Scope

This site covers the Western astrological lineage and the seasonal calendars of pre-Christian and folk Europe. That boundary is a statement about what this site is currently equipped to do well. It says nothing about which traditions deserve study, and makes no claim that anything here belongs to anyone by descent.

What is in

The lineage as it is documented, which is not a European story. It runs from Mesopotamian celestial omens through Egyptian and Greek material, through Sasanian Persia and the Arabic-speaking world, into Latin Europe, and on into the modern revivals. Alongside it, the calendars and seasonal observances of pre-Christian and folk Europe, and the twentieth-century reconstructions built on them.

A tradition here is named by a place and a period. It is never named by a people, and nothing on this site should be read as suggesting that ancestry grants anyone a claim to a practice or bars anyone from one.

What is out, and the actual reason

Living astrological traditions outside that lineage are not covered as practices. The most significant is jyotiḥśāstra, the Indian tradition. This site does not teach it, does not implement its technique, and does not present its interpretive doctrine.

The reason is competence. The distinction from propriety matters, because the two give different answers.

An appropriation argument would have to say that this material is not this site's to write about. That argument does not hold. The Sanskrit horoscopic corpus is published, translated, taught for university degrees in India, and sold openly. Nothing in it is restricted by the tradition's own norms. This site sells nothing, claims no lineage, and takes nothing anyone is excluded from. Treating that tradition as untouchable while treating Babylonian and Greek material as common intellectual property would draw exactly the line this site's own rules forbid: it would make some traditions ideas and others property.

The competence argument does hold, and it is this site's own published rule applied consistently. An entry may not rest on a text this site cannot cite at the standard it demands elsewhere. The three works a treatment of Indian horoscopic astrology would most need have, between them, no critical edition and no scholarly English translation. The rule this site already applies to the Nechepso–Petosiris fragments — that where no critical edition exists, none may be cited — produces the same answer here, and produces it for a reason that has nothing to do with who is entitled to write.

The line, stated so it can be checked

Material about transmission is in scope. Material about technique and interpretation is not. The test is mechanical, and it uses the same registers every entry on this site already carries:

• If a claim can be written as Established, Contested,Correction or Gap, resting on peer-reviewed scholarship, it is in scope.
• If a claim requires a Tradition block — that is, if it reports what a tradition holds a thing to mean — it is out of scope, and this site is the wrong place to read it.

So the arrival of Greek technical vocabulary in Sanskrit is in scope. The dating controversy around the Yavanajātaka is in scope, and is a better piece of history than the settled-sounding account it replaced. A Sanskrit astronomical treatise reaching Baghdad in the 770s and passing into Latin Europe is in scope, and omitting it would make this site's account of Arabic astrology wrong on its own terms. What a particular placement is held to signify is not in scope, in any tradition, including the ones this site does cover.

Where this boundary would move

A competence claim is falsifiable, which is the reason for making one. This exclusion stops applying when someone who reads the primary languages and can weigh the manuscript tradition is doing the work. If that happens, this page changes.

Other traditions

Traditions outside Europe are not one category, and treating them as one would itself be a statement about peoples rather than places. They sort differently:

• Some have an enormous published scholarly literature, no restricted content, and no custodian body asserting control over description. Chinese calendrical science is the clearest case. There, as with jyotiṣa, the constraint is competence rather than permission, and the register check bears that out: the Chinese state's own instruments on this material are instruments of promotion, including a national inventory listing, a UNESCO inscription and a published national standard for the calendar's computation. Coverage has begun, at the transmission end and at the technical end both: the Chinese lunisolar calendar, the Astronomical Bureau and the Calendar Case, and the eastward transmission of the same Hellenistic material this site follows westward.
• Some have identifiable custodians who have asserted, in retrievable form, that particular knowledge is not to be published, and where publication rather than description is the harm. Several Indigenous star and calendar traditions are in this position, with formal governance frameworks behind them. For those, the burden of proof reverses: the question is not whether there is a reason to refrain, but whether there is permission to proceed. This site does not describe them, and would link to material their own communities have published rather than paraphrase it.

Correcting a widely repeated error about a tradition is a different act from describing that tradition, and remains possible in cases where description is not.

These positions are recorded in the schema rather than left to judgement. Every entry declares how much of its tradition it covers: full coverage, transmission history only, a pointer to material knowledge holders have published themselves, or nothing. An entry touching a tradition outside the declared scope must also carry a dated record of where the public register was checked for asserted restrictions and what was found. Both are build failures if absent, so scope cannot widen quietly one entry at a time.

Places, periods and peoples

This site holds that a tradition belongs to a place and a period, never to a people. That rule was written against a specific problem: identitarian claims on European pagan material, where naming a people functions as a claim about blood and naming a place does not. It works there, and it works partly because the peoples in question have no surviving polity.

It fails, and can invert, for a living Indigenous nation. Where a people has a governing body, the name of the people is the name of the sovereign, and replacing it with a geographic label is the precise move by which sovereignty was written out. A rule made to defeat identitarians would, applied without thought, read on such an entry as a refusal to name the people whose knowledge is being discussed.

So the rule is scoped: places and periods where no extant governing body exists, and the community's own name where one does.

Disagreement

The reasoning is on this page so that it can be disagreed with specifically. Corrections are welcome; see About.