Ptolemaic lore: Shrub brings DREAD & "horror in his wake" - plus malevo

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000088&sid=aj6Bx4pFqfLQ&refer=culture
`Fatal Sky' Charts Astrology's Impact on Columbus, Reagan, Bush


.... Benson Bobrick takes up the task in ``The Fated Sky: Astrology in History'' (Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $26), which chronicles how planet worship has influenced mankind from ancient Baghdad to modern America, where 10 million people a year pay to have their horoscopes read.

Bobrick, who has written books on the American Revolution and Civil War, gives his readers a workout. More Ph.D. thesis than page-turner, ``The Fated Sky'' is chockfull of sentences with more stuffing than the planetary tables of Regiomontanus. Approach this book with caution and a good supply of Stabilo Boss highlighters. The slog is worth it, right from the book's opener: ....

Bush Brings `Horror'

``Unfortunately, the horoscope of President George W. Bush would seem allied to dread events,'' Bobrick writes.

Horoscope readers will be interested to know that Bush's ``ascendant'' falls on the ``powerful fixed star'' of Praesaepe, ``one of the most malevolent clusters in the sky.''

``It does mean, astrologically, that he tends to bring horror in his wake,'' Bobrick writes of Bush, born under the sign of Cancer, the crab. ``Or so an astrologer might say. I am not one; and these are not my own, willful judgments, but Ptolemaic lore.''

Traveling from Mesopotamia into another Mideast trouble spot, Israel, Bobrick explains that the Hebrew expression mazel tov, or congratulations, originally meant ``may you have good stars.'' Ancient Jewish astrologers, who came up with the term, used the calculations of their counterparts in Iraq and Egypt to further develop the science among the Teaching of the Council of Hebrew Elders, the Sanhedrin.