• 30-hour course (ten 3-hour classes)
• This course is suitable for all levels. No astrological experience is required.

Astrology has constantly evolved alongside our understanding of astronomy and our cultural beliefs about our place in the cosmos. The rich back story of our art helps make us more grounded practitioners and offers new possibilities for creative retrieval in the present. The story of astrology is very much the story of humanity awakening to its place in the cosmos.

The Astronomy and Cultural History of Astrology begins with the most distant echoes of our species waking up to and beginning to make sense of the solar and lunar cycles in which we are embedded. These early discoveries were encoded in megalithic stone circles dating back as far as 10,000 BCE. Places like Stonehenge were used to track the timing and paths of the sun and moon and even to predict eclipses. Stone circles are a worldwide phenomena, and insofar as they represent the earliest documented “logico-ritual” interactions with the heavens, they upend the longstanding idea that astrology only begins in Mesopotamia.

Sumerian celestial omens and the Mesopotamian zodiac introduced crucial features of what we would today identify as astrology. For thousands of years, the kings of Babylon employed political astrology in the course of governing and waging war. Meanwhile in Egypt, astral theology lead priests to develop precise nocturnal time-keeping techniques for religious ritual by tracking the rising and culmination of the stars found in 36 portions of the sky, the decans.

The synthesis of the Mesopotamian focus on the ecliptic, the Egyptian focus on the angles, and Greek philosophical thought, laid the groundwork for Hellenistic astrology, which solidifies most of the major concepts of contemporary astrology, including the meaning of the planets, signs, houses, and aspects. The enormous empire created by Alexander the Great, stretching from India through the Middle East and Greece to North Africa, permitted this cross-cultural melting pot. Hellenistic astrology grew and developed throughout the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity, alternately embraced and outlawed by the powers at hand.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the Western world entered a state of decline in learning during the Middle Ages. Deprived of the educational underpinnings necessary to cast charts, astrology followed suit. Meanwhile, the astrological tradition flourished and evolved in the Islamic Empire. Just as the Renaissance was triggered by the reintroduction of Greek learning via Arabic sources, so too were astrological texts reintroduced during this period, leading to a great rebirth of astrology, enriched by its passage through the east.

While the Enlightenment would eventually lead to a scientific skepticism that largely dismissed astrology, it was in fact astrology itself that drove the early search for greater astronomical precision. Many of the major figures of the Scientific Revolution were interested in astrology, magic, or the occult, including Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo. After its second death, astrology would be revived again in the modern era via Theosophy and the New Age, eventually finding a friendship with Depth Psychology that it keeps to this day.

In this course you will receive:

• 30 hours of teaching with Travis DiRuzza
• Course syllabus
• Reading assignments for every week
• Sky Watching assignments for every week
• Extensive PDFs (including maps of empires, constellation charts, diagrams of stone circles and cave paintings, pictures of calendrical objects such as notched tusks and moon counting bones, sample astrological charts, etc.)
• Supplemental materials, including a recommended podcast and recommended movie for each week, as well as timelines, articles, and videos.
• Permanent access to all course videos and materials via the course page.

Please feel free to ask us any questions you may have about this Trust Psyche online course or any other courses we have. We love hearing from you and are happy to speak any time at Travis@TrustPsyche.com.