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Modern Western branches
Modern Western astrology
Four centuries in which one art became a dozen crafts. From William Lilly's horary and Alan Leo's astrology of character to the midpoint dials of Hamburg, Rudhyar's psyche, Jim Lewis's world map and the scholars who went back to translate the sources.
- 16
- schools
- 15
- key figures
- 400
- years
The schools
Each of these grew out of a specific book, city or argument. Follow the one whose question sounds like yours.
🕯️
Renaissance & traditional practice
England, France & Italy
17th century
The last flowering of the old art before the Enlightenment closed the universities to it. Lilly's Christian Astrology of 1647 put horary and electional work into English with cases from his own consulting books, Morin argued the system through in Astrologia Gallica, and Placidus gave the West the house division most software still opens with.
🔯
Theosophical astrology
London
1890s–1920s
Alan Leo rebuilt the art around character instead of event, with karma and reincarnation as the reason a chart reads the way it does. He sold simplified readings by post, founded Modern Astrology, and after a second prosecution for fortune telling in 1917 moved his language from prediction to tendency.
☀️
Sun-sign astrology
Britain & the United States
1930 onward
The Sunday Express asked R. H. Naylor for a piece on the newborn Princess Margaret in August 1930, readers wrote in, and the daily column followed. Working from the birth date alone reduces the chart to the Sun's sign. Less a school than a delivery format, but it decided who astrology was for.
📐
The Hamburg School
Germany
1920s onward
Alfred Witte, a Hamburg surveyor, set the classical aspects aside for midpoints read as planetary pictures on a rotating dial, and proposed four hypothetical bodies beyond Neptune, to which Friedrich Sieggrun added four more. English-speaking practitioners call it Uranian astrology.
⚙️
Cosmobiology
Germany
1928 onward
Reinhold Ebertin trained in the Hamburg method and then cut it back: no hypothetical planets, little house work, and a ninety-degree dial that stacks conjunction, square and opposition together so hard contacts read at a glance. His Combination of Stellar Influences of 1940 remains the midpoint dictionary.
🌱
Humanistic astrology
United States
1936 onward
Dane Rudhyar, a composer who had read Jung early, treated the planets as functions of a personality in formation rather than as external causes. The Astrology of Personality set out the approach in 1936 along with the eight-phase lunation cycle astrologers still use for the Moon.
🧠
Psychological & archetypal astrology
Britain & Switzerland
1970s onward
Jung's archetype gave the planets a place in psychology and his synchronicity let astrologers describe correspondence without claiming a cause. Liz Greene's Saturn of 1976 showed what the method looked like in practice, and the Centre for Psychological Astrology she founded with Howard Sasportas in 1983 taught it to a profession.
〰️
Harmonics
England
1976
John Addey proposed that a chart is better read as a set of waves than a set of angles. Divide the circle by a number and that family of aspects becomes conjunctions, so the fifth harmonic shows quintiles and the seventh septiles. Harmonics in Astrology set out the case.
🔺
Astrological psychology (the Huber Method)
Switzerland
1968 onward
Bruno and Louise Huber studied psychosynthesis with Roberto Assagioli in Florence and built a system around the shape the aspect lines make. It reads the aspect figure as a single image, uses Koch houses, and treats the chart as a map of growth for someone deliberately working on themselves.
✴️
Western sidereal astrology
Ireland & the United States
1940s onward
Cyril Fagan and Donald Bradley held that the West had drifted off the visible constellations by accident and should go back. The Fagan-Bradley offset is the standard sidereal setting in Western software; the school keeps Western technique and moves every planet back roughly twenty-four degrees.
🗺️
Astrocartography & locational astrology
United States
1976 onward
Jim Lewis projected the angles of the birth chart onto a world map, drawing the lines along which each planet would be rising, setting or culminating. Relocation charts, local space lines and Astro*Carto*Graphy all answer one question: where does this chart behave differently?
🔁
Evolutionary astrology
United States
1980s onward
Jeff Green's Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul of 1985 and Steven Forrest's work from the same years read the chart as a record of prior choices and present intentions. It centres Pluto and the lunar nodes, and it holds that a chart describes conditions rather than verdicts.
☄️
Asteroids, Chiron and the new bodies
United States
1973 onward
Eleanor Bach's 1973 ephemeris brought Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta into ordinary practice, and Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses gave them their mythology in 1986. Chiron, found in 1977 between Saturn and Uranus, was taken up almost at once as a marker of injury and of what a person teaches from it.
📈
Financial & cyclical astrology
United States
1930s onward
Mundane technique applied to markets and business cycles, watching the Jupiter and Saturn series, the ingresses and the eclipses. W. D. Gann's trading work and Louise McWhirter's 1938 study of the New York exchange are its founding texts, and its claims are the easiest in astrology to check against the record.
📊
Statistical astrology
France
1955 onward
Michel and Francoise Gauquelin ran large studies on birth data and reported that eminent sports champions were born unusually often with Mars just past the horizon or the midheaven. The Mars effect passed some replications and failed others, and the thirty-year argument gave the field a quantitative wing.
📜
The traditional revival
United States & Britain
1993 onward
Project Hindsight, begun in 1993 by Robert Schmidt, Robert Hand and Robert Zoller, translated the Hellenistic, Arabic and medieval sources into English. Older technique such as sect, triplicity rulers and time-lord systems is now taught alongside twentieth-century method rather than instead of it.
The people who built them
Fifteen astrologers, translators and researchers whose work the branches above still run on.
William Lilly
1602–1681
England
Wrote Christian Astrology in 1647, the first full textbook of the art in English, and made horary teachable by publishing the worked cases from his own consulting books.
Jean-Baptiste Morin
1583–1656
France
Royal astrologer and professor of mathematics whose Astrologia Gallica, printed in 1661 after his death, is the most systematic defence of the art written in its own period.
Placidus de Titis
1603–1668
Italy
Olivetan monk and mathematician whose time-based method of house division became, two centuries later, the Western default.
Alan Leo
1860–1917
England
Theosophist and publisher who turned astrology towards character and karma, founded the magazine Modern Astrology, and was prosecuted twice for fortune telling.
Evangeline Adams
1868–1932
United States
Brought astrology to an American mass audience through consultations, books and radio, and won a New York court case in 1914 that treated her practice as a skilled discipline.
Marc Edmund Jones
1888–1980
United States
Produced the 360 Sabian symbols in 1925 with the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler and sorted charts into seven overall shapes still used for a first read.
Alfred Witte
1878–1941
Germany
Founded the Hamburg School, wrote the Rules for Planetary Pictures, and introduced the trans-Neptunian bodies that Uranian astrologers still work with.
Reinhold Ebertin
1901–1988
Germany
Built Cosmobiology out of the Hamburg method and wrote The Combination of Stellar Influences, the standard reference for midpoint interpretation.
Dane Rudhyar
1895–1985
France & United States
Composer and philosopher who joined astrology to Jungian psychology and gave the humanistic school its founding book in 1936.
Cyril Fagan
1896–1970
Ireland
Argued that the Western zodiac had come loose from the constellations by accident, and led the sidereal revival with Donald Bradley.
John Addey
1920–1982
England
Co-founder of the Astrological Association and author of Harmonics in Astrology, which recast the aspects as wave numbers.
Michel Gauquelin
1928–1991
France
Psychologist and statistician whose birth-data studies produced the Mars effect and set the terms of the scientific argument for a generation.
Liz Greene
born 1946
United States & Britain
Jungian analyst and astrologer whose Saturn of 1976 reframed the classical malefic as a developmental task; co-founded the Centre for Psychological Astrology in 1983.
Jim Lewis
1941–1995
United States
Created Astro*Carto*Graphy in 1976 and with it a whole branch of practice about where a person chooses to live.
Robert Hand
born 1942
United States
Wrote Planets in Transit in 1976, then helped launch Project Hindsight in 1993 to bring the older sources back into English.
What modern Western astrology is
The phrase covers the astrology that grew up in Europe and the Americas after the art lost its place in the universities, roughly from the seventeenth century onward. It is not one system. It is a family of schools that share a tropical zodiac, a house division and the same visible planets, and then disagree about nearly everything else: whether the outer planets rule signs, whether aspects are angles or wave numbers, whether a chart describes events or a psyche, and whether the medieval rulebook was a loss or a release. What follows is a map of those schools in the order they appeared.
The last century of the old art
William Lilly's Christian Astrology, printed in London in 1647, is the hinge. It was the first full textbook of the art in English, and it taught by worked example, walking the reader through cases from Lilly's own consulting books: a stolen fish, a missing husband, the outcome of a siege. Two crafts come out of it in usable form. Horary answers a single question from the chart of the moment it was asked. Electional runs the same machinery backwards, choosing a moment to begin something. In France, Jean-Baptiste Morin spent decades on Astrologia Gallica, printed in 1661 after his death, arguing the whole system through against its critics. In Italy, the Olivetan monk Placidus de Titis worked out a method of house division based on the time it takes a degree to rise, which two centuries later became the setting most Western software opens with. Within a generation of all three, astrology had been pushed out of the universities and the almanacs, and it spent the eighteenth century as a folk practice.
Three new planets
The old art was built for a sky with seven moving bodies, and every rule of rulership, sect and dignity assumed that count. Then the count changed. Uranus was found in 1781, Neptune in 1846, Pluto in 1930. Astrologers read each arrival as a signature of its era, tying Uranus to revolution and electricity, Neptune to photography, anaesthesia and spiritualism, and Pluto to the atom and the mass movements. Assigning the three to Aquarius, Pisces and Scorpio gave those signs a second ruler and broke the symmetry the classical scheme depended on. That single decision is the root of most arguments between modern and traditional practitioners today.
The Theosophical turn
Astrology came back into print in Britain through the Theosophical Society. Alan Leo, born William Frederick Allan, joined in 1890 and spent the rest of his life recasting the art around character rather than event, with karma and reincarnation supplying the reason a chart should look the way it does. He built a mail-order business on simplified readings, founded the magazine Modern Astrology, and wrote the textbooks that trained the next two generations. He was also prosecuted twice for fortune telling. After the second case in 1917 he moved his language further towards tendency and away from prediction, a shift that shaped how Western astrologers have written ever since.
The Sun in the newspaper
In August 1930 the Sunday Express asked R. H. Naylor to write something about the newborn Princess Margaret. Readers wrote in, the paper asked for more, and within a few years the daily column was a fixture of the English-language press. The format has one requirement: it must work from the birth date alone, which reduces the chart to the sign the Sun occupies. Sun-sign astrology is the only part of the field most people ever meet, and it is the part working astrologers spend the most time distancing themselves from. It is not a school so much as a delivery format, but it changed who astrology was for.
The German dials
Between the wars, two German schools rebuilt the chart from the ground up. Alfred Witte, a Hamburg surveyor, set the classical aspects aside in favour of midpoints, the sensitive halfway points between two planets, read as planetary pictures on a rotating dial. He also proposed four hypothetical bodies beyond Neptune, and Friedrich Sieggrun added four more. English-speaking practitioners know the result as Uranian astrology. Reinhold Ebertin trained in that school and then cut it back: no hypothetical planets, very little house work, and a ninety-degree dial that stacks the conjunction, square and opposition on top of each other so the hard contacts can be read at a glance. He called it Cosmobiology, and his Combination of Stellar Influences, first published in 1940, is still the reference dictionary for midpoint work.
Rudhyar, Jung and the psyche
Dane Rudhyar was a composer and philosopher before he was an astrologer, and he read Jung early. The Astrology of Personality, published in 1936, treats the planets as functions of a personality in the process of forming rather than as external causes, and works out the eight phases of the lunation cycle that most astrologers still use for the Moon. Rudhyar named the approach humanistic astrology. Two of Jung's own ideas carried it further: the archetype, which gave the planets a home in psychology, and synchronicity, which let astrologers describe a meaningful correspondence without claiming a physical cause. Liz Greene, a Jungian analyst as well as an astrologer, made the method concrete with Saturn: A New Look at an Old Devil in 1976, reading the classical greater malefic as a developmental task. The Centre for Psychological Astrology, which she founded with Howard Sasportas in 1983, trained much of the current British and American profession.
Numbers, maps and cycles
The same decades produced schools that went the other way, towards measurement. John Addey argued in Harmonics in Astrology, published in 1976, that the chart is better understood as a set of waves than a set of angles: divide the circle by a number and that family of aspects turns into conjunctions, so the fifth harmonic shows quintiles and the seventh septiles. Cyril Fagan and Donald Bradley took a different quarrel to the zodiac itself, holding that the West had drifted off the constellations by accident, and their Fagan-Bradley offset remains the standard sidereal setting in Western software. Jim Lewis projected the angles of the birth chart onto a world map in 1976 and called it AstroCartoGraphy, which turned relocation into a branch of its own. And financial astrology applied mundane technique to markets, watching the Jupiter and Saturn cycle, the ingresses and the eclipses, with W. D. Gann's trading work and Louise McWhirter's 1938 study of the New York exchange as its founding texts.
New bodies and old souls
Two late additions changed what a modern chart contains. Eleanor Bach published an ephemeris for Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta in 1973, putting the four large asteroids within reach of ordinary practice, and Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses supplied their mythology in 1986. Chiron, found in 1977 on an orbit between Saturn and Uranus, was absorbed almost immediately as a marker of injury and of what a person can teach from it. Meanwhile evolutionary astrology took the psychological turn one step past the psyche. Jeff Green's Pluto: The Evolutionary Journey of the Soul, published in 1985, and Steven Forrest's work from the same period read the chart as a record of prior choices and present intentions, centred on Pluto and the lunar nodes, while insisting that it describes conditions rather than verdicts.
Testing it
Modern Western astrology is the part of the field that has most often been put to the test, because it is written in a language statistics can reach. Michel and Francoise Gauquelin ran large studies on birth data from the 1950s and reported that eminent sports champions were born unusually often with Mars just past the eastern horizon or the midheaven. The Mars effect held up in some replications and failed in others, and the dispute over how the samples were assembled ran for thirty years. In 1985 Shawn Carlson published a double-blind experiment in Nature in which astrologers did no better than chance at matching charts to personality profiles; astrologers contested its design, and the argument continues. What the whole episode gave the field was a quantitative wing that had not existed before.
The traditional revival
The newest movement in modern Western astrology is a return. Project Hindsight, begun in 1993 by Robert Schmidt, Robert Hand and Robert Zoller, set out to translate the Hellenistic, Arabic and medieval sources into English, and the material that came back changed practice. Sect, the difference between a day chart and a night chart, triplicity rulers and time-lord systems such as annual profections and zodiacal releasing are now taught alongside twentieth-century method rather than instead of it. Chris Brennan's Hellenistic Astrology, published in 2017, is the standard survey of what was recovered. The result is that a Western astrologer in the 2020s may be working with Ptolemy's rules and Rudhyar's vocabulary in the same reading.
How to read this section
The schools above are not a ladder, and none of them replaced the one before it. A working astrologer usually holds two or three at once, taking sect and time lords from the revival, midpoints from the German schools, and a psychological frame from Rudhyar and Greene. Use the school cards to follow one line of descent from its founding book, and the figures below to see where the lines cross. Every school, its methods and its vocabulary are available in the fifty-two languages of the Tarot Academy ecosystem.
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