Friday, July 29, 2016

The Chandra Levy Case and the Gold Standard of Astrological Prediction

The Chandra Levy murder case is once again in the media. Here is the NY Times article.

This was a 2001 murder that took place in Washington, DC. Chandra was an intern who had an affair with a congressman and then was murdered. A suspect was found guilty, but recently charges against him were dropped.

At the time I lived in DC and the events of the case took place less than a mile from where I lived. I don't normally do "celebrity" charts, but this one was so close by that I went ahead and took a look at the event charts. At the time, Chandra had disappeared and no one knew whether she was alive or dead or what had happened.

You can see the charts and actual written prediction I made in advance of knowing the results

A couple of comments. First, as far as I am concerned this sort of analysis is the true gold standard for astrological prediction. To be a traditional astrologer and do a real prediction, one must work from a specific chart that applies to the situation, use traditional techniques and have a written prediction, made in advance, before the results are known. That written prediction then needs to conform to the results.

This rules out looking at Hitler's, Einstein's, presidents' or other celebrity charts, where the native or querent and their career and life are already known. This rules out the "psychic" astrology reading that may well get it right, but doesn't actually use astrological technique and is not replicable by others; instead the astrologer used the chart like a crystal ball or tarot card spread as a means to access their psychic abilities or a reading where a chart is not provided or even used. This rules out the oral reading that is accessed by fallible memory later, "oh yeah, I'm sure I predicted that perfectly"

This is not to say that I always perform up to the gold standard. I'm fallible, I don't always get predictions right. And I have to say that the Chandra Levy predictions did involve the use of intuition, judgment and psychic ability. For about a week after I made these predictions, I kept looking at people's faces and seeing skulls. Nevertheless, this was psychic ability exercised within the parameters set forth by the chart.

It's very important to set these high standards for ourselves as astrologers. It keeps us from being lazy and keeps us from fooling ourselves into thinking that we are predicting when all we are doing is reading what we already know back into the chart. But it is also important to realize we can't always get the prediction right. We set the bar high and we keep our eyes open!

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