without opening up the chart by dividing it to show those less simple aspects - if the human brain worked more like a computer we wouldn’t need to do this). David expanded on Harmonic charts to a large degree beyond what John Addey was working with. He also includes midpoints structures as an important part of chart interpretation. In Vibrational astrology, orbs are of huge importance, and we use tighter (closer) orbs than most astrologers work with. And, planetary patterns are incredibly important, an pattern involving 3 or more planets (the more planets that are involved the stronger the pattern becomes) - planetary patterns affect us more than signs and houses do according to the evidence-based research conducted by David and the other astrologers he works with to conduct all the research.

After researching the Zodiac signs, their meanings are understood in a much more streamlined, concise way. Unlike the interpretations of many astrologers, signs are seen - in Vibrational Astrology - as giving the person a style of doing things, but it does not tell anything about distinct likes or dislikes, or personality traits or motives for doing what they do. So, this takes a lot of the prominence of signs away, and signs become something that just colors the tone or generalized style of behavior. Many of the attributes assigned to each sign can not be assigned to all people who have that sign prominent. That is because each sign has a particular function that it needs to express, and it will ultimately be expressed differently from person to person. I will go over each sign in a future blog, so you’ll be able to get a clear understanding of what I’m talking about.

The way the planets are viewed in other forms of astrology is also different to the way V.A. (Vibrational Astrology) views them. In V.A., the planets are said to have a frequency, and those frequencies are being channeled though us, depending on the patterns being created in our own charts. We are not our chart. We are a soul or a part of the Universe that has been born at a particular time, and the chart we are born with has a distinct combination of frequencies (like music) that is trying to play through us. We can block some of these energies, due to trauma and/or training from childhood, but if we resist or block what wants to move through us, we will feel that something is off, we will know at some level that something is missing. We will feel quite stunted and out of harmony with who we are meant to be.

This understanding is much more satisfying to me, to put things in their proper place. It has always felt wrong to me to talk about my chart as though it’s “me”, but that is the language and approach I see and hear among people discussing their charts. Changing our view, and understanding that the chart is actually just a graph of the energies that we need to express in some way, we can remember that what we are is much more than those energies, and perhaps we will feel more comfortable with those energies, and less judgmental with ourself and others.

In the upcoming blog post, I’ll dive into different aspects of Vibrational Astrology and how it works.